by Penny Jordan
As she listened to the jumbled staccato words Sarah fought down the wave of compassion making her own eyes moisten and her heart ache.
From what he wasn’t saying as much as from what he was, she was beginning to build up a clear picture of what must have happened. His parents were either separated or divorced; he had obviously lived with his mother and perhaps his grandmother as well in some other part of the country, and from what he had said it sounded as though he had lost them in a car accident and was now living with his father.A father who, it seemed, had never wanted him and who had perhaps only reluctantly accepted responsibility for him now. Poor child, no wonder he was so unhappy, no wonder he was running away, but, much as her heart ached for him, much as she sympathised with him, she had to find a way of discovering where he lived and who his father was.
‘So you’re going to find Mrs Richards, is that it?’ she hazarded, causing him to nod his head. ‘Where does she live? Is it far away?’
‘She lives in London,’ he told her importantly.
‘London; that’s a long way to go,’ Sarah commented sympathetically. ‘A very long way. Have you been walking for a long time?’
‘I left after breakfast,’ he told her immediately and innocently, causing Sarah a panic of guilt for the way she was deceiving him. But it was for his own good…his own protection. ‘I had to wait until he…my father had gone to work. Mrs Jacobs went out shopping. She told me not to go out of the garden. I don’t like her.’
Mrs Jacobs. Sarah bit her bottom lip. Surely she had heard Mrs Beattie mentioning a Mrs Jacobs who was one of her neighbours in the village? She had gained the impression that the two women were not good friends and that Sally’s cleaner heartily despised and disliked the other woman.
‘Did…did you leave your father a note?’ Sarah asked him.
He shook his head, his face settling into a stubborn mask.
‘He won’t care. He’ll be glad to see the back of me,’ he told her. ‘Mrs Jacobs says I’m a nuisance and that I cause too much dis…dis…’
‘Disruption?’ Sarah suggested. She suppressed a sigh as he nodded his head, plainly impressed by her mind-reading abilities. Much as she sympathised with him, she was going to have to get his address out of him and take him home.
Unpleasant though both Mrs Jacobs and his father sounded, she could see no obvious signs of any kind of physical or emotional abuse about him, and she was experienced enough to have recognised them had they been there. For all his fear and apprehension, he lacked the desperate silence, the smell of fear that seemed to emanate from such children.
But he was unhappy, desperately so, and she could not help wondering a little about his father, questioning what manner of man he was. She had the impression from what Robert had told her that his father saw him as a burden…a nuisance.
‘And that’s why you’re going to London…to find Mrs Richards.’
‘I’d rather live with her than with my father,’ Robert told her, tears filling his eyes as he repeated, ‘I don’t like him.’
Instinctively Sarah opened her arms to him, and he ran into them, his small body shaken by sobs as she held him, soothing him, comforting him. Poor baby, and he was still only a baby, for all his attempts to pretend otherwise.
Soon, when he had calmed down a little, she would try to coax him into agreeing to go home, but for the moment it was more important to win his confidence and comfort him than to question him, and so she let him cry, gently rocking him, while she smoothed his fair hair.
Absorbed in what she was doing, she missed the warning signs of the birds’ flight as an intruder disturbed them, so that her first intimation of his arrival was when the protective fronds of the willow were swept aside, and she looked up to see a very tall and very angry man standing glaring furiously at her.
‘Robert.’
The curt demand for the child’s attention gave away their relationship even before Robert started trembling against her, clinging on to her.
‘It’s all right, Robbie,’ she whispered, soothing him, anger darkening her own eyes at Robert’s father’s lack of sensitivity.
‘If you would kindly let go of my son…’
The words were a demand rather than a request, and immediately Sarah felt herself reacting against them, her already low opinion of him dropping several more notches as she reflected on his poor handling of the situation, and his apparent inability to see that his attitude was simply terrifying and upsetting his son.
‘You must be Robert’s father,’ she commented, forcing back her anger and trying to stand up. Not an easy feat with Robert still clinging to her, but somehow or other she managed it, automatically assuming her classroom manner, forgetting how inappropriately it went with her casual clothes and almost childish pony-tail and makeup-less face, until she saw how at first angrily and even contemptuously she was being observed.
‘Yes, I am,’ he agreed flatly. ‘But I’ve no idea who you are, or what you’re doing with my son. However, I’ll have you know that the police take a pretty dim view of child abduction.’
Abduction… Sarah sucked in a mouthful of air, too stunned by what he was implying to be able to respond verbally.
Robert was clinging even harder to her now, and she wasn’t sure which of them was shaking the most, Robert from fear or she from anger.
As she swallowed the air she had gulped she retaliated with some heat.
‘Yes, and they take an equally dim view of…of parental cruelty.’
‘Parental cruelty?’
He had started to walk towards them, and now he came to an abrupt halt. His skin was tanned but suddenly his face had lost all its colour. Not from shame or guilt, but from rage. She could see it glittering in his eyes. He had very, very pale blue eyes, like shards of ice, she had thought at first, but now suddenly they were burning so hot that she could almost feel the searing lick of that heat against her skin.
