‘May I take your name?’
‘I’d prefer to surprise him, actually. He and I…well, we once knew each other very well.’
It suddenly occurred to her that there might be a Mrs Newman on the scene, but then she remembered what Lucy had said —’there’s only his dad’—and she must be right, because the voice down the line lost some of its rigidity. ‘I see. Mr Newman should be back early tomorrow morning. He’s flying in from the States and going straight to work.’ Jessica chuckled in a comfortable, knowing way. ‘Of course. Well, he hasn’t changed!’ It was a good gamble, and based entirely on the assumption that men who travelled long haul only to head straight to the office belonged to a certain ilk. ‘Perhaps you could tell me where he works? It’s been such a while. I’m older now, and the memory’s not what it used to be. Is he still ... where was it...? No, just on the tip of my tongue...’ She laughed in what she hoped was a genuine and embarrassed manner, feeling horribly phoney. ‘City.’ The voice sounded quite chummy now. He rattled off the full address which Jessica dutifully copied down and secreted in her handbag.
And tomorrow, Mr Newman, you’re in for a surprise visit. At ten past ten on Sunday evening, sleep came considerably easier.
She made her way to the City offices as early as she could the following morning, after a quick call to Stanford, James and Shepherd, telling them that she needed to have the day off because something unexpected had turned up, and then the usual battle with the underground, packed to the seams because it was rush hour and coincidentally heading into the height of the tourist season.
She had dressed for the weather. A sleeveless pale blue dress, flat sandals. Yet she could still feel the stifling heat seeping into her pores. Temperatures, the weather men had promised, were going to hit the eighties again. Another gorgeous cloud-free day.
She wished that she could close her eyes and forget all these problems. Go back to a time when she’d been able just to whip Lucy along to the park for a picnic, when the nearest thing to defiance had been a refusal to eat a ham sandwich. She allowed herself to travel down memory lane, and only snapped back to the present, with all its worrying problems, when her destination confronted her—a large office block, all glass and chrome, like a giant green-house in the middle of London.
Inside it bore some resemblance to a very expensive hotel foyer. All plants and comfortable sitting areas and a circular reception desk in the middle.
Jessica bypassed that and walked straight to the lifts. She knew what floor the Newman man was located on. She had managed to prise that snippet of information from the unwelcome recipient of her phone call the evening before, still working on the lines of the wonderful surprise she would give him by turning up, and shamelessly using a mixture of charm and flirtatiousness to wheedle the information from him. The man, she had thought since, would never have made a security guard. Did he dispense floor numbers and work addresses to every caller who happened to telephone out of the blue and claim acquaintanceship with his employer? But she had been grateful for the information, and she was grateful now as the lift whizzed her up to the eighth floor. Receptionists, she knew from first-hand experience, could be as suspicious as policemen at the scene of a crime, and as ruthless in dispatching the uninvited as bouncers outside nightclubs. Paragons or dragons, depending on which side of the desk you were standing.
Stepping out on the eighth floor was like stepping into another world.
There was, for starters, almost no noise. Unlike the offices where she worked, which seemed to operate in a permanent state of seemingly chaotic activity—people hurrying from here to there, telephones ringing, a sense of things that should have been done sooner than yesterday.
The carpet was dull green and luxuriously thick. There was a small, open-plan area just ahead of her, with a few desks, a few disconcertingly green plants, and secretaries all working with their heads down. No idle chatter here, thought Jessica, trying to think what this said about their bosses. Were they ogres? Did they wield such a thick whip that their secretaries were too scared to talk?
She slipped past them, down the corridor, passing offices on her left and pausing fractionally to read the name plates on the doors.
Anthony Newman’s office was the very last one along the corridor.
Strangely, she felt not in the least nervous. She had too many vivid pictures in her head of her daughter being led astray by the neglected son of a workaholic for nerves to intrude. If people couldn’t rustle up time for their children, then as far as she was concerned they shouldn’t have them.
