Starting Over (32 page)

Just before dawn as she started to drift into an exhausted sleep, David leaned over and kissed her gently.

He ached so with love for her and like any father he ached, too, to put her world to rights for her.

Caspar was only a telephone call away. Surely as her husband he had every right to know that she was ill...that his daughters missed and wanted him... And that Olivia missed and wanted him, too?

That, David decided, was a decision he could only make once he had actually spoken with his son-in-law.

METHODICALLY
, Olivia had stored Caspar's mobile number in her telephone's address book. David had made sure she was asleep before making his call.

CASPAR FROWNED
as his mobile started to ring. It was late at night and Molly was in her room sleeping.

When he saw his Cheshire home number flashing up on his mobile, his first feeling was one of such piercing emotional intensity that it caught him off guard but when he heard the voice of an unknown man on the other end of the line that feeling quickly evaporated, his own voice tautly hostile as he responded to his caller's, 'Is that Caspar?' with a terse, 'Yes.'

'I'm David Crighton,' David introduced himself.

'Olivia's father.'

Olivia's
father!
Caspar's tight grip on his mobile relaxed slightly only to tighten up again even more tensely as David informed him, 'I thought I'd better ring and let you know that Olivia isn't too well.'

Not too well— The shock of hearing such news so soon after speaking to Jenny filled Caspar with sharp anxiety.

'What's wrong with her?' Caspar demanded—a moment of unthinkable, unbearable horror seizing him as he rasped, 'Has there been an accident? Is she—'

'It's nothing like that,' David was quick to reassure him. 'She's actually contracted a particularly vicious brand of flu that's going round at the moment and her doctor has decreed that she's got to stay in bed for a few days.'

'Stay in bed—Olivia!' Caspar's voice betrayed both his shock and his cynicism at anyone's ability to make Olivia comply with such a restriction.

David allowed himself to smile a little.

'Well, she wasn't too keen on the idea but to be honest it hasn't been that difficult enforcing it—she's hardly been conscious most of the time, although it looks as though she's over the worst of the fever now....'

As he listened to David's quiet revelations, Caspar was filled with a rush of conflicting emotions. The very thought of Olivia being ill enough to agree to remain in bed was one that upset him far more than he could have imagined. Unwilling to examine what he was feeling too closely, he asked David urgently,

'What about the girls?'

Not even their births had kept Livvy in bed for more than twenty-four hours.

'Oh, I suppose they're with Jon and Jenny,' he added, answering his own question.

'Actually, no, they're here at home with me.

They've been asking for you, Caspar. They miss you,'

David told him poignantly before continuing, 'I've moved in for the duration until Olivia is well enough to manage on her own.'

'Livvy has let
you
move in?' Once again Caspar's voice betrayed his feelings.

'Well, she really didn't have much of an alternative,' David confessed, driving home the point he wanted to make by adding gently, 'You see, there wasn't really anyone else. Maddy hasn't been well and has needed Jenny's help, so Livvy didn't actually have anyone else she could turn to.'

David knew that he was being unfair and he could feel in the ensuing silence humming along the telephone line just how Caspar was reacting to what he had said.

'Just how ill is she?' Caspar asked abruptly.

The scenario David was describing to him was so out of character for Olivia that he could feel his anxiety gauge rising with every word David uttered.

'Well, if the hospital hadn't already been full...'

David began.

'The hospital!' Olivia was ill enough to be taken into hospital. 'Why the hell have you left it this long to get in touch with me?' Caspar exploded.

'Perhaps because I needed to make sure that Livvy
wanted
me to, first,' David checked him softly.

Caspar stared incredulously across his room.

'Livvy
asked
you to ring me?'

'You're her husband—the father of her children. Is it really so surprising that she should want you?' David hedged.

Caspar's normally quick intellect was for once sub-ordinate to his emotions so that he didn't pick up on the evasive maimer in which David had answered him.

Livvy wanted him. Livvy needed him!

