Garth groaned, then added hoarsely, "God, Clo, I want you so much... have wanted you so much and for so damned long that I don't know if I can..."

Now he was undressing her and with far more speed and skill than she had evinced, Claudia acknowledged, hesitantly aware that the last time he had seen her naked body, she had been a younger woman.

But she needn't have worried. Garth's reaction as he exposed the soft, warm globes of her breasts made her catch her own breath in shocked delight.

No man could manufacture that kind of look, that kind of dazed and possessive appreciation and desire. She didn't really even need his words to confirm what she could see in his face, but it felt good to hear them anyway as he told her huskily, "I'd forgotten just how... how perfect you are. How... how much a woman... my woman. Oh, God, Clo, I've missed you."

And then he was burying his face against her breasts, caressing them with his fingers and then with his mouth.

It was almost like being young again, although Claudia knew that she could never have been as uninhibited then, as freely able to accept not just his desire for her, but even more importantly, hers for him; nor could she have been as truly accepting not just of his sexuality but of her own as well then as she was now. And she could certainly never remember glorying so openly, so eagerly, in the immediacy of a need that demanded instant and complete satisfaction, so much so, in fact, that in the end she was the one to tug Garth's trousers off, laughing at him while he groaned helplessly. But her laughter soon died when he reached for her, drawing her down against him, kissing her breasts again but this time lingering over the caress with deliberate sensuality, licking and then sucking her nipples in the way he had obviously remembered that she most liked.

Had he remembered, too, what else she liked?

She felt her stomach muscles start to contract while her body grew moist.

It seemed that he had, and as her fingers curled ecstatically into the still-thick springiness of his hair, Claudia looked down at the sight of him between her thighs and wondered how she could have lived so long without having him beside her.

It was like waking up from a bad dream and realising that it had merely been a dream; that this was reality, the hot, loving lap of Garth's tongue against her body, the aroused male scent of him, the feel of him, the. She gave a small gasp as her body started to respond to the insistent pressure of his mouth against the hot, wet bud of her clitoris, wave after concentric wave of need building up inside her towards a crescendo that she knew would. "Garth... Garth, not like this," she protested.

"I want you inside me...1 want..."

She was almost too late. almost.

All they had time for was the intimacy of Garth's body filling hers, an urgent, fierce thrust and then another before her sharp, high-pitched cry broke the silence like the waves of her pleasure breaking inside her.

"I don't want to move," she confessed to Garth a few minutes later as she lay beneath him.

"I daren't move," Garth admitted wryly, adding, 'but we'll have to. because. " As he looked down at her flushed face, he stopped to kiss her before adding lovingly, " Because the next time I want to love you in the comfort of a bed "The next time?" Claudia's heart jumped betrayingly but she said nothing, simply searching his face.

"This isn't a one-off thing, Claudia," he warned her, reading her unspoken thoughts.

"Not for me and I hope not for you, either. It's not too late for us to start again."

"To forget the past?" Claudia suggested shakily.

"No." Garth shook his head.

"No, not to forget it, but to build on it, to use what we've learned from it, to make sure that this time nothing and no one comes between us or makes us want to part. I've never stopped loving you. Never. And I don't think that you've stopped loving me, either."

Was he right? Claudia suspected that he could be. Above and beyond the sex they had just shared, there was something about being with him that felt so natural and right. So easy. She tried to imagine herself going home to Ivy House and back to her life without him, and she knew incontrovertibly, if unexpectedly, that it wasn't a prospect that pleased her. That right now, for whatever reason, she wanted to be with him. Because she needed his strength.

"Tara is going to need us both once she knows the truth," Garth told her, once more reading her mind with such accuracy that she was silenced, 'and I think that you and I need each other, too. What do you say, Claudia? Shall we try again? "

"I... I don't know. I need time," she had in tended to say but instead, to her astonishment, she heard herself saying almost shyly, "I... I'd like that. Garth. I'd..."

She didn't get any further. Despite his com plaint earlier about his age and his aching muscles, he lithely sprang to his feet and immediately lifted Claudia up into his arms.

"Bed is the best place, the only place for this kind of discussion, the only place for you and me right now," he whispered meaningfully as he carried her to wards his bedroom door. And as she looked at him, he promised her, "For tonight, there is no past, no pain, just our new beginning."

A new beginning? Claudia opened her mouth to remonstrate with him and to make some mature level-headed, adult response to his roman tic and plainly famous statement, but then as she looked into his eyes, she changed her mind and heard herself whispering as adoringly and, no doubt, as idiotically as a young girl, newly, deeply, drowningly, in love for the first time, "Oh, Garth, could we?"

