Starting Over (10 page)

Every word she said increased Max's guilt and fear.

Even if he hadn't already known how Maddy would react to the suggestion of a termination of her pregnancy just listening to her now would have told him.

He could feel his fingers tensing against hers. It wasn't love he felt for this baby, it was...

He could see Maddy looking at him in concern as he pulled his hand away.

'MAX?' he could hear his mother saying worriedly.

'Maddy's blood pressure isn't coming down properly. If it doesn't...' Max felt as though he were trying to speak with a throat full of splintered glass.

'If things don't improve the only way to guarantee her safety would be to terminate her pregnancy.' He heard his mother's indrawn shocked gasp.

'Does Maddy know...?' Jenny began, but Max shook his head.

'No, the consultant's thinking up to now has been that to tell her would make the situation with her blood pressure even worse than it already is. What the hell kind of sense can it be to let a woman like Maddy die,' Max cried out in anguish. 'I'm going back to the hospital,' he told Jenny when he had himself back under control. I'll probably be there all evening. God knows what we'd have done without you, Ma....' he told her gruffly.

Jenny
had
been intending to suggest that Max stay with the children for a couple of hours that evening so that
she
could go and see Olivia but now she could see how much he needed to be with Maddy. She would have to ring home instead and ask Jon to come over she decided when the children came back into the kitchen.

As Max went across to the table and kissed each child Jenny's heart ached for him. Maddy was the most maternal woman Jenny knew. She would rather die than destroy the life of her own child. A small icy shudder ran through Jenny's body as that thought formed. Please, God, let Maddy get well. Spare them that! She prayed mentally as Max drove away. Oh, please, please God.

FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME Annalise Cooke removed Jack's now crumpled letter from her school bag and started to re-read it. Not that she
needed
to, she knew every word of it off by heart, but still she had to read it, to touch the paper Jack had written it on, just for the reassurance and comfort it gave her.

School was over for the day now and she was on her way to the station to meet Jack's train.

'I'm going to come home. We can talk properly then,' he had written to her in response to her own frantic tear-stained letter to him. 'I'll be arriving at half past four so try to meet me at the station if you can.'

She had never dreamed that the wonderful weekend they had spent together what felt like a lifetime ago now would result in anything like this. Jack had been so careful! She had been almost sick with excitement the day she had travelled north to be with him. They had had his room at university to themselves and she had felt so grown-up going out with him for a meal and then going back there with him. Her father hadn't known what she was doing. He had taken her brothers away on a short fishing holiday and Annalise had telephoned Jack almost incoherent with excitement to tell him that at last they were going to be able to be together. Jack had already told her that he fully intended that they should wait longer before they made love, but this opportunity to be alone together had presented itself and it had been the most wonderful experience, perfect in every way,
everything
she had imagined and more.

Jack had made love to her as though she were the most tender, the most precious, the most loved girl in the whole world and it hadn't hurt a bit. She had giggled a little with nervousness as she had watched him put on the condom he had told her so seriously they must use. Afterwards, once she had come down to earth, she had asked him a little anxiously if he was sure that it was safe. He had insisted that it was and just to prove it he had made love to her again and twice more that night and she had felt as though she had died and gone to heaven, so blissful and perfect it—he—had been.

She had, of course, felt guilty about deceiving her father, especially when Jack had told her almost sternly that he would have preferred him to know and that
he
wanted to tell him that he loved her and that one day he planned to marry her. But Annalise knew her father far better than Jack did and she knew he would never accept that she was grown-up enough at seventeen, to do what she and Jack had done.

And even once she had come home, her blissed out exultation hadn't left her. Every night when she went to bed she had imagined that Jack was there with her, reliving everything he had done, everything he had said, each kiss and touch...each whispered promise of love and commitment. But then her feelings had changed to anxiety, and from anxiety to dread and fear as the days and then the weeks crept by and still she had not had her period.

She was two weeks overdue now. Her heart started to thump frantically against her ribs. She had wanted to ring Jack but she had been terrified that someone might overhear what she had to say and so she had written to him instead, begging him not to telephone but to write back which he had done and by return post, telling her that he was coming home. And now she was on her way to the station to meet him.

She had no idea
what
they were going to do. Her whole world had become a place of terrified dread.

She had felt so sick at school today—in fact she felt sick every day!

'THE TRAIN IS now approaching Haslewich. Please stand clear of the doors.'

Grabbing his hold-all Jack made his way to the end of the carriage. Would Annalise be there to meet him?

She should have received his letter.

The ink smudges where she had cried had torn at his heart making him ache with fierce protective love for her—and with shocked fear for himself.

She couldn't be pregnant. He had been so careful about using the condoms, wanting to be responsible about what they were doing, wanting to protect her and their love.

One day he and Annalise
would
have a family together but Jack shared his uncle Jon's old-fashioned moral beliefs. When he and Annalise became parents he wanted it to be within the security of a committed established relationship. He wanted them to be married and he wanted it to be when he was in a financial position to take care of his wife and child.

Right now he was still a student in his first year at university and it was unthinkable that he and Annalise, who was still at school, should become parents. But somehow something had gone wrong and it seemed that the unthinkable had happened.

A rash of nervous sweat broke out on his forehead.

He had had to lie to his tutor about his reasons for coming home and although he had no immediate lectures, he suspected that he had not been believed. But he had had to come home to see Annalise. There was no way he could leave her to worry on her own.

It had been lucky that he had still had the fifty pounds David, his father, had given him just before he had left for university.

Jack had felt slightly uncomfortable at the time for taking the money but it had seemed easier to accept the gift than to upset and embarrass his father by refusing it.

