don't want you to say any more," Claudia told him icily.

All that was turning over in her head was the brutally painful thought that Garth had taken Katriona into their home, their bed. He had made love to her in the same place where he had loved her, touched her, no doubt in exactly the same way as he had touched her, perhaps even told her that he loved her.

Claudia had thought that the pain of losing her unborn child and then all her hopes of any future children would be the worst pain she was ever going to be called upon to bear, but she realised now that she was wrong. That had been pain, but it had, even in all its searing agony, been a clean, sharp wound. This. this was something different. This was a slow-acting poison, a corrosive acid--a gangrene that was going to eat into her until she was totally destroyed, until all that she was was consumed in its slow death grip.

"I know how you must be feeling," she heard Garth saying rawly to her.

"Do you?" she challenged him bitterly.

"How can you know. Garth? How could you do this to me, to ms?" she demanded brokenly.

"No wonder you didn't object too much when I told you I was keeping Tara. I'll bet you had a really good laugh about that. Me, your wife, taking on your ... your child by another woman... loving her..."

"Claudia. I didn't know then that Tara was mine. She could have been--'

"Anyone's. Any man's," Claudia interrupted him, her voice cold once more.

"Yes. She could, couldn't she? But knowing that, you still... Did you love her. Garth?" she asked him bleakly.

"No." His response was instant and immediate, but to his distress, instead of making her relent, his answer only seemed to increase her bitterness towards him.

"Then that makes you even more despicable," she accused him quietly.

"If you had loved her, I could have understood, but to have done what you did without loving her... I can't stay married to you. Garth," she told him emotionlessly, 'not after this. I couldn't bear to have you in the same room, never mind. " She broke off and turned away from him.

"You're overreacting," Garth returned fiercely. He was beginning to get angry now. She hadn't even heard what he'd said or given herself a chance to work this through with him. She was ready to believe the worst of him without even thinking it through, almost as though. as though. "This is exactly what you've been waiting for, isn't it?" he challenged her bitingly.

"An excuse to get me completely out of your life. After all, it isn't as though I've been allowed much of a role to play in it recently, have I? You don't want a husband, Claudia, and you certainly don't want a lover. In fact, you don't want a man at all. At least not this man. All you want is to be a mother. Well, you're not--'

"I'm not what? I'm not Tarn's mother?" Claudia burst out.

Garth swallowed hard and stared at her. That wasn't what he had been going to say at all. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying, her face so pale she looked ill. In the eyes of the world, she might never have looked less physically appealing, but so far as he was concerned, he had never loved her more, never wanted to show her that love more, never wanted. The cottage was small and all it took was a couple of strides to take him to her side, his arms going round her as he cradled her protectively against his body, murmuring over and over again, "Clo... my love, my dearest love..."

"Don't call me that," Claudia cried, tilting her head back to look up at him, but Garth was beyond recognising the fury and rejection in her voice. All he wanted to do was to cement the bond he still believed existed between them, to show her in the only way he knew that she was his woman, his only woman, that she always had been and always would be.

Bending his head, he lifted one hand to cup her face, the weight of his body pushing her back against the wall, the intensity of his passion catching her completely off guard as he started to kiss her almost frenziedly, using his mouth to smother any objection she tried to make as he kissed her over and over again.

Claudia felt so infuriated that she almost wanted to hit him--she, who had never been or wanted to be physically violent or aggressive in her entire life. She could feel the hot, hard weight of his body burning into her own and it shocked her how easily her own body responded to its familiarity despite everything that she had learned.

Angrily, she lashed out at him, striking a blow generated by the deepest, most primitive, most primeval source of her feminine emotions, wanting to hurt him, to damage him, to destroy him as he had done her by betraying her love.

She heard, felt, the shocked gasp of air leaving his lungs as her fists pummelled fiercely against his chest--a puerile, impossible attempt to wound him and an act that didn't even give her the satisfaction of emotional relief, she acknowledged as she felt the hot rush of acid tears stinging her eyes.

