It was obvious what he felt like doing, Lucy reflected to herself. She was torn between irritation and a sudden and sharply unexpected frisson of tension, of nervousness almost. Her, nervous … and of Giles? Impossible.

‘Well, what I feel like doing right now is having a shower,’ she told him coolly. ‘And what I shan’t feel like doing afterwards is …’ She hesitated deliberately, watching him, waiting for him to become either angry or hectoring, but instead he simply looked steadily back at her. ‘I’m hungry,’ she told him pettishly, suddenly unsure of herself, and afraid because of it. ‘And I certainly don’t intend to play the little woman and start cooking.’

She reached out, took her case from him, and then retreated, closing the bedroom door on him. She waited for several minutes, wondering what he would do, and then she heard him going back downstairs.

As she stripped off her clothes and showered she wasn’t sure whether she was pleased or disappointed that he had taken her dismissal so calmly. Most of the men she knew would have been demanding their pound of flesh by now and no mistake.

She eyed herself in the mirrors as she stepped out of the shower. She had a good body; her breasts were perhaps a little fuller than fashion dictated, but her waist was enviably narrow, her legs long and slender, her bone-structure that of an expensive, fragile racehorse. Her skin gleamed with health and with the scented moisturiser she was fanatical about using. She had the beginnings of a soft peachy tan.

There was a hectic flush along her cheekbones and her eyes looked huge, as though she had been on drugs, she recognised tensely. She dried her hair and then took her time dressing and reapplying her make-up.

There was no sign of Giles. The house was so quiet that she even wondered if he had perhaps gone and left her, but when she went to the window and looked out she could just about make out the outline of the car in the darkness.

She opened the bedroom door and walked out. She had been through this often enough before to know what it was all about, she reminded herself as she walked downstairs.

So why was she feeling so nervous … so on edge?

She had almost reached the bottom step when the kitchen door opened and Giles appeared. He had changed too, and his hair was damp as though he had showered. He must, she realised on a small spurt of shock, have used one of the other rooms.

‘Supper’s ready,’ he told her.

Supper was ready. Lucy stared at him. What had he done? Certainly he could not have sent out for a takeaway, not here.

‘I thought we’d eat in the sitting-room,’ he added a little uncertainly.

Lucy nodded, for once lost for words.

An hour later, greedily eating the last of her chocolate mousse, she admitted to herself that she was impressed.

The food, which, Giles had told her shyly, he had brought with him in a hamper from London, had been wildly delicious and, she suspected, wildly expensive. There had been champagne, pink champagne, which she knew others looked down on, but which she loved.

They had started the meal with tiny wild strawberries, and then there had been delicious cold salmon served with delicately flavoured salads, a sorbet laced with something alcoholic, and then proper, darkly bitter chocolate mousse, and she had greedily eaten both hers and Giles’s.

It had been food chosen not for a man but for a woman, and again she was confused by Giles’s sensitivity in so accurately gauging her tastes.

Now, curled up on the settee while Giles removed the remains of their meal, she felt relaxed and replete. She felt, she recognised on a sudden startled stab of awareness, happy.

The scented candles Giles had lit while they ate still burned, filled the room with their fragrance, warm and musky. She breathed it in sensuously.

She was wearing a simple shift dress, simple in design, that was. It had been perilously expensive, so soft and fragile that all she was able to wear underneath it was a tiny pair of briefs.

Now as she moved into a more comfortable position on the settee she was aware of the sudden sharp peaking of her nipples, and the slow unfolding ache of desire inside her.

When Giles came back she smiled languorously at him, her eyes narrowed and mysterious. He came across to her, leaning over her. His hand cupped her face. It felt good against her skin, cool and firm. His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth, tentatively, hesitantly almost. She let her lips part, rubbing the tip of his thumb with her tongue, her eyes closing sensuously, but there was nothing calculated or deliberate about the gesture, she was genuinely aroused, and as she arched up towards Giles she heard him mutter thickly. ‘Oh, God, Lucy …’

He had never kissed her so fiercely before, so hungrily. She heard him telling her unsteadily that she tasted of chocolate, but then she teased him with her tongue and he stopped saying anything.

She had never, she realised breathlessly later, wanted to make love so much with any man. Suddenly she couldn’t wait to be rid of her clothes and for Giles to be rid of his. She could feel how aroused he was and that knowledge excited her.

She tugged impatiently at the buttons on his shirt, spreading her hands flat against his chest, licking and nuzzling his bare throat and then his chest, laughing softly as she heard him groan and felt the sweat springing up on his skin.

He fumbled with the zip on her dress the first time he tried to unfasten it, but instead of irritating her his hesitancy only seemed to sharpen the excitement coiling inside her. When he finally unfastened it and the dress slid to a silky heap at her feet, leaving her body virtually naked, gilded by the light of the candles, its sheen enhanced by the soft cream backdrop of the settee, the dark arousal of her nipples as perfect as the deepest of the velvet-petalled roses, Giles didn’t touch her. He simply looked at her.

