A Question of Loyalty

Book 2: A Military Romance Trilogy

by Kate Lace

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

Yvie first meets Adam and Pammy Clifton as neighbours in quarters in Germany, where she has been posted with her soldier husband, Richard. Their friendship is cemented by the shared experience of army life, but is put to the test when the relationship between Adam and Yvie turns into a short-lived but passionate affair.  Years later Yvie is certain that she has put all memory of that ill-fated liaison behind her. But when a released terrorist from Richard's past as a bomb-disposal expert puts his life in danger, she is forced, reluctantly, to turn to her old friends for help. Seeking refuge at the Clifton?s home in the Lake District, together with her teenage daughter Claire, Yvie is all too aware of the smouldering attraction  between herself and Adam, and is determined that it will not be reignited...

Release date: August 27, 2015

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 272

Sample

Chapter One

March 1985

Yvie was unconscious when she first encountered her future husband. She was at a party at another student’s house; a poky two-bedroom terrace with lousy decor and worse ventilation, when she began to feel ill. That the room was overcrowded, coupled with the fact that she hadn’t eaten since the day before, was not helped by the person next to her lighting up a foul-smelling French cigarette. Having Disque Bleu smoke blown in her face had proved the final straw. Her ears began to ring, she felt uncomfortably nauseous and light-headed in turns, and then, just as she felt her senses giving up and her knees buckling, she was aware of a pair of hands gripping her. After that, apart from a distant feeling that she was sliding, Alice-like, down a long, sloping tunnel, she was oblivious to anything for some minutes.

The first sensation to infiltrate her woozy state was an awareness of a soft, cool breeze caressing her face, like waves lapping over toes on hot sand. The air was so fresh and clear compared to what she had been inhaling inside the house that she breathed it in greedily.

‘Hello … hello …’ said a voice just audible above the racket of the party throbbing through the closed window above her head. Culture Club, at full blast, drowned out partygoers, apart from the odd burst of laughter. She didn’t think she wanted to cope with consciousness just yet. Then she felt someone patting her hand. She opened her eyes.

She found she was lying half on her side, on the ground, staring at a pair of men’s shoes that gleamed in the pool of light spilling from the room behind. She moved her eyes to try and see the rest of him, but the light finished at mid-shin. The remainder of the figure was a black shape silhouetted against the glow of a street lamp, so that her rescuer had a fuzzy amber aura.

‘Hey, that’s better,’ the shape said. ‘You were beginning to get me worried there.’

The effort of lifting her eyelids seemed too much for Yvie and she shut them.

‘Don’t faint again,’ said the man, sounding worried.

‘No,’ Yvie mumbled. She felt awful, despite the cool air. She lay still, allowing the stranger to pat her hand. Slowly the feeling that if she moved she would either throw up or pass out receded and she was able to raise the energy to open her eyes again.

‘Better?’ said the man.

‘A bit,’ she replied. She pushed herself up so she rested on one elbow. The man was still just a black shape. She wondered what her rescuer looked like. Perhaps if she sat up she would be able to see more of him. Yvie shuffled her legs round until she was sitting upright.

‘Not too fast,’ said the bloke.

‘I’m fine now, honest. It was the heat and the smoke.’ She really did feel so much better. It was amazing the effect of fresh air.

‘It was incredibly stuffy in there. Actually I was quite glad when you gave me an excuse to get out.’ The shape shifted. He stood up and then sat on the low wall that separated the tiny strip of front garden from the road. Yvie could see him rubbing his thighs and then easing his shoulders.

‘So did you carry me out?’ she asked.

‘Well, you didn’t float out, that’s for sure.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Hey, what’s to be sorry for?’

‘It wasn’t drink.’ She felt embarrassed about what had happened, and for some reason Yvie didn’t want this man to have a bad opinion of her.

‘You’ve lost me now.’

‘I didn’t pass out because I’d had too much to drink.’

‘I never thought for a moment that you did.’

Silence fell.

After a few seconds, Yvie felt uncomfortable. ‘Look, if you want to rejoin the party …?’

‘Not really. I wasn’t enjoying it that much.’

‘Oh.’ The conversation, which had hardly been sparkling, died. Culture Club faded and for a second the full hubbub of dozens of voices competing against each other boomed into the tiny front garden. Then they, in their turn, were swamped by Cyndi Lauper insisting that girls just want to have fun. Yvie thought that having fun was the last thing she wanted right now. She shifted her position slightly but it didn’t matter how she sat, the ground was still hard and uncomfortable. She made to stand up.

