Second Chance For Love. SUSANNE MCCARTHY

       CHAPTER ONE

      ‘MANIAC!’ The driver of the delivery-van almost had to stand on his brakes, swerving sharply to avoid a head-on collision as the white Porsche took the bend too wide, veering over towards the oncoming traffic. ‘Look where you’re damned well going,’ he advised fiercely, though the woman at the wheel would not have heard him.

      In fact, Josey had barely even been aware of the near-accident. She had driven all the way from London in a kind of trance. All she had in the car were the few clothes she had thrown into a bag. Everything else she had left behind her, along with nine years of her life.

      She had known for a long time that her marriage was over. But it had come as a bitter blow when Colin had announced, as coolly as you liked, that he wanted a divorce—so that he could marry his secretary. It wasn’t losing him that hurt. No, it was the fact that Paula was pregnant—and that he was delighted.

      He had never wanted her to have children, she reminded herself, the bitterness welling up. A baby wouldn’t fit in with their lifestyle, he had said. He worked hard all day, he had said. He didn’t want to come home to a house full of toys and nappies, and be kept awake all night by a baby crying.

      Maybe she should have left him years ago. But somehow there had never seemed to be quite enough reason to take such a serious step—vague suspicions that he was having affairs, which she had never quite been able to bring herself to confront him with. She was sure Paula wasn’t the first—he probably seduced all his secretaries. She ought to know—she had been his secretary herself once.

      She had been just twenty-one when she had first gone to work for him—and he had been the stuff of every young girl’s dreams: good-looking, urbane and dynamic. Too dynamic for the respectable, well-established firm he was in—he was keen to branch out on his own. He had exercised all his considerable charm to persuade her to take the plunge, and go with him.

      It had been fun, at first, watching the small company mushroom with success. But she had always kept their relationship strictly business—she had already had a very nice boyfriend, to whom she was unofficially engaged. Ironically, it was a row with Derek about the long hours she was working that had precipitated the change. Colin had been so incredibly kind and understanding. He had taken her out to dinner to cheer her up—and somehow she had found herself in his bed.

      Why, out of all his conquests, had he chosen to marry her? Probably to secure her loyalty, at a time when she would have been indispensable to the business, she mused wryly. And he had probably seen her as a social asset, too—someone to organise the vitally important social side of his life, preside over his dinner parties with grace, making intelligent conversation with all his tedious guests.

      And of course she had been beautiful then. She hardly recognised herself now in the thin, pallid creature she had become. Her hair was lank and lifeless, the russet glints it had once held dimmed, and her eyes were dull. She was only thirty-one, but she looked nearer forty. Maybe she couldn’t blame him for looking elsewhere.

      It was hard to know when it had all started to go wrong. Maybe it was since she had given up her career. She had been overjoyed when Colin had first suggested that, since the company was prospering so well, she no longer needed to work; at last, she had believed, it was his intention that they should start a family. But she had been in for a bitter disappointment.

      In the beginning she had tried to persuade him. But every time she had brought the subject up he had accused her of nagging, and eventually he had begun to get more and more annoyed. She had hated the rows, so gradually she had ceased to even try to discuss the issue.

      And gradually they had grown further and further apart. She had already grown disillusioned with their shallow lifestyle, with friends who seemed as disposable as last year’s fashions. If they could even have had a proper house with a garden to tend, and maybe room for a dog, she might have been a little happier. But their ultra-smart City apartment had begun to seem like a prison: she had been bored, with nothing to do but shop and go the hairdressers—and that hollow, aching longing for a baby had never gone away.

      With a hand that shook slightly she reached out to the dashboard, and found the half-empty pack of cigarettes. That was something else, she mused bitterly as she fumbled for her lighter. She had only begun smoking a couple of years ago, to calm her nerves. She had tried countless times to give them up—it was a habit she hated—but she couldn’t do without them.

      Colin had caught her by surprise, coming home in the middle of the afternoon