It would be different tomorrow, of course; to morrow she would need all her strength, all her maturity, all her courage, to face Tara and tell her what she had done. But tonight she badly needed this refuge, this anodyne, this peace, this loving, to help her to find that strength along with the wisdom to construct a bridge that would hope fully lead not just her but, even more importantly, Tara across the chasm that separated the past from the future as well as the courage to cross over it.

"I've never stopped loving you," she heard Garth saying passionately to her as he shouldered open the bedroom door.

"I never have and I never will."

'd Ryland ruefully as she sat on the kitchen work top munching a piece of toast while passing on to him the letter she had just been reading.

"There's been some sort of problem with their computer," she informed him, 'and it's resulted in a huge backlog in dealing with visa requests. "

"Mmm..."

"I'm going round to see Dad later by the way. He left a message on the answering machine asking me to call. I wonder what he wants. He hasn't been in the office for the past couple of days. His secretary, said he'd rung in to tell her that some thing urgent had cropped up and that he didn't want to be disturbed by anyone. I suppose it must be something to do with one of his clients. I tried to ring Ma yesterday, but I couldn't get hold of her. Maxine said she'd phoned in to say she was going away, but according to Maxine, she didn't say where or for how long, which isn't like her at all."

The toast had almost all gone and she inspected the piece that was left with frowning scrutiny before licking off the marmalade and then grinning as she saw Ryland watching her youthful behaviour.

"Are you going to eat yours?" she asked him.

"I'm ravenous. Must be all the energy I used up last night," she added, giving him a sideways grin.

Ryland. shook his head.

"I'm not rising for that one," he warned her dryly.

"I wasn't the one who insisted that we try some teenage magazine's sexual position of the month."

'you said it was impossible," Tara reminded him.

"And I was right it was."

"Not completely," Tara responded mock- demurely.

"Your problem is that you're getting old. If you were supple " If I was double-jointed, don't you mean? " Ryland interrupted her, 'and as for me getting old... I wasn't the one who complained that her knees hurt or that " All right, all right. Well, you know I'm not that keen on going on top. It makes my stomach look huge, and besides "Besides, you prefer to have me doing all the hard work," Ryland teased her, opening his mouth for the piece of toast she was feeding him.

"No, I don't," Tara argued back indignantly.

"It's just... well, you can call me romantic and foolish if you wish, but I just love the feeling of having you on top of me, all around me inside me," she murmured coyly.

"Mmm... especially in side me. Ry ... when we stay with your family, they're not going to expect us to have separate rooms, are they? " she asked him.

"Probably... but it's all right. The house is pretty big, so I dare say we can manage something."

"Mmm ... I don't want just something," Tara told him poutingly.

"I want everything. I hope you aren't going to want us to wait long after we get married to start a family. I've been feeling decidedly broody recently."

Ryland pretended to look alarmed but he could see from her expression that she wasn't fooled. They had, after all, discussed the subject of children at great length, and both of them were agreed that they wanted what Tara called a proper family.

"At least three," she had told him, 'and a couple of dogs. oh, and a decent-sized guest-room so that we can have people to stay and a granny suite for later when Ma gets older. "

"A granny suite. Have you told your mother about your plans for her? I hadn't realised her old age was quite so imminent," Ryland had responded wryly.

Tara had giggled.

"No, of course I haven't. I'm going to miss her so much, Ry/ she had told him seriously.

"We've always been so close. Oh, not in that awful, cloying, possessive-mother-and dependent-daughter sort of way. It's never been like that. It's just that she's always... well, it's just that she's always been there and somehow a little bit of me is almost frightened of what it's going to feel like when she isn't."

Ryland had watched her. What she wasn't voicing but what he had already recognised was that Tara had grown up in an environment with a mother who had surrounded her with love, cushioned her with it, wrapped her protectively in it, used it to throw around her a magic cloak of security that showed in everything there was about Tara, from the tone of her voice to the tilt of her head. It showed that she had been nurtured and loved, that she had been given the intangible gifts of security, self-esteem, self-respect, selfconfidence--gifts that he already knew she would ultimately pass on to their own children, gifts that he believed would make them rich beyond measure, gifts that were, in fact, priceless.

"It's going to be fun organising the wedding," Tara commented now, her face clouding slightly as she complained, "I just wish we were a larger family. There aren't any little nieces and nephews on my side to dress up as bridesmaids and pageboys."

Now it was Ryland's turn to grin.

"You can borrow some of mine," he promised her.

"I've got dozens, hoards, on my mother's side at least."

