Simply Forever Read online

  SIMPLY FOREVER

  Sally Heywood

  It was as if she'd never gone away

  When Flame had discovered Marlow Hudson's betrayal only a few weeks after their marriage, she'd fled to start a new life on her own. She'd left behind what she thought powerful, arrogant Marlow really wanted--her inheritance.

  Now her mother's ill health had forced Flame to return to Spain.

  For her mother's sake, Marlow insisted that their marriage continue--with everything that it entailed. Flame wanted to rebuild the marriage, but could Marlow really be trusted?

  CHAPTER ONE

  Flame swung round when she heard the door of her office open. It was Johnny, boss of the exhibition consultants she was working for. He took one look at her face and was across the room at once, concern evident in the searching look he gave her.

  'Sweetie, what is it?' he exclaimed.

  She side-stepped the hand he put out, crumpling the airmail letter by her side as she did so, and giving a little shake of her head at the same time. 'Just a letter from my sister,' she muttered.

  'Bad news?'

  She nodded reluctantly. 'I guess so.' And when Johnny went on looking down at her she was forced to add, 'It's Mother. She's been ill for several weeks, but it looks as if she's taken a turn for the worse.' She raised green eyes, her face pale in its frame of red-gold hair. 'I'm not sure how serious it is. Samantha's the last person to panic, but reading between the lines she seems to want me to go home.'

  'Home?'

  'Back to Spain, I mean.'

  Johnny pulled a face. 'I've never heard you call it that before.'

  Flame turned away, her hands clenching involuntarily. 'I shan't go unless I really have to.' She gazed unseeingly out of the office window at the busy London street below. Then she spun round to face him. 'Oh, Johnny, I know Samantha wouldn't suggest I went back unless she was really worried. But what shall I do? The last thing I want is to go back there, of all places!'

  'If it's as serious as you imagine, surely she would have taken the trouble to ring you?' he suggested.

  'Maybe she wanted to warn me gently?' Flame lifted her shoulders in a helpless shrug.

  'You know your sister better than I do.' He took her by the arm before she could resist. 'Look, sweetie, stop worrying. There's the phone in front of you. Ring her now, set your mind at rest. It's probably nothing at all.'

  She felt his fingers slide down her arm as she moved away. 'You're sweet, Johnny,' she said to mitigate her obvious reluctance to feel his touch. 'But I thought maybe I'd ring this evening when I get home --'

  'Nonsense,' he corrected. 'I'm not sweet, you're the one who's sweet. I'm merely selfish. You'll be no use to me today if your mind's on other things. Now here's the code book.' He skidded it across the desk. 'Stop brooding and find out the facts.' He gave her a grey-eyed glance. 'I hope it's nothing serious, not only for the obvious reasons, but because --' he pulled a face '—put simply, I don't want to let you go.'

  Despite his obvious attempt to make light of it there was a hint of some deeper emotion behind his words, and Flame knew instinctively that he was making more than just a reference to the workload they had on at present. She bit her lip, and he saved her from having to say anything by going purposefully through into his office adjoining her own.

  There was a strange tension in her as she dialled the familiar number of the Villa Santa Margarita. She had always arranged with Samantha or her mother beforehand whenever she was going to give them a call, just to be on the safe side. Now she was nervous as she wondered who would pick up the phone at the other end. She steeled herself for that certain voice, but to her relief it was Samantha herself who answered.

  'Darling,' began her sister at once, 'I'm so glad you rang! I was going to give you a bell myself tonight in case my letter hadn't got through.'

  'It arrived this morning,' Flame told her. 'How is she?' she asked without preamble.

  'Oh, Flame --' Samantha broke off, then her voice came again, calm with an effort. 'Listen, I won't beat about the bush. She wants to see you. She's fretting about not having seen you for so long and of course she's being terribly brave about it all and telling us not to worry. I really think you should drop everything and get over as soon as you can.' She added, 'You know I wouldn't be asking you to come haring back here if we weren't so desperately worried. Please say you'll try to make it --!'