She knocked on the door, not in the least anticipating that the workaholic Newman person might be involved in a meeting somewhere else, and her knock was answered immediately.
Jessica pushed open the door, hardly knowing what to expect, still fuelled by a sense of fully justified parental concern, and was immediately confronted by a large expanse of carpet, an imposing oak desk, and behind that a man whose initial appearance momentarily made her stop in her tracks.
The man was on the phone. His deep voice was barking orders down the line. Not loudly, but with a certain emphatic quietness that made some of her sense of purpose flounder.
She looked at him as he gestured to her to take a seat, and was unwillingly fascinated by the curious, disorientating feeling of power and authority he seemed to give off.
Had she been expecting this? She realised that at the back of her mind she had anticipated someone altogether less forbidding.
It was only when she was seated that she became aware that he was watching her with an equal amount of curiosity. He continued talking, but his cool grey eyes were focused on her, and she abruptly looked away and began inspecting what she could see of his office from where she was sitting. Not much. Not much, at any rate, that didn’t include him in the general picture.
‘Who,’ he said, replacing the telephone and catching her while her attention was focused on a painting on the wall—an abstract affair whose title she was trying to guess— ‘the hell are you? What do you want and how were you allowed into my office?’
His voice was icy cold, as was everything about him. Jessica looked at him and felt a shiver of apprehension which she immediately slapped down.
His was a face, she thought, designed to stop people in their tracks. Everything about it was arresting. It wasn’t simply a matter of strikingly well-formed features. More what they revealed. An impression of vast self-assurance and intelligence. He was the sort of man, she thought, who was accustomed to wielding power, to having orders obeyed, to snapping his lingers and having people jump to attention. He was also younger than she had anticipated. Late thirties at the most. What a shame he obviously couldn’t keep a handle on his own son.
Jessica smiled politely, keeping her thoughts to herself.
‘I take it you’re Anthony Newman?’
‘You haven’t answered my questions.’
‘I’m sorry to barge in on you like this, but I thought that the sooner we had a little chat, the better.’
‘If you don’t answer me right now,’ he said softly, leaning forward, ‘then I’m afraid I’m going to have to call a security guard and have you removed from the premises. How did you get in here?’
‘I took the lift up and walked down the corridor.’
‘I don’t have time for games.’
Neither, thought Jessica icily, do you have time for your son. Which is why I’m here in the first place.
‘I tried phoning you last night, but I was told that you were away on business and wouldn’t be back until this morning.’
‘Did Harry tell you where I worked?’
‘The man who answered the telephone did, yes.’
He didn’t say anything, but there was a look in his eyes that didn’t augur well for Harry’s fate.
What would he do? Jessica wondered anxiously. Sack the hapless Harry on the spot? Roast him over an open spit? Anything was possible. The Newman man looked like someone who ate raw meat
for breakfast.
‘You’re not going to ...do anything...are you?’ she asked, worriedly. ‘I mean ...it wasn’t his fault... I implied that you and I were acquaintances ... well, quite good friends, actually. I told him that you would be pleasantly surprised to see me... after all this time...delighted, in fact...’ Her voice trailed off, along with a fair amount of her momentum.
‘Now, why would you imply anything of the sort?’ He looked at her coldly and assessingly, and whereas anyone else might well have been trying to cast their mind back, wondering perhaps whether they knew who she was, she could tell that that wasn’t on his mind at all. This man knew quite well that he had never seen her in his life before.
Impressions of him, she realised, were mounting by the second, and none of them were going any distance towards putting her at her ease.
‘It seemed the quickest route to getting to see you,’ she said flatly, and his eyes narrowed.
‘Well, well, well. You don’t beat about the bush, do you?’
‘I have no reason to.’ She didn’t care for the look in his eyes, but was damned if she was going to be intimidated. She wasn’t easily frightened. Her past had strengthened her, and if he wanted to play mind games with her then he was in for a surprise.
