Sinful Truths

by Anne Mather

  It wasn’t the whole truth, but it was sufficiently convincing for Mrs Reynolds to assure her that she’d have a word with Emily’s teacher and ask her to be especially vigilant with the child today.

  ‘Girls of that age can be overly anxious about these matters,’ she said, patting Isobel’s arm as she accompanied her to the door of her office. ‘I’m sure she’ll be all right. And do give Lady Hannah our best wishes for a speedy recovery, won’t you?’

  Isobel said she would, but as she left the school she couldn’t help taking a fleeting look up at Emily’s classroom. It didn’t reassure her to see her daughter standing at the window, watching her departure, and she continued on her way to work with a heavy heart.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  JAKE was trying to get his briefcase to close when his secretary came to stand in the open doorway to his office.

  ‘Pete’s just phoned to say you’ve got a visitor on her way up,’ she said, her lips twitching with what Jake suspected was wry humour, and he closed his eyes for a moment, wishing he’d left fifteen minutes ago.

  He had no doubts that he knew who it was. Since the phone call earlier he’d been half expecting Marcie to try to get in touch with him again, and it appeared he’d been right.

  ‘I assume Pete told her I was still here?’ he said, wondering why he hadn’t thought to warn the commissionaire that he didn’t have time to see any visitors, however tenacious they might be.

  Lucy Givens smiled. ‘Why wouldn’t he?’ she asked. ‘You can hardly refuse to see her, can you?’

  Jake scowled. ‘I could,’ he said, but he knew he wouldn’t. ‘I don’t suppose you—?’

  ‘Hey, I don’t even know her,’ said Lucy, raising both hands in a gesture of denial, and Jake sighed.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Like I said, she’s on her way up,’ said Lucy, with the familiarity of fifteen years experience. ‘Good luck!’

  Jake thought that was a little too close to the bone, even for Lucy, but she had already turned back into her cubicle. He dropped his briefcase onto his desk before following her.

  And was just in time to see the small figure who exited from the lift.

  ‘My God! It’s Emily,’ he said, looking down at Lucy, who had resumed her seat at her desk, with incredulous eyes. ‘Did you know?’

  ‘Pete said she’d said she was your daughter,’ admitted Lucy, getting up to scan the girl who was hovering uncertainly at the end of the room. ‘My God, she’s just a kid!’

  ‘What did you expect?’ exclaimed Jake, raking his nails over his scalp in sudden frustration. ‘Dammit, I’m not that old!’

  Lucy arched considering brows. ‘I guess not,’ she conceded. ‘I must say, you’ve kept her identity a secret.’

  Jake’s jaw compressed. The words She’s not my daughter stuck in his throat, but he couldn’t get them out. Not now. Not with Emily suddenly catching sight of him and heading purposefully in his direction. He couldn’t do that to her, to himself. For the moment he had to let it stand and, suppressing an oath, he went to meet her.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, a little nervously, and for the first time he wondered how she’d got here, how she’d known where to find him. Surely Isobel hadn’t told her, hadn’t sent her? Not after what had happened the night before.

  ‘Hi,’ he said in return and, realising they were attracting far too much attention from the rest of his staff, gestured behind him. ‘D’you want to come into my office?’

  ‘Mmm—yes, please.’

  Emily was remarkably eager, and Jake thought how different she was this afternoon from the way she’d behaved the previous day. Had something happened? he wondered. Had Isobel explained why they were no longer together?

  Lucy smiled at the girl as they passed her desk, and Jake was forced to introduce them. ‘Um, this is my secretary, Lucy Givens,’ he said awkwardly. ‘Lucy, this is Emily—’

  ‘McCabe,’ finished the girl proudly. ‘Emily McCabe.’ She held out her hand. ‘How do you do? I’m pleased to meet you.’

  ‘Likewise,’ murmured Lucy, with a covert glance at her employer. ‘Is this your first visit to the office, Emily?’

  ‘Yes.’ Emily was amazingly self-composed, considering the circumstances, and Jake realised he’d been too ambitious in thinking Isobel might have told her the truth. ‘But it’s nice, isn’t it? And big. Really big!’

  ‘We like it.’

