by Penny Jordan
‘Ah, good, you are in… I was just leaving the office when I remembered that I hadn’t gone through those files with you. So I nipped back and got them. You’re not doing anything, are you…?’
‘No… No, I’m not doing anything,’ Deborah agreed, too surprised at seeing him to say anything else.
‘Good, that gives us the whole evening… without any interruptions.’
Warning bells rang suddenly in her brain. But it was too late; he was already inside…
* * *
‘Good… You’ve got a nice quick mind, Deborah. I like that,’ Ryan told her approvingly as he closed the last file.
He leaned back against the settee, stretching luxuriously, his chest wall lifting against his shirt as he breathed deeply. He had discarded his jacket earlier, pulling off his tie as he did so. Beneath the fine cotton of his shirt Deborah could see the dark shadow of his body hair. He was a man who exulted in his own sexuality, she recognised; a man who was vain of his masculinity… proud of it… arrogant about it.
Watching him now, as he stretched, she realised that it wasn’t only the muscles of his chest that were being revealed for her admiration, and it was hard work for her not to fall into the trap of hurriedly averting her eyes; of being flustered into pretending she had not seen the way the fine wool of his trousers had momentarily pulled against his thighs and crotch.
Somehow that brief outlining of his body had been more erotic than if he had had a full erection, and she suspected that he knew it… and had deliberately manufactured it? His action irritated her.
‘How about some. coffee?’ he suggested. For a moment Deborah was tempted to refuse, but decided she was probably over-reacting.
Tonight, apart from that one provocative stretch, he had behaved towards her as the perfect male mentor, praising, explaining, encouraging without any hint of sexuality in his manner towards her, until now…
He had even managed to make her laugh as well, to forget, even if only for a handful of seconds, her own unhappiness as he’d related a couple of incidents from his own early career. But now she felt uneasy and edgy and would really have preferred him to leave.
She had just finished making the coffee when she heard him coming into the kitchen. She tensed automatically, turning round to face him, and then saw that he was laughing at her.
‘Why so nervous?’ he asked her. ‘Not because you’re alone with me, surely? Is it me you’re really afraid of, Deborah… or is it yourself? It must be hard… being on your own…’
He was moving close to her, coming between her and the kitchen door, and in the constricted space of the small room there was nowhere for her to go.
As she tried to edge past him he caught hold of her, swinging her towards him as he told her, ‘Don’t play coy with me… You know how much I want you… and what you do to me… don’t you…?’
He was holding her waist with one hand and her wrist with the other and now, as he spoke, he took hold of her hand and carried it down his body, watching her as he held it against his erection, moving his body against her palm, blatantly enjoying what he was doing, and equally blatantly impervious to her shock.
‘Mmm… doesn’t that feel good?’ he asked her as he leaned forward. ‘Very, very good,’ he murmured against her ear as he wedged her between the worktop and his body, the hand which had been on her waist travelling up towards her breast. ‘Bigger that what you’re used to, is it?’ he laughed. ‘Well, you just wait until you’ve got it inside you… I promise you, you’ll…’ His hand was on her breast, his thumb pushing aside the fabric of her sweater.
Anger galvanised Deborah into life. She pushed hard against his chest and pulled fiercely away from him. ‘Ryan, stop it!’ she demanded. ‘You’ve got it all wrong; I’m not interested.’
‘No…?’ He was still smiling at her.
‘No,’ she told him evenly, adding quietly, ‘I’ve always made it clear to you that I’m not in the market for an affair… for sex. You know that…’
Determinedly she held his gaze while he looked at her.
‘I hope you know what you’re doing… just what you’re throwing away,’ Ryan told her silkily. ‘We could have been very good together, you and I… in bed and out of it…’
Deborah suppressed her anger. ‘Professionally, I value your advice and friendship, Ryan, but I won’t sleep with you,’ she told him steadily.
‘No? Isn’t it a bit too late to tell me that now…?’
‘Too late?’
‘Come on, Deborah, you’re an intelligent woman. You know the score…’
‘I thought I did,’ she agreed. ‘But now I’m not so sure.’ Her heart was beating heavily and painfully. Mark, it seemed, had been right after all, and yet she had been so sure that he was wrong, that she could handle Ryan, that she had made it clear to him that she was not prepared to trade sex for promotion. She had believed also that Ryan knew and accepted this.
‘Perhaps you’d better enlighten me, Ryan.’ She lifted her head and stared directly at him. ‘When you promoted me I believed that promotion was given on merit… professional merit…’
‘What promotion?’ he taunted her softly. ‘You haven’t got it yet.’
Deborah felt as though her whole body had been immersed in icy water, disbelief following shock.
‘You offered me that promotion on merit,’ she protested, but even as she said the words she was remembering the other women who had walked this road ahead of her.
‘Grow up, Deborah,’ Ryan advised her. ‘Nothing in this world comes for free. You should have learned that by now. After all, it’s a fine old tradition in business… the giving and taking of favours… in one way or another…
‘Networking, I believe they call it today,’ he told her. ‘The name is maybe different but the principle is the same. We all bargain for what we want with what we’ve got. That, my dear Deborah, is the way of the world.’
