To Love, Honour & Betray. PENNY JORDAN

that had broken into her heavy drugged sleep, the doubled effect of the two pills she had taken so deadening that it was several seconds before she realised that the noise was the telephone and another several more before she came to enough to reach for the receiver.

      ‘Claudia, it’s Maxine,’ she heard her assistant announcing herself. ‘Is everything OK? I was a bit concerned when you didn’t arrive this morning.’

      Guiltily, Claudia started to open her eyes and then widened them quickly in disbelief as she caught sight of her alarm clock. It was gone eleven in the morning. No wonder Maxine had been concerned.

      ‘Er … I’m sorry, Maxine,’ she apologised hastily. ‘I … I meant to ring you last night to warn you that I’d decided to work at home this morning. I’ve got some paperwork here I need to catch up on.’

      It wasn’t completely untrue; she did have paperwork to attend to, Claudia comforted herself several minutes later after she had replaced the receiver.

      Paperwork to do, maybe, but she certainly wasn’t in any fit state to accomplish very much, she admitted wearily.

      She had slept so deeply that if she had had any bad dreams she certainly couldn’t remember them, but even so, the drugged oblivion of her night’s sleep was just as exhausting as though she had lain sleepless and tormented. The numbing lethargy that still gripped her made her feel both guilty and angry. Quickly, she got out of bed, collected fresh underwear and headed for the shower.

      But as she stood beneath its stinging, reviving spray, she acknowledged that at least her sleeping tablets had been able to keep last night’s nightmares at bay.

      She stopped soaping herself and stood motionless beneath the water, shuddering as she recalled the eager happiness in Tara’s voice when she told her excitedly about her plans. And she, what had she done to prepare and protect her precious, much-loved daughter from what she now feared and dreaded lay ahead of her?

      Slow, painful tears seeped from beneath her closed eyelids as Claudia acknowledged what she had done, or rather, not done. When faced with a crisis, the need to be strong and independent, to take control and confront the danger facing her, she had retreated to the security of the kind of behaviour more appropriate to her mother’s generation by asking, ‘Have you told your father yet?’

      And then she had compounded her irresponsibility by escaping into a drug-induced sleep that had achieved nothing other than to worry her loyal and hard-working assistant.

      But what could she do, what could she say? Maybe, after all, she was over-reacting, over-worrying.

      If only. If only.

      As she stepped out of the shower and reached for a towel, Claudia caught sight of her reflection in the bathroom mirror. The anguish she was feeling was clearly revealed in the drawn, drained tension of her expression. The last time she had seen that particular look on her face had been during the early days when she and Garth had agreed to divorce.

      Garth …

      It had been foolish of her to react so emotionally last night and try to ring him. She knew from Tara that he had been dating on a casual basis for the past few months. Tara had complained to her that she didn’t think the thirty-odd-year-old woman he had apparently been seeing was good enough for her father.

      Like her, Garth hadn’t had anyone serious in his life since their marriage had ended, but hardly for the same reasons. Garth was an extremely attractive and very sensual man, the kind of man who, in the early days of their marriage, had been so emotionally as well as openly physically loving with her in public that her friends had often commented enviously to her on the depth and intensity of his love for her.

      Perhaps unusually so for a man of his generation and upbringing, Garth was a highly tactile man, both as a lover and a father, and Tara was like him in that respect. She, too, was very much given to loving hugs and kisses while Claudia, as she was the first to acknowledge, tended to wait for the other person to make the first move, to hold herself back a little.

      Even now, she disliked being reminded of how much she had missed Garth’s physical warmth in the early days after she had found out the truth, how often she had woken from the wretchedness of her merciless dreams and turned instinctively towards his side of the bed expecting him to be there to reach out for her and hold her close, only to remember that the emotional agony of her waking hours was even greater than that of her nightmares.

      She was over that now, of course. Well over it, and as a woman of forty-five, the mother of a grown-up daughter, as well, she did not think it appropriate to allow herself to yearn helplessly like some lovesick teenager for the physical and emotional contact, the closeness of a lover, a someone of her own that her life now denied her. Divorcing Garth had been the right decision, the only decision she could have made in the circumstances. He had, after all, betrayed her and betrayed her in such a way, deceiving her, lying to her so comprehensively and for so long, that there had been no way the damage he had done to their relationship could ever be repaired. So yesterday, why had she turned, yearning so instinctively, to him for help?

      Because he was Tara’s father. That was why and that was the only reason why, she assured herself sternly as she went back to her bedroom, securing the towel around her still-damp body, then reaching for the hair-dryer.

      Since the break-up of her marriage, she had become fiercely protective, even defensive, about her independence and her ability to face the world alone, to manage whatever problems she might have alone. She had no need of anyone, any man, to lean on, to provide her with emotional support; she had proved that.

      Last night, she had panicked, over-reacted unthinkingly with that silly and fortunately unanswered telephone call to Garth. This morning, she thankfully was much more in control of herself … much more herself, she decided firmly.

      The hand holding the hair-dryer had started to tremble. Slowly, Claudia put the dryer down and took a deep breath, purposefully counting silently as she released it.

      Now, she commanded herself sternly, let’s start again. Today is Thursday. It is nearly twelve noon. You have wasted a whole morning, so what are you going to do with the rest of your day?

      Mentally, she reviewed her commitments.

      She had an informal arrangement for lunch, following which she had a planning meeting at three and then, finally, her treat for the day, which was her first discussion with the man who she was hoping would design her garden for her. She had first heard about him earlier in the year when she had attended the Chelsea Flower Show as the guest of one of her corporate clients and had immediately fallen in love with his work, only to discover that he was extremely selective about whom he accepted as a client and that, in addition, he had a waiting list of people wanting to consult him over a yard long. Eventually, however, her determination had paid off and it was planned that she should have initial talks then meet with him in the very near future.

      Her thoughts on the garden, she walked over to the bedroom window that looked out over it. The house had had a large rear garden when they bought it, to which they had added a couple of good-sized paddocks. When they first moved in, this garden had consisted of a shabby lawn framed by overgrown herbaceous borders and separated from the kitchen garden and greenhouse that lay beyond it by an unruly hedge.

      Just before Tara’s sixth birthday, a space had been cleared on the lawn for the pretty chaletstyle Wendy house they had bought as a birthday present. Claudia had spent the whole of the previous month sewing pretty gingham curtains for it, complete with tie-backs and matching appliquéd gingham cushions for the child-sized furniture.

      In time, at Tara’s insistence, a small ‘garden’ area had been fenced off around her ‘house’, taking the place of the slide and swing whose scuff marks had made bald patches in the lawn over the years. They had planted a rambling rose against the house, Garth insisting that she hold the rose straight while he dug and then filled in the hole he had made for it. It now virtually covered the small wooden building, but Tara had steadfastly refused to allow her to do anything to change her now-outgrown childhood retreat until last Christmas when