For Better For Worse. PENNY JORDAN

haven’t you heard?’ Venice queried. ‘It’s all over the town that someone local is planning to put in a bid for the place, ostensibly as a private home, but in reality because he… they have very different plans for it.

      ‘Of course it would have to be someone with the right kind of local contacts and influence so that they could get planning permission pushed through, wouldn’t you say so, Adam?’

      Although she was smiling sweetly at Adam, no one could have been in any doubt that it was Adam to whom Venice was referring when she spoke of ‘someone local’ acquiring Broughton House. But surely Adam would never lend himself to that kind of scheme?

      It was true that Adam, as an architect, was bound to be interested in anything which might lead to new commissions, and it was certainly no secret that he was part of a highly successful local conglomerate which had designed, built and now ran several small local shopping parades and housing schemes, but all of them had been completely above board and free from any taint of the kind of underhand usage of power and position which Venice was now none too subtly implying.

      ‘Perhaps we ought to organise a committee to oppose it,’ Venice continued without giving Adam any chance to reply. ‘I have actually heard that what’s being proposed isn’t just a small parade of shops, but a huge hypermarket. Of course you have to admire whoever it is for his chutzpah. If he can pull it off, it will make him very, very wealthy, and I suppose to be fair there will be those who will say that the town does need that kind of facility. What do you think, Adam?’

      ‘Broughton House is in an area of “outstanding natural beauty”,’ Adam told her quietly. ‘I should imagine it would be impossible to get planning permission for that kind of venture.’

      ‘Oh, but surely not if one had the right connections… knew whom to approach and how,’ Venice persisted, smiling sweetly at him.

      There was a small, uneasy silence which Nick broke by turning to Adam and saying silkily, ‘You don’t seem particularly surprised, Adam, but then perhaps you know more about what’s going on than the rest of us. After all, as a member of the town council…’

      ‘Like Venice, I have heard the rumours,’ Adam countered, ‘but that seems to be all they are… rumours.’

      ‘But the house is up for sale and unliveable-in in its present state,’ Venice persisted. ‘And surely you, Adam, both as an architect and a councillor, must know something…’

      ‘Mrs Broughton lived in it…’

      Fern froze as she heard the unsteady huskiness in her own voice, her words cutting right across Venice’s deliberate probing, deflecting attention away from Adam and towards herself, drawing not just an irritated little frown from Venice at her intervention, but an angry glare from Nick as well.

      ‘Fern has always had a ridiculously sentimental attachment to the place,’ Nick announced tersely, giving her a cold look.

      ‘Well, I for one would be very surprised to hear that anyone would be foolish enough to imagine they could get planning permission for that kind of venture,’ Jennifer Bowers announced briskly. ‘And if anyone tried, I should certainly oppose it. After all, we haven’t spent all these years protecting the character and history of the town only to go and have hypermarkets built on its unspoilt land.’

      ‘Adam’s the expert on the town’s history and preservation,’ Venice persisted. ‘And I still have a sneaking suspicion that he knows more about what’s going on than he wants to tell us.’

      Because Adam himself was involved in some scheme or other to destroy the house? That was what Venice was implying, and Adam himself had done and said nothing that really contradicted her subtle accusations. Because he couldn’t?

      As she glanced round the table, Fern suspected that she wasn’t the only one wishing that Adam would make a more definite and unequivocal rebuttal of Venice’s hints.

      ‘Have you heard anything about this supermarket business?’ Roberta asked her later as they waited for Venice’s maid to bring down their coats.

      Fern shook her head.

      Was what Venice had been suggesting true? Was Adam involved in some plan to secretly circumvent the planning controls operating locally? And what about Nick’s earlier thoughts that Adam wanted the house to raise a family?

      The maid came back downstairs, apparently unable to find Fern’s jacket. Quietly she went upstairs to look for it herself.

      The coats were all placed on a bed in one of the spare rooms. She had to move several before she could find her own thin jacket, and as she lifted one of them, a heavy, plain wool man’s coat, she knew immediately that it was Adam’s. Her fingers tightened into the fabric. She could feel the hot salt burn of the tears clogging her throat and for a moment the impulse, the need to bury her face in the soft black fabric and breathe in the scent of Adam from it was so strong that she had the coat halfway to her face, the fabric gripped tightly in her fingers, before she fully realised what she was doing.

      Appalled, she dropped it, turning round quickly, her face flushed with guilt as she mechanically reached for her own jacket.

      As she pulled it on, she realised that in dropping Adam’s coat she had dislodged a heavy folded brochure from an inside pocket. She bent to pick it up and replace it and then stiffened as she realised what it was.

      Through the tears which blurred her vision she could see the photograph of Broughton House on the front cover of the sale brochure.

      She was twenty-seven years old, still a relatively young woman, but suddenly she wished with almost savage intensity that she were older, her life closer to its end, and with it the end of all the pain, the misery, the guilt which daily became an even greater burden to her.

      She was Nick’s wife, she reminded herself; she had no right to…

      To what? To love another man?

      ‘Stay with me, Fern,’ Nick had begged her. And then later when she had told him about Adam he had said it again.

      He must genuinely want and need her to overlook what she had done, mustn’t he? And surely in view of that she owed it to him to stay.

      And besides, what was the point in her leaving? she had recognised numbly. Where else was there for her to go—now that she had been all the way to hell and back again? And to heaven as well?

      Shakily she turned away, almost running towards the door and down the stairs.

       CHAPTER THREE

      ‘MMM… nice,’ Zoe murmured teasingly against Ben’s mouth as she wrapped herself around him, curling her body into the sleepy morning warmth of his.

      It hadn’t been easy getting their precious time off to coincide; Monday was the one morning of the week when neither of them had to get up early for work, the restaurant where Ben was currently working closed on Mondays and Zoe having begged, cajoled and bribed the others at the London airport hotel where she was working so that she could have Mondays off as well.

      She loved it when they were together like this, she thought drowsily as she snuggled deeper into Ben’s naked warmth, rubbing her face against his skin and nuzzling him with lazy, appreciative sensuality.

      Once, in their early days together, Ben had told her that she was just like a little cat with her soft fluid body and her habit of rubbing herself affectionately against him.

      In truth there was something prettily feline about her small triangular face and the soft sinuous grace of her body.

      But Zoe had an energy that had nothing catlike about it, an electric buzzing force that made her grey eyes sparkle with enthusiasm, and which seemed to crackle around her like a live force-field.

      There was nothing kittenish