‘Are you saying that the only reason you offered me promotion was because you wanted to go to bed with me?’
She couldn’t quite keep the anger or the disillusionment out of her voice.
‘Not the only reason,’ Ryan told her with a smile. ‘I have my position within the partnership to consider, and if I hadn’t thought you were up to the job…’ He gave a small shrug. ‘The job was there; someone had to have it… why not give it to you and kill two birds with one stone…?’
‘By using promotion as a means of blackmailing me into sex?’
‘Blackmailing you?’ He almost looked hurt. He was over the loss of control, of superiority her rejection had caused, Deborah recognised now, and if anything he was almost enjoying taunting her, forcing her to acknowledge his power over her, professionally if not sexually. ‘Hardly. What I had in mind was something that would have been a mutual pleasure… a mutual benefit. Promoting you would simply have made it easier for us to be together… for me to show you how much I enjoyed and valued you…’
Deborah digested the words and their past tense in silence.
‘You’re a good accountant, in fact you’re a very good accountant, but it takes more than professional skill to succeed, and if I could give you a small piece of advice…
‘People-management, Deborah… you need to polish up the way you relate to your colleagues… I hate to say it, but there have been one or two comments about the way you seem to have let your new role distance you a little too much. Kim Wright mentioned to me the other day that you were rather off with her.’
Deborah bit down hard on the words about to spring to her lips.
Don’t drop down to his level, she warned herself, he was playing games with her now and he was enjoying it.
‘There is far more involved in running your own department than merely getting through the workload. Have you ever considered taking a staff-management course of any kind?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact I did one when I was with Crook’s,’ she told him quietly. ‘It was on my c. v.’
She wa
sn’t going to remind him that she had received a very high commendation from the tutor on the course for the work she had done; after all, no course could teach her or anyone else to become as expertly manipulative of other people as Ryan was. That was something you were born with… or without…
‘Pity…’ Ryan told her just before he turned away from her. ‘I was looking forward to having you as my… protégée…’
After he had gone, Deborah sat down in a chair and closed her eyes. Oh, Mark, she thought tiredly.
She had his phone number. He had left it and his address on the answerphone, the answerphone he had insisted she keep, just as he tried to insist that he would continue paying half the rent on the flat. She had taken the phone but refused the rent. After all, why should he pay for something he no longer wanted?
She looked at the telephone, and then, before she could give in to her own weakness, she got up and walked quickly away from it.
* * *
Mark frowned as he looked down at the papers in front of him. He was supposed to be studying the accounts of the French company Stephanie was planning to buy, not wasting his time doodling.
As he looked at the letter ‘D’ he had meticulously made out of a series of figures he grimaced and pushed the papers away.
The French firm was quite a large one, almost as large as Stephanie’s, although nothing like as profitable. A disastrous venture, trying to grow flowers for the perfume industry, had resulted in years of heavy losses, although, as Stephanie had said, potentially the scope for the company was very good. ‘It will extend the range of flowers I can supply and the growing season.’
‘And it could also leave you very vulnerable to a takeover bid,’ Mark had warned her. ‘In fact… it isn’t unheard of, you know, for a company to be lured into over-committing itself to make it more vulnerable for a takeover…’
‘My biggest rivals at the moment are Dutch and not French,’ Stephanie had told him.
He was due to fly out to France with her later in the month to see the French business at first hand.
‘I could do with you working for me full-time,’ she had commented half jokingly to him. ‘Not to handle the day-to-day wages and general finances—I have someone to do that—but to act more as a financial-adviser-cum-PA…’
She hadn’t mentioned it a second time and Mark hadn’t taken her up on it; it was the kind of work that would appeal to Deborah far more than it did to him—a real highflying job. Deborah… He looked down at his doodling again. The remarks Stephanie had made about her own ex-husband and her marriage had caught him on a raw nerve. Listening to her, he had immediately been filled with indignation on her behalf and contempt for the man, any man who could treat a woman who loved him so generously and genuinely that badly, who could hurt her so much simply to salve his ego.
And then it had come home to him that she might just as easily have been talking about him.
But the two situations were completely different. Stephanie had made no secret of the fact that she had loved and needed her husband, that the business success was something set apart from their relationship.
Deborah did not need him, and their personal and professional lives were so closely entwined that they could not be kept separate.
Stephanie had been compassionately aware of her husband’s feelings; Deborah had totally ignored his.
And yet the picture Stephanie had unwittingly drawn for him of her husband as a spoiled, selfish man behaving like a child, punishing his wife for his own failings, and the uncomfortable feelings it raised in his own conscience, would not go away.
He had had no option other than to do what he did… If he had stayed…
Was he more like Stephanie’s husband than he wanted to admit? Had he only been able to handle Deborah’s success just as long as it did not overtake his, as she had accused? He had denied that accusation vehemently and angrily then.
Too vehemently? Too angrily?
He closed the file he was studying and walked over to stand in front of the window of the small cottage he was renting.
It was one in a series of three just outside the town; originally farmworkers’ cottages, they had been modernised by the farmer who owned and rented them out.