‘Here, let me help you.’ Her rescuer bent forward, grasped her hands and pulled her to her feet. Standing, Yvie decided in a second, was too big a step. The world reeled. She sat next to the man on the wall. Her head steadied again.

Now she was level with him, he stopped being a silhouette and Yvie saw that he was very good-looking in a clean-cut sort of way. She was struck by his hair, unfashionably short, and not the least like her other male student friends.

‘You’re not thinking of going back in?’ He nodded at the curtained window of the house.

‘Good God, no.’

‘Right.’

‘Right,’ she echoed, at a loss for anything more original. Silence for another few seconds.

‘Look, I thought I might go to The Swan and find myself a long cold drink. I don’t suppose you’d care to join me?’

The thought of a long cold drink at The Swan, a particularly nice pub near the river, sounded unbelievably appealing.

‘I’d love to,’ said Yvie without any hesitation.

‘Do you have a coat or bag or anything?’

‘Nothing but what I stand up in,’ she said, pulling her wallet from the pocket of her artfully slashed jeans to substantiate her answer.

‘Come on then.’

‘Umm … do I get to know your name before you carry me off into the wild blue yonder and ravish me?’ said Yvie with a smile.

‘I’m Richard. And I never “ravish” on a first date.’

‘Yvie,’ said Yvie, holding out her hand and thinking that it might be a bit of a shame that ‘ravishing’ wasn’t on the cards after all. Apart from his looks, he had very good skin and teeth, she noticed.

Richard took her hand and clasped it warmly. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I can already taste that cold beer.’

Yvie followed him out of the tiny garden and on to the pavement. She had been wondering how on earth they were going to get across town to the river when Richard stopped by a Ford Escort GTi convertible. He unlocked the passenger door and held it open for her.

‘Get in,’ he said.

Yvie didn’t need telling twice. Wow, she thought, a car and manners! That was a combination she hadn’t come across yet as a student. She settled down in her seat and pulled on her safety belt. She couldn’t wait to tell her sister about this. Laura would be green!

By the time Richard had pulled up in the pub car park, he knew that Yvie was the first in her family to go to university, and she knew he was in the army – which explained the haircut and the fact he could afford a car. The pair of them drew stares from the mostly middle-aged regulars as they walked into the bar. It was hardly surprising, as they made an odd couple. In one respect they were well-suited, in that they were both tall and strikingly good-looking: Richard was athletically built, with short, dark curly hair, and dressed in cords and an open-neck check shirt; Yvie, on the other hand, although of similar height and build, had orange spiky hair, torn denim jeans and a skin-tight T-shirt over which was draped an outsized black string vest. Fingerless leather gloves completed the outfit.

Yvie took in the looks. ‘I don’t think the locals like what I’m wearing,’ she murmured to Richard.

‘Can’t think why,’ he said cheerfully, and eyeing her body with undisguised pleasure. ‘I think you look fantastic.’

Yvie was touched by the compliment, and flattered, all the more because she felt that Richard meant it.

Over their first drink, she discovered that he was an only child of a military father and a doting mother, and that he was being paid by the army whilst studying for a degree in chemistry. So, instead of doing normal student things in his vacations, like working in McDonald’s and getting drunk, he went off to Cyprus on manoeuvres, or did winter warfare exercises in Norway. It seemed unbelievably glamorous and grown-up, and a world away from anything she had come across before. She wanted to talk more about him, but he insisted on hearing about her family, so she told him about her older sister who was married with a baby, and her father and her brother-in-law who worked in the local biscuit factory. Instead of being put off by her background, he seemed even more impressed by Yvie’s achievements.

‘So how come you are studying fine art?’

‘I don’t know. I can just do it. Painting and drawing is just something I don’t have to think about.’

‘How amazing. You must have such a talent.’

‘Not really. I’m just lucky. I’m like those people who have photographic memories – they can’t tell you how they do it, it’s just an ability they have.’

‘I’m still amazed.’

Yvie smiled shyly. It was nice to be appreciated. It wasn’t something she was used to. Her dad certainly wasn’t thrilled by his younger daughter’s gifts, despite the fact that all through her school her teachers had gone out of their way to tell him how Yvie was ‘doing well’. He was blue-collar and proud of it, and being academic didn’t figure in his list of desirable attributes. To him ‘doing well’ meant having a job that provided enough money for the rent, food on the table, and left some over for the breadwinner to go to the pub on a Friday with his mates. ‘Doing well’ didn’t mean going to university to study ‘colouring in’ (as he had put it) for three years. In his eyes, her sister Laura, older by three years, had done well. She’d left school, gone to work in the factory typing pool, found a man, got married and now had her first kid. And she’d achieved all that before Yvie had even made it into the sixth form.

