by Penny Jordan
Sex had been the panacea she had used, or tried to use, to blot out the past—until the morning she had woken up and realised that she would far rather be sleeping alone than with the man beside her… that sex, like any other crutch, worked only as long as you allowed yourself to believe that it would, and that in the end it was far better to face up to the harsh realities of life and the pain they brought without any crutches at all; that sex on its own, while physically pleasurable, was emotionally barren, and, ultimately, that it was something she did as an act of destruction against herself, masking that fact in the illusion that she was doing it simply for its physical pleasure.
It had taken many solitary hours of painful self-analysis for her to realise this, to realise that what she was doing was punishing herself, hurting herself, destroying herself.
That had been over six years ago, and yet still the gossip columns accredited her with an ever-changing list of lovers, while in fact… while in fact there had been none for two years, and even before that… even before that there had been far less than the world seemed to assume.
But those men that there had been had wanted her, some of them almost to the point of insanity… Unlike this man, she reflected, watching as Daniel came towards her.
He hadn't really changed; only matured, grown harder, shrewder. The assessing grey eyes were still the same, seeing far more than one wanted them to see, the handshake just as determinedly firm, the mouth still disconcertingly passionate, even when it was smiling with the cool, watchful smile he was giving her.
'Daniel… It was good of you to come at such short notice.'
She smiled back at him, the distant, professional smile she used to warn off those clients who dared to presume that she was available as a woman as well as a professional muralist.
'As I recall, you didn't give me much option.'
His voice had changed, deepened, steadied, become more measured… perhaps like the man himself?
He was looking, Sage noticed, at her mother's desk.
'Good piece,' he commented, eyeing it thoughtfully.
'I believe so, although I'm afraid I'm not very knowledgeable about antiques. My mother picked it up at a sale in Ireland. She was fortunate enough to have the wisdom to pick up quite a lot of old stuff that way in the fifties when no one wanted to be seen dead with anything over six months old, and a lot of old houses were being pulled down.'
Daniel smiled to himself at the way she described what were no doubt priceless antiques as a lot of old stuff. He had initially been slightly taken aback when he was shown into this room and discovered Sage standing there, dressed like the very toughest type of American female executive, or, at least, her own very feminised and unique version of that.
He wondered obliquely if she had chosen the silk shirt deliberately because of the way it emphasised her breasts, and then dismissed the idea as unfair.
As well as he had known her—and he had considered he had known her well in the old days, despite that final debacle—he could never have accused her of being deliberately sexually provocative. She had never had any need.
He wondered if it was true, as he had heard recently on the grapevine, that she had become virtually celibate. Quite a turn-around after the wild years of changing her lovers almost as frequently as she changed her clothes, if it was true, but then she had always had that rather unexpected core of inner purity about her.
He remembered how she had once rounded on Scott when he had idly suggested trying some of the hallucinatory drugs so fashionable among some of the undergraduate set… How she had heatedly and graphically described to him the potential hazards of such a course. He personally hadn't done drugs in those days, and had never felt the need to since, but it had struck him quite forcibly at the time that she could potentially become a woman of strong character and resolve… that once her mind was set to a course no amount of peer pressure or any other kind of pressure was likely to change it. And if she had become celibate, well, she had certainly been running well ahead of the field.
'You said there was something you wanted to discuss with me,' Daniel reminded her as Sage waved him into a chair. 'Something too urgent to wait.'
'Yes. I've asked Jenny to bring us some tea, although if you'd prefer coffee…'
In the old days he had always drunk coffee, only coffee, and now, listening to her dulcet offer, looking into her guarded green eyes, he smiled an equally crocodile smile and shook his head.
'Tea's fine. Like everyone else, I've probably become over-diet-conscious these days. I found that the threat of suffering a bout of caffeine poisoning effectively had me switching to tea.'
As Sage turned her back on him he heard her drawling mockingly, 'My God, how the mighty are fallen with a vengeance. Is this really the hard man of the Welsh hills, afraid to drink a cup of coffee in case it over-excites his adrenalin flow?'
Daniel refused to rise to the bait, simply saying with false gentleness, 'Oh, I think we're all far more health-conscious these days, don't you?'
If she picked up the underlying taunt, it didn't show. The colour which had once come so swiftly and betrayingly to her pale skin had somehow become controlled over the years, only the faintest glimmer of something that could have either been anger or amusement glinting momentarily in the green eyes as she turned back to him.
'I expect you know that as far as the committee is concerned I've had to step into my mother's shoes at rather short notice,' she told him, completely changing the subject. 'Initially I didn't have much opportunity to do any research—'
'No? Which reminds me, how is your mother?'
He hid his smile as her dark eyebrows rose in aloof surprise.
'Holding her own,' Sage told him dismissively, her tone implying that he had no right, no right at all to dare to assume such familiarity with her family. Once, even after knowing that he was Robert's son and not John Ryan's, the snub would have angered him, brushing too roughly over very sensitive areas of his psyche, but now he had both the maturity and the wit to smile inwardly at it.