Closing his eyes he told David gruffly, 'I'm out in the middle of nowhere at the moment, but I'll be on the first international flight home I can get...and...

David...'

Though he stumbled a little over his use of his father-in-law's Christian name, David himself was too relieved to care.

'Yes,' David responded carefully as he finally allowed the pent-up breath he felt he had been holding for the entire duration of their conversation to leak away in shaky relief. Olivia would never forgive him for this piece of outright manipulation and interference he suspected, but if he hadn't done it he knew
he
would never forgive himself. She was his daughter and her happiness was of paramount importance to him.

Far, far more important than Livvy herself could know.

'Thanks,' Caspar told him gruffly.

As he ended the call, Caspar looked towards the closed door of his room. Across the hallway from his room lay Molly's. Was it really only a matter of hours ago that she had warned him that they needed to talk about his marriage and that he... He closed his eyes and squared his shoulders, grimacing as he opened them again. There was no way he could leave without explaining to her, and no way either that he wanted to.

When she opened the door to his knock she looked adorably rumpled and sleepy and he had to fight against taking her in his arms and holding her whilst he told her.
Was
it possible for a man to love two women?

'Can I come in a minute? There's something I have to tell you.'

Molly knew immediately that Caspar's 'something'

involved his wife and she had to turn away from him so that he couldn't see the fear in her eyes. She had known him for such a short time and she had known all along that his marriage was far from over as he had tried to claim.

'Olivia's ill,' he told her. 'I—I have to go home...the girls...my daughters...have been asking for me....' he added, unable to look at her as he did so.

As she listened to him, a fierce wild sense of loss invaded Molly but she refused to give in to it. After all, hadn't she known all along that something like this would happen; that all the best men were inevitably already spoken for? Hadn't she known just from the way he said her name that he still loved his Olivia, even though he himself had tried to deny it?

Summoning up all her courage and all her professionalism, she touched him gently on his arm.

'You're doing the right thing,' she assured him. 'A marriage as good as yours deserves a second chance.'

'How do you know that?' Caspar asked her ruefully.

Beneath his gruffness was relief and gratitude that she had not reproached him or made things difficult for him, and a sense of sadness and guilt as well.

'I just know.' She smiled.

As she watched him leave, she continued to smile but inside she was already warning Olivia, "This time I'm letting you have him back, but if you're ever fool enough to let him go a second time I sure as hell won't be so generous.'

'You
LOOK VERY
pleased with life this morning,'

Maddy told her mother-in-law when Jenny called to see if the younger woman needed any shopping.

'Mmm...' Jenny agreed, soft colour tinging her face as she remembered the special sweetness of the very private and passionate way in which Jon had demon-strated to her just how much he did love her.

'You're looking very well yourself,' she smiled back at Maddy.

'I feel great,' she acknowledged. 'I'm worried about Max, though.' She started to frown.

'He isn't sleeping at all well and—'

'Well, I know he's been concerned about Ben's threats to change his will,' Jenny offered.

'No, I don't think it's that,' Maddy denied. 'We'd both hate to leave this house, of course, but at the end of the day if we had to...'

Jenny's frown matched Maddy's now as she caught the anxious undertone in her voice. The obstetrician might have given Maddy the all clear but Max had made it more than plain to his family that nothing and no one was to cause his wife the slightest degree of concern.

'Have you
asked
Max if anything's wrong?' Jenny queried.

Maddy gave her a rueful look.

'I've tried but Max insists that there
isn't,
but I know there
is,
Jenny. He's been having the most dreadful nightmares night after night
and
they're getting worse, but he simply won't discuss them with me and...' She paused, reluctant to expose to anyone else the way in which Max seemed to be distancing himself from her.

'He has been through a very stressful time recently,'

Jenny reminded her. 'I've never seen him react the way he did when you were in hospital, Maddy. We were all relieved, of course, when they were able to bring your blood pressure under control, but for Max the strain must have been unbearable, especially...'