‘Don’t worry, Yvie,’ Laura had said. ‘Why shouldn’t you want to go into the sixth form? Can’t see the appeal myself, but don’t mind Dad. He’ll come round.’

But Yvie was now well into her second year at university, and her dad still hadn’t come round. And Laura was doing even better, as she was pregnant with number two, and when Yvie went home, all her dad did was mutter about what a waste of taxpayers’ money her degree was going to be, and when was she going to give it all up, get a proper job and settle down. Not that Yvie thought that settling down looked like an option to aspire to. She watched her sister – run ragged with a toddler and pregnant with a second – battle with morning sickness and the drudgery of housework, and her mother – grey-haired, slightly stooped, and looking nearer fifty than forty – wash and iron and skivvy for a man who took it all for granted. And the depressing thought was that neither her mother nor her sister had anything to look forward to except more of the same. Well, decided Yvie, not for her. She wasn’t going to have a job, she was going to have a career, and when she got married – if she got married – she was going to be on equal terms with her husband. Women’s lib might have been lost on her mother and her sister, but it wasn’t bypassing her. No matter what her dad thought of her.

By the end of the evening at The Swan, Yvie was besotted. Richard was mature, attentive, charming and witty. She tried not to let the fact that he was also well-heeled and guaranteed employment on graduating influence her further, but she did acknowledge that it certainly didn’t detract from his appeal. She was completely made up when, as he drove her back to her flat, he asked if he could see her again the next day.

‘Do you ravish on a second date?’ she’d asked as they drew up outside her front door.

‘I haven’t yet, but I might be tempted,’ he said. He leaned across the gear stick and kissed her on the lips.

Yvie was surprised at how clean-tasting his mouth was. And at the gentleness of the kiss. Perhaps, she thought, ravishing isn’t going to be quite his style. She felt rather disappointed by this thought. But no matter, you couldn’t expect everything, could you?

Over the next months, Yvie and Richard saw increasing amounts of each other; they discovered they shared the same sense of humour and the same taste in films and music; their kisses became more passionate and ‘ravishing’ became a regular activity. They found fewer and fewer reasons to go home for weekends or holidays, and more reasons why they wanted to remain in each other’s company. Their friends joked that they resembled a married couple, and Yvie began to wonder if one day the joke might not become reality. Apart from the fact that she was in love with Richard, she decided he was everything a girl could want; considerate, funny, steady, loving and good-looking. The trouble was, she also knew he was everything her father would dislike: educated, well-mannered, cultured and definitely not working-class. But then, thought Yvie, if her dreams came true, Richard would be asking her to marry him, not her father.

As casually as she could, when Richard took her to army functions, she tried to find out what it was like to be an army wife; after all, it was going to be a quantum leap from life behind the biscuit factory, or from being a university student. Much as she loved Richard, she was sensible enough to realise that if she wasn’t going to cope with such a change she would just end up bitter and dissatisfied. Married life would have its ups and downs no doubt, but she hoped the ones in her life would be hills, not mountain ranges. If a future life with the Colours looked hopelessly difficult and not the sort of thing she might be able to cope with, then she would do better to walk away now than get in deeper. So she got the wives to talk about themselves; not difficult, she soon discovered, which was lucky, as the last thing she wanted was to appear obvious and scare Richard off. The poor dears, thought Yvie, don’t seem to have much of a life; the tales of the constant moving, and cleaning quarters to an unimaginable standard, together with the endless litany of separation and unaccompanied postings just had to be exaggerated. And none of them seemed to have jobs, but had got on with the business of breeding kids. Some seemed to find things to do to pass the time, like running the unit’s charity shop or teaching other wives how to arrange flowers, and Richard mentioned details in a similar vein, but Yvie was inclined to dismiss much of this talk as just so much embroidery. If it was as bad as that, no one would marry into the army – after all, living overseas, mess dinners and decent houses couldn’t possibly make up for the ghastly details she’d heard described. Anyway, she was getting a degree; she was going to have a career. She could paint, she could do that anywhere. All it would take would be a bit of imagination and she was sure she could keep herself fully employed anywhere in the world. So Yvie listened to all that the wives had to say, and then promptly, despite her initial intentions of fact-finding, ignored all the information and the advice. It never occurred to her that she didn’t want to hear the truth; that she had already made her mind up about spending the rest of her life with Richard, and she wasn’t interested in the pitfalls of such a decision. The bottom line was that she couldn’t imagine wanting another man as a partner, and she was going to take this one, warts, army life and all.

