After the call, Sharon went over the Japanese stock market, observing all the shares they held and how they were doing. She had an appointment with a Japanese client that afternoon and wanted to know what she was talking about when she met him.

She was coming out of the beautiful building which housed the bank at Lunch time when she saw Bryan strolling towards her from the taxi that had just dropped him.

He looked at her and in his head, he thought, 'Look at the lady who made him feel less than what he was. She tries to put me down at all times but she does not know that I cannot be out down. I am like a mountain that cannot be shaken. Instead of allowing myself be put down by the likes of her, I shall cease to be Bryan Ferdinand. She reported sick but there is no sign of the I'll health in her. She looks as cool and as beautiful as ever and I want her desperately but I'll be damned if I'd let her know after hurting my feelings at every turn,by flinching away from me, from my touch but she had screamed with pleasure while I made love to her and had even given me live bites that had kept reminding me of that night. Perhaps she had imagined she was with someone else? Like that German? Or David? She had allowed me near her only because she was very lonely and I happened to be the one available at the time? Damn her!

She held on tightly on the railings of the staircase for support as they met on the steps, wondering the rude and cynical word he would have for her that afternoon as her heart lurched as she saw him and she was not disappointed.

He nodded, 'Back at work then? his face dark and cool.

'Yes'.

'David saw it was the flu'. His sardonic tone indicated that he didn't believe it.

She lifted her chin. 'Yes, that's right'. Her own tone told him that she didn't care what he believed.

His mouth twisted. 'But now you're normal'.

Anyone else overhearing them would have taken what he was saying at face value but Sharon heard the undertone. The sarcasm, the distaste and she flinched from it.

'Yes', she said as she started bitterly into his black eyes.

'I know you'll be pleased to hear how much David kept saying that he missed you', he drawled. 'They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, didn't they? So your bout of flu was brilliantly timed, obviously'.

She didn't answer, her face stiff, just walked away, blinded to the traffic and confusion of London as she moved.

She hadn't seen him for over a week but he had t been out of her mind all that time and just now as they talked, she had kept looking at him, looking away, unable to stop looking back, swinging wildly all the time between extremes of feeling which left her giddy.

Absence had had a drastic effect on her heart, it seemed.She wished to God it hadn't.

That brief encounter on the steps outside the bank would make it easier next time she saw him, though. She hoped.

In fact, she saw him again the next morning in David's office. There were several of the bank directors there. Bryan and Sharon were able to ignore each other without it seeming strange.

Nobody else seemed to notice the chill in the air whenever they spoke to each other, either. Al though it seemed so obvious to Sharon. O my David picked up on it and mentioned it later in private,gently chiding her.

'What is wrong with you and Bryan? I had hoped you two would get better by now than you obviously do. Didn't you hit it off while you were in Rome? I thought that being thrown together like that might have broken the ice between you too but the way you talk to each other lately, the ice seem thicker than ever'.

Flushed and furious with herself for letting David glimpse her feelings, she said simply, 'I'm sorry if it's that obvious. I always try to be polite'.

'Oh, Polite, Yes. But I know you both, I don't need you to draw diagrams. Everytime the two of you are in the same room,the temperature goes down with a thump. You know my plans for him Sharon, one day, he'll be sitting on my chair. Try to make friends with him'.

She forced a pretense of laughter. 'Good heavens, David, stop talking as if you're ninety three! unless you are planning to retire at fifty. Bryan isn't going to take over for a long, long time'.

Then their eyes met and she frowned, struck by a new idea.

'You aren't planning to retire, are you?' That prospect appalled her. David gone. Bryan in his place? She would have to leave the bank!

'I'm certainly not planning anything if the kind but you never know what the future holds, do you? If I had been told that my wife would be taken from me so soon, I'd never have believed it. She was so you g and full of life. She never had a terminal sickness. The future is uncertain. So make friends with Bryan, Sharon'.

Sharon looked closely at him. Hope he was not trying to say something to her.

'You are okay David, aren't you?'

'I am but I am asking this of you. I am disturbed about your hostile attitude towards each other and I want you both to be amicable towards each other. That's only what I am trying to say'.

'It was too late for that, David, Sharon thought grimly. She could not even consider that. He had done alot to wreck her life and peace. She and Bryan were never going to be friends. They might have tried at it had the conference not happened but it had and they had briefly been lovers, now they were enemies and it would take a miracle to change it to be otherwise.

Sharon was working late one November night and the month was a grey and drizzly month in the year.

Everyone else had gone home but she had to finish some research on a new investment programme they were working out for a big pension fund.

She stopped to massage her eyes, Chinese fashion, her elbow on the desk and her palms pressed into her eyes, shutting out light and easing the strain on the iris, at the same time, letting her mind go blank. When she was very tired, this often helped to revitalize her for a while.

