Starting Over

"Then why isn't he here?' Alex demanded quickly.

'Sweetheart, you already know why,' Olivia reminded her gently.

'Daddy and Mummy aren't going to live together any more. You know that,' Amelia informed her younger sister sharply, but when she looked at her Olivia could see that if anything her elder daughter was even more upset than her

younger.

She ought to have expected this and been prepared for it, Olivia knew, but somehow she had hoped...

convinced herself that the girls had accepted the separation.

'Well, if we can't have a daddy then I want to have a grandpa,' Alex announced, adding challengingly,

'Other children at school have grandpas and grandmas and they—'

'Oh, Alex,' Olivia protested realising painfully that Alex's small body was resisting all Olivia's attempts to offer her love and comfort.

'Amelia...' Olivia turned to her elder daughter. She loved both her children so much that it had never oc-curred to her that they might start to reject her...blame her...because they felt they had lost Caspar.

'You're older than Alex.... You know you aren't allowed to leave school and that road...'

'I had to do it, Mummy,' Amelia told her unwillingly. 'Alex said that she would go without me if I didn't....'

The look she gave first her younger sister and then Olivia herself tore at Olivia's emotions. How well she herself could remember that feeling of being responsible for the welfare and safety of a younger sibling, the anxiety, the fear, the anger and resentment against the world that forced on her a responsibility that was too heavy for her combined with a stoical determination to carry that burden somehow.

Oh, Amelia.... What was she doing to her children she asked herself sorrowfully. What was she inflicting on them?

'I wanted to know about my grandpa,' Alex was telling her firmly. 'You wouldn't tell us so I wanted to ask Uncle Jon about him.'

Every word she uttered was adding to Olivia's despair and guilt. How could she possibly continue with her work now? How could she bear to allow them out of her sight for a single second?

Serpent-like the thought slipped into her mind that none of this would have happened if Caspar had been here.

Caspar...

She had dreamed about him last night—again—

waking up, her face wet with tears to find her arms outstretched yearningly to the empty side of their bed.

But it had been the Caspar she had fallen in love with she had dreamed of, she reminded herself fiercely, not the Caspar her husband had become.

'Amelia and Alex, you must both promise me that you will never, ever, do anything like this again,' Olivia told them. 'That road is very dangerous... and you...

'You're both so precious, so vulnerable,' she wanted to tell them, but of course they were far too young to understand.

She was, Olivia knew, facing the dilemma that faced so many single working mothers. She needed to work to support her children financially, to give them the lifestyle enjoyed by their peers within their family group and at school. The house was mortgaged and Caspar would do his bit she knew, but she had always been the main breadwinner. Yes, they could down-scale. She could sell the house and buy something smaller in Haslewich itself, perhaps, and she was fully prepared to do so; but no matter what economies they made she would still have to earn a living...and she could not do that unless she had the kind of back-up and help that meant she need never have a single second's anxiety about the safety and welfare of her daughters.

There had been another message left from the nanny agency to say that they were unable to find anyone to meet her needs. Jenny, who she had hoped would help her, could not do so. All the other women in the family had very full busy lives of their own with their own responsibilities; and besides, there was no way she wanted her precious children to feel they were always on the fringes of other people's lives, always second best, always having to stand aside and watch others receive the love and hugs of loving parents and grandparents whilst they...

Olivia closed her eyes. There was no other course open to her now. For her children's sake she had to put aside her own pride and bitterness.

She had seen the look in her father's eyes as he tended Alex's cut leg. Tears filled her own. For the sake of her daughters there was nothing else she could do.

SARA GLANCED at her watch. It was well gone eight o'clock in the evening and her desk was virtually clear. She could have left hours ago and been curled up comfortably in her fiat watching her favourite TV

programme. So what was she doing sitting here...

waiting...?

She was working, that was what she told herself, ignoring the fact that she had been achieving little for the last fifteen minutes. Anyway, what had she expected? That just because she had indicated to Nick that she had changed her mind and that she wanted to go ahead with...with the ultimate cure for the afflic-tion she was suffering from, that he would drop everything and come speeding over to sweep her off to his bed!

No, of course she hadn't.

Liar, she scorned herself with silent derision. That was exactly what she had expected him to do. Was he deliberately trying to torment her, to humiliate her or was he more mundanely perhaps the kind of man who lost interest in his prey once it had stopped running?

