‘Intriguing,’ Lois ruminated. ‘But,’ she added after a moment, ‘I don’t know it. I only ever met him that one time. Uh!’ she exclaimed. ‘You know that I know a man who may know it, right?’
‘Marcus and Noah Peverelle are great friends,’ Elexa volunteered.
‘You sound as if you know them both very well,’ Lois opined.
‘I don’t,’ Elexa had to confess. ‘Is there a chance you could ask Marcus without telling him why you need Noah’s number?’
‘If they’re such good friends, Marcus Dean isn’t going to tell me without wanting to know why,’ Lois commented. ‘Hang on, though. Ginny Dean owes me a favour! I’ll ring Marcus’s wife and get back to you.’
Elexa put down her phone after her call, wondering what she had done. She had involved Lois in something which Elexa wasn’t certain she was going to take any further anyway.
Though, in thinking about it more deeply, more logically, instead of panicking that family pressures had become too intense past bearing, she suddenly realised that, while her career was all-important, yes, there was every probability that she would at some stage rather like to have a child.
It shook Elexa a little that she had child-bearing instincts. It was something she had never considered before. But, in delving more deeply, she recalled how, when Joanna had given her the baby to hold one time, she had been more than happy to nurse the sweet, sleeping infant in her arms.
For a few minutes Elexa lived with the discovery that she was no different from most other women—and that she did have the same maternal instincts. Then she gave herself a mental shaking—that still didn’t mean that she wanted a husband. She most definitely did not. In her view they were vastly overrated.
Noah Peverelle wouldn’t be your normal run-of-the-mill husband, though. For a start it sounded, with his talk of according to his work schedule he’d land round about three years next Palm Sunday, as if he wouldn’t be around much anyway. Not that she had any intention of living with the man. And in any case, in three years’ time she would be married and divorced from him. Not that she wanted to marry the man in the first place, but…
Elexa abruptly cut off her thoughts mid-stream. Good grief, woman, don’t start making plans. You haven’t so much as got his phone number yet, much less plucked up the courage it will take to suggest what you have to suggest. But—she was still feeling quite desperate, and desperate problems called for desperate solutions.
But what if Noah Peverelle hadn’t been serious anyway? What kind of a fool would that make her look? What…? Elexa was just building up a fine head of steam against Noah Peverelle for daring to make her feel a fool when the phone rang.
She grabbed at it. But it wasn’t Lois; it was her mother. It couldn’t have been an hour ago that they had last spoken! It must be important. It was—to her mother. ‘I forgot to ask. What are you going to wear on Sunday?’
‘Wear?’ Elexa repeated in surprise. ‘Does it matter?’
‘Of course it matters. You’ll want to look your best when Tommy Fielding sees you again. I don’t want you turning up in those old trousers you were wearing when Timothy Stowe popped round the other Sunday.’
Popped round! As Elexa recalled it—and she had been wearing a pair of fairly new trousers at the time—Timothy Stowe had been especially invited to ‘pop’ in to see her father’s stamp collection, and to stay to tea. But Elexa knew from past experience that it would do no good to remind her mother of this. Timothy, Tommy—she’d probably got a Tarquin all lined up ready, should Tommy Fielding fail to thaw her annoying daughter’s stony heart.
‘I’ll make sure to wear something smart,’ Elexa replied finally, feeling too worn down by the constant attempts at coercion to want an argument with her parent.
‘Good,’ her mother replied, and rang off—no doubt, Elexa assumed, to do more scheming in the I’ll-get-my-daughter-to-the-church-if-it’s-the-last-thing-I-do stakes.
A minute later, however, and the phone rang again, and this time it was Lois. ‘I’ve perjured my soul to get this for you,’ Lois began. ‘Have you got a pen handy?’
Elexa took down the number her good friend read out to her, and repeated it back, and then said gratefully, ‘I truly appreciate it, Lois.’
‘What are friends for? Though you’ll have to tell me why you want it as soon as you can. My imagination is running riot, trying to guess what’s going on!’
Elexa said goodbye to her, knowing that not even in her wildest imaginings would Lois ever guess at the truth of what was going on. That was, Elexa mused, beginning to feel hot all over at the thought of what she was contemplating, if she ever found enough nerve to call that number.
She did call it though, a half-hour later when she was heartily fed up with her dithering. For goodness’ sake, the man hadn’t space for emotional entanglements—well, neither had she! With her throat dry, her hands shaking, she picked up the phone and pressed out Noah Peverelle’s number, and consequently didn’t know whether she felt frustrated or relieved when he wasn’t home.
He really was as busy as he’d intimated, she had to conclude when over the next couple of days she tried his number again with the same result. He was never home.
By Sunday morning it had become something of a fixture in her mind that she would keep ringing his number until he did answer. By then she knew his number off by heart and, just before she left her flat to drive to her parents’ home in Berkshire, she stabbed out the digits again.
‘Peverelle,’ said a voice she knew—and Elexa only just managed to hold down a squeak of alarm.
It was him! He! ‘Hello!’ she managed, the whole idea of what she was about all at once seeming not only crazy but totally preposterous. Yet, as she recalled that her mother had again phoned her last night to ask her to be ‘warm’ to Tommy Fielding, Elexa saw that if she could manage to spit the rest of her rehearsed speech out, she might see in front of her time free of pressure—leaving her the space she craved to be left in peace to get on with her career. ‘You don’t know me—’ She pushed herself to go on, but just couldn’t get any further. It was preposterous! It was…
‘Do you have a name?’ Noah Peverelle asked shortly. Elexa made a face—charm school had obviously been wasted on him. But for the moment she preferred to stay anonymous.
‘The thing is,’ she asserted herself to begin briskly, ‘that you would like a s-son, and I need a h-husband tem…’ Temporarily, she would have said, had he given her the chance.
‘Who the hell are you?’ Peverelle demanded curtly.
‘No one you know. We—’
‘Where did you get hold of that sort of erroneous information?’ he challenged sharply. ‘Are you press?’
‘No, I’m not!’ she erupted, unsure if she was glad or sorry that her information was erroneous. Though, hang on—it wasn’t erroneous. She had heard it herself from him with her very own ears. Abruptly then she realised that if he believed her to be from the newspapers he would automatically deny he had said any such thing, wouldn’t he? ‘We have a mutual friend, sort of,’ she hurried on.
‘Who?’ he rapped.