"I hate you Garth... I hate you." She screamed the words at him and was still screaming them ten seconds later when he grabbed hold of both her wrists in one hand, scooped her up off the floor and across his body in a fireman's lift and carried her still pummelling and kicking towards the bed.

Afterwards, Garth swore both to her and to himself that all he had intended to do was to dump her on the bed and leave her there until he had calmed down, but as he did so, he saw her tear-streaked face and the compulsion to reach out and touch it swamped him, flooding him with remorse and anguish.

"Claudia, it wasn't the way you think," he started to say, but Claudia had heard enough.

She raised her hand towards his face, intending to draw her nails savagely across it, to do anything . anything to silence those words, those lies, he was telling her.

"Claudia.-no!" Garth exploded, reaching for her wrist, locking his hand with hers in a parody of the intimacy shared by a pair of lover's entwined hands. Enraged, Claudia leaned forward, closing the fractional distance between them, desperate to find an outlet for her emotions. Then, acting purely on instinct, she sank her teeth into his bottom lip.

Garth felt the sharp bite, the brief sting of pain, tasted the hot gush of blood that followed it, saw the shocked exultation in Claudia's eyes as she realised what she had done. And it was that, the sight of the look in her eyes, the knowledge that she had enjoyed hurting him that breached the fragile ramparts of his own battle-torn selfcontrol.

He was nearly a foot taller than her and far, far heavier. Add to that his training as a soldier, and what surprised him was not how easily he overpowered her but how long she continued to fight him. What shocked him, though, was how physically arousing, how physically erotic it was to wrestle with her on the bed; to feel the soft warmth of her body beneath his; to know that above and beyond the anger they were both unleashing, there was for him in what was happening between them a very sharp and totally male awareness of the sexual heat being generated between them. It was a heat and urgency he had al n most forgotten what it felt like to feel as he held her down beneath him and watched the way her body, her breasts, rose and fell with the exertion of her breathing. In his imagination, he was already removing her clothes, already laying bare the honey gold intimacy of her body to the touch of his hands and his mouth.

Lying pinned beneath Garth on the bed, Claudia saw the way he was looking at her and felt her body's response to that look--a look as old as the one Adam had given Eve, a look as old as the one Eve had tempted and taunted Adam into giving her. One shudder and then another went through her as she recognised that while her mind might loathe what was happening between them, physically and sexually her body was aroused by it.

She knew even before Garth had lifted his hand to push aside her clothes and reveal the hard-tipped fullness of her breasts just what he was going to do and how she was going to feel when he did. Not only was there anger, bitterness and contempt, there was desire, as well, in the hot, liquid, wrenching feeling that pulsed inside her.

As his hand curled round her naked breast and his mouth found hers, she could taste the warm salt shock of his blood on her own tongue.

Behind her closed eyelids, black and red whorls of colour mingled violently together, reacting with her swirling emotions. Rage, pain, desire, need. They were all there and others, too, that she couldn't bear to acknowledge.

They made love quickly and fiercely, Claudia tearing at Garth's clothes as she would have liked to have been tearing at his flesh, ripping, shredding, hurting, raking his back with her fingernails as he thrust deeply into her, hating him for the way he was making her want him physically at the same time as she hated him so much emotionally, the dagger points of her nails shredding his skin and yet also driving him to thrust even deeper within her.

Their coming together was shattering and incredibly sensual. Claudia shocked herself with her own angry aggression that manifested itself in a need to make Garth reach orgasm deep inside her wave upon wave as though she was somehow subconsciously drawing from him all of his maleness, all of his 'seed', leaving him empty and drained, unable ever again to give to anyone else that which should only have been given to her, even though her body couldn't process it, couldn't use it. couldn't grow a new life with it. Her own orgasms were the most intense she had ever known, more of a pain than a pleasure, flooding her body with convulsive explosions so powerful that afterwards her body felt as light and empty as though she had been given a powerful emetic. But, as she discovered in the months that followed, if its purpose in her own subconscious had been to rid her of all her feelings for Garth, it had not worked, not by a long way.