Their peace and relative isolation suited Mark. He had never liked city life as much as Deborah had. A country practice like this one would suit him down to the ground, he admitted… and drive Deborah crazy with boredom.
His eyes burned drily in their sockets, his throat felt raw with emotion.
He might have stopped wanting her, but he sure as hell hadn’t stopped caring about her… loving her.
He glanced across at the telephone and then turned back to the window.
She probably wouldn’t be in anyway… There was no way Ryan would have lost any time in offering her comfort and solace.
A car went down the lane, its windows open, its radio blasting out pop music. Cher sang raunchily about wishing she could turn back time, and Mark closed his eyes against the pain he could feel welling up inside him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
‘RICHARD, do you remember that woman you operated on for breast cancer, the one whose operation you timed to coincide with her menstrual cycle? Well, there’s an article here about it in the Gazette.’
Richard put down his toast.
‘They’ve given it a full-page spread as well,’ Elizabeth told him. She passed the paper over to him. ‘They’re running a women’s health awareness campaign. It’s a very complimentary article, good publicity for the hospital…’
‘I doubt David will see it that way,’ Richard told her grimly. ‘He already thinks I’m past it; when he sees this he’ll probably try to get me certified. He hasn’t got any time for any kind of holistic approach. Samuel Tozer was complaining the other day because he’s refused to authorise funds for massage therapy for his geriatric patients. It’s a proven fact that massage provides emotional as well as physical benefits for elderly patients, but David virtually accused him of trying to run some kind of seedy massage parlour aimed at corrupting his patients. Samuel was livid.’
‘But the article is full of praise for your concern for your patients… It even contrasts the treatment your cancer patient received and her recovery with the experiences of other women locally. And it calls for lists to be made available to patients comparing operational success-rates—something you’ve always said they have the right to see. Has David said anything more to you about wanting you to retire…?’
‘Not directly, but there have been hints. It’s virtually common knowledge now that the Northern is the favourite to get the Accident Unit.’
Elizabeth watched him sympathetically.
‘When David sees this it will probably just confirm what he’s already decided—that I’m no longer fit to be in charge of a surgical unit!’
* * *
‘Brian, have you seen this article in the Gazette? What…?’
‘Yes, I have,’ Brian confirmed, adding enthusiastically, ‘It’s excellent publicity for us, David, and not just for us but for the Health Service as a whole. It shows just how innovative and forward-thinking we can be, and how open to exploring new ideas and acting on them…’
‘New ideas… deciding when to operate by the time of the month…?’
‘The story’s been picked up by a couple of the nationals already,’ Brian continued. ‘The Telegraph were particularly keen to run an article on it…’
‘What? That means the Minister’s bound to see it. Have you any idea what fools it’s going to make us look?’
‘Fools?’ Brian protested. ‘Some of the teaching hospitals are already considering running serious trials based on the premises that Richard used… That’s how seriously they’re taking it…’
‘We’ll be the laughing stock of the country,’ David continued, overriding Brian’s protest. ‘I warned you months ago, Brian, that Humphries was a liability, and I’m afraid I shall have to tell the Minister so. She’s
bound to raise the matter next week when she comes down.
‘If you want my advice, your wisest course would be to dissociate yourself as much as you possibly can from what’s happened. You’ll have to accept some responsibility, of course… It’s a pity you spoke to the Press without consulting me first. Still, it does mean that at least we’ve got a perfect excuse for getting rid of Humphries now. We could hardly do anything else. It’s bound to affect his credibility, people’s faith in him as a surgeon, and indirectly, through him, their faith in the General as a hospital.
‘The Northern have cut their staff down quite dramatically along with shortening their waiting lists by weeding out what turned out to be a good many unnecessary operations,’ David told him smoothly. ‘Christopher Jeffries agrees with me that patients who refuse to take proper care of their health and who in fact prejudice their own chances of recovery and therefore waste both the Authority’s time and money must be made to realise that they really cannot expect the Health Service to put right what amounts to self-inflicted damage.’
‘You can’t legislate against people like that,’ Brian protested. ‘It goes against the whole ethos of the Health Service…’
‘It’s for their own good,’ David contradicted him smoothly. ‘Smokers, drinkers—they need to realise that they are responsible for their own health problems. Now that is what I call forward-thinking… not some idiotic belief that the position of the moon affects a patient’s chances of recovery from an operation.’
Smokers… drinkers… what next? Brian wondered tiredly as he replaced the receiver. Drug addicts, suicide attempts… the elderly… would they be considered to be responsible for their own ill health and treatment refused them accordingly?
He sat back in his chair, appalled by the knowledge of what might potentially happen when human beings took it upon themselves to play God.
One rule for the rich, another for the poor. He had thought the Health Service had come into being to put an end to that.
Suddenly he felt very tired and very old.
* * *
‘I hope you didn’t mind… about my giving that interview to the Gazette, Hannah Jacobs told Richard hesitantly as he finished examining her. ‘Only it was Mr Hamilton who suggested it. He said that since I obviously felt so strongly about what you had done, the trouble you had taken, I should share it with other women… give them the opportunity to benefit as I had done; and then when the Gazette approached me I remembered what he’d said and gave them the interview…’