  'I'll come as soon as I can,' Flame broke in, her hands like ice.

  'Sooner would be best --' Samantha's voice lifted half humorously, then choked to a stop. She seemed to make an effort to pull herself together and told Flame about the clinical tests they were waiting for. 'I don't want to scare you, Flame, that's why I wrote first.'

  'I understand that, Sammy.' Unconsciously Flame used her elder sister's pet name, then, with a few words of reassurance that she knew could do little to help, she said she would start ringing round at once to try to book a flight. 'I'll call you tonight to let you know what time I'm arriving,' she told her sister.

  One big question shrieked to be asked, but at the last minute her courage failed her. After enquiring about the children she replaced the receiver, then leaned against her desk for a long moment afterwards, appalled at her own cowardice.

  Marlow. The name hammered in her head. They would have to meet. There was no escape now she was going back. No escape at all. But surely he wouldn't be so tactless as to come and meet her at the airport? Purely Samantha would arrange things differently, for by this time she must know how things still stood between them...

  'All right?' Johnny was standing in the doorway of his office, a tentative smile on his face, breaking into her train of thought. When he saw her expression his smile faded at once, though. 'Not all right, I can see that.'

  Flame shook her head, her eyes suddenly bright. 'I'm frightened, Johnny. Samantha sounded so unlike her usual bubbly self. She says Mother's had to have some tests at the clinic... It sounds serious, doesn't it?' It was difficult to imagine her pretty and vivacious mother as an invalid. Though she was in her early fifties now, Flame had always taken her mother's continued good health for granted. Her father had been the sickly one, moving to the warmer climate of southern Spain many years ago because of the recurring chest problem to which he had eventually succumbed some ten years ago.

  'So you'll be going out there after all?' Johnny's eyes were already flicking to the data-day calendar on the wall beside her desk.

  'I'm sorry. I know it's going to leave you in the lurch at the worst possible time --'

  'That's not what worries me.' His grey eyes darkened for a moment, then he gave an off-beat smile. 'It can't be helped. Better get on to the agency and find me a temp, preferably one who can spell, remain civil in a crisis and make a decent cup of coffee. Do it First, then ring Transflight and ask for Tim.'

  Flame jerked up her head.

  'Not for me, idiot, for you,' he read her expression aright. 'If anybody can get you a flight at short notice, Tim can. Mention my name.'

  Flame gazed at him without moving.

  'Well, what are you waiting for?'

  She shook herself. 'Your efficiency always leaves me speechless!' she tried to joke, but even as she did so she knew that Johnny had observed her hesitation and put two and two together.

  He gave her a level glance. 'So you'll be meeting him, I take it?'

  'I can hardly avoid it.' She gave a jerky laugh. 'It doesn't matter. It's not the end of the world... it just feels like it!' She was still trying to make light of the increasing tension she was feeling at what lay ahead, but Johnny wasn't fooled.

  'Tell him you've met a wildly successful guy in London who's crazy about you ---'

  His voice unexpectedly thickened and he ran a han
d rapidly through his spiky brown hair. 'Hell, I don't mean to come on all heavy, especially at a time like this. But I can't have you jetting back to him without a word about how I feel about you. You know I like to sort of hang loose...' He let his words tail off, gave her a lop-sided smile and went on hastily, 'You may have felt you're just one of the many at the moment, but it can't have escaped your notice that I think you're something pretty special. Flame?'

  He moved closer, cupping her chin in his hand to tilt her face to his. This time she didn't flinch away, but her eyes warned him that the barricade was still up.

  'You must have guessed by now how I feel,' he told her. 'And I think you must have guessed I'd have moved in on you long ago if I hadn't thought you'd slap me down pretty smartly if I did. I guess I'm hoping by the time your divorce comes through in six months' time you'll be as hooked on me as I already am on you.'

