For Better For Worse

For Better for Worse

Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

EPILOGUE

Copyright

PROLOGUE

AS FERN saw Nick walk into the kitchen, her stomach muscles tensed.

She had heard him arrive from upstairs, had witnessed the impatience with which he had slewed the car to a halt and climbed out, slamming the door, and then glancing up at the house.

She had stepped back from the window then, an automatic and very betraying gesture, pausing as she caught sight of herself in her dressing-table mirror. She looked strained and tired, her eyes empty and lifeless… as empty and lifeless as her marriage to Nick?

Abruptly she had turned away from the mirror and hurried downstairs.

It was her own fault that Nick was in a bad mood, of course. She should not have raised the subject of how much time he was spending working last night. He had always hated her ‘interfering in his life’, as he called it. She had learned early on in her marriage that Nick loathed any form of restraint, even the mildest hint of criticism.

What was wrong with her? he had demanded to know last night. Didn’t she realise how fortunate she was, how many women would gladly change places with her?

‘You’re my wife,’ he had told her. ‘Nothing can change that.’

A promise, or a threat?

She tensed now, guiltily trying to suppress her rebellious thoughts. Nick was right. She was lucky to be married to him, especially after…

As he came towards her, her tension increased, her muscles locking. Automatically she looked away from him, pain a hard-edged lump in her throat. Nick was a very handsome man, and yet these days she found that sometimes she could hardly bear to look at him.

‘I love you… I need you, and I’m never, ever going to let you go,’ he had told her when he’d proposed to her, and she, swept off her feet, totally overwhelmed by his intensity, his insistence, dizzy and bemused by the speed with which he had taken over her life, had been unable to resist the pressure he had put on her.

Then she had been flattered; reassured; filled with gratitude and joy by his words.

Then…

Now, even with the width of the kitchen between them, she could smell the scent of another woman’s sex on him.

Fastidiously she increased the distance between them.

Was Nick having another affair? Last night he had denied it. And she had wanted him to deny it.

She had invested so much in this marriage, given so much to it. Too much?

How could she stay with him if he was having another affair, and yet how could she leave? Marriage was a lifetime commitment, and when problems arose within it they had to be worked at… or ignored? Her heart lurched. Was she really such a coward?

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Nick demanded sourly. ‘Not still sulking, are you?’

Protectively Fern turned to one side, reaching for the kettle, letting the straight swath of her hair swing across her face, obscuring her expression.

‘I’ve got a bit of news for you,’ Nick told her.

The surliness had gone from his voice now. It was lighter, triumphant… gloating almost. Her tension increased, but Fern suppressed it, concealing her reaction from him as instinctively as she had concealed her face. Inwardly her soul ached at what she was doing; for what their relationship had become.

‘It seems my saintly stepbrother is planning to buy Broughton House.’

Fern’s fingers tensed on the kettle-handle. She was glad she had her back to Nick.

‘Now I wonder what he wants with a place that size. All those bedrooms. A real family place…’

Fern could hear the ugly note of triumph quite clearly in his voice now. ‘Pity he hasn’t got a real family to put in it, isn’t it? Or maybe he’s thinking of acquiring one.

‘What is it, Fern? I haven’t said something to upset you, have I? Oh, I forgot—you’ve always been pretty keen on Broughton House yourself, haven’t you? You were always up there at one time… or so you claimed…’

‘I visited old Mrs Broughton occasionally, that’s all,’ Fern told him quietly.

Why did he insist on doing this to her? He knew as well as she did that there was no need… no point… He knew how bitterly she regretted what she had done.

‘Did you go to bed with him, Fern?’ he had asked her. ‘Did you?’ And she had wept silent tears which she knew had betrayed her.

‘He doesn’t want you, you know,’ he had told her, softly, gently almost, kinder to her now when he had the least reason to be than he had ever been. If he had shown her that kindness before, that compassion… would things have been any different?

How many men would still have wanted to remain married to her after that? Not many. A husband’s infidelity was one thing; a wife’s was something very different.

‘You’re my wife,’ he had told her when she had broken down and asked him why he wanted her to stay. ‘Marriage is forever, Fern. Isn’t that what your parents have always told you?’

She was his wife. He wanted their marriage… wanted her… needed her, so why was there this emptiness between them, this lack of harmony… this ugliness which eroded her pride and her self-respect?

‘I’m going up to have a shower,’ Nick told her.

To wash another woman’s scent off his body? Didn’t he realise that it was too late?

The kettle boiled and switched itself off.

So Adam was thinking of buying Broughton House… and of getting married.