  Lucy pulled a wry face at Jake and, deciding it was time to end this exchange, he ushered Emily ahead of him into the large corner office he occupied.

  Then, glancing over his shoulder, he said, ‘You’d better call Howard and tell him I won’t be needing the helicopter for another—’ he consulted his watch ‘—for another half-hour at least.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Lucy spoke demurely enough, but he could tell she was enjoying his discomfort. It wasn’t every day she had something so juicy to gossip about, and the arrival of a hitherto unknown daughter was certainly that.

  He was tempted to tell her to keep her mouth shut, but it would have been a wasted effort. Emily’s arrival had been noticed by too many people for him to even imagine he could keep it a secret. Consequently, he was feeling justifiably harried when he closed the door and found Emily looking round his office with a decidedly proprietary air. She was still wearing her school uniform, but she’d dropped her haversack onto the floor. She evidently felt she had a right to be there, and his initial reaction was to swiftly disabuse her of that belief.

  But then she turned to look at him, her eyes suspiciously bright and swimming with unshed tears, and his resentment faltered. However confident she’d seemed in front of Lucy, coming here had evidently taken a lot of guts, and she was having a struggle now in holding on to her composure.

  ‘You—you don’t mind me coming, do you?’ she asked unsteadily, and Jake found he hadn’t the heart to be angry with her.

  ‘I—does your mother know where you are?’ he said instead, avoiding a direct answer, and she sighed.

  ‘No.’

  Jake frowned. ‘Then won’t she be worried about you?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Emily moved to look out of the windows. ‘We’re very high up, aren’t we?’

  ‘Twenty floors,’ agreed Jake. ‘But you know that. You came up in the lift.’

  ‘Yes.’ Emily seemed to realise something more was expected of her and she turned round again. ‘Mummy won’t miss me until she gets home from work.’

  ‘Which is when?’

  ‘Five o’clock.’ Emily shrugged. ‘Or thereabouts. Sometimes she’s early; sometimes she’s late.’

  ‘How late?’

  ‘Half-past five. It was six o’clock once, but that was because a client was late getting to the property.’

  Jake could feel himself getting annoyed again. But not with Emily this time. Dear heaven, didn’t Isobel know Emily was too young to be a latchkey kid? Why the hell didn’t she employ a childminder for a couple of hours in the afternoon? A neighbour would do. Just someone to make sure Emily didn’t get into mischief in her absence.

  Like coming here!

  ‘Okay,’ he said, realising this was something he would have to take up with Isobel. He indicated a grouping of armchairs and a low-backed sofa in the corner. ‘Why don’t you sit down and tell me why you’ve come?’

  Emily hesitated. ‘I think you know why I’ve come,’ she said, making no attempt to do as he’d suggested. ‘I want to talk to you about Mummy.’

  Jake’s eyes widened. Mummy! Yeah, right.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, moving to the desk and propping his hips against the polished granite. ‘What about your mother?’

  Emily bit her lip. Then, wrapping her arms about her midriff, she said quickly, ‘I know why you’re not together any more.’

  Jake’s brows descended. ‘You do?’ he said, trying not to show his astonishment, and Emily nodded.

  ‘Yes. She told me. She said she’d done something—I suppose it must have been really b
ad—and you wouldn’t forgive her.’ She licked her lips. ‘But she’s sorry; I know she is. Mummy doesn’t do things to hurt people. You ask Granny.’

  Jake’s shoulders sagged. ‘And that’s why you came all this way?’

  ‘Mmm.’ Emily’s eyes were still too bright, but there was a definite hint of expectation in her expression. She sniffed, rubbing her nose with a nervous finger. ‘I wanted to ask you to forgive her. For me.’ She took a beat. ‘I want us to be a family again.’

  Bloody hell!

  Jake wondered if he was being naïve in thinking Isobel hadn’t put this idea into her head. Emily was ten years old, for pity’s sake. How the hell had she known where to find him if her mother hadn’t told her? And how had she got here? Emily’s school was on the other side of town.

  ‘Look,’ he said, desperately searching for a way to salvage this. ‘I don’t—that is—’ Her eyes, those luminous blue eyes, gazed into his and he was defeated. ‘What—how—how did you know where I worked?’ he finished lamely, and Emily’s smile briefly appeared.

