For Better for Worse

‘Your mother rang,’ she told him. ‘Sharon has passed her exams and she’s got really good grades. They’re hoping to come down to London for a couple of days to celebrate…’

‘Mmm… and so she should have done, the cost of that crammer we sent her to,’ Ben complained.

But Zoe knew him better now. She wasn’t the girl who had skimmed so carelessly over the surface of life any more, too caught up in her own needs to look beneath it. She knew how pleased he was, just as she had known, despite his bluster and complaints when she had first tentatively suggested it, how much it meant to him that she had shared his desire to help Sharon repair her sense of self-worth and to take a fresh interest in life.

No one could ever wipe away the pain of losing her baby; no one knew that better than Zoe. One day, if she was lucky, Sharon would find someone as caring as Ben, and when she did she hoped that, unlike her, Sharon would have the maturity to recognise his true worth.

She turned to look at her mother, who was still cooing over Katie, her heart melting with love, and then trembling slightly as she remembered how close she had come to turning her back on the wonderful gift she and Ben had been given.

Katie, whose conception she had first resented and then feared, Katie who she had believed would never know the love and care of her father.

Katie…

She looked at Ben and saw the way he was already anxious to have the baby back in his arms, and smiled wryly to herself as she murmured to him, ‘Just think what you’re going to be like when she’s seventeen.’

Ben grinned back at her.

‘I’m trying not to,’ he admitted ruefully.

‘Well, it probably won’t be so bad when you’ve three or four of them to worry about instead of just one,’ Zoe told him straight-faced.

‘Three or four?’

‘Yes, I think you’re right,’ Zoe agreed, deliberately misunderstanding. ‘Four would be better. Two of each… Of course, they might all be girls, but I don’t think I could stand that much competition.’

‘Four…’ Ben repeated, looking slightly dazed. ‘Four…’

‘Mmm… or perhaps six,’ Zoe murmured, sliding her arm through his and laughing up at him, and putting her head to one side while she studied him for a minute before teasing, ‘Yes, I definitely think you look like a father of six.’

‘Oh, you do, do you? Well, we’ll just have to see what we can do about that, won’t we?’

‘What are your mummy and daddy whispering about, I wonder?’ Heather asked her grandchild.

Katie didn’t know, she only knew that she liked it very much indeed, here in her nice, safe, warm world surrounded by people who loved her and cherished her. Very much indeed.

* * *

As Jennifer Bowers stepped up on the podium and waited for the applause to die down, Nick surreptitiously checked his reflection in the half-open glass door into the hall.

The suit was a new one—Armani—no dull, staid Savile Row tailoring for him; he was young enough, handsome enough to be able to carry off a sophisticated, modern image without alienating the voters, the PR firm Venice had hired had assured him.

‘You look perfect,’ Venice had purred when she had been called in to inspect him. ‘Perfect.’

It had irked him that others should apparently deem it necessary that Venice’s approval was needed, but he had learned to be wary about what he said to his wife.

There had been some medical concern over Venice’s health during her pregnancy, although Nick had never been able to establish what it was; certainly it did not prevent her from taking a controlling interest in everything that he did, from selecting his clothes to negotiating the purchase of the elegant London house which was to be their base once he was elected.

Nothing was to upset her, she had told Nick; there were to be no arguments, no unexplained absences from her side.

She had smiled at him as she said that, just as she had smiled at him when she had explained that Lucy Ferrars, the pretty little brunette who worked for the PR firm and who had soothed his battered ego with her obvious adoration, had lost her job.

‘Peter didn’t feel she was the right type and I must say I had to agree with him. From now on Peter himself will take charge of your public relations, Nick.’

It baffled Nick sometimes how Venice, who during the last weeks of her pregnancy never seemed to stir from the house, complaining that she felt too ill and looked too awful, nevertheless seemed to be aware of exactly how he spent every single second of his day.

His business had been sold; he wouldn’t have time for it any more, Venice had told him, adding with one of those dangerous, calculating smiles he had come to loathe so much that it had hardly been the type of thing that would do anything to add to his prestige.

‘It’s not as though you had any proper qualifications, a proper profession, like Adam for instance, is it?’ Venice had purred.