  'Johnny,' Flame returned his smile as lightly as she could, breaking the intimacy of physical contact, 'I'm fond of you, and I really admire the way you've built this agency up. It's been great working for you. But you know, after what I went through with—with Marlow,' she faltered over the name even now, 'getting into any sort of relationship again is something I fight shy of.'

  'I'm not pressuring, sweetie. But if things get tough out there, you know who you can run to.' Johnny ran a hand through his hair again, obviously embarrassed at losing his cool 'love 'em and leave 'em' pose for a moment, then he was back in familiar mode again. 'As I said, what are you standing about for? Go for it!' He swung back into his office as his own phone started to ring.

  It was the beginning of another hectic day. But in between work Flame managed to fix a flight through Johnny's friend Tim, and at Johnny's insistence she rang Samantha again to let her know she would be arriving at five-fifteen in the morning. This time she forced herself to be sensible.

  'I'll take a taxi from Malaga,' she said. 'I don't need anybody to pick me up from the airport.' She didn't have to elaborate on the 'anybody'.

  'You'll have to face him some time, Flame,' warned Samantha. 'He's still part of the family.'

  'Only for another six months.'

  'Legally, yes, but in other ways for much longer than that...' Samantha sounded thoughtful. 'What I want to say, love, is he's still living at the villa, and for Mother's sake you're going to have to be civil to each other. You know how she feels about you both.'

  'I'll be civil, don't worry. Nothing that rat can ever say or do will ever make me lose control again.' Flame spoke fiercely, convinced that at last she was over him. 'I'll be the perfect lady. Just don't let him be the one to meet me at the airport. I can face him, but not at five in the morning. Have a heart!'

  'Emilio has already offered to pick you up, actually.'

  'Still together?' Flame fell back on the standard joke.

  Samantha chuckled despite the strain she was under. 'We've behaved stupidly in the past, but luckily we both admit it.'

  'I always say crazy fools should stick together,' Flame, quipped. As she replaced the receiver and began to throw a few clothes into a bag she felt a twinge of remorse at the obvious happiness in Samantha's voice. She and Marlow had blown their own chance of marital happiness eighteen months ago, and the chance of Marlow admitting the blame was zero.

  Lucky Samantha! Things had turned out differently for her and her Spanish husband. They had had a yoyo relationship at first, her sister's exuberant nature clashing openly and often with the volatile Latin temperament of her husband, and during the period before Flame's own marriage Samantha and Emilio were actually trying to live apart. But their problems had all blown over by the time Flame and Marlow had come to walk down the aisle. Reunited with her obviously adoring husband, Samantha had looked almost as radiant as the bride.

  Deep down Flame knew the marriage was a good one, but one thing she couldn't forget, and that was how worried her mother had been throughout those years, as if she felt the break-up was a stigma on the whole family.

  Flame had later come to see this attitude as one of the reasons her mother was so keen for her to marry, as if success in that direction for her younger daughter could conceal what she seemed to see as the failure of the elder one. But it wasn't entirely fair to say her mother had pushed her into marriage, for on top of that, of course, was the question of the land.

  And on top of all that, if it wasn't enough, was the question of what now seemed to Flame her own senseless infatuation with Marlow Hudson himself. She had needed no encouragement to plunge headlong into marriage with him, she thought ruefully. She had been only too eager.

  She went round the flat, checking that everything that should be switched off before she left was off. Bitter thoughts were running through her mind, and later, as the taxi sped towards the inevitable meeting with Marlow, she felt helpless to stop the flood of memories surging back. Until now she had ruthlessly repressed them, but with a meeting imminent she couldn't hold them back any longer. She remembered how she had left Spain, vowing never to return as long as Marlow Hudson remained uncrowned king of Santa Margarita. Now she was being forced to go back on that vow.

  The whole issue of their marriage had been a recipe for disaster from the very beginning. Take one inexperienced nineteen-year-old, she thought wryly, and one power-hungry male, add in a rather large and undeveloped piece of real estate waiting for someone to exploit it and finally stir in one very impractical lady owner looking for a man to shoulder the burden.