She was sure Richard felt the same way about her. Oh, please God he did. She didn’t think she’d be able to bear it if he didn’t.

Chapter Two

May 1986

It was around a year later, just before their finals, that Richard asked her to marry him. It was at a ladies’ guest night at his regimental mess. Although she had been scared witless at the first couple of ‘do’s she had attended, Richard had steered her carefully through most of the likeliest pitfalls, and had advised her on what to wear – a tricky matter given that her wardrobe had consisted mostly of punk-rock fashions. Now Yvie was far more at home in the formal and traditional atmosphere of the officers’ mess, and had acquired a ballerina-length silk dress from Monsoon and toned her hair down to a shade of auburn. She was still considered a little outré by some of the senior mess wives but she was ‘coming along nicely’, in the opinion of Richard’s commanding officer. Yvie, despite her avant-garde take on fashion and art, discovered that she liked the comfortable predictability of mess functions. From the food to the music, from the uniforms to the topics of conversation, things rarely seemed to alter, and she came to understand why traditions persisted: no nasty shocks, no surprises, just an enjoyable evening. So when Richard produced a ring from the inside pocket of his bum-freezer mess-kit jacket, Yvie, besotted with Richard and dazzled by the candlelight and the glamour, didn’t give any consideration to her answer. However, when she rang home with the news, the fact that her father didn’t give any consideration to his reaction either took some of the gloss off her happiness.

‘And how the bloody hell do you think we are going to pay for the sort of wedding Richard and his posh friends are used to? If he and his la-di-da friends think I’m going to beggar this family so they can get pissed at my expense, they’ve got another think coming. And furthermore, my girl, if you think that by marrying out of your class you’re going to be happy … well, let me tell you …’ And her father had continued, ad nauseam and belligerently, in that vein until Yvie’s money had run out and her father was left talking to the tone. Yvie blinked back the tears that her father’s comments had caused and replaced the receiver.

Richard, waiting outside the phone box, noticed her tears instantly. ‘What’s the matter, sweetie?’

Yvie shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

Richard put his arm round her shoulder and gave it a rub. ‘It must be something. No one cries over nothing.’

Yvie sniffed. ‘We’ll have to wait a bit. Dad thinks it’s going to be too expensive,’ she said, paraphrasing and bowdlerising frantically. ‘If I get a half-decent job when I leave uni, I’ll be able to save and help him with the cost.’

‘It won’t be that much,’ said Richard, who didn’t have the first idea how much a wedding cost.

The next day Richard tracked down Yvie as she was coming out of lectures.

‘I spoke to the mess manager,’ he told her.

‘Congratulations,’ said Yvie, looking bemused.

‘No, silly. I spoke to him about getting married.’

‘You mean you’re going to marry him not me?’ said Yvie in mock horror.

‘Will you shut up and listen. I spoke to him about us getting married – you and me. He can do it for about three pounds a head. Do you think your dad can run to that? I shouldn’t think that we’ll have more than a couple of hundred guests at the most, probably less. Of course, the mess’ll come for free. That just leaves the cost of your dress and the ones you want for your bridesmaids.’

Yvie was speechless. She threw her arms around Richard’s neck and began crying all over again. Richard decided be really didn’t understand women. They cried when they were unhappy and then when you made things better – they cried all over again.

Of course, Richard didn’t tell her that the cost of three pounds a head was exclusive of both extra duty pay for the mess staff and any alcohol, to say nothing of the champagne that would be required. Put those factors into the equation and the cost more than quadrupled. But he was going to pay for all that, and the cake that the mess chef was going to make, and Yvie’s dad need never know. So, with no other obstacles in the way, the wedding was planned for July.

However, despite discovering how little it was going to cost him to see his youngest daughter married, come the big day, Yvie’s father still wasn’t happy. Firstly, he wasn’t stupid, and he knew that the reception was costing more than three quid a head, but he assumed that all officers’ mess ‘junkets’ as he called them were subsidised by taxpayers like him. Secondly, his socialist leanings prevented him from enjoying the spectacle of his daughter leaving the church beneath the swords of a guard of honour. Nor could he relax in the understated opulence of the officers’ mess. Yvie’s mother, though, was in raptures and kept mentioning to Laura that, with all those uniforms, it was ‘just like the royal wedding’, which put Laura’s nose right out of joint.

