by Lynne Graham
‘What happened to the baby?’ Sophie demanded in a curt undertone. ‘Did you have it adopted?’ and then more loudly, ‘I suppose you got rid of it once you got away from those old people!’
Kitty shut her eyes in mute distaste, wishing she could as efficiently shut out that ranting, hysterically shrill voice. ‘I had a miscarriage.’
‘That horrible old woman!’ Sophie gasped. ‘All these years. She should have told me instead of leaving me in ignorance.’
Since her concern hadn’t led her to visit Martha Colgan and ask, Kitty didn’t take the hint that Sophie had endured a sleepless night or two very seriously. ‘You said that Jake would blame you,’ she reminded her stiffly. ‘I don’t see why. I don’t even understand why we should discuss this. It all happened a very long time ago.’
Sophie’s pale blue eyes centred on her vindictively. ‘It wasn’t his baby, was it?’ she stabbed with offensive pleasure.
Kitty looked steadily back at her, unsurprised by the vicious attack. ‘It was. So I wouldn’t hurry to tell Jake otherwise.’
Sophie’s bright scrutiny dulled and she turned back to the window, her abrupt movements betraying that she was still in a very emotional state. ‘Did you know that your mother once worked in the estate office?’
‘My mother?’ Completely thrown once more by the peculiar change of subject, Kitty stared at her. ‘No, I didn’t know that.’
‘Jake was only two years old,’ Sophie continued tight-lipped. ‘I still had all my illusions intact about my marriage. It took your mother to disenchant me. Charles made a fool of himself over her.’
Kitty’s brows had knitted. ‘I don’t quite follow,’ she said, although she was terribly afraid that she did.
‘Don’t you? He wouldn’t leave her alone,’ Sophie rephrased in disgust. ‘Now I believe they call it sexual harassment. He was more than twice her age, old enough to know better! Your mother was very shocked by his behaviour.’
‘What happened?’ Kitty murmured uneasily.
Sophie loosed a choked laugh. ‘She handed in her notice. I will never forget the look of pity in her eyes when she told me that she was leaving. She felt sorry for me!’ she vented shrilly. ‘I despised her for it.’
‘But if she didn’t encourage your husband—’
‘Do you really believe that that made it any less humiliating for me?’ Sophie demanded. ‘Do you think other people didn’t notice how he was behaving? Your mother made a laughing stock of me. There were those who said there was no smoke without fire. I was glad when she had to leave home to find another job.’
In other words, her mother had suffered for something that was not her fault, Kitty reflected grimly. Impatience nipped at her. Sophie had imparted her sense of injury at great enough depth. Kitty had grasped that the older woman had transferred her loathing for her late mother to her, but she saw no reason for a lengthy discussion about a non-event that had occurred before she was even born.
‘I think we ought to concentrate on the present, Mrs Tarrant,’ she said gently, for unless she was very much mistaken Sophie had her back turned to her now because she was in tears.
She jerked round. ‘If only it were that simple,’ she muttered shakily. ‘You won’t believe me, but I didn’t really dislike you when you were a child. You didn’t harm me. It seemed like poetic justice when you fell in love with my son. I didn’t care because I didn’t think he was in any real danger. After all, I’d done everything I could to make him see that you could never fit into our lives, and I thought I had succeeded until I saw him kissing you at our last New Year party. I was appalled but I blamed you for it!’
‘Yes,’ Kitty said, wondering when Sophie’s ramblings would begin to make sense.
Mrs Tarrant’s face contorted with bitterness. ‘Believe me, it was a ghastly enough evening without that. Everybody wanted to know where Charles was and I couldn’t tell them. He’d said that he wanted a divorce but I didn’t realise he meant it until he failed to come home for the party. The last thing I needed that evening was to see you in my son’s arms.’
