PENNY JORDAN - Coming Home

THE CAT MIAOWED demandingly and to oblige it Honor went to get some food. Tomorrow she would make a concerted effort to find herself a builder—unless fate was kind enough to send her one.

‘A HERBALIST! I can’t see Gramps … Do you think that’s a good idea?’ Max Crighton asked his wife dubiously. ‘He’s bad enough about conventional medicine and I don’t think—’

‘We don’t have to tell him that she’s a herbalist,’ Maddy said gently. ‘I don’t want to deceive him, but I’m so worried about him, Max. He looks so weak and frail even the children are beginning to notice.’

‘Mmm. I know what you mean,’ Max agreed absently, picking up one of the fresh scones Maddy had just placed on a wire rack to cool and then shaking his fingers as it burned them.

‘Wait until they’re cool,’ Maddy scolded him. ‘You know they’ll give you indigestion if you don’t.’

‘Indigestion.’ Max’s eyes danced with laughter. ‘That’s what marriage does for you. The woman you love stops seeing you as someone who is sexually exciting and thinks of you instead as someone with indigestion.’

‘I wouldn’t say that ,’ Maddy responded with a small smile.

‘No?’ Max questioned, his voice muffled as he took her in his arms and buried his mouth in the warm, soft, creamy, cooking-scented curve of her throat.

‘Nooooo …’ Maddy sighed.

The truth was that it would be hard to find a man who was more sexually attractive than her husband. Max wore his sexuality with very much the same panache and air of self-mockery with which he wore his barrister’s robes, a kind of dangerously sexy tongue-in-cheek, wry amusement at the reaction he was causing, coupled with a subtle but oh so sexy unspoken invitation to share in his amusement at it.

‘Why is that lady looking at my daddy?’ Emma had once asked Maddy as Max had met them both on their way home from school. He had stopped his car and got out, causing all the other mothers to gawp at him with varying degrees of bemused appreciation.

‘The lady’ in question had been almost as stunningly attractive as Max was himself, but for all the notice he had taken of her she might as well have been the same age as his aunt Ruth.

To the envy of Maddy’s friends, Max was a totally devoted husband and father.

It hadn’t always been that way. The Max who had married her had been a dangerous predatory man who had treated the emotions of those closest to him with a callousness it was hard to imagine now.

If, by some horrible blow of fate, the changes within him brought about by his frighteningly close brush with death in Jamaica should ever be reversed and he should revert to the man she had first met, Maddy knew that she could not and would not go back to being the girl she had been, the girl who had such low self-esteem that she had quietly and humbly allowed Max to emotionally abuse her.

Those days were gone and so was that Maddy. Now she and Max were equal partners in their marriage. Max didn’t just love her; he respected her, as well.

‘Where are one, two and three?’ he murmured against her throat as he nibbled hungrily, referring to their three children.

‘At your mother’s,’ Maddy told him huskily.

‘Mmm … let’s go upstairs.’

‘What’s wrong with down here?’ Maddy teased him daringly, giving him a flirtatious look. ‘Ben never comes in here and there’s no one else in the house.’

‘Here?’

Max raised his eyebrows, but Maddy could tell that her suggestion had excited him.

‘You look so wonderfully sexy in your court clothes,’ she whispered in a small breathy voice.

Max started to laugh but immediately joined in her game, reaching out towards the tray of scones and saying sternly, ‘So what is this? I see that one scone is missing and you, wench, are the only one who could have taken it. Such a theft demands a very heavy sentence.’

‘No … no …’ Maddy cried, trying to tug her hand out of Max’s grasp, but he refused to let her go, skilfully backing her against the table.

‘A very heavy punishment,’ he repeated huskily. ‘Unless, mayhap, you have not eaten the stolen sweetmeat but secreted it about your person, in your pocket, perchance,’ he demanded. ‘Or …’

As his hands lifted towards her breasts, Maddy exploded into laughter. ‘Oh, Max.’ But as she saw the look in her husband’s eye, her laughter died.

‘Oh, Max, what?’ he challenged as he moved his body over hers and slid his free hand inside the blouse he had just unfastened. His palm felt heavy and warm against her breast, her nipple hardening immediately.

‘We can’t,’ Maddy breathed. ‘Not here …’

‘No?’ Max challenged her, letting go of her wrist to push her blouse off her shoulder and un-clip the front fastening of her bra before lifting her onto the table.

An hour later, a flushed and floury Maddy just managed to finish fastening her blouse before her three children and her mother-in-law came into the kitchen.

‘Jenny.’ Maddy beamed as she responded to the older woman’s affectionate hug. ‘Thanks for having them. Have you been good for Grandma?’ she asked her two elder children whilst Max expertly scooped their youngest out of Jenny’s arms.

‘Your skirt is all floury,’ Leo pointed out to his mother.

‘Yes, and so is your blouse,’ Emma chirped.

Blushing, Maddy turned away.

‘Mummy’s been very busy,’ Max told them tongue-in-cheek.

As Maddy turned towards him to give him a wifely look, Jenny remarked in amusement, ‘There’s flour all over the back of your skirt, as well, Maddy … and Max’s suit—’

‘Caught in the act,’ Max admitted cheerfully. ‘Well, almost …’

‘Max!’

Both Jenny and Maddy protested at the same time.

‘What does Daddy mean?’ Emma demanded, tugging insistently at Maddy’s skirt.

‘Uh-huh, bath time for you, baby,’ Max announced quickly, walking towards the kitchen door.

‘Men!’ Maddy expostulated to her mother-in-law after he had escaped.

‘Hmm. Talking of which, how’s Ben?’ Jenny asked her.

‘Not really any better,’ Maddy admitted. ‘He just doesn’t seem to … I’ve arranged for this herbalist I’ve heard about to come and see him. The problem is that she’s so busy it’s going to be a few weeks before she can come.’

‘A herbalist … ?’

‘Herbal medicines are proven to work,’ Maddy began defensively, but Jenny shook her head.

‘I wasn’t criticising, my dear. I think it’s an excellent idea.’

‘Do you? Good. In fact, I’ve been wondering if we mightn’t use it somehow at The Houses.’

‘The Houses’ were the units of accommodation originally sponsored and started by Ben Crighton’s sister Ruth to provide secure homes for single mothers and their babies. They had since been extended to provide not just accommodation and rooms where young fathers could visit their children, but also to give access to educational opportunities to help equip the young mothers to earn their own living.

‘What are you planning to do?’ Jenny asked Maddy in some amusement. ‘Train all our teenage mums as potential herbalists?’

Maddy laughed. ‘No, of course not. No, what I was thinking was that we could perhaps utilise the kitchen garden here and combine a programme on gardening with nutritional awareness and simple, basic home remedies of the type our grandmothers would have used. It would be another step towards making our mums independent and add to their sense of self-worth.’

‘Well, it’s certainly worth thinking about,’ Jenny agreed.

After her late marriage to the man she had loved and believed lost to her, the father of her illegitimate daughter, Ruth had handed over day-to-day control of the charity she had founded to Jenny and Maddy, thus allowing her to split her time between her home in Haslewich and her family in America.