Laura had genuinely tried not to be jealous of Yvie’s wedding, but it was exceedingly difficult. Deep down Laura was proud of her little sister, getting a degree and everything, but when she had got married, she’d had to make do with a reception in the local church hall, in which the smell of the previous day’s jumble sale lingered, and a buffet of fish-paste sandwiches, scones and cheap white fizzy wine put together the previous day by her and her mum. Not quite the same league as this glamorous affair. Nor did it help that her children were letting her down. She’d been as pleased as anything when Yvie had asked if Lisa-Marie would be her bridesmaid, but even though she had looked scrumptiously sweet, the effect had been spoiled when she had picked her nose constantly during the service, and then had overindulged on pop at the reception and had been sick down the front of her dress. And Kylie, the baby, was teething and grizzled solidly throughout the afternoon. She might have found it easier to cope if her husband, Mick, had thought to help her with them, but he was too busy knocking back free champagne to notice – or care. Laura had tried to look happy for Yvie but, what with one thing and another, she’d just ended up feeling sorry for herself and wishing she could go home, put the kids to bed and have a drink herself. The only note of cheer, as far as she was concerned, was being chatted up by Richard’s best man – Adam Clifton. After five years of marriage to Mick, it was a novelty to be told she looked just like Bonnie Tyler and that she ought to try modelling. In her heart she knew it was flannel, but it didn’t stop her from feeling like a million dollars – until Lisa-Marie was sick for a second time.

Not surprisingly, Yvie was also very conscious of Richard’s best man. She hadn’t met him before, even though Richard assured her that they were best friends. When, after Sandhurst, Richard had gone to university to study, Adam had gone to join a unit in Germany and had spent the ensuing three years either on training courses or on exercise ‘to keep him out of the way until he knew what he was doing’, according to Richard. Well, thought Yvie, he certainly seemed to know what he was doing at her wedding. He flirted with her female friends, complimented her mother on her outfit, joshed with her father, made a memorable and funny speech and danced with most of Yvie’s female relations, including Laura, whom, Yvie noticed, he even induced to smile briefly. And, to cap it all, he had been far and away the handsomest man in the room. In fact, if Yvie hadn’t just become Mrs Maxwell, she might have vied with the single women for his attentions. Even so, she felt a tiny pang of envy for the girls who did get his attentions, a pang that she quickly quashed. But she could have fancied a whirl around the floor with him, and was unreasonably disappointed when they left for their honeymoon before she had the chance.

Immediately after their honeymoon, Richard was posted to Germany, and married life in the army did not begin as Yvie had envisaged. For a start, she spent several months living in her parents’ house while they waited for a quarter. During that time, she’d had to listen to her father’s constant mutterings about the uselessness of the British officer classes, how Yvie should be getting a job, how supporting the army in Germany was a drain on the taxpayer, how Laura’s kids were the apple of his eye and how Yvie herself would have done better if she hadn’t given herself such highfalutin ideas as a result of going to university. It wore Yvie down. It might not have been quite so bad if Richard had been able to visit but, what with being abroad, together with the fact that his unit was involved heavily in the annual autumn exercises, his trips back to see Yvie were rare. By November, a quarter was found, the exercises were over for another year and Yvie assumed, as she disembarked at Hanover airport, that her married life was now about to roar into action, so to speak. If nothing else, she had got away from her father.

‘You’ll love the flat,’ Richard told her as they sped away north on the main Autobahn to Hamburg. ‘It’s in this little village and it’s so pretty. I know you’ll adore it.’

Yvie thought that she didn’t care where she lived, just as long as it was with Richard. Anywhere, even a trench on the ranges, would be preferable to staying with her parents for a day longer, so Richard’s description of their first house bettered her expectations by miles. Yvie was not disappointed when they drove into the village of Bad Mannheim. Yvie had heard the word ‘gemütlich’ but had not really understood the full meaning until she saw the village centre with its church, tiny market square and brightly painted shutters adorning the surrounding houses, and there were winter pansies in the window boxes and hanging baskets by the doors, which added yet more colour to the pretty scene. Just down the road from the church, Richard drew the car up in a little car park behind a small block of flats topped by a pitched ro. . .