  ‘I looked you up in the telephone directory at school,’ she said proudly. ‘McCabe Tectonics. That’s what you call your company, don’t you? It was easy to find.’

  Jake blew out a breath. ‘And how did you get here? Did you take a cab?’

  ‘A cab?’ Emily looked puzzled for a moment. ‘Oh, you mean a mini-cab,’ she said, understanding. ‘Heavens, no. I couldn’t afford a mini-cab. I caught a bus.’

  ‘A bus!’ Despite his affirmation that Emily was not his daughter—and therefore not his responsibility—Jake was horrified. The idea of her leaving school and catching a bus across town was bad enough, but no one had known what she intended to do. No one had known where she was going. And if, by some means Jake didn’t even want to contemplate, she’d disappeared, no one would have been any the wiser.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Emily assured him, evidently picking up on his consternation. ‘I catch the bus home from school every afternoon.’

  ‘And that’s what? Three stops?’ Jake’s voice was curt, but he couldn’t help it. ‘Dammit, Emily, you don’t go traipsing around town without telling anyone what you’re doing. What if you’d been—?’ He broke off, amending his words. ‘What if you’d been—kidnapped?’

  ‘Because I’m your daughter, you mean?’

  Emily was evidently considering this and, losing patience with both himself and her, Jake pushed away from the desk and strode towards the door.

  Yanking it open, he confronted a startled Lucy, who was talking on the phone. She hung up at once, however, adding to his sense of frustration, and his tone lacked any of its usual humour when he said, ‘Cancel my trip to Brussels, will you? Get onto Helmut Leitnich and offer him my apologies. Tell him we’ll have to reschedule the meeting for next week.’

  Lucy, whose face was a little pink now, nodded energetically. ‘Yes, Jake.’

  ‘Oh, and tell Pete I’ll need my car in about fifteen minutes. After you’ve brought us coffee and orange juice—right?’

  Lucy got to her feet. ‘Coffee and orange juice,’ she echoed. ‘Got it.’

  ‘Good.’ Jake paused. And then, because he refused to let her think that she was making a fool of him, too, he added brusquely, ‘And if I find out you’ve been prattling about this to all and sundry, you’d better start looking for another job!’

  Isobel saw the sleek black Porsche parked a few yards down from number twenty-three as she walked home.

  She was tired, and anxious, and she wouldn’t have noticed the car at all if it hadn’t looked so familiar. It was similar to Jake’s car, and she wondered which of her neighbours had fallen in love with it. It looked in excellent condition. Its paintwork was immaculate, its alloy wheels gleaming like new. Even its number plate was—the same!

  And that was when she started to panic.

  She ran the last few yards to her gate, fumbling in her bag for her keys as she went up the steps to the front door. But the door opened as she reached it, proving that someone had been watching for her approach. She took the stairs more quickly than she would have thought possible in her present depressed condition.

  All thoughts about her mother, about what the doctor had told her when she’d rushed to the hospital in her lunch hour, were forgotten as she reached her door. What was Jake doing here? What had he been saying to Emily? Had he decided to endorse last night’s revelations with a more precise version of her shortcomings? To prove to the child once and for all that he wanted no part of her, of either of them?

  Emily opened the door before she could use her key, but there was no sign of any distress in her expression. On the contrary, Isobel thought she looked a little guilty, as if she’d been doing something she shouldn’t. And for the first time Isobel wondered if Jake’s car being in the street outside might just be a coincidence.

  It didn’t last long. ‘Daddy’s here,’ Emily announced, with what sounded like unnecessary haste. ‘He brought me home.’

  ‘He did?’

  Isobel was confused. She moved into the hall, allowing the door to close behind her, unbuttoning her coat with fingers that were not quite steady.

  ‘You’d better tell your mother where I brought you home from,’ remarked Jake laconically, coming to prop his shoulder against the drawing room doorway, and Isobel looked up to find her husband regarding her with enigmatic eyes.

