The Marriage Resolution

Someone was knocking on Peter’s front door.

‘That will be the doctor,’ Hugo announced before she could gather her confused thoughts and correct his misapprehensions.

‘The doctor…?’

‘Yes, Peter is very poorly. Excuse me, I’ll go and let her in.’

Her! Peter’s normal doctor wasn’t a woman!

As she stood to one side a very attractive, cold-eyed brunette walked through the door towards Hugo, saying, ‘Ah, Mr Montpelier. I’m Dr Jane Harper; we spoke on the phone.’

‘We certainly did,’ Hugo agreed, with far more warmth in his voice than there had been when he’d spoken to her, Dee noticed, digesting the unwanted recognition that knowledge brought as uncomfortably as though it had been a particularly unwelcome piece of food.

‘Please, come this way,’ Hugo was inviting the doctor, and she was smiling at him as though…

Angrily Dee swallowed down her own unpalatable thoughts.

CHAPTER TWO

PETER was very poorly. She had known he wasn’t well, of course, and had been getting increasingly concerned about him, but to hear Hugo describing him as ‘very poorly’ had come as an unpleasant shock to her. Anxiously Dee followed Hugo down the narrow hallway. She had seen the female appreciation in the other woman’s eyes as Hugo had let her in, even if it had been quickly masked by her professionalism as she’d asked quickly after her patient.

She herself was quite obviously an unwanted third, Dee recognised as Hugo outlined Peter’s symptoms to the doctor and she listened intently to him, positioning herself so that Dee was blocked out of Hugo’s line of vision. Not that she minded that. She was still trying to come to terms with the shock of his totally unexpected presence.

The last time she had seen him he had been a rangy young man dressed in tee shirt and jeans, his wild mane of hair curling youthfully round his face. Initially his reputation as something of a rebel had caused Dee’s father to be a little bit disapproving of him, but even her father could not have found fault with the appearance he presented now, Dee acknowledged as his absorption with the doctor gave her the opportunity to study him surreptitiously. The tee shirt and jeans had been exchanged for a smartly tailored business suit, and the dark hair was no longer shoulder-length but clipped neatly to his head, but the bone structure was still the same, and so were the aquamarine eyes and that dangerously sexy mouth. Dee’s heart gave a dangerous little flutter—and that was something else which did not appear to have changed either!

Anxious to distract herself, as well as concerned for Peter, she started to walk towards the stairs.

‘Where are you going?’ Hugo demanded, breaking off his quiet conversation with the doctor.

‘I thought I’d go up and see Peter…’ Dee began, but immediately both the doctor and Hugo began to shake their heads in denial.

Feeling thoroughly chastised, Dee tried to conceal her chagrin.

‘I’d better go up and see him,’ the doctor was saying to Hugo.

‘Yes. I’ll come with you,’ he agreed.

Both of them were totally ignoring Dee. To suffer such ignominy was a totally unfamiliar experience for her, and not one she was enjoying, but there was no way she intended to leave—not until she had discovered how Peter was.

It was ten minutes before the doctor and Hugo came back downstairs, and Dee’s anxiety for Peter overcame her outraged pride enough for her to ask quickly as they walked into the room, ‘How is he? What’s wrong with him? Will…?’

‘He’s got a weak heart and he’s been overdoing things,’ the doctor told her matter-of-factly. ‘Trying to move some books, apparently. He really shouldn’t be living on his own, not at his age. He ought to be living in some kind of sheltered accommodation since he doesn’t appear to have any family, and in view of his recent operation.’

‘Oh, no, that would be the last thing he would want…’ Dee began to protest. but the doctor was already turning away from her.

‘He was fortunate that you were here when he collapsed and that you knew what to do,’ she said warmly to Hugo. ‘If he’d continued to try to lift those books…’ She stopped, and Dee told herself sternly that she was being unfair in thinking that what Hugo had done was quite simply what any person with any sense would have done, and scarcely seemed to warrant his elevation to the rank of a super-hero as the doctor seemed to suggest.

‘I’ll make some arrangements with the social services for some home help for him,’ the doctor told Hugo, once again totally excluding Dee from the conversation.