‘If you’re after money, then I’m afraid you’ve taken the wrong route.’ He glanced down at some documents lying on his desk. Having made his deductions as to her reason for being in his office, his curiosity was giving way to indifference. In a minute, she suspected, he would look at his watch, yawn, then stand up and politely usher her to the door.
‘My company already contributes a sizeable amount towards charities.’ He linked his fingers together, dragged his eyes away from the document, and looked her over. ‘And a little word of advice here—if you want someone to give you a donation, the very last thing you should do is connive your way into their offices and try to catch them off guard. People generally don’t care for the element of deviousness involved.’ Jessica found that she was leaning forward in her chair. ‘I am not here in connection with a request for money, Mr Newman.’
His eyebrows flew up at that. ‘Then why are you here?’ Mild curiosity there, she saw. He probably thought that she would get back to the subject of money in a while, after a few byroads to try and divert his attention. A naturally suspicious mind. ‘I’m here about your son.’
That worked. It wiped all expression off his face. It was as though shutters had suddenly been pulled down over his eyes. ‘And you are...?’
‘Jessica Hirst.’
He frowned. ‘Well, Mrs Hirst...’
‘Miss.’
‘Well, Miss Hirst, whatever you want to discuss can be discussed on the school premises. If you’d care to see one of my secretaries, she’ll fix you an appointment. Frankly, I do think that it’s a bit unorthodox to barge your way into my offices.’ His frown deepened. ‘Why did you involve yourself in a ruse to get this address? Surely it’s on the school file?’
‘Most probably,’ Jessica said calmly. ‘But, since I’m not a teacher at your son’s school, that wouldn’t have done me much good, would it?’
‘Then who the heck are you?’
Your son is a corrupting influence on my daughter. Your son is leading my daughter astray. I’m here to ask you to keep your wretched son away from my daughter.
‘My daughter is Lucy Hirst. Perhaps your son Mark has mentioned her to you?’
‘What the hell has he gone and done?’ His voice was as hard as steel. ‘No, Miss Hirst,’ he said heavily, ‘Mark hasn’t said anything to me about your daughter. At least, not that I can recall.’ He raked his fingers through his hair and looked at her without flinching.
‘Nothing at all?’ This time it was her turn to frown, and to wonder whether she hadn’t read the signs all the wrong way. Perhaps his name hadn’t been dropped into conversations as regularly as she had thought. Maybe she had been mistaken, and the boy was only some kind of acquaintance. Perhaps Lucy’s change of attitude had nothing to do with any malign influence at all, and was simply a matter of hormones and puberty kicking in later than she had expected. She had no experience of these things. She could hardly recall her own growing pains, although there had been no room in her disintegrating family life for growing pains to have much space. ‘As I said—not that I recall,’ he said with a hint of impatience. ‘Lucy’s mentioned him off and on for months...’
‘Well, if you tell me that my son knows your daughter, Miss Hirst, then I’ll take your word for it,’ he said, by way of response to that remark, and Jessica, who had been lost in her own thoughts, trying to work out whether she had made an utter fool of herself in storming into this man’s office full of accusations and demands for a solution, looked fully at him now.
‘Are you telling me that you wouldn’t know whether your son was seeing my daughter because you don’t communicate with him?’
She sounded like a lawyer, she realised. Working alongside them must have rubbed off on her in more ways than one.
‘Listen to me, Miss Hirst, if you think—’
The telephone buzzed, and he picked up the receiver and informed his secretary that no further calls were to be put through.
‘Look,’ he said, standing up, ‘this isn’t the right place to have this kind of... conversation. Ellie’s not going to be able to keep all my callers at bay.’
He was very tall, and without the desk acting as a shield his presence was even more overwhelming. She discovered that she was watching him, taking in the lean muscularity of his build, the casual air of self-assurance.
‘I’ll get my chauffeur to take us to the Savoy. We can discuss this there over a cup of coffee and rather more privacy. But I warn you now that my time is limited.’