Unlike Robert, he wasn’t fair-haired but much darker, although she noticed that his thick dark hair was touched faintly with gold at the ends as though he had at some time or other spent a long, long time in a very hot climate.
Surprisingly, though, facially he was very like his son, or, rather, Robert was a miniature version of him. They had the same bone-structure, the same nose, the same mouth, but whereas in Robert that full bottom lip trembled with baby emotion and vulnerability, in his father it betokened a sensuality and sexuality which made Sarah itch to distance herself physically from him, her body alive to a sense of danger that went far deeper than any immediate and conscious awareness of his anger and irritation. She didn’t allow herself to ponder on this, though; she was far too concerned about Robert and his panic-stricken reaction to his father’s arrival on the scene to have the time to concentrate on her own atavistic awareness of his father as a man…no, not as a man…as a male…a hunting, arrogant, sexual male being to whom she was a natural form of prey.
‘Parental cruelty,’ he repeated grimly now, jerking her attention back in focus. ‘What the hell are you trying to say? What has Robert been telling you?’ he demanded.
Without making any move towards her, without either raising his voice or using any kind of aggressive force, he was nevertheless attempting to intimidate her, and she responded immediately to that attempted intimidation, raising herself to her full height, her chin firming, her eyes steely and cool as they held his gaze.
‘Robert hasn’t said anything,’ she told him not quite truthfully. ‘He was in far too distressed a state. He’s a very unhappy little boy,’ she added pointedly, adding, to reinforce the point, ‘He was on his way to Ludlow…to London.’
She saw the way the blood surged up under the other’s skin, and knew how much he hated being confronted with the truth. In other circumstances she might have felt sorry for him. He was wearing an expensive business suit, and she noticed that his hands were badly scratched, and his shoes covered in dust, as though he had pushed his way relentlessly down the narrow stream
-side path, desperately seeking his missing son. But motivated by what? Anger? She could certainly see that in his face, along with impatience and irritation, but what she could not see there was any love, any remorse, any guilt.
‘Come here, Robert,’he was demanding tersely now, frowning when his son refused to obey him. He was plainly unused to dealing with children, Sarah suspected, and, thinking of the child clinging piteously to her side, she said quietly,
‘Perhaps if I came back with you…?’
Immediately the tanned male face tightened in rejection, the blue eyes cold and biting as they studied her. She could see the refusal forming on his lips, but before he could speak Robert burst out frantically, ‘I won’t go back. I won’t go with you…I hate you…I hate you…and Mummy hated you too.’
He was crying again, tearing, racking sobs that, if they weren’t checked, could easily carry him into hysteria. Instinctively Sarah bent down and picked him up, lifting him in her arms, so that his face was buried in the hollow of her throat, his small arms wrapping fiercely round her as she rocked and soothed him.
As she talked quietly to him she heard his father cursing under his breath.
He shot back a cuff and glanced at his watch, and the sympathy she had started to feel for him fled as Sarah heard him say edgily, ‘That’s enough, Robert. Look, I’ve got a meeting in half an hour…’
He must have seen the contempt, the dislike that flashed through her eyes, Sarah recognised, because he stopped speaking, his mouth firming into a hard angry line before he told her acidly, ‘I’m a businessman as well as a father. I have a responsibility to my workforce as well as to my son. The outcome of an important new contract is in the balance here, and this meeting is a crucial one. Without it…well, let’s just say that without it I could have to let some of the workforce go. Why on earth he had to choose today of all days to play up like this… You do realise that Mrs Jacobs is out of her mind with worry, don’t you?’ he demanded of his son. ‘She had to ring me at work to tell me you’d gone missing, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that Ben saw you heading for the stream path…And as for you…’ he gave Sarah an angry, bitter look ‘…surely you realise that a child of his age, on his own, has to have left home without those responsible for him knowing where he is, and instead of encouraging him you could at least have attempted to take him home.’
His accusation took Sarah’s breath away, but before she could deny his statement he was speaking to his son again, reiterating curtly, ‘We’re going home, Robert.’
But, as Sarah had known would happen, Robert refused to let go of her, clinging desperately to her when his father tried to take hold of him.
It was, she knew, out of necessity and nothing else that the man was obliged to stand so close to her, close enough to put his arms around her as he tried to unwind Robert’s hands from behind her neck. She could smell the hot man scent of his skin, see the tiny pores of his face, dark where his beard would grow, his lashes a thick and enviably long fan against his skin as he frowned over his impossible task.
Uncomfortably aware of just how she was reacting to him, of the tiny female ripple of unexpected and unwanted response that jarred through her body, Sarah tried to step back from him, driven, as much by her need to put some distance between them as by her desire to help his son, into saying huskily, ‘Look, it would be much easier if I came back with you.’
She could see the refusal…the rejection…and his dislike in his eyes as they focused brilliantly on her. He was still far too close…far, far too close, she realised as she felt her breath stop in her throat, and her heart started to pound unevenly.
‘I’m not going back. I want to go and live with Mrs Richards,’ Robert was protesting, still clinging to her, adding piteously, ‘Don’t let him take me. I hate him.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake! Very well, then, you’d better come back with us. It’s this way.’