Jenny stopped.

'Especially what?' Maddy pressed her determinedly.

Jenny sighed. Jenny was beginning to wish that she had kept silent, but Maddy was looking increasingly distressed and Jenny knew she would have to finish what she had started.

'Max was afraid that he might lose you, Maddy,'

Jenny began gently. 'The consultant had explained to him what might potentially happen to you. And—and to the baby if you didn't respond to treatment, and Max....' Jenny bit her lip.

'Max told me that he couldn't endure the thought of losing you and that if it were his decision to make, then to save your life he would have instructed the hospital to terminate your pregnancy—'

As she heard Maddy's shocked gasp, Jenny reminded her quietly, 'Max loves you very much, and we are talking about a situation where he feared that if you hadn't responded to treatment, both yours and the baby's lives would have been lost. However, the consultant told him that you would have had to have been part of that decision had it needed to have been made. Max had wanted to make the decision for you to spare you.'

As Jenny saw her daughter-in-law's face, she sighed guiltily. 'I'm sorry, Maddy, I shouldn't have said anything.'

'No. I'm glad that you did,' Maddy told her truthfully. 'I had no idea. The hospital never said...'

And neither had Max!

Maddy gave a cold shudder and placed her hands protectively over her body. The thought of anyone or anything harming her baby aroused all her fiercely protective maternal instincts.

Half an hour later after Jenny had departed with the supermarket shopping list—although Maddy was fully recovered Max was insistent that she didn't do anything that might overtire her—Maddy made her way to Max's study.

He looked up as she walked in, the immediate pleasure lightening his eyes dimming to wariness.

'Your mother's just been,' Maddy told him quietly.

Walking over to the window and keeping her back to him Maddy continued, 'I told her how worried I've been about you.'

'What on earth for? I've told you I'm fine, Maddy.'

It was strange what knowledge could do. Now, beneath the surface irritation in his voice she could hear quite plainly other and darker emotions.

'No, you're not,' Maddy contradicted him fiercely.

'How could you be when...' She swung round to face him, her eyes brilliant with anger and pain.

'Jenny told me, Max. She told me about what might have happened to our baby.' There was no way that Maddy could bring herself to use the word that had filled her heart with such anguish and rejection.

'What!'

She knew immediately that Max understood what she was trying to say.

'She had no right,' he began furiously. 'There was no need—'

'No
need?'
Maddy's voice shook with emotion.

'You
had chosen my life above our baby's and you say there was no need for
me
to know.'

'Maddy, please try to understand,' Max begged her desperately, leaving his desk to go to her, watching white-faced as she stepped back from him, ignoring the silent appeal of his outstretched hand.

'I couldn't bear the thought of losing you, even though...' He was the one who had to turn away now, as his own feelings overwhelmed him.

'Even though what, Max?' Maddy demanded, her voice was as sharp with pain as his.

'Even though I knew you would hate me for choos-ing you above the baby,' Max admitted. 'The children we already have need you and I... There's no way I could bear to live without you,' he told her.

'Do you think it's been
easy
for me?' he demanded when she made no response. 'Do you think I haven't suffered, cursed myself in my heart over and over again...hated myself...? In my worst moments I've even imagined that...' He stopped, unable to tell her about the true awfulness of his nightmares.

Max closed his eyes. Having admitted so much he might as well admit the rest.

'And if you want the truth, Maddy, if I had to live through the whole hellish thing again I'd
still
make the same choice. I thought I was strong but I'm not.

I'm selfish and weak.
You'
re my
life,
Maddy.

'Don't say any more,' Maddy begged him.

Max waited, tensing his body against the pain of seeing her walk away from him, of knowing that he had destroyed her love for him. But to his astonishment, Maddy was actually walking towards him.

When she reached him she lifted her hand to his face, her eyes luminous with emotion as she touched his skin.

It shocked her that he could have borne so much pain without saying anything to her.