Starting Over (33 page)

She had known, of course, how much he loved her and their children, but the raw naked intensity and depth of the emotion she was now seeing came as a revelation to her.

'I can't bear knowing that I wanted to destroy our child,' he told her emotionally. 'And I don't—can't—

blame you if you hate me for it, Maddy.'

'I don't hate you,' Maddy told him softly adding,

'and Max, it wasn't our child you wanted to destroy, it was me you wanted to save!'

As she watched him, Maddy could see from his expression that she hadn't managed to reassure him.

His voice cracking with pain, Max told her, 'I even actually thought...wanted...' He stopped, groaning.

Then, covering his face with his hands, he said thickly,

'I wished that this child had never been conceived.'

He drew a deep shaky breath. 'And now,' he stopped and then told her harshly, 'it haunts and torments me, Maddy, that somehow he or she will know and that when it is born, it will be born hating me for...for what I contemplated doing.'

'Max!' Maddy's voice rang with shocked compassion. 'No, you mustn't think that.'

'I should have been the one to protect you both and not... But I couldn't bear the thought of losing you, Maddy, and now I can't bear to think that this child when it is born will believe—'

'Max, stop it!' Maddy commanded him firmly.

Wrapping her arms around him and holding him tightly, she whispered to him, 'You're torturing yourself unnecessarily. Look at me,' she demanded.

The unfamiliar note of command in her voice surprised Max into obeying her. The tears had gone from her eyes now and they were clear and calm.

'I promise you, Max, this baby, if it knows anything, will know that it was conceived in love, created out of love...our love for one another and for it.'

'I was so afraid that if you knew what I'd felt...what I would have done...you'd stop loving me,' Max confessed, as the loving reassurance of her words soothed his anguish like cooling healing balm applied to a raw festering wound.

Maddy looked at him steadily, her eyes full of the feelings she wanted him to see.

As she squeezed his hand she told him shakily,

'There is nothing...
nothing
you could do that could stop me loving you now.'

'Maddy...Maddy...'

As she lifted her face for his kiss, Maddy felt the dampness of his tears on her face.

'We're safe now, Max,' she whispered reassuringly to him. 'We're
all
safe, and this baby will love you just as much as I do!'

'BOILED EGG
and soldiers,' Olivia giggled as David solemnly put the tray down on the bed beside her.

'Oh, Dad,' she protested whilst David's heart sang at her easy use of the word.

'Now I
know
that I'm an invalid. Do you remember the time I brought breakfast in bed for you and mother?' Her smile shook slightly and she looked away from him. This new relationship they were exploring together reminded her of being a teenager all over again, with all its wobbly uncertainties and self-doubts contrasted with moments of joy and euphoria so intense that they were almost magical.

'How could I forget it?' David mourned with a grin.

'The eggs would have done sterling service as cannon shot and as for the tea...'

Olivia laughed.

"The salt in the timer was wet and it had set, so I was waiting for ages for the salt to run through not realising, and I didn't know you weren't supposed to open the tea bags. Mother was furious with me,' she remembered ruefully.

David watched her but said nothing. Although Olivia wasn't to know it, Tiggy had been on one of her binges the previous night and she had spent most of the night purging herself of the food she had eaten.

'I'd better go and check on the girls,' David told her. 'Otherwise they're going to be late for school.

You're out of fresh food so I'll do some shopping on the way back—and no getting out of bed whilst I'm not here,' he warned her mock severely. 'There's no way you're strong enough for that yet.'

Olivia smiled but didn't disagree. She was still feeling ludicrously weak, which must be the reason she was allowing him to take charge and boss her about without objecting. She had to be feeling weak otherwise she would never, as she was doing right now, actually be mentally acknowledging how good it felt to be cosseted and looked after.

Just knowing that he was there somehow made her feel as though a huge weight had been lifted off her shoulders.

