Now or Never. Penny Jordan

a gift given on special days, at heightened moments of desire, rather than an accepted part of a familiar lovemaking ritual.

      ‘I love the taste of you, the feel of you, the desire of you,’ Oliver had told her passionately. ‘Please don’t deny those pleasures to me, Maggie.’

      Hand in hand they went back to their bed, Oliver insisting on tucking her carefully beneath the duvet before joining her.

      ‘Forget about Nicki and the others,’ he whispered to her as he kissed her goodnight.

      Forget? Maggie wished that were possible!

      ‘Stuart …’

      In the darkness of their bedroom, Alice tried to reach for Stuart’s hand, but he pulled away from her, turning over, his back to her.

      ‘Leave it, will you, Alice?’ he demanded brusquely. ‘For God’s sake, let’s not have an in-depth inquest. So I lost a bloody erection! So what? It happens all the time. You making a drama out of it isn’t going to alter anything.’

      Her making a drama out of it? Alice suppressed her desire to point out to him that she hadn’t particularly wanted to have sex in the first place and that he had been the one to suggest it.

      But she could feel Stuart’s tension, and instinctively she wanted to comfort him. To reassure him, to reach out and hold him; but just as instinctively she knew he would not want her to. She could feel how shocked and disbelieving he was.

      On his own side of the bed, Stuart lay staring into the darkness. Never once in all the years they had been married had he suffered an erection failure. Never. Ever.

      His eyes burned as though they were filled with grit, his body gripped by tension and a sickening sense of powerlessness. He knew why it had happened, of course. Of course! How could he not? It didn’t need a series of expensive counselling sessions with a shrink to tell him. The miracle was perhaps that it hadn’t happened before!

      From his childhood he could hear his father’s voice exhorting him, ‘Be a man, Stuart.’

      Be a man! His father had been a man. A very special man. Stuart had known all the time he was growing up that he could never hope to rival him, that his father belonged to a rare and exclusive club whose doors would be for ever barred to him. His father was, after all, a hero and he had the medals to prove it; the medals, and the stories, the reminiscences and tales of comrades who had not possessed his own luck and who had perished.

      Stuart could still vividly remember how different his father had been when he had got together with his ex-comrades. At home he had been a distant, commanding figure, constantly exhorting Stuart to live up to his maleness. He had died shortly after the twins had been born.

      ‘A man needs sons, Stuart,’ he had pronounced approvingly after their birth. Sons … another marker of a man’s maleness.

      It was all rubbish, of course, and his views would be ridiculed now—Stuart knew that. Men and women were equal now. Equal …

      Stuart closed his eyes against the burning pain seizing him. Just for a second he longed to bury himself against Alice’s sleepy warmth, to take comfort from her and be comforted by her, but how could he, when he knew …?

      What was she going to say when she found out? Would she despise him? Reject him? Blame him for letting her down?

      Could he blame her if she did? He had tried to prevent it happening, but all the time, from the first moment he had met Arlette Salcombe, he had known it was inevitable. That single look between them, that meeting of glances. He had known then. And now there was no way out and no way back!