"No," Ryland returned, shaking his head, 'no, she won't. "

"How can you be so sure?" Tara half teased him.

"I know she's not so young any more but..."

"Margot will never marry because it's impossible for her to marry the man she wants," Ryland told her bluntly, explaining when he saw her puzzled expression, "Margot loves Lloyd--her mother's brother's son. They're first cousins. It's against the law in the state of Massachusetts and a number of others for them to marry and my aunt would never have condoned their getting married even in another state. Margot fell in love with him when she was fifteen and since then... It isn't something that's discussed in the family."

"Does he... Lloyd... love her?" Tara interrupted him, her eyes full of tender compassion.

"I... Lloyd has been married and has two stepchildren. He doesn't have Margot's intense... well, she's a very driven sort of person. Lloyd lives in California. My aunt decided to set up a branch of the business out there, printing pretty much the same sort of stuff for the campus at UCLA as we do for Yale and Harvard. She put Lloyd in charge of that end of things."

"She sent him away from Margot, you mean," Tara said in a low voice.

"It's impossible--illegal--for them to be together," Ryland reminded her quietly.

"She did it for the best. Except when Lloyd met someone else out there and decided to get married, well, Margot had a bit of a breakdown. They meet every summer at the island. There's an island my great-grandfather bought, just off the coast--' " An island, your family owns an island. " Tara began, but Ryland shook his head dismissively.

"It's nothing," he told her, 'just an exposed piece of rocky headland, really, but. " He paused.

"It's there Margot and Lloyd see each other. Not that it's ever mentioned."

Tara shivered and wrapped her arms tightly around her body, trying to imagine how it must feel to love a man you could never really be with, to want a man you could never truly have.

In their early days together when he had been telling her about his family background, Ryland had played down the role he knew he was ultimately going to have in the family business.

He had told Tara he had come to England to study British publishing and he had then gone on to explain to her the nature of his family's business, telling her that his great-grandfather had started a small company to publish textbooks and papers written by his friends at Yale and Harvard.

The business had grown and become extremely profitable, still maintaining its close links with the university.

After his uncle's untimely death in a sailing accident--his hobby had been racing oceangoing yachts--his wife, Ryland's aunt, had stepped into his shoes and run the business as its chief executive. Ryland's father continued with his own work, bringing in new manuscripts for them to publish and sell. Under his aunt's aegis, the company had gone from strength to strength. She had an extremely sharp financial brain and Boston's money men had a great deal of respect for her--as did Ryland himself.

Any one of Boston's first families would have been highly delighted to see their daughter marrying Martha Adams's nephew, Ryland suspected, but marriage hadn't been something he had been remotely interested in--until he had seen Tara. Within days, within hours of meeting her, he had known that she was the one--the only one.

Perhaps he was more like his cousin Margot than he had previously imagined, he acknowledged ruefully.

There was something in Tara's make-up, a streak of idealism, the result perhaps of having always and only ever known the loving, tender protection of those around her and of having known, as well, just how much she was cherished and valued, that somehow set her apart and made her special, made him love her.

"I do understand you have to return," Tara assured him, adding, "I just wish that Boston wasn't so far away."

Tt isn't," Ryland murmured, tilting her face up towards his own so that he could look down into her eyes as he whispered softly a second time, " It isn't. "

As he bent to kiss her, Tara shook her head.

"Not to us, perhaps, but it is to Ma. I could see it in her eyes. She looked almost... almost frightened ... as though... I've never seen her look like that before.

Not even when she and Dad. I hated it when they divorced. I don't want anything like that to ever happen to us, Ry. "

"It won't," he reassured her gently.

"It won't.

Your mother probably just needs a little time to get used to the idea of our living in Boston," he added comfortingly.

"After all, she's got her own life. She's still a very active and attractive woman... a very, very attractive woman," he noted appreciatively, causing Tara to give him an indignant pinch.

"Perhaps we could give ourselves a week or so to settle in and then get her to come over for a visit," Ryland suggested as he removed Tara's ringers from his arm and then bent his head to slowly suck them one by one.