'I'll have to ring the office,' she told him. 'I've got a couple of appointments that will have to be cancelled and—'

'When I get back,' David told her and smiled with loving firmness. He was halfway across the bedroom when Olivia suddenly remembered something, calling out urgently, 'Dad...'

'What is it?' David was at her side immediately.

'Aren't you feeling well. What...?'

'No. No, I'm fine, but I've just remembered. Isn't it today you and Honor are supposed to be going to the hospital for her tests?' Olivia asked him.

She saw immediately from his expression that she was right.

'Honor tried to postpone the appointment but unfortunately she couldn't.... She says it's no problem for her to go on her own and she understands that there was no way I could leave you, not the way you were.'

For a moment Olivia was too moved to speak as she absorbed the wonder of what he had said.
She
had been more important to him than either Honor or their baby....
She
had been the one he had chosen to be
with...her
needs had come first.
She
had come first, but as fast as such thoughts formed, little-girl thoughts that echoed all the pent-up feelings of her past, newer, stronger more mature ones, took their place. She, too, was a mother. She
too
knew that anxiety every woman feels for the health and safety of her unborn child and
she
knew, too, how much Honor must surely really want David to be with her...even more so than a younger mother. Very firmly she shook her head and smiled at her father.

'Dad, I'm fine now,' she told him. She continued insisting wisely, 'And there's no way I could
ever
forgive myself if you weren't with Honor. She needs you to be there—whatever she might have said.' She could see the hesitation and uncertainty in his eyes.

'You must go,' she repeated. 'Please. I want you to.'

As she spoke, Olivia suddenly felt as though she had stepped over an unseen threshold, as though she had overcome an unknown antagonist, as though she had reached out and taken hold of the strong supportive hand she had never even known previously was there waiting to grasp her own. Suddenly she acknowledged she felt secure, loved... shiningly sure of herself and her place in the world and in her father's love.

'Very well, but remember, no getting out of bed,'

David told her, coming back to her bedside and bending to give her a fierce hug and kiss the top of her head. His eyes were full of tears. They still had a long way to go and a lot of problems to solve, David knew that, but now, for the first time he felt optimistic about the final outcome.

As
BEN PICKED UP
the mail he glowered bad-temperedly at the front door. He shouldn't have to do this. Maddy should be here to do it... or Jenny.... They had no right to leave him on his own. Well, he was going to make sure that he taught them a lesson. He was going to change his will and then... He frowned as he saw a letter addressed to himself. It was thick and bulky. A little awkwardly and uncertainly he opened it, leaning against his chair for support as he did so.

Before she had taken the children to school Maddy had relit the log fire in his study. She had tried to persuade him to have one of those newfangled gas log things but he preferred the real thing. Gas logs! He snorted as he started to read the letter and then froze, the gas logs forgotten as a huge wave of icy shock and fury engulfed his whole body. By the time he had read and read the letter again he was shaking so much that he could barely hold it.

Savagely he ripped it up and threw it on the fire.

His heart was pounding painfully with a mixture of anger and panic. It was all lies of course, it had to be.

He had never... He gasped as out of nowhere a wall of pain suddenly hit him, sweeping him up into a death grip so intense that he couldn't even cry out against it.

It sliced into and through him, tearing at him, claw-ing and mangling, like a living red-hot fury. He tried to fight it but it wouldn't loosen its grip of him. The familiarity of his study started to darken and fade, he could see a bright light almost too painful for his eyes to endure and then suddenly there
he
was, standing in front of him, laughing as he walked towards him, his hair shining with the light that surrounded him, his eyes unlined and a deep dense blue, his teeth white, his bearing upright. Ben could see tenderness and compassion in his eyes as well as something else he didn't want to see.

'No,' he protested, trying to draw back from his touch.

'Ben, it's me....' the other told him gently.

'Max,' Ben cried out in confusion. 'I don't—'

'No, not Max,' the other corrected him patiently.

'You know who I am, Ben. There's nothing to be afraid of. I've come to take you home.'

'I am home,' Ben started to say but the words froze on the heavy cumbersome weight of the body he could see lying on the floor below him.

