The Marriage Resolution

Dee raised the knocker and rapped loudly twice. Peter was slightly deaf, and she knew that it would take him several minutes to reach the door, but to her surprise she had barely released the knocker when the door was pulled open. Automatically she stepped inside and began, ‘Goodness, Peter, that was quick. I didn’t expect—’

‘Peter’s upstairs—in bed—he collapsed earlier.’

Even without its harshly disapproving tone the familiarity of the male voice, so very, very little changed despite the ten-year gap since she had last heard it, would have been more than enough to stop her dead in her tracks.

‘Hugo…what…what are you doing here?’

As she heard the trembling stammer in her own voice Dee cursed herself mentally. Damn! Damn! Did she have to act like an awestruck seventeen-year-old? Did she have to betray…?

She stopped speaking as Hugo started to shake his head warningly at her. He pushed open the old-fashioned front-parlour door and indicated that she was to go in.

Obediently Dee did so. She was still in shock, still grappling to come to terms with his unexpected presence. It was years since she had last seen him.

When they had first met he had been a graduate whilst she had still been a first year student. He had been working towards his Ph.D., a tall, quixotically romantic figure with whom all her fellow female students had seemed to be more than half in love. Even in a crowd as diverse and individual as his peers had been, Hugo had immediately stood out—literally so. At six foot three he had easily been one of the tallest and, it had to be said, one of the best-looking men on the campus, so strikingly and malely attractive that he would have automatically merited a second and a third look from any woman, even without his signature mane of shoulder-length thick dark hair.

Add to the attributes of his height and male physique—tautly muscled from playing several sports—the additional allure of shockingly sensual aquamarine eyes and a mouth with the kind of bottom lip that just automatically made a woman know how good it would be to be kissed by him, and it was no wonder that Hugo had been the openly discussed subject of nearly every female undergraduate’s not-so-secret fantasies.

Dee had quite literally run into him as he was rushing to one of Peter’s meetings one day.

Dee, who had heard about Hugo from the female grapevine, and who had glimpsed him to heart-stopping effect in and around the campus, had been astounded to discover that Hugo was a leading activist in Peter’s small army of idealists and helpers.

‘What do you mean, what am I doing here?’ Hugo was challenging her now curtly. ‘Peter and I go back a long way and—’

‘Yes, yes, I know that,’ Dee acknowledged. ‘I just thought…’

She was in shock; she knew that. Her body felt icy cold, and yet at the same time as sticky and uncomfortable as though she was drenched in perspiration. Her heart was hammering frantically to a disjointed and dangerously discordant rhythm, and she suspected that she was actually in danger of hyperventilating as she tried to force some air into her tense lungs.

‘You just thought what?’ Hugo demanded tauntingly. ‘That I was still carrying a torch for you? That I just couldn’t go on living without you any longer…that my feelings for you, my love for you, was so strong that I just had to come looking for you…?’

Dee blenched beneath the witheringly sardonic tone of his voice. Was it really unbearably cold in this room or was it her…? She could feel herself starting to tremble. Only inwardly and invisibly at first, and then with increasing intensity until…

‘How are your husband and your daughter?’ Hugo asked her with obvious indifference. ‘She must be…how old now…nine…?’

Dee stared at him. Her husband…her daughter…What husband…what daughter…?

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…’

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.