Even though she was prepared for it—her body tensed against it—the pain was still sharp enough to make her catch her breath.

Adam was her brother-in-law; that was all, she reminded herself fiercely. Her stepbrother-in-law. Nothing more. Not now, not once… not ever.

Eleanor saw the advertisement while she was sitting in her dentist’s waiting-room flicking through a surprisingly current copy of Country Life.

It was the photograph that first caught her eye; the front of the house faced south and it had been photographed on a sunny day so that the stone walls were washed to a soft warm gold, the light glinting on the uneven leaded panes of the dormer attic windows.

The house looked settled, solid, permanent, safe and reassuring, offering a refuge from life’s turbulence… offering comfort.

She stared at the photograph for so long that at first she didn’t hear the receptionist call out her name.

Later, when she got home and discovered that in her haste to respond to the girl’s second clipped summons she had stuffed the magazine into her bag, she stifled her feelings of guilt and put the magazine down on her desk, intending to throw it away. But for some reason she didn’t… For some reason, later on in the day, taking a break from a particularly difficult translation of some Spanish documents for one of her clients, as she drank her cup of tea she found herself flicking through the magazine again, stopping when she reached the half-page ad featuring the house, reading the written details below the photograph briefly, her real attention focused on the photograph itself, on the warmth the house seemed to give off, the security… the sanctuary…

Sanctuary… The word dug into her conscience like a sharp thorn. What need did she have of any sanctuary? A happy second marriage, a successful career… two well-adjusted sons. She was one of the luckiest people she knew; everyone said so…

Everyone…

‘They want us… they want us… They want us!’ Zoe exulted, breaking free of Ben’s arm to perform a brief pirouette of triumph, laughing up at him as he caught hold of her, restraining her and shaking his head.

‘Don’t get too excited,’ he warned her. ‘This is only the first step. Now we’ve got to keep our fingers crossed that they can find the right place.’

He was frowning now with the seriousness which had initially attracted her to him and which sometimes she found heartachingly hard to fathom.

Why did he always seem to fear that life was waiting to deliver a blow? Why couldn’t he simply share her exultation? But she was being unfair; she knew that in his own way he did, and that, although he would die rather than admit it, this first step down the road they had plotted out for themselves was intensely important to him.

‘Benedict Fraser, Restaurateur of the Year,’ Zoe crowed, refusing to allow him to suppress her exhilaration. ‘I can see it now. “Benedict Fraser, ably aided by his ravishingly attractive and capable business manager, Ms Zoe Clinton, at their country house restaurant… quite definitely the success story of the year…"’

‘Hang on. We still have to find our country house,’ Benedict warned her. ‘Or at least our backer has to…’

‘Our backer… I still can’t believe it’s all happening. And all through you stepping in at the last minute and doing the catering for the Hargreaveses’ wedding.’

‘I’d never have done it if you hadn’t pushed me into it. Wedding breakfasts aren’t really my thing, and having to step in at the last minute like that… It’s all down to you.’

‘It’s not down to either of us,’ Zoe corrected him firmly. ‘We did it together. Both of us. We make a good team, Ben.’ She darted him a brief look and added softly, ‘In bed and out of it…’

As she had known it would, her reference to the sexual aspect of their relationship made him slightly embarrassed. For a man who was such a skilled and sensitive lover, he was oddly shy and uneasy about discussing sex. His upbringing, perhaps?

She shook her head, pushing the thought aside, not wanting it to spoil her own pleasure in their day.

‘How long do you think it will take Clive Hargreaves to find a suitable property?’

‘I don’t know. But he’s obviously already looking. I saw a pile of brochures on his desk when we were signing the contract.’

Zoe gave an ecstatic sigh. ‘We’re finally on our way. Nothing can stop us now… nothing. It’s all there waiting for us… everything we’ve wanted. Our own restaurant and the option of developing it into a small country hotel. You as the chef—the chef—and me managing the administration side of things. Just the way we dreamed.’

‘The way you dreamed. I would never have let myself imagine…’ He broke off, shaking his head. ‘I still can’t believe it’s all actually happening. This chance means so much to me, Zoe.’ He stopped walking and looked at her. ‘I don’t think you realise…’

‘Yes, I do,’ she interrupted him softly. ‘I know just what it means to you to have your own place, Ben. I know how important it is to you.’

‘Providing nothing goes wrong…’

‘Nothing will go wrong. What could go wrong? The contracts are signed, and we’re on our way. Stop worrying… Nothing will go wrong—I promise you.’

