When the tea was made she wandered back to the study door, behind which she could hear him arguing with someone. Long experience made her murmur, 'Half an hour at the least.'

Wherever she looked she could see few changes. The pictures on the stair walls were the ones she'd chosen. She'd taken one of them with her, and its place was still blank.

Here she'd once been unhappy and stifled. Garth had been generous, giving her everything that money could buy, but he'd also arranged her life and their children's lives, from on high. The little builder's yard he'd managed to scrape together had nearly gone under in the first year. He'd saved it by the skin of his teeth, but Faye had known nothing about this until she'd learned by accident three years later. The discovery that she'd been excluded from his inner counsels had been like a blow over the heart.

He'd failed to see that she was no longer the blindly adoring girl he'd married. She'd matured into a woman with a mind of her own, who still loved him, but now knew that he wasn't perfect.

They argued about the children. Garth was pleased with his son yet hardly seemed to notice his daughter. But Cindy adored her father and Faye often saw a wistful look in the child's eyes at his neglect.

Adrian, too, suffered a kind of neglect. Garth would buy him anything, but he wouldn't take time off to watch Adrian play in the school football team. He was determined to rear the boy to be 'successful' as he understood the word, but Adrian wanted to be a footballer. Garth dismissed this with a shrug. 'He'll grow out of it,' he told Faye. 'Just don't encourage him.'

She yielded in their disputes, telling herself that to be with him was enough. But her children were another matter. She stood up for them with a strength that surprised Garth. Arguments became quarrels. When she could stand it no longer, she left him, taking the children.

The last thing he said to her was 'Don't fool yourself that it's over, Faye. It never will be.'

She continued upstairs, to what had been Adrian's room, but the door was locked. So was Cindy's, and the one that led into the bedroom she'd shared with Garth. Frowning, she returned downstairs.

Here the doors were open and next to the study Faye found Garth's new bedroom, little more than a monkish cupboard, with a plain bed and a set of mahogany furniture. The walls were white; the carpet biscuit-coloured. Everything was of excellent quality but the total effect was bleak, as though the man who owned it carried bleakness within himself.

The sole ornament was a photograph beside the bed, showing a young boy of about nine, with a bright, eager face. Faye smiled, recognizing Adrian, but her smile changed to a frown as she saw there was no picture of Cindy.

She waited in the hall until he emerged from the study.

'What's the matter?' he asked, seeing her face.

'I'd like to see your study. There's something I have to know.'

The study told her the same story. There on the desk were two photographs of Adrian, but none of Cindy.

'How dare you?' she said, turning on him. 'You had no right to censor your own child out of existence. Cindy's still your daughter, and she loves you.'

'I don't know what you-'

'Where's her picture? You've got Adrian's. Where's Cindy's?'

'Look, I'm sorry. I didn't do it on purpose. I just didn't notice-'

'You never noticed her, and you broke her heart. The only one you cared for was Adrian, and then only when you could see yourself in him. But he isn't like you. He's gentle and sensitive.'

'There's nothing gentle about him when he's kicking a ball around a pitch.'

'How would you know? You've hardly ever seen him. Yes, he plays a tough game but he's a nice person. He looks after Cindy; he cares about people.'

'Everything I'm not, apparently,' he said in a tight voice.

'Yes. He doesn't like the things you like, and I won't have him forced to be someone he isn't. That's one of the reasons I left: to protect them from you.'

'That's a dreadful thing to say,' he told her, his face very pale.

'It's a dreadful thing to be true. Garth, I came here tonight because I'm tired of living in limbo. I really want that divorce.'

'I'll never give you one. I told you that when you left.'

'Yes, you said you'd take the children if I went for a divorce. That scared me at the time. You even used it to make me give up my job-'

'You didn't need to work. I offered you a large allowance-'

'But I wanted to be independent.'

He didn't understand that. He never had. He'd thought it madness when she'd struggled to get a diploma in bookkeeping through a correspondence course. She'd been thrilled to get work with Kendall Haines, a local environmentalist, but Garth's bitter anger had made her leave the job.

Refusing to be defeated, she'd approached the problem in a different way. She had a real flair for bookkeeping and began taking in freelance work from several small, local businesses. She'd used a computer that had been very basic even when she'd bought it second-hand, and which now looked as if it had come out of the Ark. The budget wouldn't run to the modern machine she longed for, yet still she was content. She'd won her independence in the face of Garth's hostility.

But his high-handed action still rankled. 'I was happy in that job until you forced me to leave it to stop you claiming Cindy and Adrian,' she told him now. 'I couldn't see it then, but that threat was nonsense. No court would have given you the children, and if it had you wouldn't have known what to do with them. It's just that you can't bear to let go of what was once yours. But we're not property, and it's time to let go.'

'What makes you think I've changed my mind?'

'It doesn't matter. Time has passed. Sooner or later we'll divorce, and I'd like it to be sooner. Our tenth wedding anniversary is coming up, and I don't want to be legally your wife on that day. Can't you see that it would be a mockery?'

'You were still my wife on our ninth anniversary. What difference does it make now?'

'The tenth is special,' she argued. 'It's the first of the big ones: ten, twenty, twenty-five, fifty. Ten is like a milestone. It says that your marriage has lasted. But ours hasn't.'