‘Oh,’ she added, suddenly turning to glance dismissively at Dee. ‘He wants to see you…’

‘I told him you were here,’ Hugo informed her briefly as Dee hurried towards the door.

Was she being unkind in suspecting that the doctor wanted to have Hugo to herself? And if she did what business was it of hers? Dee thought as she hurried upstairs.

Peter looked very small and frail lying there in bed, the sunshine pouring through the open windows highlighting the thin boniness of his hands.

‘Peter!’ Dee exclaimed warmly as she sat down beside him and reached for one of his hands, holding it tightly.

‘Dee, Hugo said you were here…Now, you’re not to worry,’ Peter told her before she could say anything. ‘Hugo is just fussing. I just felt a little bit short of breath, that’s all. There was no need for him to call the doctor…

‘Dee…’ Suddenly he looked very fretful and worried. ‘You won’t let them send me…anywhere…will you? I want to stay here. This is my home. I don’t want…’

Dee could see how upset he was getting.

‘Peter, it’s all right. You’re not going anywhere,’ Dee tried to reassure him.

‘The doctor was saying that I ought to be in a home,’ Peter told her anxiously. ‘I know. I heard her…she…’

He was starting to get even more upset, increasing Dee’s concern for him.

‘Peter, don’t worry…’ She started to comfort him, but as she did so the bedroom door opened and Hugo came hurrying in, glowering at her as he strode protectively to Peter’s side.

‘What have you been saying to him?’ he demanded acerbically. ‘You’re upsetting him…’

She was upsetting him? Of all the nerve.

‘Peter, it’s all right,’ she promised her father’s old friend gently, deliberately ignoring Hugo—not an easy feat with a man the size Hugo was, and even less easy when one took into account his overpowering sexual charisma. ‘The only home I would ever allow you to move into would be mine, and that’s a promise…’

Out of the corner of her eye Dee could see the way Hugo’s mouth was tightening.

What was he doing here anyway? She had had no idea that Peter still had any contact with him. He had certainly never mentioned Hugo to her.

‘I don’t want to go anywhere; I want to stay here,’ Peter was complaining fretfully, plucking agitatedly at the bedcover as he did so. Dee’s tender heart ached for him. He looked so vulnerable and afraid, and she knew, in her heart of hearts, that for his own sake he ought not to be left to live on his own. Somehow she would have to find a way to persuade him to come to live with her, but he would, she knew, miss his university friends, the old colleagues he still kept in touch with.

‘And staying here’s exactly what you shall do—at least so long as I have any say in the matter,’ Hugo told him firmly.

Dee glowered at him. It was all very well for Hugo to make promises that were impossible to keep. And as for him having any say in the matter…!

But before she could say anything, to her astonishment she heard Peter demanding in a shaky voice, ‘You are going to stay here, then, are you, Hugo? I know we talked about it, but…’

‘I’m staying,’ Hugo agreed, but although he said the words gently the look in his eyes as he looked across the bed at her made Dee feel more as though he was making a threat against her than a promise to Peter. What on earth was going on? What was Hugo doing here? There were so many questions she wanted—needed—to ask Peter, but it was obvious that he was simply not well enough to answer her—and that knowledge raised other concerns for Dee.

Peter shared with her the legal responsibility for administering the charities her father had established, and, whilst technically and practically speaking the work involved was done by Dee, via her offices in Rye-on-Averton, so far as legally rubber-stamping any decisions was concerned Peter was her co-signatory, and his authority was a legal requirement that had to be adhered to. He, of course, had the right to nominate another person to take over that responsibility for him, and Dee had always assumed that, when the time came, they would discuss who would take on that duty. Now it seemed it could well be a discussion she was going to have to have with him rather earlier than she had expected.

Peter was a gentleman of the old school, with the old-fashioned belief that women—‘ladies’—needed a strong male presence in their lives to lean on, and Dee knew that he secretly deplored the fact that she had never married and had no husband to ‘protect’ her. She suspected too that he had never totally approved of the licence and authority her father had left to her so far as his financial interests went, and she often wondered a little ruefully what Peter would have thought had he known that her father had appointed him as a co-trustee for Peter’s benefit and protection rather than for hers.

‘His ideas, his ideals are more than praiseworthy,’ her father had once told her, adding with a sad shake of his head, ‘But…’