Men had looked at Lucy before, but none of them had ever looked at her like this, as though they were beholding a miracle, a vision; none of them had ever looked at her with heaven in his eyes.

And then he started to touch her, to kiss her, not hesitantly or half clumsily, as she had expected, but with a true lover’s sensitive awareness of every minute response she made, so that when she quivered as his mouth touched the sensitive cord in her neck he kissed it again slowly and lingeringly. And when her nipple swelled tautly in the moist heat of his mouth he knew that she wanted him to caress her there, without her having to say or do anything to tell him so.

His knowledge of how to please her was something that shocked her almost as much as her own quick, almost avid sexual response to him. She found that she was piqued, jealous almost of where he might have gained that knowledge, of the woman or women with whom he had learned such unexpected skills.

But, as Giles told her later, his sexual experience was far less than hers, and what had guided him, motivated him had been his need to please her, to love her.

The climax that shook her body long before he entered her caught them both off guard, Lucy doubly so because it was an alien sensation to her to have her body so completely out of her own control.

Giles was not a selfish lover, nor a demanding one, and nor, she discovered to her astonishment, would he allow her to even the score with the quick, deft manipulation of her hand.

When she drew back from him, startled to have her hand gently but very definitely removed from his body, he told her quietly, ‘When it happens I want it to be when I’m inside you.’

She made a brief, automatic inviting movement, but he shook his head.

‘No,’ he told her huskily. ‘I want you to want it as well.’

Later she did, laughing a little at him when it was over so quickly, recovering the control she felt she had lost when her body had responded to him so completely earlier.

She fell asleep in his arms, something so alien to her that to wake up and discover that she was in bed with him, and to know that he must have carried her upstairs while she slept, sent a frisson of apprehension along her spine.

To quell it she woke him up and made love to him passionately, almost angrily, her anger dissolving into tears of release when her body was overwhelmed by the intensity of her orgasm.

When she woke up in the morning she was alone. She turned her head, glancing at where Giles had slept, the pillow smelling faintly of him. She moved, turning her face into it, her emotions torn between a helpless awareness of how different he was from anyone else she had known and an instinctive fear of that difference and what it was doing to her.

He came back while she was lying there. He had, she realised when she saw the tray he was carrying, brought her her breakfast … her breakfast, she noticed, and not his: orange juice, which looked as though it had been freshly squeezed, warm croissants, honey and tea—proper tea, not the insipid tea-bag variety they normally had in the flat, and all served on a tray with a cloth and proper china, and, instead of the too perfectly tightly furled hot-house-grown rosebud which always seemed de rigueur in the hotels in which she had stayed with previous lovers, Giles had picked from the garden a jugful of fully open, softly petalled roses.

She buried her face in them, breathing in their scent, not wanting him to see the stupid tears burning her eyes.

‘Where’s your breakfast?’ she asked him when she judged that her voice was steady enough for her to do so.

The smile he gave her was rueful, boyish almost. ‘I had bacon and eggs,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t think you’d appreciate the smell. I thought I’d walk down to the village and get some papers—let you eat in peace.’

It shocked her that he should know her so well already, that he should know that after the intimacy they had shared she now needed some time to herself, to distance herself a little from the intensity of that intimacy, to recover the emotional isolation that was so necessary to her.

She was a sensual woman, but she was also one who had absorbed too many of the sexual insecurities suffered by her mother when she was abandoned by Lucy’s father.

Although when making love she had no inhibitions at all about her body, she preferred to perform the ritual of cleansing her skin, of preparing herself for the world, on her own.

While she could enjoy the love-play that went with sharing a shower or a bath with her lover, she did not like to share what was to her the greater intimacy of preparing herself to face the outside world. No man had ever realised that so immediately and instinctively as Giles had known it.

After he had gone she pictured him making her breakfast, squeezing the oranges, picking the roses. So much care … so much planning must have gone into every fine detail of this weekend with her. She liked that. She liked knowing that he had gone to so much trouble. Where another woman might have disliked his lack of spontaneity, Lucy did not. To her spontaneity equalled fecklessness, the same restlessness which had driven her father to leave her mother. Giles wasn’t like that. Giles was careful, thoughtful. He made plans.

It was a magical weekend, extended by an extra two days because neither of them could bear to break the spell.

Once Giles could add knowledge to his love for her, his lovemaking took on a special quality that took it worlds beyond anything Lucy had known before.

And it wasn’t just in bed that he surprised and delighted her. He took her out, sightseeing, shopping, entrancing her with his determination to spoil and indulge her.

It was only when they were driving back to London that he confessed to her that he hadn’t hired the house at all, but that it belonged to his godmother.

