The Marriage Resolution

Dee had known what her father meant, and very tactfully and caringly over the years she had ensured that Peter’s pride was never hurt by the realisation that her father had considered him to be not quite as financially astute as he himself believed he was.

In less than a week’s time Dee was due to chair the AGM of their main committee. There were certain changes she wished to make in the focus and operation of her father’s local charity, and she had been subtly lobbying Peter and the other members of the committee to this end.

Her main aim was to focus the benefit of the revenue the charity earned, from public donation and the endowments her father had made to it, not on its present recipients but instead on the growing number of local young people Dee felt were desperately in need of their help. Her fellow committee members, people of her father’s generation in the main, would, she knew, take some convincing. Conservative, and in many ways old-fashioned, they were not going to be easy to convince that the young people they saw as brash and even sometimes dangerous were desperately insecure and equally desperately in need of their help and support. But Dee was determined to do it, and as a first step towards this she needed to enlist Peter’s support and co-operation as her co-signatory.

She had already made overtures to him, suggesting that it was time for them to consider changing things, but it would be a slow process to thoroughly convince him, as she well knew, and she had sensed that he was already a little bit alarmed by her desire to make changes.

Peter had fallen asleep. Quietly Dee stood up and started to move towards the bedroom door, but Hugo got there first, not just holding it open for her but following her through and down the stairs.

‘There’s really no need for you to stay here with Peter,’ Dee began firmly once they were both downstairs. ‘I could—’

‘You could what? Move him into your own home? What about your own family, Dee…your husband and child? Or is it children now? No, Peter will be much more comfortable where he is. After all, if you’d genuinely wanted him there you’d have taken steps to encourage him to live with you before now, instead of waiting until he’s practically at death’s door…’

Death’s door! Dee’s heart gave a frightened bound.

‘I did try to persuade him,’ she defended herself, ignoring Hugo’s comment about her non-existent husband and family in the urgency of her desire to protect herself from his criticisms. ‘You don’t understand…

Peter’s very proud. His friends, his whole life is here in Lexminster…’

‘You heard what the doctor said,’ Hugo continued inexorably. ‘He’s too old and frail to be living in a house like this. All those stairs alone, never mind—’

‘It’s his home,’ Dee repeated, and reminded him quickly, ‘And you heard what he said about wanting to stay here…’

‘I heard a frightened old man worrying that he was going to be bundled out of the way to live amongst strangers,’ Hugo agreed. ‘At least that’s one problem we don’t have to deal with in Third World countries. Their people venerate and honour their old. We can certainly learn from them in that respect.’

Third World countries. It had always been Hugo’s dream to work with and for the people in such countries, but a quick discreet look at his hands—lean, strong, but not particularly tanned, his nails immaculate—did not suggest that he had spent the last ten years digging wells and latrines, as they had both planned to do once they left university.

How idealistic they had both been then, and how furiously angry Hugo had been with her when she had told him that she had changed her mind, and that it was her duty to take over her father’s responsibilities.

‘You mean that money matters more to you than people?’ he had demanded.

Fighting to hide her tears, Dee had shaken her head. ‘No!’

‘Then prove it…come with me…’

‘I can’t. Hugo, please try to understand.’

She had pleaded with him, but he had refused to listen to her.

‘Look, if I’m going to stay here with Peter there are one or two things I need to do, including collecting my stuff from my hotel. Can you stay here?’

The sound of Hugo’s curt voice brought Dee abruptly back to the present.

‘Can you stay here with him until I get back?’

Tempted though she was to refuse—after all, why should she do anything to help Hugo Montpelier?—her concern for Peter was too strong to allow her to give in to the temptation.

‘Yes, I can stay,’ she agreed.

‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ Hugo told her, glancing frowningly at his watch. A plain, sturdy-looking one, Dee noticed, but she also noticed that it was a rather exclusive make as well. His clothes looked expensive too, even if very discreetly so. But then there had always seemed to be money in Hugo’s background, much of it tied up in land, even if he had preferred to make his own way in his university days. His grandmother had come from a prosperous business family, and she had married into the lower levels of the aristocracy.

In Hugo’s family, as in her own, there had been a tradition of helping others, but Hugo had dismissed his grandfather’s ‘good works’ as patronage of the worst kind.

‘People should be helped to be independent, not dependent, encouraged and educated to stand free and proud…’

He had spoken so stirringly of his beliefs…his plans.

Dee longed to reiterate that he had no need to concern himself with Peter, that she would take full responsibility for his welfare, but she sensed that he would enjoy dismissing her offer of help. She had seen the dislike and the contempt darkening his eyes as he’d looked at her, and she had seen too the way his mouth had curled as he had openly studied her as she crossed Peter’s bedroom floor.