His placid amusement niggled at Sage; for a moment she forgot that he was her adversary and dangerous and reacted to his infuriating male arrogance in much the same way she might have reacted once to David, challenging him angrily, 'I didn't realise you knew my mother.'
The moment the words were said she regretted them; of course he didn't know her mother, and in underlining that fact she was behaving not as the woman of sophistication and assurance she wanted him to see but as the child they both knew she had once been.
However, to her astonishment, instead of acknowledging the truth of her remark he said, 'Well, I can't claim to know her. I suspect very few people can do that—on the one occasion we did meet she struck me as a very complex lady indeed.'
Sage felt her mouth start to drop open. Before she could close it she saw that Daniel was looking at her and smiling.
'Catching flies, Sage?' he teased her.
Angrily she snapped her lips together.
'I met your mother when news of the motorway first became public. She attended the initial open meeting— I was there as well.'.
What he didn't tell her was that her mother had deliberately sought him out, not because of his role as chairman of the company which would be constructing their section of the motorway, but because she had recognised his name, recognised it and remembered it as belonging, as she explained to him, to the young man who had telephoned several times asking for news as to Sage's health and well-being in those long dark months after Sage had lost Scott.
They had had a long talk together, he and Sage's mother, and afterwards he felt he had come closer to understanding much about Sage that had puzzled him before.
Angry with herself, Sage turned away from him. Why on earth hadn't she thought of that, that he might have met her mother in her capacity as chairperson of the local committee? Why was she allowing her thoughts to drift back into the past, and on to a personal level, the kind of personal level
which meant she was digging pits for her own unwary feet?
'Yes… I'm afraid I'd forgotten what an important person you are these days,' she responded tartly. 'Chairman of a public company… and managing director of a small subsidiary one.'
'Mm…' Daniel agreed, not sure where her conversation was leading, but convinced suddenly that she was about to get to the crux of why she had insisted on this meeting.
'You don't deny, then, that you are the managing director of Hever Homes?' Sage pressed.
Daniel stared at her and then shrugged his shoulders. 'Is there any reason why I should?'
'I don't know,' Sage told him smoothly… as smooth as a snake before it strikes, Daniel reflected, watching her, fascinated by the way her moods were reflected in the green depths of her eyes. Here was a woman who, no matter how hard she tried, would never be able to totally disguise her feelings… at least not with those who knew her.
Sharply and uncomfortably it struck him that he knew her far too intimately and in far too much detail for someone who had supposedly put all thought of her out of his life fifteen years ago. He also wondered why on earth it was, when he knew damn well that she had had countless numbers of lovers, that she should have such an air of fragility and vulnerability. He hadn't missed the way, when he had first walked into the room, she had backed off from him. Not in the way of someone arrogantly infuriated that another should dare to infiltrate their personal space, but like someone threatened and made nervous by the close proximity of another human being of the opposite sex.
That had intrigued and puzzled him, especially when it had been done so quickly and so instinctively that it had been completely free of any artifice.
She was a bundle of contradictions, a child wearing the mask of a sophisticate. A wanton who loved sex for sex's sake according to rumour, and yet at the same time a woman who stepped back out of reach of a man's touch with the immediacy of a timid virgin. And he knew she wasn't that. Had she thought of Scott that first time, ached for Scott with all of that intensely passionate nature of hers? Had she gone home to her solitary bed and lain there imagining, pretending that the man who had taken her maidenhead had been her precious and too dearly loved Scott?
They were interrupted briefly when Jenny came in with the tea tray, and then quickly withdrew.
Sage poured his tea with the same stylish grace with which she did everything, and yet there was also a hesitancy about her movements, a momentary clumsiness almost that made him reach out instinctively to steady the hand that held the teapot.
The moment his fingers closed on her wrist he felt their tension. His thumb had accidentally rested against the pulse in her wrist and now it lingered there, feeling its too fast beat, as she demanded breathlessly, 'Don't touch me!'
Just for a moment he looked steadily at her and saw in her eyes what she was too proud to try to conceal-that she remembered as faultlessly as he did himself a time when she had asked him for just the opposite.
He released her wrist slowly, knowing that long after he had left her the scent of her would still be clinging to his skin from that brief touch.
'What is it you wanted to say to me, Sage?'
'It's this,' she told him, putting down the teapot, not trusting herself to pick up the cup and hand it to him, but instead indicating to him which cup was his and forcing herself to try to appear in control of a situation which was fast escalating into something way, way beyond that control.
'I happen to have found out that you, in the name of your company Hever Homes, have bought the Old Hall and its ten acres of land, no doubt intending to develop that land and turn it into a shoddy neo-Georgian housing estate, or some such thing,' she told him scornfully, 'and in the process of so doing making a very substantial profit for yourself. You bought that land before the news of the planned route for the new motorway became public knowledge. You therefore bought it with privileged information, didn't you? I wonder how it would look in the papers if it became known that a chairman who, as the Press are so fond of telling us, prides himself on his honesty and his moral strength should have used such privileged information for his own gain… and in fact should have bought that land and the house standing on it almost by fraud—by telling its previous owner that he would keep the house intact and allow nothing to destroy it.'