CHAPTER ONE

ELEANOR suppressed a small exclamation of impatience, glancing at her watch as the traffic came to another halt. London was impossible at this time in the morning. Especially when the streets were still grey and wet, the sky sullenly threatening and what blossom there was beginning to show on the trees battered by the sharp east wind.

The traffic moved—inches rather than yards, and she counted slowly to ten, trying to relax her tense muscles. She was going to be late arriving at her office, and she had an appointment at nine-thirty. A potential new client. She gnawed anxiously at her bottom lip, recalling the interview she had had recently with her accountant.

They were still making a profit, he had told her, but their costs were rising; the rent on their offices had doubled in the last eighteen months and was set to rise again. All over the city, peripheral businesses such as theirs were beginning to suffer from the cutbacks made by the conglomerates and multinationals which used them.

The tidal flood of extra and extremely profitable business she and Louise had seen in the last years of the Eighties was now ebbing away very fast and the anticipated upsurge in business they had expected from the new ties with Europe had been a trickle rather than a flood.

The office, which had been so convenient when she still lived in the flat, before she and Marcus had married and she and the boys had moved into his elegant Chelsea house, was now an increasingly tension-inducing drive across London.

Why was it that wet weather always made the traffic slower? she wondered irritably, frowning. She had intended to make an early start this morning, but then Tom had overslept and come down late to breakfast and Gavin had ‘lost’ his football kit, so that by the time she had actually managed to chivvy them plus their belongings into the car she had already been running behind schedule.

Marcus had already had his breakfast and started work in his study. He had frowned up at her as she opened the door, putting down the brief he had been working on. Even now, after three years of being together plus almost a year of marriage, her heart still turned over when she saw him. A ridiculous reaction in a woman of thirty-eight going on thirty-nine, surely? And to think that until she had met him she had been a woman who prided herself on her common-sense approach to life, on her awareness of the errors of judgements and the misplaced romantic ideals which had led to the break-up of her first marriage.

Until she had seen the brief in Marcus’s hand, she had almost been tempted to ask him if he could run the boys to school; the school was closer to his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn than it was to her office. But, despite the intensity of their love, a part of her remained brittly conscious that Tom and Gavin were her responsibility, just as Vanessa was his.

Vanessa… She could feel her stomach muscles tensing as she thought about Marcus’s daughter.

It troubled her that she was finding it so difficult to establish a good relationship with her. She was after all Marcus’s child… his daughter. Vanessa’s parents had been divorced for several years before she, Eleanor, had become involved in Marcus’s life. But whenever Vanessa came to stay with them Eleanor felt uncomfortable and on edge. She had even begun to feel ill-at-ease when she and Marcus made love when Vanessa was there.

Part of the trouble was that the Chelsea house had never been designed for two adults and three children. Marcus had bought it after his first marriage broke down; for a single or even a married couple without children it was the ideal London home, small but elegant with its downstairs kitchen-cum-living-room and Marcus’s study plus the dining-room, its first-floor drawing-room, which was spacious enough for the kind of parties a highly successful barrister might need to give. There was nothing wrong either with the two good-sized bedrooms, each with its own private bathroom, unless of course you happened to have three children to squash into that one spare double bedroom.

The bedroom which, Vanessa had told Eleanor coolly but very challengingly, had always been hers when she visited her father.

Which meant that her sons had to share the double room next to theirs and then be squashed up together in the small stuffy attic bedroom, which had never ever been intended to be anything other than a temporary emergency bedroom, whenever Vanessa came to stay.

She loved Marcus so much and she knew he loved her, but he had lived on his own for almost seven years before they met; he had been used to a quiet, well-ordered way of life, without the kind of tensions which now seemed to be disrupting their lives.

The obvious answer was to move, to find a larger house which would accommodate them all comfortably, give them all room to breathe… give all three children their all-important personal space.

The trouble was that, in London, the size of house they needed would be so exorbitantly expensive that it was pointless even thinking about moving.

Her business made a reasonable profit, and as a leading litigation barrister, a Q.C., Marcus earned good fees, but living in London was expensive. Her ex-husband had remarried almost immediately after their divorce and had a second young family, and was simply not in a position to continue to contribute to Gavin and Tom’s education—at eleven and thirteen respectively both of them still had several years of education ahead of them, especially if, as she hoped, they both went on to university.

Her tension eased as the traffic suddenly started to move.

It was just the miserable weather that was making her feel so on edge, she reassured herself. At this time of the year, everyone had had enough of cold and damp and was looking forward to some sun.

She and Marcus had hoped to spend a week with friends in Italy in May, but one of Marcus’s court cases had been brought forward and now it looked as though their week in Tuscany would have to be cancelled.