Lucy already knew that both his parents were dead. He had been born to them late in their lives, an only child maybe, but one who had still had the love of both his parents.

When he said he loved her he meant it, Lucy recognised, and she was beginning to suspect that she loved him as well.

Strangely, that did not terrify her as it might once have done, and when three months later he proposed, she accepted.

They were idyllically happy. Secure for the first time in her memory, gradually Lucy let her defences down.

Children, he must want children. She had tested him before they were married, but he had shaken his head and told her roughly that she was all that he wanted.

‘Maybe one day, if you want them,’ he had told her. ‘But girls, Lucy, not boys, otherwise I shall be jealous of them.’

She had laughed then. His words seemed to set the final seal on her happiness.

And they had been happy, Lucy remembered achingly. Too happy perhaps. Perhaps the very quality and intensity of her happiness ought to have warned her.

She had never intended to become pregnant. It had been an accident; a brief bout of food poisoning which had nullified the effect of the contraceptive pill she was taking. By the time she realised she was pregnant it was too late for her to opt for an early termination.

She had been frantic at first, angry and resentful, with Giles as well as with the child she was carrying. She was thirty-three years old and the last thing she wanted was a baby.

Although she tried to suppress them, all the fears she had had before she fell in love with Giles resurfaced. She was alternately anxious and emotional, angry and depressed, but stubbornly she refused to explain to Giles what was wrong. He thought it was because she was pregnant without wanting to be and that she blamed him for it, when in fact she was suddenly terrified of turning into her mother; of producing a child which Giles would reject along with her.

She couldn’t analyse her fears and she certainly could not discuss them with anyone. Her doctor was old-fashioned and disapproved of mothers-to-be being anything other than docilely pleased with their condition.

The more her pregnancy developed, the more afraid Lucy became, the more trapped and angry she felt. And as the weeks went by she could almost feel Giles withdrawing from her. Where once he had always slept as close to her as he could, now he turned away from her in bed.

Her body was changing. She was carrying a lot of water with the baby, which made her seem huge. It was no wonder Giles didn’t want her any more. He denied it, though, and claimed that it was for her sake, because he could see how tired she was, how great her discomfort.

She couldn’t sleep at night, twisting and turning. She woke up one night and Giles wasn’t there. She found him sleeping peacefully in the spare room. She woke him up, furious with him, blaming him for everything, telling him how much she hated him … how much she hated the baby.

She felt more afraid and alone than she had ever felt in her life. She was so used to having Giles to lean on, having Giles to love her, and now suddenly it seemed as though he didn’t any more.

She couldn’t bear people asking her about the baby, and when they did her whole body would tense with rejection, but some instinct she hadn’t known she possessed drove her.

She found she was instinctively adjusting her diet; exercising her body less vigorously, sleeping for longer; it was as though some part of her outside her control was ensuring that, despite her conscious resentment and misery, her baby was being well looked after.

The first time she felt the baby kick she was in the garden picking flowers for a dinner party. She dropped them in shock and stood there, her eyes suddenly brilliant with tears, but when Giles came home she didn’t say anything to him.

A gulf seemed to have opened between them. He couldn’t even seem to look at her these days without wincing, and when he kissed her it was a chaste, dry peck on the cheek.

The people they were entertaining that evening were a local solicitor and his wife. Giles was well established at Carey’s now, even though he detested Gregory James. He was not the kind of man who enjoyed pushing his way up the corporate ladder, and as long as he was happy Lucy had been happy as well. He was a good husband financially, generous, giving her her own allowance. His godmother had died just after their marriage and the money he had inherited from her he had invested to bring them in an extra income so that they lived very comfortably.

The solicitor’s wife was a couple of years younger than Lucy but looked older. She had three young children, around whom her entire life revolved.

‘Has the baby kicked yet?’ she asked Lucy over dinner. ‘I remember the first time John did … I couldn’t wait to tell Alistair. We spent all evening with me with my turn exposed and Alistair’s hand on it just so that he wouldn’t miss it if it happened again. And it was the middle of winter.’

Lucy’s hand shook as she tried to eat her food. Giles couldn’t bear to look at her now, never mind touch her, or at least that was how it seemed.

When Lucy was just over six months pregnant she went into premature labour. Giles was away on business for Carey’s and so there was no one to accompany her when the ambulance screamed to a halt outside the house, summoned by the alert doctor’s receptionist’s response to her frightened telephone call.

The baby, a boy, was born before Giles arrived. She wasn’t allowed to hold him. He was taken away to be placed in an incubator. He was very frail, the hospital told them when Giles arrived two hours later, white and strained, having received a message relayed from the hospital via his secretary.

Lucy was too shocked and drugged to take in much of what was being said. It had all been so unexpected. There had been no warning signs, nothing she had felt or done.