She was totally unaware of Bryan's approach until he touched her shoulder.

Then she whirled round, her gree eyes in shock.

'Oh! It's you. Don't creep up to me like that. You nearly made my heart stop'

'Snd we wouldn't want that, would we?' he said dryly and she felt herself flush. You have to be on your toes when you talked to him, he used double meanings like thorns under the skin.She let that one go by without comment.

'Why are you still working? You've got a long flight tomorrow, you should get an early night'.

'I shall', he said I'm just off but I saw your light on and came to say goodbye. I'm sure you will be relieved to see me go'.

She would and yet she already felt a grey depression settling down over her like a mist of winter. She was going to miss him badly but she wasn't admitting that to him before he made fun of her and her emotions.

One black brow curved sardonically. 'No comment? Well none needed bit I shall miss the Christmas office party and all the fun and games under the mistletoe which I understand goes on.....'

He bent very fast, before she had time to realise what he intended,and kissed her, his lips hot, compelling, waking the sleeping passion always curled inside her body whenever he was near.

It only lasted a moment then he stood up breathing thickly, darkly flushed, his eyes hostile.

'You can slap my face when I get back! Don't marry David while I am away or you would be sorry you did', he said and walked out, leaving her trembling, frustrated, on the point of tears.

It seemed to rain everyday after he was gone.She couldn't get him out of her mind especially at night, in her bed, when erotic fantasies about him kept her awake for hours.

Those nights, she would remember the taste of his lips, the smell of his sweat, of his cologne, his hard masculine body.

She would remember how he moved inside her and with her and she would moan wanting him terribly. Then her hands would creep to her most intimate parts and while still thinking about him and the way he loved her in bed, she would satisfy herself and only then would she be able to fall asleep.

She had experienced loneliness but this time it was loneliness with a plus. This was really what it felt like to be lonely.

It rain most everyday that one day, looking out the window, David commented, 'Lucky Bryan, of it weren't for the exhausting flight, I'd have gone myself but I couldn't face the journey'.

'I've never been to Australia's, Sharon said wistfully.

'You should have said something and maybe the both of you could have gone.

'I didn't want to', she erupted and then catching David's eye, she flushed. 'Well, you wouldn't want both of us gone at the same time, would you?'

David frowned. 'That's true but I just realized that you can't stand him, can you? Odd, I find him likeable, a brilliant mind too, very shrewd. I wonder why you don't like him?'

'I can't like everyone!' she protested,then tried to change the topic. 'Whether like this makes you want to take a holiday somewhere hit and sunny, doesn't it? The Caribbean would be nice or Florida'.

'What about Germany?' David said and she gave him a startled look.

'Germany? That's not sunny. I remember Gerhard telling me about winters there when he was a child. How he skied to school and went skating on frozen lakes'.

'Yes, I know but Gerhard did invite us to visit the German bank and the diary is pretty empty for the start of December'.

Sharon thought about it, chewing the end of a pen. 'Both of us?'

David looked pretty mischievous. 'I think Gerhard would expect you to be there, don't you?'

Sharon smiled. 'I don't know what you mean!'

'Oh yes, you do, he fancies you', David lifted his eyebrows. 'Oh come on, you like him!'

'Of course I do'.And it was true that the first ten days in the month of December was a blank space in her diary. Layer, there would be alot of Christmas Parties both private ones and office parties.

'Abd while we're over there, we could do some Christmas shopping's, David said cheerfully. 'After we've had our discussion with Gerhard in the German bank, we'd stay for a couple of days and go to one of the wonderful Christmas fairs they have in Germany, this time of the year'.

'Yes, that would be fun'.

'I suppose you'd be spending Christmas with your family as usual?' David asked.

'I'm not sure. I often go home for Christmas as well as a week in the summer. It's much to far to go home at the weekends. I'd no sooner get there than I'd be ony way back. I always love to have a week at least before I go'.

'Do they come to London often? Where do they go for their holidays?' David was always interested in other people's lives. It was one thing about him that made him a good boss and a good friend.

Sharon sighed. 'My father hasn't had a day off in years. He works three hundred and sixty five days a year on the farm and so does my mother

Sharon had kept trying to convince her parents to come away with her to some exotic place for a holiday but they wouldn't bulge and it had never happened as a result.

The family had a hill farm in the border lands between England and Scotland made little money but her father loved it dearly.

He was happy getting up before the sun broke through, looking after stock, mending dry stone walls, injecting sheep against the dozen or so diseases they were prone to, doing all the kinds of job that needed doing on the farm at any time of the year.

