For Better For Worse

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 (#ulink_33d16b60-2109-5aac-89a2-17dccca62b7a)

‘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 about her either; she scorned such ploys and affectations. It was, Ben reflected wryly as he slid his fingers into the thick dark mass of curls haloing her face, only now, in these their most intimate moments, that her normal exuberance was calmed and tamed, to reveal her vulnerability and sensuality.

‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ he told her as he felt her hand slide downwards over his body.

Zoe laughed, turning her face into the curve of his throat and kissing him lovingly.

She laughed again as she heard him groan and felt him turn his body in towards her, his actions running directly counter to his words.

It had always been like this between them right from the very start, Ben, cautious, concerned, wanting to hold back; take time and to be sure; she…

She made a voluptuous sound of appreciation against his skin as her fingers closed gently round him.

…She impatient, impulsive, knowing almost from the first moment they had met that she wanted him.

She felt him move against her, his body aroused, hard; she caressed him slowly, enjoying her own body’s response to him, the taut, heavy feeling in her breasts; the sensitivity of her nipples especially when she rubbed herself rhythmically against his chest, the small betraying, knowing pulse that grew insistently urgent as she let herself absorb the hot silky texture of his skin, anticipating the pleasure that lay ahead, the pleasures they had already known.

Ben wrapped his arms around her, kissing the top of her head and then, when she lifted her face to look at him, her mouth.

His skin smelled of warmth and sleep and the faintly acrid scent of his sweat, and that special unmistakable scent that was his alone and which as always she found unbearably erotic. She wondered if her scent affected him in the same way. Ben didn’t like talking about sex. In the northern city in which he had grown up, boys… men grew up with an attitude towards sex which was very different from the ones she had absorbed from her own middle-class parents.

And yet Ben was an unbelievably tender and caring lover, almost as though, if he was unable to talk to her about this most intimate side of their lives together, then at least he could make up for his inhibitions by showing her all he felt.

They knew each other well enough now, had been together long enough to recognise without words each other’s signs of arousal, each other’s sexual needs, and yet each time they made love it was different… special… familiar and yet still, for Zoe, achingly pleasurable.

Now, when Ben kissed her, he did so lingeringly, slowly, taking his time, as though the intimate caresses of their mouths were a total act of physical communication and satisfaction on their own, and not merely a preliminary act to his physical possession of her.

No, if anything she was the one who was the more impatient.

Not that there was any doubt that Ben wanted her, she acknowledged in satisfaction as she stroked her thumb along the underside of the rigid shaft of his penis and felt him shudder against her, his muscles tensing as his teeth tugged on her bottom lip.

She felt his hand touch her breast, cupping it, and she moved against him, enjoying the delicate friction of his palm against her nipple. Soon he would bend his head and kiss her throat, her shoulder and then her breast itself, taking his time, lingering over each caress, while she felt the urgent thud of his heartbeat against her body and savoured the delicious tension of her own growing need to feel his mouth against her nipple, tugging on the small hard peak of flesh.

Languorously she stroked her hands over his stomach and hips, sliding them down over his buttocks, caressing him lazily until she felt the sharp pins and needles of pleasure exploding inside her as his tongue rubbed over her nipple. Her fingers tightened on his skin, his mouth opened over her nipple. She shuddered in pleasure as the hot fierce surge of her own arousal overwhelmed her.

‘Now, Ben,’ she told him thickly. ‘Now… now… now. I want you now…’

Half an hour later, when the sharp summons of the telephone broke into the luxurious pleasure of their shared post-coital relaxation, Zoe told Ben lazily, ‘It’s your turn.’

‘Why on earth can’t we get a telephone by the bed?’ Ben grumbled as he pushed back the duvet and reached for and pulled on a clean pair of underpants.

‘Because you said we couldn’t afford one,’ Zoe reminded him, watching him with unashamed pleasure.

He had a wonderful body, lean and powerfully male without being over-muscled. His arms and chest were taut with sinewy strength, his stomach flat and hard. She gave a small convulsive movement of sheer sensuality, remembering the sensation of the soft dark hair that grew on his body against her fingertips; fine and silky over his chest and stomach, it darkened and thickened into a heavier stomach-tensing line of more intense growth along the centre of his body, spreading wider and thicker above the base of his penis.