She sat up abruptly, letting her hair fall forward to veil her flushed face. 'My father is not well, Vince.'
'So Lloyd is beginning to feel the pinch, is he?' Vince snarled, then he laughed harshly, and the sound of his laughter made her body tense. 'Now he will begin to know how my father felt, and that's exactly what I have wanted to achieve.'
Cara winced inwardly and observed him through lowered lashes while he lit a cigarette and drew hard on it. There was anger in every movement he made, and it was etched deeply in his harsh profile when he turned from her. It frightened her to see him like this, and it hurt to know that there was nothing she could do about it.
'Why do you hate my father so much?' she asked, her hands clutching nervously at the sheet. 'What did he do?'
'Why don't you ask him,' came the harsh reply, and Cara's eyes followed him in despair as he walked around to his side of the bed.
'I'm asking you, Vince.'
Steel-grey eyes met hers beneath frowning, fair brows, and his jaw was so taut that the muscles jutted out on either side. She fully expected him to brush aside her query once again, but a tired look flashed across his rugged face, and he sat down heavily on the bed. He studied the tip of his cigarette for endless seconds as if he were trying to decide on something, then he drew hard on it once more, and crushed the remainder into the ashtray on the bedside cupboard.
'My father used to hire himself out as a subcontractor to larger companies,' he enlightened her at last on this painful subject, and she steeled herself in preparation for what she was about to hear. 'Eighteen years ago Lloyd hired my father to assist in the erection of the building which now houses the municipal employees. My father studied the plans and, when the material was being delivered to the sight, he told Lloyd that the steel reinforcement was insufficient for a building of that size and structure. Lloyd wouldn't listen to him. He insisted that the new quality steel would be quite sufficient in quantity and strength, and my father reluctantly bowed to his superior knowledge.' Vince's mouth twisted with derision as he met her steady glance. 'The building had barely reached the second floor level when a section of it collapsed under pressure. Two of my father's men were killed, and several were injured.'
'Oh, no!' the words were torn from Cara, and her hands covered her mouth as the horror of the incident hit her, but Vince was too engrossed in his thoughts and painful memories to hear her.
'Lloyd had a clever lawyer, and when the matter went to court he accused my father unjustly of negligence and several other things besides. My father was a simple, trusting man, but it was a case of his word against the written proof your father had in his possession that sufficient steel had been ordered,' Vince continued, and the bitterness in his voice was almost too much for her to bear. 'My father got off lightly when they took his past record into consideration, but the stigma of that incident clung to him and, as a result, no company would hire him. With his pride and his dignity shattered, and with his integrity continually questioned, my father gave up on life and shot himself.'
Cara went cold as if someone had poured a bucket of chilled water over her. She could understand, at last, the reason for Vince's desire for revenge, but what she could neither understand, not accept was the implication that her father had almost deliberately ruined Siegfried Steiner's career as well as his reputation. Something was dreadfully wrong, but she would not know what it was until she had spoken to her father and had persuaded him to relate his side of the incident to her.
'I was twenty at the time,' she heard Vince saying, 'and I was studying engineering, but the money in the bank was dwindling, and I had to find myself a job while I continued my studies. Harriet was fourteen at the time. She had ambitions of becoming a doctor, and I was determined that she would not be disappointed. 'I sold everything we possessed here in Murrayville, and rented a cheap flat in Johannesburg for myself and my sister. I attended lectures during the day, and at night I did anything from a steward at a restaurant to a road-house attendant. I needed every cent I could lay my hands on, and I spent most of my weekends doing private building and repairs jobs. Harriet also had her fair share of those hard times. She cooked and cleaned, and somehow managed to fit in time to attend to her studies.' His features twisted savagely and he lit another cigarette, blowing the smoke out of his nostrils like a furious animal. 'When I finally completed my studies I knew exactly what I was going to do. I worked for a while to save up enough money, and in the end I started my own company. I started small, but I literally clawed my way to the top of my profession. I was moving in the right circles and, when I heard rumours of the steel plant which was being planned for Murrayville, I knew that the moment I had been waiting for had arrived. The most important objective in my life was to break Lloyd as he had broken my father, and now I have succeeded.'
