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      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘ARE you ready yet, Mum? Honestly, I feel as nervous as though I were the one having to make the speech.’

      ‘I’m not making a speech, merely handing over the cheque to Dr Hanson,’ Lacey Robinson responded to her daughter’s excited chatter.

      In point of fact she was guilty of evasion. She was nervous. Helping to raise the money for the research into the rare and devastating disease—which, while carried in the female genes only, manifested itself in physical symptoms in the male sex, like haemophilia and other similar disorders—had been one thing. Standing up in public to hand over to the hospital the cheque for the money they had raised was another.

      She had already told herself very firmly that such self-consciousness was ridiculous in a woman of thirty-eight with a nineteen-year-old daughter, but that hadn’t stopped the butterflies at present crowding her stomach.

      ‘I’m so proud of you, Ma,’ Jessica told her, crossing the kitchen to come and put her arms round her and give her a hug. Of the two of them Jessica was easily the taller, topping her mother’s slender five-foot-two frame by a good four inches, but their colouring was the same. Both of them had the same silky fine dark hair and the same wide-spaced grey eyes, the same unexpectedly full lips, although in Lacey’s case there was a vulnerability about her features which was missing from those of her more ebullient daughter.

      ‘I haven’t done anything,’ Lacey protested now. ‘It’s the people who donated the money in response to our appeal who deserve recognition and praise.’

      ‘Yes, of course,’ Jessica agreed. ‘But you were the one who organised everything, who first started the appeal.’

      ‘Only after I’d heard about little Michael Sullivan at work. It was so heartbreaking. I still don’t know how on earth Declan and Cath have managed to come to terms with the tragedy of it. To have lost two children before little Michael, from the same inherited disorder…’

      ‘Can Michael ever be cured?’ Jessica asked her quietly.

      ‘No, not cured, but with the money we’ve raised further research can take place into ways of alleviating the effect of the deterioration of the central motor system, and of course, now that they’ve managed to isolate the gene which causes the disease, a…Well, with the new techniques they have for discovering the sex of an embryo at a very early stage in a pregnancy, the parents can opt to have only girls who, while they carry the disease, are not affected by it.’

      ‘You mean that now the Sullivans could choose to have only daughters?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Well, I don’t care what you say, I’m still proud of you,’ Jessica told her warmly, adding, ‘I’m glad they decided to have the presentation now, while I’m at home.’

      Jessica was in her first year at Oxford, taking a degree course which would one day equip her with excellent qualifications. If Jessica was proud of her, then how much more was she proud of her daughter? Lacey reflected lovingly.

      Life had not been easy for Jessica, an only child, a fatherless child…A child without the financial advantages of many of her peers, she could so easily have grown up rebellious and resentful, unhappy and alone, but, almost right from the moment she was born, she had been a sunny-natured, happy child.

      It was typical of Lacey that she herself took no credit for her daughter and, as she wryly told friends, she could certainly take no credit for her scholastic abilities, nor her excellence at sports. Those were qualities—gifts—Jessica had received from her father.

      ‘Come back, Ma. Where are you?’ Jessica teased her now, waving her hand in front of Lacey’s face and grinning at her.

      ‘You know what I think, don’t you?’ Jessica commented thoughtfully ten minutes later when they were both in Lacey’s small car, driving towards the civic hall where the presentation was to take place. ‘I think that our Dr Hanson rather fancies you, Ma.’

      Lacey flushed. She couldn’t help it. That was the curse of her pale Celtic skin colouring.

      Jessica saw this betraying reaction and laughed before asking semi-seriously, ‘Why have you never remarried, Ma? I mean, I know you loved him, but after he’d left you, when it was all over and you were divorced…didn’t you ever…haven’t there…?’

      ‘Been other men?’ Lacey invited wryly.

      It was her policy and always