Unable to dwell logically or unemotionally on such unpalatable and unwanted thoughts, Sara got off her chair and paced her office agitatedly.

If he didn't want her, well that was fine by her. He, after all, was the one who had come on to her and not the other way around. She had noticed how sexually compelling he was of course, but... She tensed as the telephone on her desk rang. There was no telephone in the flat which was why she had remained down here in the office, finding herself work to do just in case...

She made an angry grab for the telephone receiver grimacing when she discovered that the caller was someone who had dialled the office number in error and who really wanted to make a booking in the restaurant.

Politely she asked him to hold on whilst she went into the restaurant for the reservation book.

Having taken the booking, she was on her way back to the restaurant with it when she saw him. He was just about to push open the outside door. It was a wet night and as she watched him in avid absorbed intensity she saw him shake the raindrops off himself.

He hadn't seen her as yet and so she was able to watch him, virtually rooted to the spot by the urgency and strength of what she was feeling.

NICK HADN'T intended to go to the restaurant—or indeed to make any attempt to contact Sara. He wanted, no, needed, time to come to terms with what she had said to him. But then he had discovered that he needed some cash and the nearest cash dispenser was only a few seconds' walk away from the restaurant and...

As he pushed open the door he saw her. She was standing looking at him. A huge swell of feeling so strong that it shocked him surged through him. He wanted to swoop down and pick her up there and then, take her away somewhere where he could be totally and completely on his own with her...then they would see just how easy she would actually find it to separate sex from emotion.

As he reached her side some dangerous impulse within her drove Sara to say in soft challenge, 'Goodness me, I'd begun to wonder if you'd changed your mind and to think that perhaps you were one of those men who was all talk but no action!'

Aghast she wondered what on earth had prompted her to say something so foolhardy. But it was too late to take back her challenging words now. She could see from the angry glint in Nick's eyes just what he thought of them.

'Changed my mind? No way. And as for the rest of your statement...' His voice had become as smooth as cream but Sara was very sharply aware of the acid sting that lurked beneath his soft words.

'It will be my pleasure to prove otherwise.'

His pleasure! A tiny dart of fear and insecurity stabbed through Sara's body. Unwittingly her glance lifted to his to search his eyes, her own widening and darkening with an unexpected vulnerability that made Nick catch his breath. Just what kind of a game was she playing with him? One moment the sophisticated sexually experienced woman of the world, the next a vulnerable-looking novice who trembled at the mere thought of having sex.

But, after a remark like the one she had just made to him, there was no way she could be that!

Help

lessly Sara wondered how on earth she could have been so idiotic. No man liked having his sexuality challenged—she knew that.

Nick took a deep breath. What was he waiting for?

She had made it plain to him just what she wanted.

'I have to return home for a few days....'

'Home?' Sara questioned numbly. What was he trying to tell her? That he had, after all, changed his mind? That he needed more time to decide? Either way...

'Yes. I live in Pembrokeshire,' he told her tersely.

'I want you to come with me.'

Go with him?

Sara wasn't sure if the weakness that filled her was caused by shock or relief.

'We could be alone there,' Nick told her quietly, forcing her to meet and hold his gaze. 'I don't think either of us want to have our private lives played out under the interested eyes of either Frances and her family or my brother and his...'

'No,' Sara agreed. 'But Pembrokeshire...'

She hadn't got as far as thinking where they would expiate their mutually unwanted desire but had hazily assumed they would go to some hotel. Certainly, she agreed with him that she didn't want anyone else to know what was happening. After all, it wasn't as though they were going to have a proper relationship or become a 'couple,' but to go away alone with him to his home...

'If you can't trust me enough to come to my home then you certainly can't trust me and if you can't trust me enough to enter my home then you certainly can't trust me enough to enter your body,' he told her trenchantly and with such open sexual meaning that Sara flushed.

'I... When... There's Frances and my work... I'd have to take time off,' she began disjointedly.

'The weekend after next,' Nick told her immediately. 'Oh, and you'll need warm clothes. The cottage is fairly remote.'

Warm clothes! Sara gave him a startled look but wished she hadn't as he returned it with amusement, bending his head to whisper wickedly in her ear,

'What's wrong? Granted I want you like hell and I can promise you it's going to give us both very great pleasure when I prove it to you, but we shan't be spending the entire weekend in bed. Pembroke has one of the most famous and beautiful coastline walks in the country. If the weather's good enough we could even sail.