To the outside world, their divorce was quiet and amicable.

"I can't live with you any more Claudia had told Garth distantly.

"I.

don't want you in my life, Garth. "

Garth had given in with a heavy heart. Despite all his attempts to reason with her, she had remained obdurate. She could not stay married to a man who had made the whole concept of their marriage a mockery and a sham.

Tara, it was agreed, would live with her mother, with Garth remaining very much a strong presence in her life.

/! can hardly refuse, can I? " Claudia had acknowledged at their final private meeting, giving him a bitter smile as she added painfully, " After all, she is your daughter. "

"And yours," Garth had insisted.

But Claudia had refused to look at him, and he had known that when she turned her face away from him, it was because she was crying. He had known, too, that any attempt on his part to go to her and comfort her, to reach out and hold her as he so much longed to do, to tell her how very, very much he loved her and always would, would achieve nothing and probably make her hate him even more.

As she drove through the London traffic, it was Tara who was in Claudia's thoughts. When she and Garth had broken the news to Tara that they were divorcing, her shock and tears, her pleading with them to stay together. Tara.

Had the circumstances been anything other than what they were, Claudia knew that she would have relented then and given in to Garth's pleas that they keep their marriage going. But how could she when every time she looked at him, every time he touched her, she could only see Katriona? Every time she saw him with Tara, she would be thinking of how and with whom her precious daughter had been conceived.

Gradually, Tara had come to accept the separation, and Claudia had stuck to her word that Tara could see as much of her father as she wished had stuck to it despite the pain it caused her. Tara. Tara at fourteen. sixteen. eighteen the age Katriona had been when. And now her daughter was a girl no longer but a young woman, a young woman poised on the edge of her own adult life, a young woman whose life could be soured and spoiled as Claudia's own life had been by betrayal.

But not the betrayal of a woman by a man. No, the betrayal she would have to suffer would in its way be even worse--the betrayal of a child by her mother.

Once when Garth had been urging Claudia to tell Tara the truth, she had told him fiercely, "I can't. How can I? I owe it to her to protect her--' " It isn't Tara you're protecting," Garth had cut in bitingly.

"It's yourself. Have you thought of what's going to happen, of how she's going to feel if she discovers it from someone else?"

"She won't ever discover it," Claudia had insisted, but even then she had been afraid, aware how fragile the deception she had woven around Tara's birth actually was and how easily the real facts could be put together if someone was determined to discover the truth.

How would Tara feel if she had to face those facts alone in a strange country, if Ryland's aunt should discover the truth and confront her with it? How would she feel in Tara's shoes? What would her thoughts, her feelings, be towards the 'mother' who had made it possible for her to be put in that position by not warning her? By what yardstick would she judge the extent of that mother's love when she had put her own needs to be seen by her daughter in the best possible light above that daughter's need and right to be protected from anything and anyone in a position to harm her?

Tara would have every right to feel as betrayed by her as she had felt by Garth and to hate her with the intensity with which she had hated Garth.

Were her own feelings, her own needs, really more important to her thanthose of her child? Yes, her child, she told herself fiercely, becauseTara was her child. Her love for her was that of a mother as surely asthough she had been the one to give birth to her.

Emotionally, Tara was to her flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood.

She was the kind of mother who had always known instinctively when Tara was away from her if she was ill or unhappy, the bond between them so deep that in some senses it was almost psychic.

She couldn't let Tara go to America without knowing the truth, and as suddenly as though her vision had previously been clouded and hazy, now it was startlingly clear, its clarity almost a sharp, physical pain.

How could she not have told Tara before? she accused herself.

How could she have allowed her own fear of being rejected by her daughter to become more important than Tara's right to know the truth.

To the shock of the driver behind her, she abruptly swung the car round, cutting across a bus-only lane to turn left into the maze of narrow streets that, if memory served her, would take her to her destination.

With all the instincts of a homing pigeon, she knew there was only one place she wanted to be right now, only one person she wanted to see.