Now, from the maturity of his nineteen years, a schoolboy no longer but legally now, in the eyes of the law and himself, an adult man and a man in love as well, he was wryly aware of how immature he had been when he had left home some years ago to go in search of his missing father.

Now that David had returned to his family and Jack was able to judge him man to man, he had discovered that his father was neither the despicable villain his sister Olivia claimed nor the hero he himself had secretly hoped he might be, but simply another human being. The cautious tentative roots of a new relationship had been put down between them but they were nothing when compared with the sturdy dependability of the relationship he shared with Jon and Jenny.
They
were the two who had really parented him, who had shown him what family could and should be and it was
their
marriage and
their
family life that Jack knew instinctively he would one day base his own on.

Not that he didn't
like
his father. He did, and he also liked Honor, his stepmother, too. He was glad that his father had come back and even more happy to see the close bond that existed between his uncle Jon and his father. He had just wished that his sister Olivia had been able to be more cool about the whole thing.

But he had far more to worry about now than Olivia's determination to hold their father at a distance.

If Annalise was right... His stomach churned with sick anxiety. It wasn't just Annalise and himself he was concerned for. There were Jon and Jenny, who he knew would be saddened that their trust in him had been misplaced—and Annalise's father who was so very, very strict with his daughter.

He would have to leave university and try to find a job; something that would pay enough for him to support himself and Annalise and the baby, but what he had no idea. They would have to get married, of course. Grimly he blinked away the moisture threatening to film his eyes. Mentally he could picture his aunt Jenny's face and hear the quiet sadness in her voice as she talked about the plight of the young girls who she tried to help through the agency of Ruth Crighton's charity.

'They love their babies, but some of them are so young themselves...too young, and so very often they don't understand that love on its own just isn't enough.'

His heart started to bang in heavy painful thuds.

There was no way he wanted his Annalise to be one of those girls.

Oh, God,
why
hadn't he been more careful? But it was easy for him to ask himself that now when at the time... When, at the time, his whole world had been filled with the intensity, the immensity, of what he and Annalise were sharing, the wonder of their love, the wonder of her and the special gift of herself she was giving him.

The train had stopped. He got off, immediately scanning the platform for Annalise, blinking in the bright sunshine.

And then he saw her, a small, forlorn figure, standing with her back to him several yards away. She was wearing her school uniform and a feeling of intense guilt flooded through him.

He was shamingly aware that there had been a moment, a second of time, when he had first read her letter when he had wanted to reject what she had written, when his own shock and panic had made him want to simply pretend that nothing had happened, when he had forgotten that he was now an adult and a man and that Annalise and their baby were
his
responsibilities, when he had desperately wanted to be able to lay the burden of what had happened on someone else.

She was turning her head looking for him, and squaring his shoulders Jack called her name.

As he reached her he put down his hold-all to embrace her. Tears filled Annalise's eyes as she felt the fierce reassurance of Jack's hug. Only now could she admit to herself how afraid she had been that he might not come.

'Not here,' she whispered chokily. 'Someone might see us.' But still she clung desperately to him and Jack could feel her body trembling.

'Nothing's happened?' he guessed. 'You haven't...?'

As she shook her head he tried not to acknowledge how much he had been clinging to the hope that by some miracle she was all right.

'No,' Annalise told him. 'Oh, Jack, what are we going to
do?'

Wordlessly they clung together whilst Jack stroked the smooth thickness of her hair. She was so vulnerable, so dependent on him. Fear filled him.

'I don't know,' he admitted honestly.

Fresh tears filled Annalise's eyes.

'Oh, Lise, please don't,' Jack groaned in despair.

'Look, let's go for a walk down by the river, we can talk down there....'

'I don't want anyone to see us,' Annalise told him anxiously. 'Do your aunt and uncle know you're here?'

'Not yet. I didn't...' Jack stopped. 'I wanted to talk to
you
first,' he told her gently. 'Have you done anything yet? Been to see a doctor...or...'

Annalise's face paled as they set off towards the river.

'No. No, I couldn't. I wanted to telephone you but I daren't,' she told him. 'I wanted to ask you to get one of those test things and bring it with you. I daren't go into a chemist and ask for one here....'

Inwardly Jack berated himself for not thinking of that for himself.

'We could go to Chester to get one,' Jack offered.

Annalise shook her head.

'I can't, not until next weekend.'

They had reached the river now and Annalise turned towards him, her face sharply grave and mature as she told him unsteadily, 'I've been thinking about one of those places...you know, they advertise them in the back of magazines...where you can...'

'No!' Jack denied forcefully, the colour draining out of his face.

'But what else can we do?' Annalise asked him pitifully. 'We
can't
have a baby, Jack...and my father will
kill
me if he finds out....'

I'm the one who's to blame—not you,' Jack told her fiercely. 'I should never...' He stopped. 'I'll make everything all right, Lise, I promise. We'll get married.

I'll leave university. We'll find somewhere to live. I'll get a job....'

The look in her eyes of someone already world-weary with the burden of her knowledge and yet at the same time full of the anguish and fear of a child, tore at his guts.

'Don't
look at me like that,' he begged her.

'We can't do those things,' Annalise told him sadly.

'We're too young. They won't let us.... Your family will hate me if you leave university. You'll end up hating me, too, and our baby....'

'No,' Jack denied immediately. 'Never,
ever...

Please
don't say that, Lise....'

There was no one else on the river path and impulsively Jack pulled her into his arms, holding her tightly against his body, his voice muffled against her hair as he told her how much he loved her and how much he would always love her.

Annalise wept quietly in his arms. Already she knew that his love on its own wasn't going to be enough to protect them from what lay ahead of them.