"Mmm..." Tara moaned responsively.

"Mmm..." Ryland agreed as he eased her down against the bed and transferred the moist heat of his mouth from her fingers to her nipple.

Tara closed her eyes and gave herself up voluptuously to the pleasure of his lovemaking.

Ryland had teased her shortly after they had revealed their love for one another and celebrated that revelation with a romantic and very sensual weekend away at a discreet country hotel in a bedroom complete with a four-poster, a huge open fire and, even better, a bed-sized open space in front of it that there was a delicious wantonness, a wildness almost, about the way she lost herself in their lovemaking that was intriguingly at odds with the mild-mannered and restrained day-to-day image she presented to the outside world.

"That's because I'm in love with you," Tara had told him seriously and meant it, because it was true.

Her emotions had always been close to the sur n face, easily stirred and fired, and it had taken the gentle influence of her mother to help her learn how to harness the impetuous, impulsive side of her nature and to look beyond its immediacy to the eventual consequences. Tara felt privileged that in her the passionate intensity she felt, an inheritance from her father's side of the family, was tempered and strengthened by the quiet wisdom that was her mother's. Passion and sensitivity--they could, for someone without the loving parenting she had received, have been uncomfortable bedfellows, but Tara loved and valued both sides of her personality because they were her emotional inheritance from her parents.

She liked knowing that in her individuality she was still a part of them, just as the children she and Ryland produced would be a part of them. Like her, she hoped that they, too, would one day listen with the same rapt attention as she had while their grandparents told them stories of their own youth and that they, as she had done, would absorb from those stories a sense of family and continuity, a sense of security and safety, of warmth and belonging.

It still sometimes brought quick emotional tears to her eyes to visit her grandparents and to see the love and pride in their eyes, to see and touch the familiar things that she had known from babyhood: the Sevres dinner service that a member of her mother's mother's family had brought back from France; the medals her maternal grandfather had received on the death of his uncle, a veteran of the Somme; the linen sheets both of her grandmothers had been presented with on their respective marriages and that both of them had ruefully admitted they never used, much preferring the easier laundering of modern bedclothes.

Despite her totally modern outlook on life, Tara was a girl who was very much in touch with, very much in tune with, her family's past.

Ryland, who had already recognised that about her, hoped it might incline his aunt to look favourably on Tara and approve of their marriage.

He might neither need nor particularly want that approval and the inheritance that would ultimately go with it, but as he had already told Tara, he felt it was his duty to accept the role in the family business for which he had been groomed. There were certain things about his family and that role that he had not as yet told Tara, but they did not affect his love for her, and who knew, if his cousin Margot changed her mind about remaining single. He smiled in the darkness as Tara fell asleep in his arms. How could his family not love her? How could they possibly find fault with a person as instantly lovable and totally adorable, so perfect in every way, as his Tara?

"Ryland's coming home and he's bringing a girl with him."

"A girl? Who?"

Lloyd propped himself up on one elbow as he looked down into the face of his lover--and cousin.

Margot shrugged dismissively.

"I don't know, some English girl."

"Is it serious?"

"No relationships are allowed to be serious in this family until mother's sanctioned it. You know that."

The expression on her face echoed the bitterness and resentment in her voice as she sat up in bed and reached for the packet of cigarettes on the bedside table, lighting one and drawing fiercely on it.

In the clear light of the island morning, the sharp angularity of the bones both of her body and her face was almost cruelly revealed. What had, on the girl, been extreme slimness had become, on the woman she was now, an almost bony thinness, the outward expression of her inner frustration and bitterness, as though these deep-rooted feelings that had distorted her life had eaten away at her flesh as thoroughly and destructively as any bodily illness.

"My God, if only things were different," she burst out intensely, her dark eyes flashing as she turned to look at the man lying beside her.

Three years separated them in age--three thousand miles in distance, apart from the brief days and hours they occasionally managed to snatch together, those and the six weeks they shared annually here on the island that belonged to Margot's mother and his aunt.