Daniel stared at her, sipped his tea thoughtfully and then put down his cup and saucer, while Sage held her breath, waiting for him to retaliate, to lose his temper, to throw her accusations back in her face.
Instead he simply said calmly, 'You have been busy, haven't you? And if I don't agree to…? What is it exactly you want me to do, Sage?'
Now it was her turn to stare. She had expected more from him. Rage, sarcasm, contempt for the tactics she had used. Anything other than this cool calm.
It took her several minutes to realise that he was waiting for her to speak. When she did she discovered that the pitch of her voice was slightly husky and uncertain… that she sounded more like someone suing for favours than a victor stating terms to the vanquished.
'I want you… or rather Cavanagh Construction, to pull out of the motorway contract.'
Even now he remained calm. 'To what purpose? I mean, is this a personal vendetta, payment for past mistakes…' he paused and watched her '… or does it have some other more altruistic purpose?'
For the first time that evening he saw the scarlet colour run up under her skin. He almost felt sorry for her as he watched her and saw her change before his eyes from capable businesswoman to insecure girl.
She was thirty-four years old and her skin was still as fine and fair as it had been at nineteen. He badly wanted to reach out and touch it, to see if it felt as smooth and warm, to see if it tasted—if she tasted—the way he still imagined she would. He closed his eyes and immediately wished he hadn't as he was visited by fifteen-year-old visions of her body unclothed, of her arms held out towards him.
'How dare you suggest there is anything personal in this? Do you really think I'm stupid enough to harbour grudges, or even that what happened between us is so important to me any more? It's the road I'm concerned with here, Daniel, and it wouldn't matter a damn to me whether I knew you or not. In fact I'd prefer it if you were a stranger to me. I may not be my mother—I don't have her skills, her gifts—but I damn well will do anything I can to carry on her work.
'When I first came back I told myself it was stupid to make such a fuss about a road. What did it matter where it went? It had to go somewhere—someone's back garden had to be a little spoilt, someone's fields had to be sacrificed. Why not the villagers', here? But then I saw what it was really going to do, learned how people really felt about it.
'This isn't a dead dormitory village filled with migrants from London, weekend country-dwellers… it's a working village with not just a past but a future as well, a future that the people here want for their children and their children's children; and they don't want their lives cut in half by a motorway that could easily be rerouted to go right round their homes instead of straight through the middle of them.
'My mother must have had some plan of action in mind. She was in London the day of the accident. Who knows whom she might have been going to see? She had many important contacts… I have to buy time, time for her to get better, to take over. Time—that's the only thing I can do here for her, and the only way I can buy that time is through you. It's down to you. Withdraw from the contract and I'll keep quiet about the land.' Her lips curled. 'Oh, that doesn't mean I approve of what you're doing—I don't, I think it's despicable.'
She came to a full stop, disgusted to find that her body was trembling as well as her voice.
During her tirade she had got up and started pacing the room.
Now Daniel stared at her. She could read nothing in his face… see nothing but cool indifference in the hard implacability of his eyes.
'You intend to blackmail me into dropping out of the contract, is that it?' he asked her coolly.
Blackmail. The sound of the word made her squirm inwardly, made her feel guilty, unclean somehow.
'You can call it blackmail if you wish,' she told him haughtily. 'I call it using whatever advantages I can. After all, I'm not the one who promised a sick old lady that I'd take care of her family home, that I'd restore it and live in it.'
'No… No, you aren't, are you?' Daniel said heavily, standing up so abruptly that his movement startled her.
He was coming towards her and instinctively she backed off, until she saw the way he smiled at her reaction.
Damn the man. What did he think he was doing? She was no frail old lady to be intimidated and bullied.
'Well?' she demanded aggressively.
'I need time to think this over…'
Sage frowned. This was a reaction she hadn't expected. She had anticipated an immediate yes or no, a fierce rage of temper, some brutal accusation—perhaps even a moment's physical violence, or at least the threat of it, but not this cool, unreadable demand for time, and instinctively she suspected it, watching him warily.
'How long?'
'Two days. I'll give you your answer in two days' time.'
She wanted to argue, to press him for an immediate decision, but something held her back, an instinct that she held on to, silently nodding in bitter acceptance of his terms, knowing as she did so that in some sinister way he had subtly managed to wrench control of the situation away from her and in to his own hands.
Although she badly longed for the arrogance to summon Jenny to escort him to the front door, she knew she just could not do it. For one thing she wouldn't have put it past him to have simply walked out without waiting for Jenny to appear; for another… for another it went against everything her mother had taught her, and even in this instance those were not teachings she could ignore.
And so, feeling foolish and oddly vulnerable, she walked with him to the front door and then opened it for him, saying curtly, 'Two days, Daniel. That's all. After that I go to the Press.'