For Better For Worse. PENNY JORDAN

      ‘Don’t he to me, Fern,’ he had told her bitterly. ‘You’re trying to punish me for telling you the truth. Just as you tried to punish me for having an affair by…’

      She had run out of the room then, unable to bear to listen to him any more, knowing that she was behaving childishly and yet unable to trust herself to stay and hear him out.

      It had been shortly after that that her father had died, and then her mother, who had suffered ill health for several years, had gradually started to grow worse, and she had had no energy left to do anything other than cope with her mother’s decline.

      ‘Fern, for heaven’s sake come on,’ Nick demanded irritably. Quietly she picked her bag up off the bed and walked towards the bedroom door.

      Well, at least there was one thing she could be sure of about this evening’s dinner party, Fern reflected, trying to resurrect her sense of humour, and that was that Venice would not be dressed in an out-of-date, dowdy black dress.

      She was wrong, on one point at least. Venice was wearing black, but that was the only thing her own dress had in common with the outfit Venice had on, Fern remarked wryly as Venice opened her front door to them.

      At closer to thirty-five than thirty Venice was older than Fern; older than Nick too, a tiny, vivacious, fragile-boned creature with a small oval face and enormous eyes. Where another woman might have self-consciously tried to conceal her lack of height, seeing it as a fault rather than an asset, Venice seemed to take pleasure in deliberately underlining the fact that she couldn’t be much more than five feet tall, and Fern, who had in the past suffered several slighting comments from Nick about her own small frame and the fact that short women invariably lacked the elegant grace of their taller sisters, stifled a small pang of envy at Venice’s abundant self-confidence.

      The black dress she was wearing might almost have been painted on to her body. For someone so small-boned she had disconcertingly voluptuous breasts. Fern had overheard a couple of other women discussing Venice and her figure, one of them wondering out loud if her breasts might possibly owe more to man than nature.

      Whatever the case, they were certainly catching Nick’s eye, Fern recognised.

      Had Venice deliberately chosen that trimming of black feathers for her dress, knowing that they not only provided an eye-catching contrast to her skin, but also that the sheen on the feathers reflected the pearly translucence of her bare skin?

      The single pear-shaped diamond that nestled between her breasts was so large that it only just escaped being vulgar. When she moved, it blazed cold fire like the matching diamonds in her ears.

      Tonight the almost white-blonde hair, which she normally wore in a perfectly shaped shoulder-length bob, was drawn up and back in a contemporary version of a Bardot-type beehive hairstyle, all careless, artful fronds of ‘escaping’ hair and tousled curls, half as though she had just come from her bed and the arms of her lover, piling her hair up carelessly on top of her head, more concerned with the pleasure of their lovemaking than her public appearance.

      Only of course that particular type of artless sensuality could only be achieved with the aid of a very expensive hairdresser.

      But even without the embellishments provided by her late husband’s wealth Venice would have been a very beautiful woman, Fern admitted.

      That she was also a very sensual and provocative one as well and that she enjoyed being so Fern also had little doubt.

      Venice was obviously very much a man’s woman and made no attempt to hide it, something that was reinforced by the cursory way she welcomed Fern, turning immediately and far more enthusiastically towards Nick, moving between Fern and her husband, her back almost but not quite turned towards Fern, almost deliberately excluding her from her welcome to Nick.

      A welcome which was surely far more effusive than was warranted by the business relationship Nick claimed to have with her. Or was she being unfairly suspicious? Fern wondered, as she stood quietly to one side, politely waiting for Venice to finish her conversation with Nick.

      ‘That’s a beautiful diamond,’ Fern heard Nick saying softly to her.

      ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ Venice agreed.

      As she smiled up at him, her index finger stroked over the hollow between her breasts just above where the diamond lay, almost deliberately drawing Nick’s attention to her body.

      Not that she needed to do so, Fern acknowledged. He had hardly taken his eyes off her since she opened the door to them.

      The last time Nick had become involved with another woman, he had claimed that she, Fern, had driven him to it with her sexual coldness. If she, his wife, had been more responsive to him, if she had not forced him to find sexual solace in the arms of another woman, he would never have dreamed of being unfaithful to her.

      It was her fault that he had had an affair.

      And deep down inside herself Fern had believed him. After all, hadn’t her parents brought her up to be aware that it was her female role in life to please and appease, to be gently and femininely aware of the needs of others, and to minister to them before her own?

      She had married Nick without giving much thought to whether or not they might be sexually compatible, naïvely assuming that her inability to find much pleasure in their initial lovemaking had been because of her lack of experience.

      And besides, she had not been marrying Nick for sex. She had been marrying him because he loved her… because he needed and wanted her.

      It hadn’t taken her very long to realise that the understanding with which Nick had appeared to treat her lack of sexuality before their marriage was an indulgence he might have been prepared to allow a fiancée but was most definitely not prepared to allow a wife.

      She should never have stayed with him, she recognised now. Not once she realised she no longer loved him; but it had seemed more important then to put her parents’ feelings before her own, and Nick had been so persuasive, so contrite, so sure that this time they would be able to make a go of it, that she simply hadn’t had the heart to tell him that she no longer wanted to.

      And then of course there had been the complication of Adam, and so she had given way.

      Not just because she had wanted to protect her parents, not even because she was still torn between what she felt or rather did not feel for Nick, and what she firmly still believed—as she had been brought up to believe—that the sanctity of the state of marriage, of the commitment she had made, far, far outweighed the self-indulgence of giving way to her own feelings; but also, shamefully, she had given way because she could not face the thought of Adam knowing she had walked out on her marriage and suspecting why… feeling sorry for her that what had happened between them had in the end been at her instigation, and did not mean… could not mean that she could ever have any future with him…

      No, she could not endure the humiliation of listening to Adam explaining in that careful, neutral voice of his that he did not really want her. As though she needed telling…

      ‘Stay with me,’ Nick had pleaded. ‘We can make it work. I know we can…’

      And she had allowed herself to believe him… because she had so desperately needed to believe him.

      And now?

      She could feel the panic starting to flood through her, the aching, cold, terrifying sensation of somehow having been asleep, only to wake up and find herself trapped in a world, a life that was totally alien to her.

      She was still suffering from the effects of her parents’ deaths, she told herself. That was why she was experiencing this sense of panic and loss… this sense of dislocation … of being not just a stranger to herself, but in some sense an outsider to her own life… someone who was dispossessed… alone… alien…

      It was a relief when Venice finally turned to her, giving her a coolly appraising look as she commented with a feline smile, ‘Fern… do come into the drawing-room. You look cold… and