Some people had no sense of gratitude, Sarah reflected grimly as he turned on his heel, patently expecting her to follow, but to her surprise he stopped, lifting back the branches of the tree so that she could step through, and then picking up her rucksack before saying more quietly to Robert, ‘You’ve got two legs, Robert, and you’re far too heavy for…’
‘Sarah. Sarah Myers,’ Sarah supplied automatically for him.
‘…for Miss Myers to carry you all the way back to the house.’
‘Don’t want to walk,’ was Robert’s response, his bottom lip jutting out stubbornly as he turned his head and looked at his father. Sarah’s neck was wet from his tears and she felt a wave of tenderness and concern wash over her as she willed his acerbic parent to at least try to understand and to have some compassion for him.
‘Very well, then, if you won’t walk I’ll carry you.’
As she felt the way Robert shrank back from his father Sarah’s tender heart ached for the little boy.
‘Why don’t you show me the way, Robert?’ she suggested, gently putting him down but protectively keeping her own body between him and his father as she took hold of his hand.
As she turned her head she saw that her gesture had not been lost on Robert’s father. His mouth was curved into a line of bitter cynicism.
‘Quite the little mother, aren’t you?’ he goaded her grimly. ‘What is it about your sex that makes you so obsessively unable to behave with any kind of logic where children are concerned? Can’t you see that he’s—?’
‘That he’s what, Mr…?’ Sarah intervened furiously, challenging him.
He looked at her, frowning as though surprised by both her attack and her desire to know his name.
‘Gray. Gray Philips,’ he introduced himself flatly. ‘And you must be able to see that Robert is deliberately working himself up into a hysterical state.’
Quietly, so that Robert couldn’t overhear her, Sarah contradicted equally flatly, ‘No…what I see is a little boy who’s lost everyone who loves him…a little boy who has apparently been left in the charge of a woman who neither likes nor cares about him…a little boy who has no one he can turn to other than his dead mother’s housekeeper.’
Sarah knew that she was being deliberately emotive, but she couldn’t help it. There was something about this impatient, critical man that pushed her into needing to bring home to him his child’s emotional plight. ‘What I can also see is that you don’t appear to know very much about children, Mr Philips.’
Sarah drew in her breath at the way he looked deliberately at her own bare left hand before taunting softly, ‘And you do? Do you have children of your own, then?’
To her mortification, Sarah felt her skin flushing as she was forced to admit, ‘No…no, I don’t.’
‘Then I suggest you wait until you do before you start handing out the homespun advice,’ he told her grittily.
Thoroughly incensed by his attitude, Sarah corrected him impetuously, ‘I might not have any children, but professionally—’
‘Professionally?’ Gray Philips cut in sharply, frowning at her. ‘What exactly does that mean? What exactly is your profession?’
‘I’m a teacher,’ Sarah told him, wondering even as she said the words just how much longer they would be true, and then pushing her fears and doubts behind her as she felt Robert’s hand trembling in her own.
No matter how much she might dislike his father, she was not helping Robert by allowing her antagonism to take hold of her.
He ‘hated’ his father, Robert had said with childish intensity, and Sarah had not missed the brief look of pain that had touched Gray Philips’s mouth as he had listened to his son’s rejection of him. Despite her sympathy with Robert, she had to acknowledge that his father had every right to insist on taking the little boy back home.
She could not stop him from doing that, but what she could do was to go with him and to satisfy herself as much as she could that it was the confusion and grief of losing those people that he loved that was upsetting Robert so much and not any actual mistreatment b
y his father.
Oddly, despite his antagonism towards her, she could not quite convince herself that Gray Philips was mistreating his child. He had been too angry for that…his reaction to his son’s disappearance too free of guilt and deception to suggest that he knew exactly why Robert had been running away.
He was walking ahead of them now, pausing to hold aside the vicious brambles blocking the path, his frown deepening as he saw the way Robert clung to her side.
It was twenty minutes before they were in sight of the village, but Gray Philips didn’t walk towards it, instead branching off on to an even narrower and more overgrown path, which came to an abrupt end outside a solid wooden gate set into a high brick wall.
Gray Philips opened the gate for her, standing to one side so that she and Robert could precede him through it. Out of good manners, or as a means of ensuring that…that what? That she didn’t pick Robert up and run off with him…What chance would she have had of outpacing a tough adult male like him?
The garden inside the brick wall was overgrown, the brambles even thicker than those on the path outside. Beyond the wilderness of undergrowth a cordon of trees guarded a green lawn and formal flowerbeds, and beyond that lay the house, all mellow brick and unevenly leaded windows.
It was old, Sarah recognised, Elizabethan, and much, much larger than her cousin’s farmhouse.
Whatever Robert’s father might not be, he was quite obviously a very wealthy man. But wealth did not buy happiness, and, even while she was admiring the house, she was not envying him the money that had enabled him to buy it. What good was money when his son was so obviously afraid of him…when his wife had presumably left him? Had she been afraid of him as well? But she must have loved him once. She had married him, after all…they had had a child.