Every summer for over twenty years, both of them had come here to be together, away from prying eyes. As first cousins, certain states con and Betray 73 side red their blood relationship too close for them to marry and legalise their love for each other as Margot so passionately wished they might. Margot wasn't sure which was the stronger feeling she had for these weeks in the summer--hatred or longing. Longing when they were apart from one another and hatred when she was here because being here meant being aware of the fact that she could never ever have her heart's desire; that she could never be with Lloyd as she ached and wanted to be with him. As they both wanted her to be with him, she amended hastily. After all, he suffered just as much as she did, yearned just as much as she did. ached, needed, wanted, loved just as much as she did.

They had both known, of course, even before they had fallen in love that such a love was forbidden.

"But what will happen if I get pregnant?" Margot had asked Lloyd tremulously the first time they had made love, lying uncomfortably together in the sandy earth amongst the trees, hidden out of sight of the house.

"You won't," Lloyd had assured her, showing her the condom he had bought.

That had been the beginning of it, the beginning of what to her was a continuous rack of pain from which there was no relief, no cessation, no, not even sometimes in his arms, because always at the back of her mind was the knowledge that their togetherness was only temporary, that uiti mately they would have to part and go back to their separate lives.

"Stay with me she had begged frantically one summer a number of years ago.

"I can't. You know that he had told her.

"I think Carole-Ann might be beginning to suspect something. In fact, I think we might have to--' " No! " Margot had burst out explosively before he could finish.

"If she does suspect, then we'll just have to find some way of... She can't stop us being together, Lloyd. She has you all the time. Does she know how lucky she is to be your wife?" she had demanded passionately.

"How much I wish..."

Lloyd had turned and taken her in his arms.

"You know that can't be," he told her.

"Oh, Lloyd," she cried.

"God, why does it have to be like this? Why can't we be together? Go away somewhere--abroad?"

"You know we can't do that. How would we live? Both of us are dependent on the business."

"The summer's passing quickly." Margot shivered now.

"Another three weeks and you'll be going back. Oh, Lloyd, I don't know how I can bear it."

Helplessly, she started to cry.

Tiredly, Lloyd closed his eyes. They weren't young any more. The UCLA branch of their business, which his aunt had originally set up as much to put some distance between him and Margot as anything else, had proved to be extremely profitable and certainly no sinecure. He loved Margot, of course he did, and he always would, but sometimes the intensity of her passion for him, her need, her dependency on him, wore him down.

These six weeks he spent on the island every summer, technically updating his aunt on everything that had been happening with his side of the business, were, for Margot, the pivot of her whole existence.

"If we didn't have this, there'd be no point in my going on living," she had told him more than once. Increasingly, though, he was guiltily aware that while Margot was so emotionally dependent on him, he was not free to live his own life.

It had been different when they were young. Then he had shared her passion, been as overwhelmed by his feelings for her as she was by hers for him. But now!

He was approaching forty and what did he have to show for it?

m material terms and so far as others were concerned, no doubt he seemed as though he was doing all right. He had a good job, money in the bank, a nice apartment, a new car.

But what about in other terms? What about those aspects of his life that could not be assessed in dollars or possessions?

He was divorced now with two stepdaughters whom he rarely saw, a few friends and Margot. "Lloyd, tell me everything's going to be all right, that we'll always be together," Margot was demanding passionately.

Tiredly, he reassured her but he knew his voice lacked conviction.

What was that noise? Groggily, Claudia tried to focus on the high-pitched ringing sound that had broken into her heavy drugged sleep, the doubled effect of the two pills she had taken so deadening that it was several seconds before she realised that the noise was the telephone and another several more before she came to enough to reach for the receiver.

"Claudia, it's Maxine," she heard her assistant announcing herself.

"Is everything OK? I was a bit concerned when you didn't arrive this morning."

Guiltily, Claudia started to open her eyes and then widened them quickly in disbelief as she caught sight of her alarm clock. It was gone eleven in the morning. No wonder Maxine had been concerned.

"Er-.J'm sorry, Maxine," she apologised hastily.