What had he seen in her to arouse that contempt? Did he perhaps think the length of her honey-blonde hair was too youthful for a woman in her thirties? Did he find her caramel-coloured trousers with their matching long coat dull and plain, perhaps, compared with the clothes of the no doubt very youthful and very attractive women he probably spent his time with? Did it amuse him to see the way the soft cream cashmere of her sweater discreetly concealed the soft swell of her breasts when he had good reason to know just how full and firm they actually were?

What did it matter what Hugo thought? Dee derided herself as he turned away from her and strode towards the door. After all, he had made it plain enough just how little he cared about her thoughts or her feelings. She shivered a little, as though the room had suddenly gone very cold.

Ten minutes after Hugo had left Dee heard Peter coughing upstairs. Anxiously she hurried up to his room, but to her relief as she opened his bedroom door she saw that he was sitting up in bed, smiling reassuringly at her, his colour much warmer and healthier than it had been when she had seen him earlier.

‘Where’s Hugo?’ he asked Dee as she returned his smile.

‘He’s gone to collect his things,’ she answered him. It hurt a little to recognise how eager he was to have the other man’s company—and, it seemed, in preference to her own.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked him. ‘Would you like a drink…or something to eat?’

‘I’m feeling fine, and, yes, a cup of tea would be very welcome, Dee.’ He thanked her.

It didn’t take her very long to make it, and she carried the tray upstairs to Peter. In addition to his tea she had made him some delicately cut little sandwiches, as well as buttering two of the home-made scones she had brought with her for him. She knew he had a weakness for them, and couldn’t help smiling at the enthusiasm he exhibited when he saw them.

‘I didn’t realise that you and Hugo had kept in touch,’ she commented carefully when she was pouring his tea. He had insisted that he didn’t either need or want to go back to sleep.

‘Mmm…Well, to be honest, we hadn’t…didn’t. But then I happened to run into him a few months ago quite by chance. He was here in Lexminster on business and we were both guests at the same drinks do. I wasn’t sure it was him at first…but then he came over and introduced himself.’

‘Mmm…he has changed,’ Dee agreed, bending her head over the teapot as she poured her own tea and hoping that her voice wasn’t giving her away. She would have recognised Hugo anywhere—there were some things that were just too personal ever to be changed. The aura that surrounded a person’s body, which one knew instinctively once one had been permitted within their most intimate personal space, their scent, as highly individual as their fingerprints, and even the way they breathed. These were things that could not be changed.

‘What’s he actually doing these days?’ she enquired as carelessly as she could.

‘Hasn’t he told you? He’s the chief executive in charge of a very special United Nations aid programme. As I understand it, from what he’s told me, their plan is to educate and help the people they’re dealing with to become self-sufficient and to combat the ravages of the years of drought their land has suffered. He’s very enthusiastic about a new crop they’re still working on, which, if it’s successful, will help to provide nearly forty per cent of the people’s protein requirements.’

‘That is ambitious,’ Dee acknowledged.

‘Ambitious and expensive,’ Peter agreed. ‘The crop is still very much in the early experimental stages. The whole scheme involves huge amounts of international funding and support, and one of Hugo’s responsibilities is to lobby politicians for those funds. He was saying that he’d much prefer to be working in the field, but as I reminded him he always did have a first-class brain. At one time I even thought he might continue with his studies and make a career in academics himself, but he was always such a firebrand…’

A firebrand. Dee had thought of him more as a knight in shining armour, rescuing not distressed damsels but others less fortunate than himself and with far more important needs. Being romantic and idealistic herself, it had seemed to her that Hugo had met every one of her impossibly high ideals and criteria, morally…emotionally…and sexually…Oh, yes, quite definitely sexually! Her virginal reluctance to commit herself physically to a man had been totally and completely swept away by the passion that Hugo had aroused in her. Utterly, totally and completely. She hadn’t so much as timidly crossed her virginal Rubicon as flung herself headlong and eagerly into its tumultuous erotic flood!

‘You should talk with him, Dee,’ Peter was continuing enthusiastically. ‘He’s got some very good ideas.’

‘Mmm…I hardly think learning to grow our own protein is a particularly urgent consideration for the residents of Rye,’ Dee couldn’t resist pointing out a little dryly.

It irked her a little to be told she should crouch eagerly at Hugo’s feet, as though he were some sort of master and she his pupil. In fact, it irked her rather more than just a little, she admitted. She might not have completed her degree course—her father’s death had put an end to that—and she had certainly not been able to go on to obtain her doctorate, but what she had learned both from her father and through her own ‘hands-on’ experience had more than equipped her to deal proficiently and, she believed, even creatively with the complexities and demands of her own work. So far as she was concerned she certainly did not need Hugo’s advice or instruction on how to manage her business.

‘You’ve got a definite flair for finance,’ her father had told her approvingly, and Dee knew without being immodest that he had been quite right.