think Louise is getting ready to leave,’ Jenny warned her daughter-in-law now, disturbing Madeleine from her reverie.
As she glanced towards the newly married couple, Maddy’s heart suddenly missed a beat. They seemed so happy, so much in love, Gareth looking tenderly down into Louise’s upturned face and then bending to kiss her. As they reluctantly broke apart, Maddy could quite plainly see the look of shimmering joy illuminating Louise’s face. It wasn’t that she begrudged Louise her happiness—how could she? It was just … it was just … Swallowing hard, Maddy looked the other way.
Obligingly Madeleine got up and went to separate her own two children from the happy mass playing in the adjacent anteroom.
Leo, who had been a page boy, had conducted himself with aplomb, and Emma had swiftly recovered from the morning’s bout of nausea, but they were tiring now as Madeleine’s experienced maternal eye could tell.
As Bobbie, Ruth’s granddaughter, came to find her own daughter, she grimaced at Madeleine and confided, ‘I’m not looking forward to a transatlantic flight on top of this….’
‘But it will be worth it once you’re with your family,’ Madeleine reminded her.
‘Oh, heavens, yes,’ Bobbie agreed fervently.
As Luke came to join her and picked up their small daughter, cradling her tired body in his arms, Bobbie couldn’t help reflecting on the differences between Luke and Max.
Her Luke was a tender, loving father and an equally loving husband, while Max … Max might pretend in front of others—especially his grandfather—to be a caring human being, but Bobbie could see through that pretence.
Poor Maddy.
Poor Maddy. She had heard herself so described so often that sometimes she thought she ought to have been christened thus, Maddy reflected several hours later, unwillingly recalling hearing Bobbie whisper the two words under her breath as she had turned to smile at Luke.
Leo and Emma were safely tucked up in bed, their stories read and sleep not very far away.
Ben had gone to bed protesting that Maddy was fussing unnecessarily and that there was nothing wrong with him, even though it was perfectly obvious that he was in pain. Tiredly Maddy headed for her own bedroom. Supposedly it was the room she shared with Max on his rare visits home, but in reality … Max might deign to sleep in the large king-size bed alongside her, but for all the intimacy, the love, the natural closeness one might expect to be shared between a married couple, they might just as well have been sleeping in separate beds and at opposite ends of the large house.
On this occasion, though, Max was not intending to stay the night and had already left for London. Maddy had long since ceased to struggle with the pretence that their marriage was either happy or ‘normal,’ just as she had ceased to question the fact that Max was returning to London ostensibly to ‘work.’
And the worst thing about the whole horrid situation was not that Max cared so little for her, but that she cared so much. Too much. What had happened to the dreams she had once had, the bright shining hopes, the belief that Max loved her?
Her maternal ears, forever tuned, picked up the sound of a soft cry from Emma’s room. Tiredly she slid out of bed. Emma was going through a phase of having bad dreams.
Having parked his Bentley at the rear of the smart mews house he had bought with the wedding cheque given to them by Maddy’s grandparents, Max unlocked the front door and headed for the bedroom, dropping his overnight bag on the floor and stretching out full length on the bed as he reached for the telephone and confidently punched in a set of numbers.
The woman’s voice on the other end of the line sounded sleepy and soft.
‘Guess who?’ Max asked her, tongue in cheek.
There was a brief silence before she responded.
‘Oh, Max … But I thought! You said you were going to a family wedding and that you’d be staying for the weekend….’
‘So, I changed my mind,’ Max told her, laughing. ‘What would you like for breakfast?’
‘Breakfast … Oh, Max … I don’t … I can’t …’
She sounded more alert now, and Max could picture her sitting up in bed in her Belgravia house, her tawny hair down round her shoulders, her skin honey gold from her recent holiday in Mauritius. He had flown out to join her there for five days.
‘Some client conference,’ the solicitor who had originally instructed him had commented enviously when he had handed Max Justine’s fax.
‘When you’re playing for millions, the cost of flying your barrister out for an urgent conference is pretty small beer,’ Max told him carelessly.
Justine was the wife of a millionaire, soon-to-be billionaire corporate raider. The first thing she had done when she had discovered that he was having an affair with one of her ‘friends’ was to instruct her solicitor that she wanted him to hire Max as her barrister, the second was to arm herself with as much evidence as she could of her husband’s business affairs, including his complex and often adventurously artistic interpretation of the tax laws.
Max had decided appreciatively that she had enough on him to make it a piece of cake for them to get her the kind of divorce settlement that would make her virtually as comfortably wealthy as his ex as she had been as his wife, and to get him the kind of publicity that would ensure that he maintained his position as the country’s foremost divorce barrister.
‘Divorce isn’t really the kind of thing we like to specialize in here in chambers,’ the most senior member, a QC and one of the country’s foremost tax law specialists, had advised Max stiffly when he had originally joined them. ‘It’s not really quite us, if you know what I mean.’
Max had known exactly what he meant, but he had also been acutely aware of the fact that it was only his father-in-law’s name that had got him a place in the chambers at all. He also knew that the only reputation he had then to gain him the clients who would bring him the kind of high profile and even higher income he craved so desperately was one of being unwanted and rejected by his previous ‘set,’ where he had been allowed to work only as a tenant and on the cases that no one else wanted to deal with.
His new chambers attracted a clientele who wanted and expected only the best barristers whose names and reputations they already knew, and so Max had seen a niche for himself in the one field where the chambers didn’t already have a specialist—matrimonial law.
That had been several years ago, and now Max’s reputation had grown and his name on a case was likely to strike dread in a wealthy husband about to enter the divorce arena.
The extremely high fees Max charged for his services weren’t the only benefit he earned from his work. Max had quickly and cynically discovered that newly divorced and about-to-be-divorced women very often had an appetite for sex and the male attention that went with it, which ensured him a constant turnover of willing bed mates.
One of the main advantages of these relationships, from Max’s point of view, was that they were always relatively brief. While his female clients
