LITMIR.BIZ

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his face she’d make everything right between them again, she promised herself. Yes, she most definitely would. And it wouldn’t be too long now, just long enough for him to make those calls. She’d give him that much space; she owed him that. He wouldn’t stay away for the rest of the night.

      

      But he had. Still in her robe, propped against the pillows, disorientated because she wasn’t in her own, familiar surroundings, Olivia woke from fretful dreams, deeply annoyed with herself. She had gone and fallen asleep before he’d come back to bed, and nothing had been put right.

      Turning to remedy the unthinkable situation, her body tensed up. His side of the bed was well and truly empty. Had her seeming rejection, her refusal to behave as if nothing had happened, angered him to the point of refusing to be anywhere near her? She felt physically sick.

      They met on the sweeping staircase, that much admired feature of Rye House. But she wasn’t up to admiring the Grinling Gibbons carvings right now. She’d showered and dressed quickly, intent on routing him out, dreading the possibility of discovering that their beautiful relationship had been damaged, vowing that she wouldn’t let it be.

      ‘Where were you?’ she demanded, refusing to flinch beneath those cold grey eyes. He was fully dressed and looked as if he hadn’t slept at all.

      ‘Working.’ He stopped on his loping way up. ‘I came up to shower and dress at six. You were dead to the world. I’ve been sent to fetch you down for breakfast.’

      She didn’t want any. Her stomach was in knots. He was looking at her with a stranger’s eyes. It frightened her. But she wasn’t going to let it show.

      ‘Punishing me for denting your ego, you mean,’ she retorted, resisting the impulse to shout because one or other of his parents could put in an appearance at any time. But she was sickened by the obvious lie. If their marriage was to grow and flourish they had to be hon-est with each other. She hated evasions of any kind; she’d had enough of those from Max to last her a dozen lifetimes. She stared straight back at him. ‘Admit it. How could you possibly work? Here, in the middle of the night? You were sulking!’

      ‘I could work on a clothes-line,’ he informed her coldly. ‘A telephone, paper, a pen—I don’t need much more. And sulking’s a woman’s game, one that cuts no ice with me. Coming?’

      She looked at his merciless, sensual mouth and shuddered in primitive response. Fighting it, she made her lush lips as prim as they could be. She didn’t want to kiss him—no, she did not. She wanted to shake him!

      Trying to smile for his parents’ sake, she got herself into the kitchen by will-power alone. The smell of bacon made her feel ill.

      ‘You mustn’t let him get away with it!’ Angela stated. ‘Working through the night—there’s no need for it! And he used most of my headed notepaper, too!’ She pointedly moved a bunch of papers out of the way and put a loaded toast rack down on the huge kitchen table.

      ‘It was all I could find; I’ll get it replaced,’ Nathan said with a tight smile. ‘And don’t nag, Ma; it makes you sound old.’

      Olivia’s face ached with the effort of trying to look pleasant and unconcerned, as if she were totally in tune with her new husband’s odd working habits—sympathetic, even faintly amused.

      Edward sauntered in, sniffing the air. ‘Is breakfast nearly ready? I’m starving! It’s a shame you two have to rush off this morning. You could have helped me with the Cobra—’ He broke off as he caught his wife’s withering look and amended, ‘Or gone to church with your mother. We’d planned on lunching at the golf club. They put on a passably good roast. No eggs for me, Angie.’ His youthful eyes smiled into Olivia’s. ‘When I remember, I try to watch my cholesterol intake. Pour the coffee, would you, Livvy? I’m gasping. Are you sure you won’t change your minds and stay?’

      Pouring coffee into the wide-bowled cups, Olivia left Nathan to convince his parents that they had to make tracks.

      ‘There are several things I need to sort out,’ he answered tersely as his mother set a huge plate of bacon and eggs in the centre of the table.

      ‘Help yourselves,’ she invited. ‘Do you know how forbidding you sound, Nat? “Things to sort out”, indeed.’ She took her place and shook out her napkin. ‘You need never do another stroke. You could retire tomorrow, and you know it. Workaholics don’t make the best husbands, isn’t that right, Livvy?’

      ‘I’m working on it!’ Which probably hadn’t been the most tactful thing to say, she decided, feeling those cold grey eyes on her, boring right through her. But she did her best to look cheerful, eating hardly anything while trying to look as if she was enjoying every mouthful—just waiting for the time when she and Nathan could be alone to sort out the uncomfortable mess they’d somehow got themselves into.

      But being alone didn’t necessarily mean being closer, she discovered as they drove away from Rye House not long after breakfast. The silence was gnm.

      Her heart lurching, she broke it. ‘I’m sorry about last night. You must know I didn’t mean it.’ She flicked him a hopeful sideways look but his profile was stony. Swallowing a ragged sigh, trying not to plead, she offered, ‘Listen, we have to discuss it rationally—everything. Hugh, James, my job, even Angie’s bright idea about buying that house. Everything.’

      They had left the tangle of narrow country lanes behind and Nathan put his foot down. The big car responded throatily and Olivia’s stomach jumped up into her mouth. She just hoped there weren’t any speed cameras about. She said thickly, ‘I hate this atmosphere. I don’t know about you, but I want things back the way they were. We love each other,’ she stated desperately. ‘It should be simple enough!’

      ‘It is simple enough.’ His voice was as smooth and precise as his driving style. ‘You know what I want. When you’ve reached a decision, tell me. Until then there’s little we can usefully discuss. Think about it.’

      Oh, yes, she knew what he wanted. She closed her eyes wearily. Each time her resignation had come up for discussion he’d grown more insistent.

      It had started off fairly innocuously, Nathan reasonably pointing out that she didn’t need to work, that her job would keep them apart, that he wanted her with him wherever he went. Desperately torn, she had tried to explain that she would have to think about it.

      ‘James threw a fit when I told him we were getting mamed and asked for two months’ honeymoon leave,’ she’d told him. ‘But he gave in and said, “Anything, so long as I know the best PA I’m ever likely to get isn’t walking out permanently.’” She’d smiled then, confident that he loved her enough to understand that she couldn’t simply phone through, as he appeared to expect her to, and say she wasn’t coming back. ‘I guess I’d have to train someone else up, and that could take time.’

      But Nathan hadn’t seen it that way. ‘He doesn’t own you,’ he’d said. Implying that he did, Olivia had thought, beginning to bristle, appalled by the first coldness she’d seen in his eyes. And it had been then that he’d broken the uncomfortable tension between them, suggesting a restaurant and nightclub. And after that, after overhearing Hugh’s scandalous remarks, he’d stopped trying gentle persuasion and was now insisting.

      He had, she recognised hollowly, issued an ultimatum. And told her to think about it.

      She didn’t want to.

      She loved him to distraction. She would willingly die for him. But he had to see that she wasn’t going to let herself be bullied into doing something she knew would make her uncomfortable with herself. Max had done that too many times; she wouldn’t allow it to happen again.

      Yet the prospect of deepening the rift between them by refusing to do meekly exactly as he said, exactly when he said it heaped her heart with deep misery.

      She twisted her hands in her lap, her fingers sliding over the engagement ring he’d given her, sliding and stroking it as if that would bring back the gloriously

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