Her father was a big man but though he was still tall, he now stooped. He had lived a hard life but it was the life he had chosen for himself and he never regretted it nor complained.

Sharon's mother never complained either nor gave any sign of resentment for toughness of her daily life. She worked as hard as her husband, indoors and out. She made the bread they ate, fed the hens and collected their eggs, killed them too and cooked them.

She washed the clothes and linen, ironed and baked and scrubbed and cleaned.

There was never any money and this had spurred Sharon on to achieve all she possibly could. She soon understood that if she wanted to make it in life, she had to get good grades at school. She had worked with intense concentration and got the results she needed. She had chosen banking as a career be ause she had not wanted to teach, go into law or engage in any other profession.

Her mother's brother who had been a local bank manager had encouraged her telling her that banking was the best career for girls these days.

So, she had come down to London, and got a first job here in the bank, riding with surprising speed as she realized what an aptitude she had for such a job.

She found it all so fascinating, the big bank buildings, the transfer and sale of shares, the electrifying nervous tension of the market whether good or bad, to any one who observed the day to day routine of the bank, banking might seem full but if they were in the middle of the action, then they would definitely feel the excitement and charged tension of it all.

As the years went by, she had grown away from her parents to some extent. She lived her father but she was never able to relax with him. He had tunnel vision, saw life only from one point of view.

She couldn't talk to him, he had no idea about the world she inhabited, the sort of life she lived and she was bored to death with the talk of sheep diseases a d the unending talk about the farm. They had nothing in common anymore except shared blood.

He wouldn't even accept her offer to help out financially even with the hard times they were facing. However, Sharon assured them that she could afford to send them money every month but he wouldn't accept it.

'You keep your money to yourself, girl' was all he said. After living for many years in the farm and grown used to the hard life of the farm, he had become so old fashioned and his pride would not allow him accept anything from anyone even his own daughter. He might have accepted it from a son but never from girl, definitely.

When Sharon had secretly sent some money to her mother, her father had asked her to send it back and her mother had sent it back accompanied with a short note asking Sharon not to do it again.

Joe Smith, her father had fixed ideas, fixed moral standards that he had learnt in his youth. He never watched TV, listened to the radio nor read newspaper. Sharon knew that her father would be shocked if he knew that she had slept with Bryan. He probably thought that she was still a virgin at twenty six, waiting for the right man to come along before she married.

Her mother, Jane Smith was a gentle, tolerant woman but she had never supported Sharon against her father in the past and Sharon didn't think that she ever would.

Jane was the type of woman who said, 'My husband, right or wrong....' and stuck to it.

Nearly sixty now, she looked older, the auburn hair she had passed on to her daughter had turned grey. Her face had too many lines and she seemed to be tired always.

Sharon saw the way, long hours of hard work was turning her mother older and weaker and anytime she went home, it was worse and she had to bite her tongue to prevent her from saying anything to her father because her interference always upset her mother and never achieved anything.

The truth was that her parents had shared everything all through their marriage. There was a deep quiet live between them that never changed and never would.

So it was better for her to go home, very infrequently, she could hold her tongue if she didn't see them always.

Coming back to the present where she was speaking to David about the kind of trip she would have loved to have.

'I've always thought that I'd love to spend Christmas somewhere romantic like Vienna.

'We shall. Why don't you? David said. 'I'd love to go to Vienna for Christmas. Why don't we go together?'

She gave him a startled look and laughed. 'It would be magical, wouldn't it?' She didn't take him serious. She thought that like her, he was just fantasizing, daydreaming.

She had seen a program on TV the other day and had been enchanted by its magnificent walls and everything about it.

'Let's do it!' he said and she suddenly realised that he meant it.

He met her eyes, his coaxing, 'I hate Christmas on my own, friends invite me but family Christmas makes me feel very melancholic indeed. Staying in the hotel is even worse, all that fake jollity and gaudy paper hats, waiters dressed up like father Christmas! But you and me...we both know the score we're just good friends, no complications on either side. So what do you say, Sharon? Will you come?'

There was something so wistful about his tone, she hesitated then threw caution to the winds and nodded recklessly. 'Okay, let's do it!'

They sat and planned it there and then and Sharon went to book the trip the following day. They would fly three days before Christmas and come back a week later, stay in one of the best hotels in Vienna. They were both excited- It brightened the wintery days that followed, like candles burning in a dark place.

But that was before it dawned on her that she had missed two periods. She hadn't bothered so much about the lateness of the first one. She had never had regular periods but she had never gone two months before and as the days went by and nothing happened, she became scared.

What if... but it couldn't be! She had told Bryan that she had taken no precautions and she was sure he had taken the necessary precautions. He had promised that he would take care of it and she had left it in his hands. So she couldn't be going to have his baby.