Perfect Marriage Material. PENNY JORDAN

contact with one another.

      ‘I must go, Livvy,’ Saul said, ignoring her once more. ‘I promised Bobbie I’d be back before twelve. She and Luke want to spend some time with Aunt Ruth and Grant before they fly back to Boston.’

      ‘Yes, I know,’ Olivia returned. ‘I think it was wonderful the way Ruth and Grant made a prenuptial agreement to each spend six months of every year living in one another’s country.’

      ‘A decision worthy of Solomon,’ Saul agreed with a smile. His smile disappeared as he turned back towards Tullah and gave her a small, terse nod of his head before saying curtly, ‘Good night.’

      Tullah barely waited for the door to close behind Saul’s departing back before saying huskily, ‘Would you mind if I went up to bed, Liwy? I’ve got a bit of a headache and—’

      ‘No, no, you go up,’ Olivia assured her. Tullah knew her antagonism towards Saul had disturbed her but still she couldn’t apologise for it or take back what she had said.

      

      An hour later as she snuggled up in bed next to Caspar, Olivia told him sleepily, ‘I can’t understand why Tullah is so antagonistic towards Saul of all people. He really is one of the nicest men you could ever meet. Uncle Hugh used to say that it was just as well Saul decided to go into industry because, despite all his professional qualifications, he just doesn’t have that aggressive hard edge you need to make it to the top as a barrister. Luke’s got it, of course, and—’

      ‘Mmm...she does seem to have taken rather a dislike to him,’ Caspar agreed, kissing the top of her head before adding reassuringly, ‘It’s just as well you didn’t have him picked out as a possible father for the children you’ve decided Tullah wants to have.’ He chuckled at the thought.

      ‘Saul and Tullah... No, that would never work,’ Olivia declared, laughing.

      

      ‘Daddy...’

      ‘Mmm...’ Saul responded, bending down to tuck a stray curl off his younger daughter’s face. She had been crying in her sleep in the grip of one of the bad nightmares she had started having whilst she was staying in America with her mother and Hillary’s second husband. Having woken her gently from it and calmed her down, Saul watched her tenderly in the light from the small child’s lamp as he waited for her to go back to finish whatever it was she wanted to say to him.

      ‘You won’t ever go away and leave us, will you?’

      Somehow he managed to resist the impulse to snatch her up out of her small bed and hold her close.

      ‘Well, sometimes I do have to go away on business,’ he responded calmly and matter-of-factly, ‘and sometimes you go away, too, when you leave to stay with Mummy, but I promise you I won’t ever go away from you for very long, poppet.’

      ‘Do I really have to go and stay with Mummy even if I don’t want to?’

      Saul’s heart sank.

      He had tried his best to explain to the children that they were Hillary’s children as well as his and that she loved them and wanted them with her. The older two, Robert and Jemima, had understood even though they had both forcefully expressed their desire to stay with him. With Meg, however, it was proving much harder to explain that it was not just a legal requirement that her mother had access to her, but also his own conviction that at some stage in their lives all three children were going to want to have contact with their mother and that if he acceded to their desire now not to have to visit her, then not only would he be guilty of depriving them of an emotional bond he believed they needed to have, but ultimately there could possibly come a time when they would blame him as an adult and their father for allowing them to make a decision they were at present too immature emotionally to make. And it was for that reason, for their sakes, that he had been at such pains to keep his divorce from Hillary and the subsequent custody case as unacrimonious as possible.

      As it was, it would be a long time before he forgot the telephone call he had received from Hillary three months ago, hysterically demanding that he fly over to America immediately and collect the children because they were destroying her relationship with her new husband, who had demanded that she make a choice between the children of her first marriage and him.

      Predictably, being Hillary, she had chosen him. But then, Hillary had never been a particularly maternal woman. They had married impetuously and without really knowing one another, and Saul still felt guilty about the fact that despite knowing how ill-equipped emotionally Hillary was to cope with two small children, how resentful of them she felt, he had given in to her desire to have a third child to try to mend their failing marriage.

      But much as he might regret the reasons for Meg’s conception, Meg herself he could never regret, and he was determined that she would never know that in many ways she had been the final nail in the coffin of her parents’ faltering marriage.

      ‘I never wanted children. I don’t like children,’ Hillary had stormed petulantly at him during one of their all too frequent rows.

      And Saul was ashamed now to remember that he had re taliated equally bad-temperedly. ‘Well, you certainly don’t seem to like mine.’

      His. Well, they were certainly his by law as well as by birth.

      ‘But how will you cope?’ Ann, his mother, had asked him anxiously when he had initially told her of his decision to fight for full custody of the children. ‘I’ll do what I can, of course, but...’

      ‘Look,’ Saul had told his mother, ‘you and Dad have your own lives to lead. We all know how much Dad is looking forward to retiring. I’ll manage, don’t worry.’

      And so far he had, but there were times, like tonight for instance, when his regular babysitter couldn’t make it and he was forced to swallow his pride and turn to his family for extra help.

      One answer, of course, would be to employ someone full time to live in, but he didn’t want the children to feel that he was offloading them onto someone else and he certainly didn’t want them to start thinking that he didn’t either love or want them and especially not little Meg, who had come back from the States so heartbreakingly insecure and clingy.

      ‘Did you have a nice time at Auntie Livvy’s?’ Meg asked him.

      ‘Very nice, thank you,’ Saul fibbed.

      When Olivia had telephoned him to invite him over for dinner and to tell him excitedly about her friend who was relocating to work for the same firm as him, reminding him that they had previously met both at her and Caspar’s wedding and Amelia’s christening, he had had no intimation or warning of what the evening held in store.

      Yes, he remembered Tullah. What red-blooded heterosexual man would not? She had the kind of looks, the kind of figure, that was instantly appealing to the male psyche. There was something about that combination of thick, lustrous hair, creamy skin and wonderfully curvy body that suggested a sensuality, a lushness that had a far more instant and dizzying effect on male hormones than any bone-thin, media-lauded model-type of woman.

      What man looking at Tullah’s full, soft mouth and her even fuller and softer breasts could resist imagining what it would be like to lose himself in the sheer pleasure of touching her, caressing her, kissing her, making love with her?

      Politically incorrect such thoughts might be, but they were undoubtedly an important part of what made a man a man, and to Saul’s mind at least, tolerably acceptable as long as they remained restrained and controlled in the male mind. But then, as he had discovered tonight, Tullah had her own inimitable way of ensuring that any private male fantasies involving herself were very quickly squashed.

      Perhaps it was the shock of the contrast between the soft, feminine lushness and apparent warmth of her body and the antagonistic, almost aggressive sharpness of her manner that had made him feel so taken aback by her obvious hostility towards him, or perhaps it was simply a rebel male gene of vanity because she was so plainly dismissive and contemptuous of him. He didn’t know. What he did