As she turned into the underground car park beneath the block that housed her office, the sleet started.

It was just gone half-past nine, she noted as she locked the car and headed quickly for the lift.

The office block was a modern one, centrally situated in the heart of the city and a good catchment area for their business. Eleanor and Louise had agonised for weeks on whether or not to take the lease. It had been expensive even then, and in those days neither of them had been sure of what volume of work they could expect.

That they had met at all had been pure chance. They had literally bumped into each other when Eleanor had been delivering some translations she had just completed for a large firm of importers.

Louise had been there on a similar errand and, once they had discovered that their language skills complemented rather than competed with one another, it hadn’t taken long for them to decide to pool those skills and set up business as a formal partnership.

It had been a decision which had paid off well; their reputation had spread by word of mouth and within four years of becoming partners they were successful and well known enough to feature in a rash of magazine and newspaper articles about the emergence of the successful businesswoman of the Eighties.

In those days both of them had been single, Eleanor with a bad marriage and an even worse divorce behind her and only too thankful to fling herself head-first into the demands of establishing a new career, not just because she needed the money, but because it also offered her a much needed solace for her wounded pride and battered self-esteem; and Louise, eight years her junior, just emerging from the trauma of ending an intense and destructive relationship with a married man.

Physically so very opposite—she tall and fair, quiet and restrained in both her thoughts and her actions, Louise small, brunette and impulsively vivacious—they had shared a common need to heal the wounds life had inflicted on them, which had bonded them together in their determination to make their partnership work.

And it had worked… Had worked? Eleanor frowned as the lift reached her floor, and then shrugged as the doors opened. Had worked and was still working, she assured herself firmly.

The office block had originally appealed to both of them because of the brightness of its new design. Built around an atrium, it had a spacious, open feel to it which was emphasised by the atrium itself.

Today, though, the marble and chrome seemed to give off a chilly air that made Eleanor shiver slightly.

They had probably turned down the heating again, she reflected as she headed for her office. All the tenants had been complaining about the rapid escalation not just in their rent but in their overheads as well. As she glanced down into the atrium itself she noticed that some of the plants looked over-green and slightly shiny, more as though they were artificial than real, she reflected with distaste, her attention caught by the sterile perfection of a white lily.

Such plants did not belong under London’s sleet-laden grey skies, or imprisoned here, forced into life beneath their covering of glass and heat.

Claire, their receptionist, looked up with a relieved smile as Eleanor walked into the foyer.

She and Louise had chosen the décor for their offices with great care, calling on an interior designer friend of Eleanor’s for confirmation of their choice, but what had seemed energetic and appropriate in the Eighties now looked brash and slightly harsh, as inappropriate for the grey skies of recession as the plants in the atrium were for the grey skies of London perhaps.

‘Monsieur Colbert has arrived,’ Claire told her. ‘I offered him coffee but he refused.’

Thanking her, Eleanor went through into her own office, removing her coat and checking her appearance quickly before hurrying through into the room she and Louise used for negotiating with clients.

Pierre Colbert was French, with business connections which brought him regularly to London and which took him just as regularly to all the other major European cities. He acted as an agent for several large clothing designers and wholesalers, the type who were two steps down from the ‘named’ designers and two up from the general run of high street suppliers.

His business, if they could secure it, would prove an extremely valuable addition to their portfolio. Eleanor had heard via another client that he was unhappy with his existing translators, and she had made a tentative approach to him suggesting that it might be worthwhile their getting together.

She had been warned that as well as liking to get his pound of flesh he was also rather difficult to deal with, and, as she walked into the office and saw the impatience with which he was regarding her, her heart sank a little.

She didn’t show her feelings, though, giving him a calm smile and extending her hand.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she apologised. ‘The traffic…’

‘The English do not know how to drive,’ he interrupted her brusquely. ‘In Paris we have traffic; here in London you have chaos…’

‘Perhaps you would like a cup of coffee,’ Eleanor offered, side-stepping his aggression.

‘Coffee?’ He smiled sourly. ‘I think not.’

Was he deliberately trying to goad her into a response, Eleanor wondered, or did he simply not realise how rude he was being? She had met other men like him, men who were plainly uncomfortable with and antagonistic towards women in business, and she had developed her own method of dealing with them.

Once, in the aftermath of a long, lazy afternoon of lovemaking, Marcus had told her with sleepy pleasure as he ran his hand lingeringly over her warm, relaxed flesh, pausing to cup her breast and slowly caress the still erect peak of her nipple, ‘I love this peace you always carry with you, Nell. It’s such a pleasure to be with a woman who is so calm and secure. It makes it so easy to love you.’