Cara sat there staring at him, her eyes brimming with tears, and a numbness spreading through her body. She had never been confronted with such bitterness before, and she wanted to reach out to comfort him, but she suppressed the desire knowing that, to Vince, it might seem as if she was offering herself once again in an attempt to save her father.
Her hand went out hesitantly to touch his arm, and she could feel the muscles grow taut beneath the towelling material of his robe. 'Vince, I'm sorry about your father, but are you sure there wasn't some mistake?'
'There was no mistake,' he snarled, brushing off her hand as if it were something obnoxious, and his eyes stabbed at her with a blazing fury in their depths. 'Your father was trying to make a packet out of the deal by using the absolute minimum of material and, if we hadn't all been so ignorant at the time, we could have fought and won the case.'
She lowered her gaze dismally and blinked away her tears. 'If what you say is true, then I can't blame you for feeling the way you do, but—'
'But what?' he rapped out the query when she faltered.
'The things you have said about my father don't ring true somehow,' she confessed, stretching her loyalty to the maximum. 'He may be weak in some ways, but I have always known him to be totally sincere, and painfully honest in business.'
'You have obviously been mistaken.'
Cara shook her head and gestured helplessly. 'There must be some dreadful misunderstanding.'
'There was no misunderstanding,' he contradicted harshly, getting to his feet and pacing the floor as if to rid himself of a burst of excess energy. 'Lloyd accused my father publicly of negligence, and in the building trade that amounts to the death sentence.'
The numbness began to leave her, but it made way for a new kind of torment. She was being torn in two by her loyalty to her father, and her loyalty to Vince which was born of a love he had no need of.
'I'm sorry about what happened, Vince, but to continue this vendetta against my father isn't going to bring yours back, or right the wrong that was done,' she pointed out.
'I know what I'm doing.'
'No, you don't!' She was angry now and, unconcerned about how much of her he could see through her flimsy night attire, she leapt out of bed and clutched at the sleeve of his robe to halt his furious pacing. 'You're being eaten up inside by hatred and the desire for revenge, and you can't live like that,' she argued desperately for his sake as well as her father's.
'I don't need a lecture from you about how I should and should not live my life,' he replied with a savagery that made her back a pace away from him. 'You want me to drop everything, and you want me to give your father a chance, but you can forget it. If Lloyd had once—just once—paused to give my father a chance when the odds were against him, then I might have considered giving him a chance now, but under the circumstances your father doesn't deserve it.'
Her tawny eyes, wide and pleading, met the chilling onslaught of his glance. She had a premonition of something yet to come, and she gestured in despair as she croaked: ''Please, Vince.'
'No way!' he snarled, walking away from her to crush the remainder of his cigarette into the ashtray. 'Forget it!'
He loosened the belt about his waist and shed his robe and, for a brief moment, she had a glimpse of his perfectly proportioned body before he got into bed and pulled the covers over him. He turned on to his side and switched off the light, and Cara stood there like a statue for several seconds before she realised that she was shivering with the cold.
She crawled into bed beside him and switched off her own light. She felt defeated. She had listened to everything he had told her, and she had tentatively tried to reason with him, but she should have known that nothing would dissuade him from what he was doing to her father. She lay staring into the darkness, her eyes filling with hot tears, and she had never felt more desolate in her life. They were sharing a bed for the first time without touching each other, and she could not decide at that moment which was worse; the vendetta he was carrying out against her father, or this invisible barrier which had suddenly risen between them?