Tara's expression was still sombre.

"I wish, too, that Mum and Dad were still together. Oh, I know they'll both be there being civilised about things." She made a wry face.

"But I don't want them to be civilised, I want them to be the way they should be with one another.

I want them to be. to be happy," she announced, having struggled for the right words.

"I'm sure they are," Ryland told her robustly, adding in a more gentle but still-cautioning tone, "They're old enough to make their own decisions about how they live their lives, Tara, and who with."

"Yes, I know, but that's just it, isn't it? Neither of them has made any decision about... about living with someone else. I mean they might just as well still be married. They could still be married."

"They hardly ever see one another," Ryland reminded her.

"Dad still loves Ma. I'm sure of it. He's got photographs of her in his bedroom. They must have been taken shortly after I was born because she's holding me and--' " It's probably because you're in the photo that he's kept them," Ryland felt obliged to point out.

He already knew of Tara's conviction that her parents ought to be together. It was one of her favourite hobby-horses and one he felt sure that was shared by many other children of divorced parents, most of them adult enough and mature enough to know better.

"And Mum hasn't had anyone else," Tara continued, warming to her theme.

"Not that she hasn't had the opportunity."

"She's a very attractive woman," Ryland agreed, then winced and exclaimed, "Ouch' as Tara kicked him lightly.

"What was that for?" he demanded.

"You've said before how attractive you think she is. Just how attractive do you find my mother exactly?" Tara asked him ominously.

Ryland laughed, turning to tug her off the work top and into his arms.

"One hell of a lot ... but nowhere near as much as I find her daughter," he whispered teasingly as he started nibbling little kisses against Tara's neck.

"Mmm ... I thought you had to go to work," Tara reminded him.

"Yes, I do," Ryland agreed regretfully.

"Well, Dad's asked me to go straight round to his apartment this morning instead of into the office. Heaven knows what he wants. A nice bonus would be rather useful right now," she said, laughing.

Ryland smiled at her. He admired and respected the way that Tara's parents, both of them very comfortably situated financially, resisted the temptation to shower their quite obviously adored only child with life's luxuries.

Tara lived on the income she earned working for her father, and her salary was exactly the same as that earned by the other young graduates with the consultancy.

How was she going to react when he told her that economising wasn't going to be something she would need to do in the future--and more importantly, when was he going to tell her?

"Tara..." he began warily.

But she was already starting to tell him, "I must go. I'm running late." After kissing him lingeringly, Tara grabbed her jacket and purse and headed for the door, saying as she left, "I'd better get going. It will take forever to get across London. Can you order Chinese for supper? I don't think we're going to have tune to cook this evening. "

"What do you mean we?" Ryland teased her. It was a standing joke between them that of the two of them he was the better cook. After she had gone, he didn't know whether he felt pleased or sorry that he had not been able to admit the truth to her. There was still plenty of time, he comforted himself.

Half an hour after Tara had left, the phone rang just as Ryland himself was on the point of leaving. Frowning, he went to answer the call, the unexpectedness of hearing his father's voice deepening his frown.

"Son, you're going to have to get home," he heard his father telling him heavily.

"We've already checked and there's a flight leaving Heathrow your time eleven o'clock. We've booked you a seat to New York with a connecting flight up to Boston. We'll pick you up at the airport."

"Airport? Dad..."

"I can't explain now, son. Just get here."

Ryland knew there had to be something very seriously wrong for his father to demand his immediate return home, and the heaviness he could hear in his voice sent a shiver of prescient doom shuddering down Ryland's spine.

"Dad, is Mom... are the girls...?"

"No. Your mom's fine and so are the girls. Look, I can't talk about it right now. Once you get here, you'll understand. And Ry ... I think it's best if you come alone."

Come alone! His father ended the call before Ryland could ask him any more questions. Just what the hell was going on? He could feel the adrenalin starting to chum through his veins as anxiety knotted his stomach. For his father to have booked him a flight home was alarming enough, but the tone of his father's voice had triggered off a primeval, gut-deep reaction in Ryland. Something was terribly wrong.

Something was terribly wrong indeed.

Come alone, his father had told him.

He would have to ring the airport and check that they had him booked onto that flight. Pack a few necessities and get himself over to Heathrow before eleven. And he would, of course, have to let Tara know what was happening.

He checked their phone list and pressed the automatic number for her father's flat. The telephone started to ring at the other end. Ryland frowned when it became obvious that no one was going to answer it.

Obviously, the traffic had been even worse than Tara expected and she wasn't there yet. Presumably, her father wasn't there, either.