'Matthew,' he whispered shakily as his twin waited and watched.

'Yes,' he confirmed...waiting whilst Ben reached for his outstretched hand before saying gently, 'Come.

It's time for us to go.'

'Matthew,' Ben repeated, the word sighing through him. 'My brother...'

'WANT TO
talk about it?'

Sara tensed as her father walked along the edge of the jetty to where she was sitting hunched, staring out at the blueness of the sea.

"There isn't anything to talk about,' she denied.

Richard Lanyon looked thoughtfully over her down-bent head. She had arrived several days earlier, white-faced and with haunted eyes.

'It's a man,' her mother had pronounced when Sara had flatly refused to say anything to them other than that she had decided to fly out and spend Christmas with them.

'What man?' Richard had demanded, his mouth an ominous line.

'A Crighton man,' Sara's mother had hazarded.

Richard had shaken his head over his wife's female intuition, but now...

'Anything or
anyone
,' he challenged her directly now, watching the way her eyes widened and darkened as though she were in physical pain.

'Sara,' he begged her.

But she refused to be drawn, saying only, 'It's no use, Dad. Talking won't do anything. He doesn't...'

Getting up and dusting the sand off her bare tanned legs she told him, 'I love him but he doesn't love me.

I'm not a little girl any more,' she reminded him soberly, 'and you can't make the pain go away for me....

I wish you could.'

Sombrely he watched as she walked away—not his little girl any more but a woman.

THEY WERE OVER
the worst of the immediacy of the shock of it now, rallying around one another as close families do. David had wanted the funeral to be a quiet family affair but firmly and with authority Jon had overruled him.

"That might be what
we
want, but it's not what Dad would have wanted,' he had told him.

'He liked things to be done with pomp and cere-mony. He would think we had done very poorly by him.'

'Mmm.. .nothing less than a state funeral if it could have been arranged,' Max had agreed and David had conceded that they were right.

It had made his heart ache with love and pride to witness the quiet calm way Jon had automatically taken charge after Jenny had returned to find Ben dead on the floor beside his chair, and he had been more than glad to concede that right to him.

All the family were invited, including the Chester branch.

'You know how competitive Dad always was with them,' Jon had reminded David when David had looked askance at the formal black-edged cards Jon had ordered for the service. "This is what he would have wanted and we owe him that,' Jon had told his twin gently.

'Mmm... Well, when it's my turn, please remember I want something much simpler—a natural woodland DIY burial.'

Jon had laughed chiding him teasingly, 'If you think for one minute
I'm
going to dig a hole big enough for
you...'

CASPAR SAT
forward on the edge of his seat as the taxi turned into the drive. He had asked David not to say anything to Olivia about his return and a little reluctantly the other man had agreed.

'How is she?' he had asked David when he had rung from the airport to say that he had arrived.

'Much better,' David had confirmed. As David spoke to him Caspar had heard in the background the voices of his two daughters and a feeling of aching longing had filled him.

OLIVIA HAD
perfectly understood when David had said that he was returning home. She was feeling a lot better although Jon had insisted that she was not to rush back to work. Ben's death had come as a shock to all of them despite the fact that he had been unwell for quite some time.

She heard Ally barking and saw the tail lights of the taxi disappearing but no premonition of who her visitor might be struck her as she went to open the door, so that the shock of seeing Caspar standing there made it impossible for her to hide her emotions from him.

The long flight to Manchester had given Caspar more time than he wanted to think, not just about what he was doing but what he
had
done and what he and Olivia had done—
together
and
apart
—the good and the bad.

He had missed his daughters and he had missed Olivia, too, but it took the fierce jolt of emotion bump-ing his heart against his ribs as he saw the feelings Olivia didn't have time to hide to make him acknowledge just how strong his love for her still was.

'Caspar...'

No sooner had Olivia done nothing more than gasp his name than Amelia and Alex came rushing into the hallway flinging themselves into their father's arms.