Only one person could help her, could reinforce her decision and protect her from the danger of changing her mind, backing down, giving in to her fear.

Loving someone meant putting their needs above your own. True motherlove was selfless, not selfish. True mother love.

Garth cursed when he found that he had a visitor. It had been a badday made worse by the realisation as he drove away from Ivy House thatdespite all the years that he and Claudia had lived their separatelives, there was a part of him that had always recognised Claudia ashis. His wife, his soul mate, his love. It would have been theeasiest, the most natural thing in the world to have taken hold of herearlier and to have shown her.

To have shown her what? That he could still overpower her and forceher to have sex with him? Oh, yeah, wonderful. What a hero that wouldmake him.

He frowned as he flicked up the button on the door intercom and snapped a terse, "Yes?"

"Garth, it's me... Claudia. We... I... need to talk to you. I... I've decided to tell Tara the truth..." Silence.

"Garth... Garth, are you there?"

"Yes... yes. Come up, Clo. No, wait there, I'll come down for you."

He was acting like a wild kid, he chided himself as he practically ran down the flight of stairs that led to the entrance lobby, but he simply couldn't help it, couldn't restrain himself.

"Claudia ... Clo..."

Lost in the unexpected warmth of the hug that Garth gave her as he opened the door, Claudia was too taken aback to do a thing other than simply let him hold her and be glad that he was doing so, be grateful to him not just for his human warmth but for his instinctive and correct reading of her mood, her fragility and uncertainty, her vulnerability.

"I've been thinking all day about... about things," she told him awkwardly as he released her and guided her towards the stairs.

"I.

went to the flat. It's all different round there now. private houses and--' "Yes. I know."

"You know." Claudia stared at him as he opened the door to his apartment and ushered her inside.

"I... I drive down that way occasionally," he told her. He wasn't going to tell her how often. When he felt particularly low he drove there and simply parked outside their old flat, remembering. wishing. "I've been so... blind. Garth, so... so selfish. I thought I was doing the right thing protecting Tara, but today I suddenly realised... I don't know how I'm going to tell her," she plunged on, unable to look directly at him, focusing instead on the view beyond the window.

"I.

just know that I have to. before someone else does. I'm so afraid.

Garth," she confessed, shocked not so much by her admission but the fact that she was making it to Garth, of all people.

"I'm so afraid that when she knows the truth, she won't... she'll--' "She'll be shocked, yes," Garth told her gently.

"But.-Tara is your daughter, Clo, in all the ways that count. She's got your ability to reason and to judge only with compassion and kindness. She'll understand why you didn't tell her."

"Will she? Will she understand that I was more selfishly concerned with my own feelings, my own fear of losing her love, than I was of her feelings? Oh, Garth..."

Suddenly, to her shock, she was shaking, trembling violently, so violently that it was impossible to conceal the intensity of her emotions. For the third time in the same day, she felt Garth's arms wrap round her, comforting her, soothing her.

"Come and sit down," he urged, adding almost prosaically, "Have you eaten? I was just about to make myself some supper."

It wasn't true. He had eaten earlier in the day, but now it struck him that Claudia looked starved--not just for food, but starved in the emotional sense of being hungry for every kind of nourishment. Warmth, compassion, support. love.

"No... I'm not hungry," Claudia started to deny, then stopped. What was she doing here? Why on earth had she come here to Garth? Garth, the very last person she should have allowed herself to turn to in her need to have someone help her, understand her.

"Yes... yes, I would like something, please," she amended huskily, and she knew as she said the words that even if Garth wasn't aware of their importance, she was. For the first time since she had told him she wanted him out of her life, she was acknowledging that despite everything she knew she ought to feel, she did still need him.

Need him or.

"Wait here," Garth told her.

Claudia could hear him moving about in the kitchen as she stood in the living room, staring unseeingly out across the Thames. She had been in his apartment before, briefly. It was furnished comfortably in a very masculine fashion but it had, she suddenly recognised, an air of impermanence about it, a lack of personal touches, as though Garth had never truly adapted to it as his home.