from the moment Carolyn handed over her newborn daughter and she nestled contentedly in her arms, Maddie was enchanted. When the baby’s pudgy fingers closed fiercely round one of hers, Maddie’s heart had squeezed as tight as the tiny girl’s grip. When those unblinking blue eyes looked up at her with total trust, everything inside Maddie just melted.
‘Oh, God,’ she groaned. ‘I never thought this would happen to me, Carolyn, but I think I want one of these for my very own.’
Carolyn laughed softly from where she was propped up against a mountain of pillows in her hospital bed, looking far too lovely, Maddie thought, for a woman who had given birth less than twenty-four hours before. Even the dark smudges under her eyes did nothing to detract from her blonde-haired blue-eyed beauty.
‘There’s nothing to stop you from having a baby, Maddie,’ she said. ‘All you have to do is marry Spencer, and Bob’s your uncle.’
‘Marry Spencer? Good Lord, I wouldn’t wish that on a dog.’
Carolyn gave her a perplexed look. ‘But... but only last month you told me you were crazy about him!’
Maddie grimaced. ‘Crazy being the operative word. The man’s an insufferable snob. Do you know he started criticising my taste in clothes? He actually said I looked cheap. You don’t think Auntie Maddie looks cheap, do you darling?’ she crooned at the baby, who seemed entranced by the huge silver hoops that were swinging from Maddie’s lobes.
Carolyn decided this was one of those moments when silence was golden. She, personally, would never describe Maddie as cheap-looking. Way out, perhaps. Or off-beat. Definitely Bohemian. Maddie was of ah artistic nature. One expected artistes to be different, didn’t one?
Carolyn could see, however, that if a man did not really know and love Maddie for the warm, generous and genuine person she was underneath her outwardly outrageous facade, he might mistakenly think her cheap.
Of course, it would help if she dressed differently. Her clothes were always outlandish and her jewellery garish, to say the least. Carolyn wished Maddie would wear a little less makeup and a lot more underwear....
Carolyn’s rueful gaze drifted over the outfit her friend was sporting that morning. Skin-tight black leather pants with a matching black leather vest held together with a single wooden button. Every time Maddie moved—or even breathed in—it looked like the precarious closure would pop right open to display her obviously braless state.
‘I don’t have to get married to have one of these little darlings,’ Maddie resumed, glancing up at Carolyn with a minx-like gleam in her flashing black eyes. ‘All I need is a suitable sperm donor. He’d have it all, of course. Brains. Beauty. Breeding. I have no intention of introducing an inferior specimen into this poor pathetic world. Someone like this splendid example of human perfection in my arms would be fine.’
She sent Carolyn a wicked smile at this juncture. ‘You wouldn’t mind lending me Vaughan for a few nights, would you, sweetie? He seems to be one of those prepotent sires who passes on all his good genes.’
Carolyn laughed.
There’d been a time when she’d worried Vaughan and Maddie were lovers. They’d been very close for many years, having been flatmates during their university days, after which they’d gone into business together—Maddie doing the interior decorating of Vaughan’s architectural projects.
But despite the intimacy of their ongoing relationship and their relaxed camaraderie, they claimed they had never been physically intimate.
And Carolyn believed them.
Maddie’s flamboyant sensuality might have worried a less secure wife, considering the amount of time they spent together. But Carolyn felt supremely confident in her husband’s love, as confident as she was of Maddie’s friendship.
‘You find your own sperm donor, thank you very much,’ Carolyn advised with mock tartness. ‘And I think I’ll have my baby back before your craziness goes off on another tangent and you become a baby stealer.’
‘You think I’m joking, don’t you?’ Maddie smiled as she handed back the tiny bundle. ‘About having a baby, I mean, not about wanting to borrow your Vaughan. Much as your hubbie’s a gorgeous hunk of male flesh, he’s not really my type. Never was.’
‘And what is your type, Maddie? Spencer?’
‘I suppose so,’ she agreed happily. ‘Lord knows I must be a masochist, but I always seem to be attracted to the sort of supercilious stuck-up silver-spoon who wouldn’t normally be seen dead with someone like me.’
‘And why’s that, do you think?’ Carolyn asked thoughtfully. ‘I mean ... I would have thought you’d find such men stifling.’
Maddie shrugged. ‘I do, in the end. Especially when they start wanting to change me—or hide me away. That’s the kiss of death as far as I’m concerned. Needless to say, dear old Spence got his walking papers the night he decided I would have to change my clothes before he could possibly take me out in public. He rang me every hour of every day for a while, but I simply clicked on my answering machines, both at home and at the office, and in the end, he gave up. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.’
Carolyn shook her head, sighing. ‘You have a mean streak in you, Maddie. Still, I can’t admit to feeling much pity for Spencer. He’s a male chauvinist pig, if ever there was one.’
‘Then why suggest I marry him, for pity’s sake?’ Maddie pointed out frustratedly.
‘I was only teasing. I knew darned well you wouldn’t. You’re never going to get married, are you?’ Carolyn said, a tender exasperation in her voice.
‘No.’
‘Is it because of what happened to your mother?’
‘You mean do I have some deep-seated Freudian aversion to marriage and commitment because Mama was loved and left by a married man, leaving poor little ol’ me behind?’
‘Something like that.’
Maddie laughed, tossing her long black curls from her shoulders. She really was a very striking woman, Carolyn thought. And far more complex than anyone realised. In a way, she felt some pity for the pompous Spencer. And any other man Maddie sank her teeth into.
‘What a perfectly interesting thought!’ Maddie exclaimed, her smile dazzling white behind her lushly scarlet lips. ‘It never occurred to me, but you could be right, I suppose. I never try to psychoanalyse myself. I am what I am, and to hell with anyone who doesn’t approve of me, which includes Spencer. The last thing I need in my life is some hypocrite of a man who wants to make me over into what he thinks is suitable to his narrow-minded stuffy life-style.’
‘Good Lord, Maddie! I didn’t realise you hated men so much!’
Maddie blinked, startled by her friend’s remark. ‘But I don’t!’ she denied. ‘I simply adore men!’
‘Do you, Maddie? Do you really?’
‘Of course I do,’ she insisted, though not meeting Carolyn’s eyes as she looped a stray curl behind her left ear. ‘Don’t be silly. I can’t stand not having a man in my life.’
‘Then why don’t