Compassion had touched Kitty in an unexpected surge. She screened her eyes, aware that sympathy would not be welcome. Sophie sank down almost clumsily in the seat opposite and pressed a hanky to her trembling mouth. ‘I thought I knew my son and I didn’t. I thought it was an infatuation he would soon get over. I believed that you had encouraged him to behave that way, but you must accept,’ she whispered with a slight sob catching at her voice, ‘I never dreamt that he might have slept with you or that you could be pregnant. I knew he wouldn’t listen to me if I told him to stay away from you. So I had to tell him something that would make him stay away. It was for his own good. I did it for him…’
‘What did you do for him?’ Kitty muttered tautly, finally realising that Mrs Tarrant was finding it very difficult to come to the point.
‘All I wanted to do was knock any foolish ideas he might have about you right out of his head. I was determined to stop it going one step further,’ Sophie confessed tearfully. ‘Nobody knew who your father was and I didn’t care that I had to lie. I knew it wouldn’t go any further. I told Jake that you had the same father. I told him that you were his half-sister…’
Kitty’s heartbeat had lodged suffocatingly in her throat. In sick horror and disbelief she stared at the older woman, but Sophie wouldn’t meet her eyes.
‘I also knew that if Jake approached Charles he would deny it. But my husband would have denied anything like that. I knew that Jake would still believe me,’ she asserted, tearing at her hanky with restive fingers and then sobbing accusingly at Kitty, ‘I did it for him, and then he went off and married that little tart because he couldn’t have you!’
Kitty had sustained such a shock that Sophie had swum out of focus. ‘And he actually believed you?’ she mumbled in nauseated turmoil.
‘Yes. I made it a good story with plenty of details,’ Sophie admitted without remorse, drying her eyes, calming now that she had reached her climax. ‘I convinced him.’
‘And when did you tell him the truth?’ Kitty demanded with sudden ferocity.
‘When I was ill. I didn’t mean to tell him. I was never going to tell him but somehow I did.’ She cast Kitty a glance of barely concealed hatred. ‘He accused me of ruining his life. If it weren’t for you, my son and I would still be close.’
Waxen-pale, Kitty murmured, ‘Why didn’t Jake tell me all this?’
Sophie tautened. ‘When he came to my sister’s I begged him not to tell you. I persuaded him that it was only fair to let me explain. I made him promise me.’
‘Because you were afraid that I’d mention the baby.’ The syllables hurt Kitty’s aching throat.
‘Why should you tell him?’ Sophie snapped. ‘You’ve got him now. Can’t you be satisfied with that? I’m the one who has suffered.’
Kitty stood up, too dazed to feel anger, too shaken to want more than to escape Sophie’s venomous presence. She had spun an unforgivable web of lies and she wasn’t particularly sorry that she had done so. Kitty didn’t believe that, at the time, Sophie had cared very much more about how those lies affected her son. Her most powerful motivation had been to ensure that Jake put Kitty out of his life, and the depths she had sunk to in obtaining that end suggested to Kitty that Sophie had been punishing her son for daring to go against her.
‘I suppose you weren’t well at the time,’ Kitty allowed painfully. ‘But don’t blame me for causing trouble between you and Jake. That, at least, can’t be laid at my door.’
CHAPTER TEN
KITTY turned off the lane to walk through the fields. All those lives affected, all that suffering, she reflected in a stupor. Jake had loved her and his mother had made that love a forbidden emotion to be suppressed and denied. On the brink of losing her husband, Sophie had fought not to lose her son as well. What a farce it must have been when Jake had gone off at a tangent and married someone else! His mother hadn’t planned for that eventuality.
The wi
nd stung her wet cheeks. She was crying. How much had he loved her? If Sophie hadn’t interfered, what would have happened between them? Would he have wanted her child? Would he have asked her to marry him? Or had his mother’s lies supplied him with an unpalatable but not unwelcome escape route from an extremely difficult situation?
She walked all the way to Lower Ridge. She didn’t want to see anyone until she had regained her equilibrium. The cottage was a blackened shell with gaping windows. Sophie, she registered painfully, had changed the entire course of her life. Eight years ago, Jake would have married her—whether he’d wanted to or not. He would have married her because she’d been carrying his child. And his mother and his sisters would have made her life hell behind his back.
Her father had been ashamed of her as she had been then. Would Jake have been the same? Jake, whose manners were so ingrained that they were second nature to him, Jake, who had never known what it was to feel self-conscious in any kind of company…Jake. Suddenly she needed him with a violent intensity that shuddered through her.