He looked at her closely. 'Is that the only reason?'

Under his keen gaze, she coloured. 'No, I-I want to get married again.'

She waited for his anger at this offence to his pride, but it didn't come and this disconcerted her. 'Tell me about him,' he said mildly.

'He's a kind man and I love him.'

'And you think he can fill my place with my children?'

'He already does and he's doing a terrific job. He's there for them.'

'He has no right to be. I'm still their father, just as I'm still your husband.'

'And what you have, you hold. I might have known.'

He touched the gold chain about her neck. 'Did he give you this?'

'Yes.'

'I wouldn't have thought Kendall Haines could have afforded that. He's obviously more successful than I realized. But he still isn't the right man for you.'

'I never told you his name. How did you-?' She gasped in outrage. 'You've had me spied on!'

'I always keep up-to-date information about my investments,' he said coolly. 'I knew when you went to work for him, and the first time you dated him.'

She drew a sharp breath. 'That was why you made me leave that job,' she said angrily. 'Because I was falling in love with him. You're even trying to control me now.'

'This man isn't right for you.'

'I think he is and I'm going to marry him. I can't be browbeaten any more, Garth-'

He took a quick breath. 'Browbeaten? Is that how you think of a marriage in which I gave you everything-?'

'Except yourself. Once you got your own business you were never there when I needed you. You handed your gifts down from on high and expected me to defer to you, and when I started answering back you didn't like it. I had to escape-'

'You'll never escape me,' he said harshly. 'I won't allow it.'

'You think you're going to turn the full might of the law onto me-?'

'No, it's much simpler than that,' he said softly, and pulled her into his arms.

He was too quick for her to avoid him and before she knew it his lips were on hers, caressing her with the same fierce purpose as in the past. In the beginning it had delighted her. Now, she was filled with outrage at his arrogance. Once, their sexual rapport had been perfect. Even when they had quarrelled it had still been there, giving them an illusion of a marriage. Now he thought he had only to remind her of that to overcome her will.

She fought to remain still and inwardly resist him. It should be easy with her anger to help her. Besides, she was strong now. If she waited, he would soon see that it was no use.

But his lips were full of persuasion, coaxing her to relive hot, brilliant moments, when the world had been full of love and beauty. If he'd been possessive, so had she, caressing and cherishing his body, rejoicing that he had chosen her for this magic gift. He had been young and his frame had been at its magnificent best; long legs and arms, a smooth brown chest, and hips whose power could make her cry out with ecstasy.

In the lonely, sobbing nights after their separation, she'd fought to deaden those memories and believed she'd succeeded. But he was here now, the living, breathing man, determined to make her remember what had united them, and forget what had driven them apart.

'You'll never escape me,' he murmured against her mouth, 'as long as we have this.'

His lips moved insistently against hers. This. One little word to sum up a dazzling, glorious and finally bitter experience: passion and grief intermingled. Love, pain, disillusion. All these things were there the moment he touched her, indestructible after all this time.

'I never forgot you,' he said hoarsely. 'Not for a moment. You were always with me-just as I was always with you-'

She tried to deny it but the treacherous warmth was already filling her body, weakening her will, making her want things she had no right to want. She'd sworn this wouldn't happen, but the memory of his passion still lived in her flesh, recalling her to life. She had once loved him so much, and though love might be finished, she was what that love had made her, and the past could never be destroyed completely.

For a few treacherous moments her body moulded itself to his, burning with remembered desire and need. She'd belonged to him completely, but that was a long time ago-although it seemed only yesterday-this very moment-for ever-

'It's not so easy, is it, Faye?' he whispered. 'It's not so easy to forget the truth…'

But the arrogant words shouted in her brain like a warning. Faye shuddered as she saw how close she'd come to weakening. Garth was a clever man and this was no more than a cynical mockery of love. She took a deep breath and forced her head to clear.

'The truth is that everything is over between us,' she said emphatically. 'Can't you understand that?'

'Why should I?' he growled. 'You don't kiss me as though it was all over.'

'I'm in love with another man…'

'Little liar!'

'And I'm going to marry him. You can't stop me.' Putting out all her strength, she broke free of him. 'You thought it was going to be easy, didn't you, Garth? When I arrived tonight you were sure I was going to drop into your hands. But I'm not like that any more. I've made my own life and there's no room in it for you.'

Garth was very pale. 'We'll see about that.'

But he was talking to empty air. Faye had fled the house.

CHAPTER TWO

'Faye, you shouldn't have been alone with this man. He's a monster.'

Faye smiled at Kendall Haines, the man she planned to marry as soon as she was free. 'Garth isn't a monster,' she protested. 'He just steamrollers over people.'

'All the more reason for you to stay away from him.'

It was the day after Faye's visit, and she and Kendall were spending the afternoon together at her home. It was as small and modest as Elm Ridge was rich and grand, but it was her very own and she loved it. The furniture was mostly second-hand, and it showed the wear and tear of two boisterous children. The house looked what it was, a place where a family lived, a real home.

Faye was dressed to fit in with the furniture, in a worn pair of jeans, topped off by a flowered shirt.

Kendall's voice became firm. 'You must promise never to do such a thing again. I can't bear to think that you're still legally his wife.'

'Not for much longer.'