Now or Never. PENNY JORDAN

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!

      5

      ‘What do you mean, a man telephoned asking for me?’ The anger in Laura’s voice made Joey cower away from her.

      ‘What man, Joey?’ Laura demanded. ‘What did he say?’ She could feel the heat in her face. Her heart was hammering against her chest, driven by anger. Anger and not excitement, no way was she going to allow it to be excitement.

      Her fingers curled into her palms, making tight fists. It had to be Ryan. It couldn’t possibly be anyone else. He must have got the number from Human Resources. He had no right to ring her. No right to …

      ‘What did he say? Did he tell you his name?’ Her voice rose, sharpening with each word, frightening Joey even more. He had intuitively picked up on Laura’s antagonism towards his mother and that increased his fear of her.

      ‘Did he tell you his name?’ Laura was shouting now, too wrapped up in her own fear to be aware of Joey’s. Right now he was just an irritating child who, through either malice or stupidity, was refusing to give her the information she so desperately needed.

      ‘Joey?’ Laura exploded, grabbing hold of him and giving him an impatient little shake before she could stop herself. Almost immediately she released him, but it was too late. Just as she did so Nicki walked into the kitchen.

      ‘Let go of him! Let go of him, Laura!’

      Furiously Nicki rushed to protect her son, kneeling down to gather him up in her arms as Laura released him.

      ‘How dare you? How dare you touch my child?’ she blazed. ‘Joey, it’s all right, it’s all right, you’re safe now,’ she comforted her son, rocking him in her arms as Laura looked on in a mixture of contempt and bitterness.

      ‘That’s right!’ she threw at Nicki. ‘You rush to protect your precious child—but you can’t always be here to protect him, Nicki. After all, I haven’t forgotten that there was no one to protect me from you!’ Instinctively Laura tried to defend herself and her actions.

      ‘What? I never did anything to hurt you!’ Nicki denied immediately.

      ‘You’re lying,’ Laura spat out, giving her a thin-lipped, acid smile. ‘But then you would, wouldn’t you? Anyway, for your information, I wasn’t hurting Joey. And if I were you, instead of treating him like a baby, I’d spend a bit more time making sure he knows how to take a telephone message properly.’

      ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Joey protested from the comfort of Nicki’s arms. ‘The man didn’t say any name. He just asked if you were here.’

      Laura had been terrifying her son half to death simply because of a phone call? Nicki’s mouth compressed.

      ‘Whoever he is, Laura, if he wants to speak to you enough he will ring back.’

      Laura’s face burned even hotter as Nicki made no attempt to conceal the smugly superior tone of her voice. Immediately she reacted to it, saying fiercely, ‘It’s typical of you to think what you’re obviously thinking, but you’re wrong. I don’t want him to ring back. In fact, I don’t want to speak to him at all. To speak to him or to see him. You see, unlike you, I have no intention of becoming involved in an affair with a married man or having sex with him behind his wife’s back.’

      As she listened to Laura’s outburst Nicki’s face went white. Releasing Joey, she told him huskily, ‘Joey, go up to your room and watch your videos for a while before it’s time for school, will you, darling?’

      Over Joey’s blond head their glances fought, neither of them allowing herself to give way. As soon as the door had closed behind Joey Nicki demanded, ‘What is it exactly that you’re trying to say, Laura?’

      Laura shot her a bitterly cynical glare, hating what was happening but powerless to stop it. The words, the pain, the anguish had been dammed up inside her for too long to be controlled, now that she had released them.

      ‘What do you think I’m trying to say? You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. And don’t bother trying to lie about it. I was there! I heard you. They’d sent me home from school because I wasn’t feeling well. I tried to tell them that there wasn’t any point because there wasn’t anyone there to look after me.’ She gave a mirthless smile. ‘After all, my mother had only been taken into hospital a few days earlier. To give my father a rest, that’s what they’d said when I went to see her. But it wasn’t a rest he was getting, was it, Nicki? He wasn’t resting on the bed in the guest room at all, was he? No. He was lying there whilst you—’

      ‘Stop it.’ Appalled