She wanted to touch him; she wanted to feel his hard male body against her own, and she wanted the strength of his arms about her to assuage some of the fears storming through her, but the barrier between them was totally impregnable. She was being ridiculous and irrational, but the hot tears slid down her cheeks on to her pillow. She wept silently for all the things which could have been. If only Siegfried Steiner had not taken his own life. If only her father had not had a part in that fatal act. If only…! There were so many that she could not count them on her fingers, but she went on counting them over and over until she drifted into oblivion from sheer exhaustion.
Cara awoke during the night to find Vince lying with a heavy arm draped across her waist. She knew he had not touched her consciously, but she derived a certain comfort from it, and she drifted at last into a sound sleep.
Cara started the Saturday morning with a feeling of uneasiness which she could not shake off. It lingered on through that cold, bleak morning, and the atmosphere in the house merely intensified that premonition that something was about to happen. She went for a stroll in the garden when the sun burst through the clouds after lunch, and she walked about restlessly, lost in thought and oblivious of her immediate surroundings. There was a certain beauty even in the starkness of winter, but Cara was unaware of it. A rose bush, sheltered from the first winter frost by the widespread branches of an evergreen shrub, was bearing what would most likely be the last roses of that season, and their crimson petals provided that rather dreary section of the garden with a vivid splash of colour.
She did not see the roses; she saw only the dry leaves and twigs like a carpet beneath her feet, and the naked branches of the trees reaching up to the sky. Everything appeared to be dead, or in the process of dying, and that was exactly how Cara felt at that moment. She had been dying slowly since she had made the discovery that she was in love with Vince. He could never love her; he could never love anyone. There was room only for revenge in his heart, and that revenge was directed at the only other man Cara cared for deeply. She ought to hate Vince for what he was doing to her father, but she could not. Perhaps it was her misguided notion that, beneath his harsh exterior, there lurked a man who had once laughed often, and a man who could care very deeply if only he would allow himself to do so.
'Cara?' Harriet spoke directly behind her and, startled, she spun round almost irritably, but her irritation vanished when she glimpsed a plea in those eyes which were so very much like Vince's. 'May I walk with you?' Harriet asked hesitantly.
'If you wish,' Cara shrugged indifferently.
She had no desire for company at that moment, but the garden did not belong to her, and Harriet could walk where she pleased.
'I imagine you must dislike me almost as much as you dislike Vince at this moment,' Harriet remarked after they had strolled along in silence for several seconds, and Cara felt a little shiver of shock race through her.
'I don't dislike you, and I don't—' She bit her lips and gestured a little helplessly while she fought back the tears which seemed to leap so readily to her eyes. 'I don't dislike Vince, but I—I wish I knew of a way to ease this terrible desire for revenge he carries about with him,' she explained at length.
'The only thing which will ease his desire for revenge, I'm afraid, is to see your father completely shattered,' Harriet sighed, and she drew Cara into the summer house. They seated themselves on the wooden bench, and they were silent for some time before Harriet continued to speak. 'He wasn't always like this, Cara. He used to be fun, and gentle and caring, but our father's death hit him hard. He worked day and night most of the time to put me through school as well as university, and in the process he became the hard, unfeeling man he is today. Eight years ago he started the Steiner Engineering and Construction Company. He started with nothing, and it has taken sheer steely grit to build the company up to what it is today. He has made quite a few enemies in the process, and there are people who believe that to know him is to fear him, but I'm convinced that deep down inside of him he is still the good and caring brother I always knew.'
Harriet was not telling Cara something she did not know. She was, unknowingly, confirming part of what Vince had told Cara the night before, but Harriet was relating the past without the bitterness which had been so evident in Vince.
'I can only hope that hard outer crust will crack one day to release the old Vince,' Harriet concluded at length, and Cara silently echoed that wish.
She glanced briefly at Harriet and caught a glimpse of something in those grey eyes that made her feel uneasy. It was almost as if Harriet was pleading with her, and this awakened Cara's curiosity. 'What are you trying to tell me, Harriet?'
'I think you have the ability to bring about that change in Vince,' she said unexpectedly. 'I pride myself on being a good judge of character, and I detect in you that certain warmth, compassion and understanding that Vince needs so much at this moment.'