  ‘Where you brought her home from?’ she echoed blankly, dropping her coat onto the chest that stood beneath an antique mirror and turning to look at her daughter again. ‘I don’t understand—’

  Emily hunched her shoulders. ‘He brought me home from the office,’ she said with sulky emphasis, and Isobel’s eyes widened in dismay.

  ‘You—you went to—to his office?’ she asked, realising that although she’d thought things couldn’t get any worse they already had. ‘Oh, Em…’

  ‘It’s no big deal,’ muttered Emily. ‘Why shouldn’t I go to his office? Other girls do.’

  ‘I don’t care what other girls do,’ said Isobel, dreading to think what Jake must have thought. ‘Oh, Em, don’t you think I have enough to worry about without you creating more problems?’

  ‘What problems?’

  Jake had straightened away from the door, and now Isobel permitted herself to look his way. Until then she’d barely noticed what he was wearing, but now she saw how formally dressed he was. The narrow trousers of his charcoal suit outlined the powerful length of his legs, and beneath the double-breasted jacket a black turtleneck sweater was his concession to a shirt.

  As always, he looked dangerously good to her, and she made a play of replacing her keys in her handbag to give herself time to construct her answer. ‘Oh—you know,’ she said, wishing he would move out of the doorway and give her a little space. ‘This and that.’

  ‘Granny’s in hospital again,’ put in Emily, evidently eager to say anything to divert their attention from her misdoings, and Jake’s brows descended.

  ‘She is?’ he said, looking at Isobel through lashes that were absurdly long for a man. ‘You didn’t tell me that.’

  ‘When have I had the chance to tell you anything?’ Isobel countered and, growing tired of the impasse, eased her way past him to head down the hall.

  As she’d half expected he followed her, with Emily not far behind. ‘This is why you were so late last night,’ he said flatly. ‘I should have asked.’

  ‘It’s not your problem,’ replied Isobel, tossing her handbag onto the counter and checking that the kettle was full. ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Not long.’ Jake glanced behind him. ‘Why don’t you go and do your homework, Emily?’ he suggested, his tone denying any argument. ‘I need to speak to your mother.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Privately,’ he added warningly. ‘I think you’ve pushed your luck far enough for one day, don’t you?’

  Emily pursed her lips. ‘You will tell me when you’re leaving, won’t you? So I can say goodb
ye?’

  Jake heaved a sigh. ‘If you like.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Emily grinned and lifted her hand, and almost automatically, it seemed, she and Jake exchanged a high five. Then, with an appealing look at her mother, she scooted off to her bedroom, and Isobel and Jake were left alone.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Isobel said at once, wondering if she would ever be in a position where she didn’t have to apologise to this man. ‘I had no idea Em might—that is, she had no right to come to your office. I hope she didn’t cause a problem for you.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Jake was sardonic, but unlike the night before he didn’t exploit his advantage. ‘Hey, they’re all wondering where I’ve been keeping my daughter all these years. No sweat!’

  Isobel’s lips parted. ‘You told them she was your daughter?’ she asked in an awed voice, and Jake’s mouth thinned.

  ‘I didn’t tell them anything,’ he corrected her drily. ‘I didn’t have to.’ Then, when she turned back to fumble with the tea caddy, he added, ‘How is the old girl, anyway? Still calling down the hounds of Hades on my head, right? Funny, I’d have thought she’d break out the Jack Daniels when we split up. But she still puts the knife in any chance she gets.’

  Isobel turned to look at him, her brows drawing together. ‘You still see her?’

  ‘From time to time,’ agreed Jake, lifting a dismissive shoulder. ‘When she needs some repairs to that old ruin she calls her home.’

  Isobel was stunned. ‘She never said a word to me.’

  ‘Why would she?’ Jake shrugged. ‘It suits her very well to keep you and me apart. I think she’s afraid I might forgive you for sleeping with Mallory. She puts up with me bankrolling her, but she wouldn’t like to see us get back together.’

  Isobel’s fingers trembled as she lifted the kettle. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said, her hand shaking so much that she splashed hot water over her wrist. ‘Oh, damn,’ she mumbled, the pain of the scalding water on top of everything else bringing tears to her eyes. ‘She wouldn’t do that. Not without telling me. She—she has too much pride.’