Jessica nodded. She had planned on taking full control of the proceedings, as she had been taking full control of everything from as far back as she could remember.
Now she felt as though the rug had been pulled from under her feet, but with such dexterity that she was left feeling not unbalanced by the manoeuvre—more disconcerted by the speed.
‘Coming?’ he asked from the door, and she nodded again and stood up.
CHAPTER TWO
WHAT did he mean that his time was limited? Did that imply just right now, or could she read that as a general statement? She should have picked him up on that! Why on earth hadn’t she’? Didn’t he see that this was just the problem? Limited time equalled maladjusted son, who was leading her precious daughter astray!
Jessica felt as though she was losing any advantage she might have had over the proceedings.
Ever since she had stepped into the man’s oversized office she had found herself confronted with someone who, even momentarily disconcerted, as he had been, was so accustomed to taking charge of things that he had automatically, taken control of the situation. Leaving her utterly lost for words. And now here she was, with a low table separating them and extravagantly laid out with pots of percolated coffee, cups and saucers and a plateful of extraordinarily mouth-watering little bites.
‘So,’ he said, crossing his legs and looking at her, ‘why have you seen fit to storm into my office and confront me? You might as well tell me right now what my son has been up to. If it’s what I think it is, then I’m sure we can settle on some sort of amicable arrangement.’
The wintry grey eyes revealed nothing. There was absolutely nothing about him that encouraged her to relax in any way at all, and she had to resist the impulse not to give in to an embarrassing display of nervous mannerisms. Her self-confidence had ebbed enough as it was, and she was determined that he did not become aware of that. ‘Why do you think I came to see you, Mr Newman?’ she asked, throwing the question back at him.
‘I have neither the time nor the inclination for games, Miss Hirst. I assumed that you were going to tell me precisely that. Wasn’t that your reason for barging unannounced into my office?’ She stared at him without flinching, and eventually he asked, impatien
tly, ‘Has my son got your daughter into any sort of trouble? Is that it?’
Jessica didn’t answer. She decided that the best course of action was to get him to plough his way through this one instead of encouraging her to do all the talking. If a solution was to be engineered, it would have to be a two-way road; he would have to be prepared to travel his fair share of the distance.
‘Is she pregnant?’ he asked bluntly, and Jessica could feel hot colour rush into her face. The question, with all its implications, was almost an insult.
No, Lucy was not pregnant! She knew that. Why would this man jump to that conclusion? The answer came to her almost as soon as she had asked herself the question—because it was the most obvious cause of concern to a mother. Because boys will be boys. He certainly didn’t seem to be shocked by the assumption.
‘And what exactly would your solution be if that were the case, Mr Newman?’
‘I’m a wealthy man, Miss Hirst. I would be prepared to accept any financial difficulties that might arise.’
‘In other words, she would be paid off.’
‘Naturally paternity would have to be proved.’
Was this how wealthy people operated? she wondered. Throw enough money at a problem and, hey presto, no more problem? His approach was so cold, so emotionless, that she could feel every muscle in her body tightening in anger. ‘That is, if she wanted to keep the baby at all. There are other options, as you well know.’
‘Abortion?’
‘You make it sound like a crime. But Mark is only seventeen years old, and your daughter... How old is she?’
‘Sixteen.’
‘Sixteen. Barely out of childhood herself. A baby could well ruin her life.’ For the first time he threw her a long, speculative look that took in everything, from the neat little blue dress, well-tailored but beginning to show its age, to the blonde bob, to the flat sandals—her only pair of summer shoes, bought in a sale over two years ago. Her wardrobe wasn’t bulging at the seams, but everything in it was of good quality, made to last. The only problem with that was that eventually those made to last items began looking a little stale. Right now she felt downright old-fashioned, and the reason, she knew, lay in those assessing grey eyes.
The Unmarried Husband Page 2