The Hidden Years
Penny Jordan
MILLS & BOON
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Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
JUDGED by the laws of logic, the accident should never have happened at all.
A quiet—or at least quiet by London’s frenetic standards—side-street; a clear, bright spring morning; a taxi driver who prided himself on his accident-free record; a slender, elegant woman who looked and moved like someone ten years younger than she actually was; none of the parts that went to make up the whole was in any way logically vulnerable, and yet, as though fate had decreed what must happen and was determined that it would happen, even though the woman crossed the road with ease and safety, even though the taxi driver had seen her and logged the fact that she had crossed the road ahead of him, even though the pavement and road were free of debris and frost, for some reason, as she stepped on to the pavement, the woman’s heel caught on the kerb, throwing her off balance so that she turned and fell, not on to the relative safety of the pavement, but into the road and into the path of the taxi, whose driver was safely and law-abidingly not driving along its crown in the sometimes dangerous and arrogant manner of taxi drivers the world over, but well into his correct side of the street.
He saw the woman fall, and braked instinctively, but it was too late. The sickening sensation of soft, vulnerable human flesh hitting his cab was a sound he would carry with him the rest of his life. His passenger, a pin-stripe-suited businessman in his early fifties, was jolted out of his seat by the impact. Already people were emerging from the well-kept, expensive houses that lined the street.
Someone must have rung for an ambulance because he could hear its muted siren wailing mournfully like a dirge… He could hardly bear to look at the woman, he was so sure that she must be dead, and so he stood sickly to one side as the ambulance arrived and the professionals took over.
‘She’s alive…just,’ he heard someone say, and in his mind’s eye he pictured the people somewhere who were still at this moment oblivious to the tragedy about to darken their lives.
Somewhere this woman would have family, friends, dependants—she had had that look about her, the confident, calm look of a woman in control of her life and those lives that revolved around her own. Somewhere those people still went about their daily business, unaware and secure.
Her mother, injured in a road accident and now lying close to death in a hospital bed—it seemed impossible, Sage thought numbly; her mother was invulnerable, omnipresent, indestructible, or so she had always seemed.
Vague, disconnected, unreal thoughts ricocheted through her brain: memories, fears, sensations. The Porsche, which had been a celebratory thirtieth birthday present to herself, cut through the heavy traffic, her physical ability to control and manoeuvre the expensive piece of machinery oddly unaffected by her mental turmoil.
There was a sensation in the pit of her stomach which she remembered from her childhood and adolescence: an uncomfortable mixture of apprehension, pain and anger. How dared her mother do this to her? How dared she intrude on the life she had built for herself? How dared she reach out, as she had reached out so very many times in the past, to cast her influence, her presence over her own independence?
She wasn’t a child any more, she was mature, an adult, so why now was she swamped with those old and oh, so familiar feelings of resentment and guilt, of pain and anger and, most betraying of all, of fear?
The hospital wasn’t far away, which was presumably why they had contacted her and not Faye. And then she remembered that she was her mother’s closest blood relative…the next of kin. A tiny tremor of pure acid-sharp horror chilled her skin. Her mother, dying… She had told herself for so long that she felt nothing for the woman who had given birth to her—that her mother’s treachery and deceit had made it impossible for any emotion other than hatred to exist between them—that it was doubly shocking to feel this dread…this anguish.
She turned into the hospital, parked her car, and climbed out of it, frowning, the movement of her elegant, lithe body quick and impatient. A typical Leo was how Liz Danvers had once ruefully described her second child: fiery, impetuous, impatient, intemperate and intelligent.
That had been almost twenty years ago. Since then time had rubbed smooth some of the rough edges of her restless personality, experience gentling and softening the starkness of a nature that weaker souls often found too abrasive. Now in her early thirties, she had learned