Now or Never. Penny Jordan

in finding room for Julie. But the sooner she was back at home with her own family, the better, Stella resolved.

      It was all very well for Hughie to face up to his responsibilities and to accept that he had them, but Julie’s parents had their responsibilities as well!

      ‘Mmm … I’ve missed you.’

      ‘I’ve only been gone for four hours,’ Maggie tried to protest, but Oliver was too busy kissing her to let her speak properly.

      ‘Four hours, fifteen minutes and several seconds,’ Oliver corrected her as he cupped her face and smiled down into her eyes.

      Irresistibly his glance was drawn to her mouth. Maggie had the most wonderful, the most sexy, the most kissable mouth he had ever seen. In fact, so far as he was concerned, Maggie had the most wonderful, the most sexy, the most kissable, the most lovable everything any woman possibly could have.

      ‘How was The Club?’ he asked her teasingly as he drew her closer, one hand in the small of her back, the other resting on her still-flat stomach. ‘I suppose they’ve all rushed home to knit baby clothes.’

      To his bemusement and her own chagrin, Maggie immediately burst into tears.

      ‘Baby hormones,’ she excused her reaction to Oliver, but as she said the words she could hear inside her head Nicki’s voice, taut with anger and contempt, insisting, ‘You can’t be pregnant!’

      As he registered the brief look of betraying bleakness in her eyes, Oliver demanded gently, ‘Tell me what’s wrong.’

      Maggie closed her eyes and took a deep, painful breath.

      ‘You are far too perceptive,’ she told him wryly.

      ‘We made a pact, Maggie,’ Oliver reminded her. ‘No game playing, no hidden agendas, no hidden anything between us.’ Lifting her hand to his lips and placing a kiss in her open palm, he added, ‘We agreed that our love deserves better than that.’

      Now more tears were threatening her composure but for a different reason this time, brought on by a different emotion. Pain and joy—strange how in their intensity both could call forth the same physical response.

      ‘How could I ever forget us making that pact?’ Maggie answered him, her eyes luminous with her love.

      Self-protection had been a necessity following the breakup of her marriage and had become a way of life for her. Strong, feisty, successful career women in their forties were vulnerable in a way that women one or two decades younger were not. All the more so when, like Maggie, they broke one of society’s taboos by falling in love with a younger man. Because of that, Maggie was very protectively careful of her emotional responses. It was rare for her to make such an open admission of her feelings. That alone was enough to alert Oliver to the fact that something—or somebody—had seriously hurt her.

      ‘Tell me,’ he insisted.

      ‘It’s Nicki,’ Maggie admitted shakily. ‘She hates the idea of me having this baby.’

      ‘She what?’ Oliver frowned. He knew how important Maggie’s friends were to her; he had heard the full history of their relationship, their shared traumas, and the way they had always supported and protected one another. He knew too how excited Maggie had been about telling them the news, and he could see beneath the brittle bravery of her smile just how hurt and shocked she was.

      ‘She says that I’m too old,’ Maggie told him. ‘She says that I’m depriving another younger woman of the chance to have a child. She says that I’m doing it to … to keep you—’

      ‘To keep me!’ Oliver interrupted her. ‘Maggie, there is no way on this earth that you could ever or will ever get rid of me. You know that. You know how much you mean to me. How much I love you. You know what I think … what I believe.’ He looked at her, holding her gaze with his own. ‘You … us … our love, they are my destiny, Maggie. You are the woman I have longed for all my adult life. If one of us deserves to be accused of holding the other to our love via our baby, then that one is me.’

      Maggie felt the tight lump of anguish inside her easing. This conviction that Oliver had, and spoke so naturally and easily to her about, that he had been destined to love her, which he made sound so down-to-earth, so much an irrefutable fact, was something she simply could not discuss with anyone else. Because she was afraid she, they, Oliver would be laughed at?

      Her friends were mature women and mature women did not believe in fate. Or that love could transcend time, cross the generation barrier? Why? Because she herself dared not allow herself to believe it, no matter what Oliver might say? Because she suspected that had any other man but Oliver spoken to her in such a vein she would have dismissed him as being some daydreaming crank?

      ‘Nicki’s main concern is that I’m not aware of the problems of being an older mother. She says she can’t understand how I can claim to want a child now when I refused to have one with Dan.’

      Now it was her turn to look into Oliver’s eyes.

      ‘Isn’t it time you told her the truth about that?’ he suggested gently.

      Restlessly Maggie moved away from him.

      ‘It isn’t as straightforward as that. Nicki has always thought a lot of Dan. He was her friend before he and I started dating. She actually introduced us. I don’t want to …’

      ‘Destroy her illusions?’ Oliver supplied.

      He had a habit of lifting one eyebrow when he asked a question and Maggie found herself wondering if it was a mannerism his son or daughter would inherit. Just to think about the coming baby made her heart turn over and melt with love and yearning.

      ‘Which do you least want to destroy, Maggie? Her illusions or your friendship? Which do you think she values the more? Which would be most important to you? Don’t you think she might even feel a little insulted to know that you believed both her friendship and her ego to be so fragile? Or are you afraid that she will be offended that you have withheld the truth from her for so long?’

      ‘It wasn’t a deliberate decision,’ Maggie defended herself. ‘And it wasn’t so much that I wanted to withhold the truth from my friends …’

      ‘No, what you wanted to do—your prime concern,’ Oliver emphasised, ‘was to protect Dan.’

      ‘It wasn’t his fault that he was infertile,’ Maggie protested. ‘He was devastated when we learned that the problem lay with him …’

      ‘So devastated that he went out and had an affair!’ Oliver agreed dryly.

      ‘Oliver, you aren’t being fair! Try to put yourself in his position. He desperately wanted us to have children. He had always wanted to have a family, and when nothing happened, he was wonderfully supportive of me.’

      ‘Until he found out that he was the one who couldn’t give you a child and not the other way round.’

      ‘I think he had the affair to … to test out what he had been told,’ Maggie responded quietly. ‘I think it was a form of denial, coupled with a feeling of shock and bereavement, of grieving … and that afterwards he simply couldn’t bear to stay with me because of the destruction of the hopes we had both shared for so long and because …’

      ‘Because you knew the truth,’ Oliver inserted grimly.

      ‘Because he was afraid that my love might become pity,’ Maggie corrected him gently.

      ‘How long is it since he left you, Maggie?’ Oliver demanded.

      Would it ever go away, this tiny, gritty piece of jealousy over the man who had shared so much of her life before him; who had had so much of her, with her, before him? He knew how much she had loved her husband and how much she had suffered when their marriage had broken up, but his anger against Dan went deeper than jealousy. Dan was, so far as Oliver was concerned, responsible not just for hurting Maggie, but for undermining her, for letting her take the blame for the