What on earth was she doing here? She was her own worst enemy. What was the point in these agonised thoughts of what might have been? She started home. There was so much she wanted to tell him now, so much she needed to ask. The Range Rover was in the yard, parked at an angle as if Jake had vacated it in a hurry. Delighted that he was back, she pushed through the back door. Tugging off her muddy boots, she sniffed appreciatively. The kitchen was tantalisingly full of the smell of roast lamb. She could hear Jessie vacuuming upstairs.
Jake intercepted her in the hall. ‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘Merrill’s,’ she answered in bewilderment.
His dark features rigid with anger, he clamped a steel-fingered hand to her arm and pressed her into the lounge, slamming the door shut behind them. He didn’t know his own strength. She massaged her benumbed forearm with unsteady fingers, her eyes wide. ‘What’s wrong?’
He faced her with his long, straight legs braced slightly apart. Aggression wrote high-wire tension into every lean, sinuous line of his body. As dark, intent eyes settled fiercely on her, her heartbeat speeded up, a lurch of fearful apprehension filling her.
‘Bob Creighton’s boss was up at the Grange yesterday with a surveying team. Apparently Barker let your name slip in conversation and then tried to swear Creighton to secrecy.’
In the throbbing silence, a surge of guilty crimson slowly stained her cheekbones. Her eyes fell from his.
‘My God,’ he whispered in a seething undertone. ‘It’s true. You’re behind Colwell Holdings. You own the estate!’
Her teeth had drawn blood from her lower lip. ‘I didn’t want you to find out like this. I was going to…surprise you…’
‘Surprise me? You wanted to surprise me with the news that you thought you could buy and sell me ten times over?’ His raw incredulity sliced into her like a physical blow.
‘Who told you?’
‘Creighton. The man is worried about the security of his job. He approached me. Word of our marriage has leaked out locally. Creighton seemed to think that I would be taking over the estate. I could put my hands round that scrawny, lying little throat of yours and squeeze hard!’ he swore with sudden savagery. ‘Everything you’ve done since you came back here has been based on lies and duplicity. But God, did you need to go to such lengths to make a fool of me?’
‘I didn’t! I didn’t know how to tell you!’ she gasped, devastated by the suspicions he had about her motive for silence. ‘It’s your home, Jake, and I want it to be ours. I just want you to have it back!’
‘You want me to have it back. And you actually believed that I would accept it?’ he demanded, his dangerously quiet inflexion fracturing with the charge of his anger. ‘It didn’t occur to you that I might have some reservations about living off the proceeds of immoral earnings?’
‘W…what?’ Her swimming violet eyes were fixed pleadingly to him. Her brain was functioning in slow motion. Mrs Tarrant had left her feeling weak and vulnerable.
‘Col—well. Colgan-Maxwell,’ he spelt out with derisive bite. ‘He did indeed pay generously for his pleasure. I can hardly believe that you ceded me the same privileges without a price-tag attached! You’ve got the principles of a whore, Kitty. And I will tell you now that I am not living with them.’
Ashen pale, she protested, ‘Jake, you have to listen to me. This has gone far enough. Grant’s not my—’
A graphic expletive cut her off mid-speech. ‘Do you really think that I care any more whether he is past or present? I told you how I felt last week. You can take your ill-gotten gains out of this house and march that little carcass of yours up the road to the Grange, but you will go alone!’
‘I might just do that!’ she threatened wildly.
He wrenched open the door with a flourish. ‘Go ahead, and while you’re up there have the grace to recall some of the elementary manners I instilled in you. Apologise to your manager. Employees deserve a little respect and consideration.’
‘You swine!’ she sobbed. ‘It would serve you right if I did leave you!’
She fled upstairs, almost toppling the vacuum cleaner on the landing. The crash of the bedroom door reverberated through the entire house as she flung herself across the bed.
A minute later the door swung wide.
‘I wish I’d never married you!’ she threw at him painfully.