It happened like that sometimes, the nurses soothed her, but Lucy couldn’t let it rest. She felt guilty that somehow she was the one responsible for the baby’s too early birth. She wanted desperately to see him, but had lost a lot of blood and they didn’t want her to move.

In the morning she could see her son, they told her, and Giles, who had been terrified when he walked into the ward and saw how pitifully small and frail she looked, tried awkwardly to describe their child to her.

His halting, terse description seemed to reinforce to Lucy that she had failed, and that he was angry with her because it was her fault that the baby had been born too soon, when in reality what Giles was trying to do was to blot out his mental image of the appalling fragility of the little figure he had seen through the screen that separated him from the premature-baby unit, and the wires and tubes that had been attached to his son’s minute body.

He hadn’t realised until he saw him just how much the sight of his own child would affect him. He had known that Lucy did not want children, and he loved her so much that he had been happy with that. He had seen how angry she was when she found out she was pregnant, and he had known that she blamed him.

All through her pregnancy his guilt had increased. He had seen the discomfort she was in. He had tried his best not to exacerbate things for her. He had even started sleeping in another room in case his need for her overwhelmed him. He ached so much to touch her, to explore and know the rounding contours of her body. He was amazed at how very sensual and arousing he found the visible signs of her pregnancy, at how much he wanted to make love to her, a reaffirmation of all that he felt for her and for the child they had made between them, and then he had been ashamed of his need, reminding himself that Lucy did not share the joy he was beginning to feel in the coming baby.

Now, in the hospital, trying to describe their son to her, he ached with the love the sight of him had stirred up inside him, and with the fear. He was so small … so fragile. He could feel the tears clogging his throat, burning his eyes, and he knew he mustn’t cry in front of Lucy. He turned away from her, unaware of the hand she had stretched out towards him as she tried to find the words to plead with him to tell her more about their child.

She ached inside with the loss of him. A feeling she had never known she could experience overwhelmed her. She wanted her child here with her, in her arms, at her breast, and that need was a physical pain that wrenched apart her whole body.

In the end, hours after Giles had gone home, they let her see him, afraid that if they didn’t she would work herself up into a fever anyway.

The nurse who wheeled her down to the prem unit warned her what to expect.

‘He’s very small,’ she told her quietly. ‘And very frail, I’m afraid.’

Lucy didn’t hear her. ‘My child … my son.’ Her body tensed, aching with love and fear.

The small room seemed so full of equipment that the five incubators were almost lost among the paraphernalia of monitors and tubes.

The nurse on duty stood up, frowning a little as Lucy was wheeled in, but Lucy was oblivious to her presence. All her attention was concentrated on the tiny baby in its incubator; the sole occupant of the small ward, her baby … her son. Without realising what she was doing she stood up, her body trembling as she left the wheelchair, ignoring the protests of the attendant nurse, the weakness of her own body forgotten as she stumbled across to the incubator.

The baby was lying on his back, his head turned towards her, his eyes open. She shuddered as she saw the mass of tubes attached to him and the way his tiny, fragile body fought to take in oxygen. His entire body from head to toe was only a little longer than a grown man’s hand, his limbs so delicate and fragile that his vulnerability made Lucy tremble with anguish and love.

Her impulse to reach into the incubator and pick him up was so strong that she could barely resist it. Her body ached with tenderness and despair. The intensity of the emotion that gripped her was like nothing she had ever experienced or imagined experiencing. Every other aspect of her life faded into oblivion as she looked at her baby and saw him look back at her. The pain of wanting to reach out and touch him, to hold him, and of knowing that for his sake she could not do so, that to even attempt to do so would be to endanger his life, filled her whole body.

As she watched him she prayed for his survival and knew that she would sacrifice anything, even her own life, for him, and the fact that she had once not wanted him or any other child was forgotten in the wave of love that swamped her. She stood motionlessly watching him, pleading silently.

Please God, let him live. Let him live. The sin, the guilt is mine. Please don’t punish him because I thought I didn’t want him.

But her prayers went unanswered. He was a strong baby, they told her compassionately later, but just not strong enough. He had been born too soon and his body was just not developed enough to sustain him outside the womb.

Lucy knew before they came to tell her that he had gone. She had spent every moment they allowed her in the unit, watching over him, afraid even to look away from him, silently, fiercely supporting him with her strength and her love, willing him to go on living, but finally the staff overruled her protests that she must stay with him, and she was wheeled back to her bed. She had lost a good deal of blood, they reminded her, and she was still far from fully recovered herself.

When Giles arrived she wept and begged him to make them let her stay with Nicholas, and when Giles told her that he agreed with the staff that she must recoup some of her own strength she turned away from him and refused to speak to him.

The rift that had developed between them while she was pregnant seemed to have deepened with Nicholas’s premature birth.

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