  She remembered the first time she had an inkling anything was afoot. 'All this will be yours one day, darlings,' her mother had told her and Samantha as they picnicked on the cliff top with the sweet-smelling pines sighing softly behind them and the broad, bright blue sweep of the sea caressing the tumbling cliffs. 'The trouble is I can't bear the thought of handing down nothing but a scrubby bit of undeveloped coastline to you both. Your dear father had such wonderful plans for it—gardens of pleasure and delight, not rocks and wilderness.'

  'We like it,' Samantha had murmured, too intent on rubbing suntan oil into one of her toddlers' already golden limbs to pay much attention. Flame had nodded in agreement.

  'But wouldn't it be wonderful if we could find someone to take charge of it for us and turn it into something really special?' Sybilla had argued, her eyes sparkling. 'What we want,' she went on to her unheeding daughters, 'is someone to take over all the boring facts and figures and transform the place into the paradise we used to dream about.'

  The two girls, Flame herself little more than a year out of school, and Samantha in the first years of her then shaky marriage and more absorbed by that and her .babies than anything else, agreed with what was being said. But neither of them could offer any practical way to turn the dream into reality.

  It was then that Sybilla Montrose had drawn their attention to the man who had been systematically buying up the rest of the coastline around them. 'It would be very neat if he could finish off his game of Monopoly with the Cabo de Santa Margarita,' their mother had mused aloud, 'not that I could ever dream of selling, of course.'

  'Mother, you wouldn't sell Santa Margarita?' exclaimed Flame.

  'Never,' agreed Sybilla Montrose emphatically, 'but there may be other ways of getting what we want, my darling.'

  There had been a gleam in her mother's eye that was nothing if not dynastic. It should have warned them that something was afoot. Too late Flame saw it all. By that time their mysterious saviour had a name and the legendary Marlow Hudson had become a frequent visitor at the villa.

  Slowly but surely, she realised now, she had been set up: innocently by her mother, who only saw an excellent marriage to one of the most sought-after bachelors on the coast and the realisation of a dream as a result of her matchmaking—but, thought Flame, less innocently by Marlow Hudson himself. He, she was now convinced, had regarded the enviably sited Villa Santa Margarita with its extensive cliff-top gardens as a fitting dowry to accompany the child bride he was being offered. Once the wheels were se
t in motion things had moved with astonishing speed. They met and were married within six weeks.

  Truly, thought Flame, she had been like a lamb led to the slaughter. It was madness to imagine a child of nineteen resisting the deliberate and practised charm of a man like Marlow. Ten years older than herself, he had led a cosmopolitan life that had given him a maturity beyond even that advantage. She had been dazzled, as he had meant her to be. And it sometimes seemed in those whirlwind days of courtship that he could actually read her mind, so closely did he seem to mould himself to her heroic image of him. She had been a puppet in his hands. Within days of their meeting he seemed to know everything about her, how best to exploit her innocent trust, how best to beguile her with the promise of unimagined heaven. She had grown desperate for him in ways her innocent heart had been unable to spell out. And she began to live every moment for the sight and sound of him.

  She pulled herself up sharply, gathering her things angrily together in the back of the taxi. Even now, after all the pain that had followed shortly on the pleasure, she could become a helpless being of desire just thinking about him. Of course it was worse now than in those early days, for now she had the memory of the touch and taste and smell of him to taunt her imagination.

  For a moment she was engulfed in a memory of his raw masculinity, something enhanced by the air of mystery surrounding him. It was a strange thing, but it wasn't until after she had left that she realised she knew so very little about him. She had been too much in love to care about his past. Now that she saw him clearly she realised he'd been an adventurer all along.

  Cutting off the memory with a silent reproof, she alighted briskly from the taxi, paid the man off, then made her way into the station for the Gatwick connection.

  As the distance between them narrowed, the ticking minutes passing her remorselessly from one stage of the journey to the next, she felt she was approaching a zone of infinite danger. But just to know how vulnerable she still was made her more sure than ever that she could never be so stupid as to yield to Marlow again.