Cara stared at Harriet for a moment without knowing quite what to say, but it was despair that finally dictated the words that spilled from her lips. 'You are forgetting, perhaps, that I am David Lloyd's daughter.'
'All the more reason why I feel you are the one to heal the wounds of the past,' Harriet argued, but Cara could not forget the look on Vince's face that day at the cottage when she had questioned him about whether she was to be punished along with her father.
'You are David Lloyd's daughter, are you not,' he had replied scornfully, and Cara could not imagine that he would ever see her in any other light.
Jackson brought their conversation to an end by appearing at the entrance to the summerhouse, and he bowed respectfully towards Cara. 'Telephone for you, Madam.'
Cara felt a cold hand clutching at her heart as she thanked him and excused herself from Harriet. Every instinct within her was hammering out a message that put wings on her feet as she ran from the garden into the house, and she was breathless when she reached the telephone in the hall and snatched up the receiver.
'Hello, Cara Steiner speaking.'
'Cara!' Lilian Lloyd's voice was like a choked cry for help. 'It's your father!'
Those icy fingers clutching Cara's heart was now chilling the blood in her veins. 'What has happened?'
'He collapsed early this morning, and the doctor has him under sedation in the hospital,' her mother explained, and Cara's fear gave way to a white-hot rage.
'Where are you now?' she rapped out the question.
'I'm here at the hospital, and I—' There was silence for a moment while Lilian obviously tried to control her tears, then she added jerkily, 'I'm so worried, Cara.'
'I'll be there as soon as I can,' Cara assured her mother, and she slammed down the receiver a moment later.
Vince was to blame for this! She had seen her father crumbling under the pressure Vince had applied, and she would never forgive him if anything happened to her father. Never!
She stormed down the passage in an unaccustomed rage and burst into Vince's study to find him seated behind his desk with an open file in front of him.
He looked up
, and those cold eyes raked her from head to foot in a way which would have made her cringe if she had not been so furious. 'I suggest you knock next time before entering my study.'
'My father is ill in hospital,' she informed him coldly, hoping against her better judgment to see some sign of remorse. 'He collapsed early this morning, and he's under sedation.'
His rugged features remained impassive except for a slight narrowing of his eyes. 'That's no excuse for bursting in here without knocking.'
''Damn you, Vince!' she exploded, her face white, and her tawny eyes sparkling with fury. 'Because your father is dead, do you want my father dead as well?'
'What your father does with his life is his choice entirely,' he replied with a callous indifference that stirred a reckless desire in her to lash out at him and, throwing caution to the wind, she did so.
'Your father had a choice as well, Vince, and he chose to shoot himself rather than face up to his problems.'
'Shut up!' he hissed savagely, his face dark with fury, and he rose to his feet with an abruptness that almost toppled his chair.
It was as if a sealed door had suddenly opened up in front of Cara. She had, unwittingly, found the right key, and she was staring into that forbidden chamber with its shadows and its pain. I detect in you that certain warmth, compassion and understanding that Vince needs so much at this moment, Harriet's words came unbidden to her mind. At any other time she might have been overcome with compassion, but at that precise moment she was consumed with anger and a terrible fear for her father's life. The truth had come to her at last as her glance clashed with Vince's during that brief, frightening silence.
'That's what is eating you up inside, isn't it?' she heard herself voicing her incredible discovery. 'You don't hate my father as much as you despise your own for not facing up to his problems and fighting back.' An awful whiteness seeped beneath the skin along his hard jaw, and his lips drew away from his teeth as if he was about to pass a cutting remark, but she did not give him the opportunity. 'Well, I'm damned if I'll let you drive my father to the point where he will want to put a gun to his head,' she slammed home her convictions. 'My father will fight back against whatever barriers you may wish to lay in his path, and my mother and I will be behind him all the way.'
The Devil's Pawn Page 14