‘And I’d like to know why you did. Was it one big ego trip? You didn’t marry me for any of the usual reasons. You don’t need security and you don’t want children. Couldn’t you resist the appeal of falling between the sheets with someone younger and more virile?’ he shot at her fiercely. ‘Am I that hot in bed?’
Her eyes stung. He towered over her where she lay. Tall and dark and very, very still. As he studied her prone body, an odd little chill ran over her. ‘I meant what I said a few days ago,’ he delivered harshly.
She was choking on a volatile mix of rage and savaged pride and pain. ‘You weren’t so particular last night!’
He dug a long-fingered hand into his pocket. A handful of notes fluttered down on the bed. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know the going rate,’ he said insolently softly. ‘But I wouldn’t want you to feel that I appreciated your beautiful body less than Maxwell. But then he wasn’t over-scrupulous, was he? Why the hell should I be?’
He flayed her skin from her bones and tore her heart from its moorings. She clashed sickly with glittering eyes that had not a shred of compassion. As she attempted to scramble off the bed, he caught her with powerful hands and pinned her flat. ‘This appears to be the only avenue of communication which you recognise,’ he intoned hardly. ‘And we are about to communicate.’
‘Don’t you dare!’ she gasped.
‘I thought the relationship between sex and money was the biggest addiction you had. But you made one cardinal error. I’m not for sale,’ he grated. ‘This is the last move in the game, Kitty. And it is mine. It’s too bad you’re not the shining prize I thought you were.’
With every harsh syllable he heaped humiliation on her. She shuddered, she bled from that final brutal indictment. He was rejecting her. That he could still desire her was merely another subtle and cruel way to weight the punishment. Rejection was an old friend to her. She had feared and anticipated it. Subconsciously she had been waiting for this moment, this torment from the beginning, and it was not within her power to fight those feelings.
But still her body burned when he touched her. It did not differentiate between anger and passion. He stormed her defences and she was too weak to deny him. The brilliance of a falling star blinded her and then there was nothing. Less than nothing. And she was lost somewhere in the terrifying emptiness that was swallowing her up.
She pretended to be asleep until he left. A bank-note lay crumpled beneath her rigid fingers as she raised herself. She crawled upright on hollow legs and all that drove her was an overpowering need to be gone before he returned. She threw a
few handfuls of clothes pell-mell into a single case.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ Jessie whispered from the doorway.
‘I’m leaving.’ Kitty’s voice sounded far away to her.
‘You’ve had an argument and his temper got the better of him, but whatever he said he won’t have meant it,’ Jessie argued in desperation. ‘He asked me if I knew about the estate. I think he was praying that it was all a misunderstanding. Why didn’t you tell him, Kitty? You’ve run up against that pride of his and he’s raw with it.’
Jessie’s voice was an intrusive drone in Kitty’s ears. She gave the older woman a blank look from dulled, dead eyes as she closed her case with trembling hands. She was adrift on a sea of all-encompassing pain. Jake had hurt her when she was at her most loving and giving. Jake despised her. Jake had shown her that she was nothing more than a body from which he could extract only a physical and transient fulfilment.
Jessie was still talking to her when she climbed into her car and she still wasn’t relating to a single thing she said. It was late evening before she arrived in London. Mrs Stuart accepted her arrival without comment. After fifteen years in Grant’s employment, his housekeeper had developed an almost robotic air of detachment to the various events that disturbed the peace of the household she ran so efficiently.
In the exquisitely furnished familiarity of her own suite of rooms, the rigid discipline Kitty had imposed on herself for hundreds of miles collapsed. But there was no release in tears. She was engulfed by a depression, blacker and more frightening than anything she had ever known. The following day passed without her noticing it. She didn’t eat from the trays that appeared and she didn’t sleep in her bed.
That evening Mrs Stuart came to speak to her. ‘Mr Maxwell has arranged for you to fly out to France tomorrow afternoon, Miss Colgan.’
Kitty frowned. ‘How did he know I was here?’
‘Mr Maxwell’s secretary telephoned this morning,’ Mrs Stuart divulged, neglecting to add that Becky had phoned every day at her employer’s request to find out whether or not Kitty had arrived.