Now or Never. PENNY JORDAN

sighed.

      It was impossible to explain the complexities of the situation to a child of Joey’s age, and impossible too to let him see what she was really feeling. She certainly shared her son’s dislike of Laura’s presence in their home, although, of course, she could not voice it quite so openly.

      In the early days when she and Kit had first started cautiously dating, she had been at pains to show every consideration for the feelings of his teenage daughter. The tragic death of her mother after a long-drawn-out illness was bound to have traumatised her, and Nicki had recognised that fact, but, no matter how slowly and discreetly Nicki had tried to progress, Laura had flatly refused to accept that her father could possibly want any kind of relationship with Nicki, or allow her into his life.

      At one point Laura’s hostility towards her had become so great that Nicki had declared wearily to Kit that, for everyone’s sake, she felt they ought not to see one another any more.

      That time apart from Kit had been one of the worst periods of her life, and if anyone had told her then that ultimately she and Kit would be together and that she would have Joey she would have refused to believe them.

      It had been Kit who had insisted that they should marry, and that Laura would eventually come to accept the situation, and Nicki had made a mental promise to herself that she would be the most understanding, the most caring stepmother there was, if only Laura would allow her to be.

      After all, Laura was a part of Kit, and Nicki had been prepared to love her for that alone! She was also, Nicki had reminded herself determinedly, a teenager who had lost her mother at a very vulnerable time in her life. She needed and deserved to have her feelings recognised, and Nicki fully intended to do that and to assure her that there was no way she wanted to deny her mother’s role in either her life or that of Kit. And she had done her best, her very best, but Laura had simply refused to reciprocate.

      Less than four months after their marriage Laura had walked out, announcing that she was going to live with her godmother, and in the end it had been agreed that she should be allowed to do so, although Kit had told her over and over again that she must always consider the home he and Nicki shared to be her own.

      She had returned briefly between leaving school and going on to university, to spend the summer with them, but if anything her hostility and resentment towards her stepmother had been even more marked in Nicki’s opinion, and she had been relieved to see Laura go.

      That had been seven years ago. Seven years during which Laura had grown up and made her own life, only now she was back. And just thinking about her and what she had done filled Nicki with tension and seething anger.

      ‘Why? Why has she come here to us?’ she demanded angrily, pacing the kitchen floor as Kit sat and watched her. ‘It’s not even as if this has ever been her home, in any real sense! You sold your family home when we got married and the money was invested for her. We bought this house together.’

      And she had supplied the bulk of the down payment and paid the mortgage, Nicki could have added, but of course she did not.

      ‘Because we’re her family,’ Kit answered her.

      ‘No!’ Nicki denied bitterly. ‘We are not her family, Kit. She has never wanted to be a part of this family. She has never accepted me as your wife or Joey as your son. You are her family. And that’s why she’s come here. To claim you, to cause discord between us and—’

      ‘Nicki, you’re reacting over-emotionally,’ Kit protested.

      ‘Me over-emotional?’ Nicki challenged him angrily. ‘The truth is that you just don’t want to accept the facts about Laura and her behaviour. You’d rather blame anyone than her! You just won’t see what she’s doing!

      She’s already upset Joey. He’s the one you should really be protecting, and not her,’ she threw at Kit, tears burning her eyes. ‘He’s only a little boy and she’s an adult. Why has she come here? Has she told you yet?’

      The look on his face was its own answer.

      All Laura had said was that she had handed in her notice at work and given up the lease on her flat and that she needed to give herself a breathing space before she decided where she wanted her life to go.

      It was incomprehensible to Nicki that a young woman in her mid-twenties should behave in such an irresponsible way, and had Laura actually been her child she would have been insisting on being given some answers to some far more pertinent questions than Kit seemed disposed to ask. Not for her the slightly nervous, conciliatory attitude adopted by Alice towards her aggressively determined daughter!

      But, of course, Laura was not her child.

      ‘She’ll talk to us when she’s ready, Nicki, and until then we have to respect her privacy,’ Kit had told her firmly. ‘Right now, Laura needs our love and support just as much as Joey does, but in a different way.’

      Laura was a bone of contention between them that was never going to go away, Nicki acknowledged grimly.

      

      Where was Kit? Nicki wondered irritably five hours later. He knew she had work to do tonight and he had promised to be home early, but there was no sign of him.

      Angrily, she remembered the row they had had last night. An exchange of destructive hissed whispers in the darkness of their bedroom, both of them tensely aware that they might be overheard.

      The result had been an ‘atmosphere’, which had been still hanging over them like a black cloud this morning.

      Even before Laura’s arrival they had been having problems. Kit’s business as an independent insurance broker and financial adviser was suffering badly in the current economic climate—a reflection on the general situation and not on him personally, as Nicki had already pointed out to him.

      Part of the trouble was that she was simply not the kind of woman who was prepared to spend her time propping up a male ego, even when that ego belonged to the man she loved. She had gone down that road with her first marriage and all she had got from it had been a bullying, violent husband, from whom she had been glad to escape through divorce.

      But when she had fallen in love with Kit he had been in no need of any ego massaging. He had applauded the fact that she was a successful businesswoman in her own right, just as she had admired his uncomplaining shouldering of the responsibility of caring for his terminally ill wife and his teenage daughter.

      She and Kit had originally met when he had approached her agency wanting to find a part-time housekeeper to help him with the responsibility of caring for his wife, Jennifer, and providing a home for Laura, then thirteen years old.

      There had been an immediate spark of attraction between them, which they had both equally immediately and separately chosen to ignore. After all, Kit had been a married man. And she had been still bruised from her first marriage, with a young and fragile business to nurture, and no place and even less need in her life for the emotional trauma of falling in love with a man in Kit’s position.

      The agency was to be her life, she had insisted to Maggie.

      It had been thanks to Maggie that Nicki had set up the agency in the first place. After the breakup of her first marriage and before she had met Kit, Nicki had done temping work. When the agency she had worked for had announced that it was closing down, she had been panic-stricken, knowing how much she’d needed the money she’d been earning.

      ‘So set up your own agency,’ Maggie had told her.

      ‘I can’t,’ Nicki had protested. ‘I could never run my own business. I don’t know how.’

      ‘Yes, you do,’ Maggie had contradicted her firmly. ‘You just don’t realise that you do.’

      And somehow or other Maggie, being Maggie, had managed to chivvy and downright bully her into taking what had then, to Nicki, seemed to be an impossibly dangerous step.

      To her own surprise, what had started out as a small