"I... I meant to ring you last night to warn you that I'd decided to work at home this morning. I've got some paperwork here I need to catch up on."

It wasn't completely untrue; she did have paperwork to attend to, Claudia comforted her n self several minutes later after she had replaced the receiver.

Paperwork to do, maybe, but she certainly wasn't in any fit state to accomplish very much, she admitted wearily.

She had slept so deeply that if she had had any bad dreams she certainly couldn't remember them, but even so, the drugged oblivion of her night's sleep was just as exhausting as though she had lain sleepless and tormented. The numbing lethargy that still gripped her made her feel both guilty and angry. Quickly, she got out of bed, collected fresh underwear and headed for the shower.

But as she stood beneath its stinging, reviving spray, she acknowledged that at least her sleeping tablets had been able to keep last night's nightmares at bay.

She stopped soaping herself and stood motionless beneath the water, shuddering as she're called the eager happiness in Tara's voice when she told her excitedly about her plans. And she, what had she done to prepare and protect her precious, much-loved daughter from what she now feared and dreaded lay ahead of her?

Slow, painful tears seeped from beneath her closed eyelids as Claudia acknowledged what she had done, or rather, not done. When faced with a crisis, the need to be strong and independent, to take control and confront the danger facing her, she had retreated to the security of the kind of behaviour more appropriate to her mother's generation by asking, "Have you told your father yet?"

And then she had compounded her irresponsibility by escaping into a drug-induced sleep that had achieved nothing other than to worry her loyal and hard-working assistant.

But what could she do, what could she say? Maybe, after all, she was over-reacting, over- worrying.

If only. If only.

As she stepped out of the shower and reached for a towel, Claudia caught sight of her reflection in the bathroom mirror. The anguish she was feeling was clearly revealed in the drawn, drained tension of her expression. The last time she had seen that particular look on her face had been during the early days when she and Garth had agreed to divorce.

Garth. It had been foolish of her to react so emotionally last night and try to ring him. She knew from Tara that he had been dating on a casual basis for the past few months. Tara had complained to her that she didn't think the thtrtyoddyear-old woman he had apparently been seeing was good enough for her father.

Like her. Garth hadn't had anyone serious in his life since their marriage had ended, but hardly for the same reasons. Garth was an extremely attractive and very sensual man, the kind of man who, in the early days of their marriage, had been so emotionally as well as openly physically loving with her in public that her friends had often commented enviously to her on the depth and intensity of his love for her.

Perhaps unusually so for a man of his generation and upbringing. Garth was a highly tactile man, both as a lover and a father, and Tara was like him in that respect. She, too, was very much given to loving hugs and kisses while Claudia, as she was the first to acknowledge, tended to wait for the other person to make the first move, to hold herself back a little.

Even now, she disliked being reminded of how much she had missed Garth's physical warmth in the early days after she had found out the truth, how often she had woken from the wretchedness of her merciless dreams and turned instinctively towards his side of the bed expecting him to be there to reach out for her and hold her close, only to remember that the emotional agony of her waking hours was even greater than that of her nightmares.

She was over that now, of course. Well over it, and as a woman of forty-five, the mother of a grown-up daughter, as well, she did not think it appropriate to allow herself to yearn helplessly like some lovesick teenager for the physical and emotional contact, the closeness of a lover, a someone of her own that her life now denied her. Divorcing Garth had been the right decision, the only decision she could have made in the circumstances. He had, after all, betrayed her and betrayed her in such a way, deceiving her, lying to her so comprehensively and for so long, that there had been no way the damage he had done to their relationship could ever be repaired. So yesterday, why had she turned, yearning so instinctively, to him for help?

Because he was Tara's father. That was why and that was the only reason why, she assured herself sternly as she went back to her bedroom, securing the towel around her still-damp body, then reaching for the hair dryer Since the break-up of her marriage, she had become fiercely protective, even defensive, about her independence and her ability to face the world alone, to manage whatever problems she might have alone. She had no need of anyone, any man, to lean on, to provide her with emotional support; she had proved that.