by Penny Jordan
He frowned as he hung up. What was the matter with him? It was too easy to blame his father for his present dissatisfaction with his life, too easy and unfair. His father had never forced or coerced him into doing anything.
He realised just in time that he was approaching his motorway exit. He would be at Christie’s sooner than he had expected after all.
Half an hour later he drove through Thresham. The small market town was virtually deserted. Too small to attract the attention of the planners of the sixties, it still had its narrow streets and its huddle of timber-framed and small Georgian houses.
He winced though to see the neon sign of a fast-food restaurant in the town square, although, to judge from the group of teenagers gathered outside it, not everyone shared his aversion. Fast food wasn’t a wholly new invention after all, he mused. One only had to think of the pie and sweetmeat sellers who would have thronged this square on a busy market day.
He couldn’t be very far away from Carey Chemicals, he realised, and on a sudden impulse he pulled to the side of the road and opened his briefcase, searching for the map and plan that had accompanied the investigator’s report.
He had virtually to drive past Carey’s on his way to his sister’s. It was gone nine o’clock and going dark. A good time to take a discreet and unofficial look at the place.
Carey’s had long ago ceased to need to run shift work, and as far as he knew from the report there was no official nightwatchman. What was the need? Carey’s had precious little left to steal. Gregory James had seen to that.
He found the lane easily enough. It was bumpy, un-tarmacked, and in the glare from his headlights he could see the signpost indicating ‘Walkers, this way’. He had forgotten that the site was bisected by a right of way that ran virtually through its centre.
Alex would not like that. Or at least he would not have liked it had he genuinely been intending to run the company as a going concern, instead of merely using it in order to take advantage of the proposed government grants.
Saul could see the purpose of the government’s scheme. It would be a good way of both furthering research into new drugs, and at the same time ensuring that the expense of successful ones was kept to a minimum for the National Health Service. But how many people would see it as Alex was doing, as a means purely of boosting their own profits?
Why should he concern himself over that? It was more Christie’s territory than his. She was the guardian of the family’s morals, not he.
He would have to be careful about what he told her, he admitted wearily as he parked his car and switched off the engine. He frowned to himself, aware of a growing sense of distaste for what he was going to have to do.
But what was the alternative? Give up his job. He would never get another. Alex would see to that. He had an ex-wife and two children. He couldn’t afford moral scruples.
But could he afford not to have them? Could he go on the way he was, with the canker of self-dislike eating into him, destroying him?
As he got out of his car he heard an owl hooting. When he looked up he saw the small bodies of tiny bats swooping and darting around the upper storey of the old corn mill.
He paused for a moment to study their busy movements. As a boy he had lived in East Anglia, flat, open countryside where in those days it had been safe for a child to roam at will. In his imagination he had travelled the secret fens with the free traders, evading the government’s excise men sent to hunt them and their illegal cargoes of French goods down, and then when he was older he had spent endless hours studying the wildlife with his father.
He felt a sudden ache deep inside. He had loved his father so much, wanted to please him … wanted to make up to him for all that his own life had lacked; to give him the success he had wanted so much. But his father was dead and had been for nearly ten years, and there was no one in his life to whom he could offer the gift of attaining his father’s ambitions for him.
A feeling of intense melancholy, of loneliness swept over him. He was tired of the way he was living, of the cynicism that had eroded the brightness of his dreams. He was tired of the constant power struggle with Alex, but most of all he was tired of himself, he acknowledged as he turned on his heel and walked over to the buildings.
* * *
Davina sighed as she closed her office door. The corridor lights were off but she knew her way well enough, and there was just enough light from outside to lessen the darkness.
It had been a long day. This morning she had had a deputation from the shop stewards representing the unions. They had wanted to know what was going to happen to the company.
She had answered them as honestly as she could, and she had seen the fear in their eyes when she was forced to admit the possibility of the company’s having to close. She was hoping that they could find a buyer, she had told them.
‘Who the hell would want to buy this place?’ one of the men had demanded sourly. ‘We’re working in conditions that aren’t fit or safe.’
Davina flushed at the accusation in his voice. There was nothing she could do to refute it. She had seen their working conditions for herself and had been appalled by them.
‘I’m sorry, but there just hasn’t been the money to re-equip,’ she had told them, but her voice had faltered as she thought about the money that Gregory had gambled away.
She was a rich man’s daughter, and, although she had learned young to be frugal, over the last few years she had indulged herself with the luxury of good, well made clothes, expensive clothes; and she had been acutely conscious of the fact that the suit she was wearing had probably cost more than many of her employees earned in a month, even though it was several years old.
She had seen in the eyes of the two women shop stewards present that they were equally aware of the disparity in their situations, and again guilt had engulfed her.
A buyer. Would the bank be able to find one? The manager had warned her that he had grave doubts.
She had reached the reception area, which was empty and in darkness. The air smelled stale and faintly dirty. While no expense had been spared in fitting out Gregory’s office, the reception area, the first place a potential customer saw on his or her arrival, was shabby and unappealing. Davina’s nose wrinkled in faint distaste as she hurried through it, opening the door and stepping out into the pleasantly fresh evening air.
She locked the door and then turned round. Her car was several yards away. As she hurried towards it she turned the corner of the building without looking up, her mind on the company and her problems, so that the totally unexpected sensation of walking straight into another person, when she had believed herself to be completely alone, sent her body into an automatic physical reflex action of panic.
The man—she knew it was a man even before she was able to look properly at him—caught hold of her as she tried to step back from him. She tensed as she felt his fingers gripping her arms, all the warnings she had read and heard about the danger of being a woman out at night on her own suddenly flooding terrifyingly through her.
The man was holding her too tightly for her to break free, and so instead she beat frantically at his chest and heard the surprised exhalation of air he gave.
That calmed her a little, making him suddenly seem less powerful, making it obvious that the contact between them had shocked him as much as it had done her.
At the same time Saul realised how much he had startled her. He had seen her coming round the corner, walking quickly, her head down, but it had been too late for him to call out a warning to her and she had walked straight into him.
Now he reacted instinctively to her panic, pulling her close against his own body and holding her pinioned firmly there while he told her quietly, ‘It’s all right. I’m not going to hurt you.’
She looked up at him then, a quick, startled, questioning look that fully revealed her face to him.
Davina James.
He recognised her immediately from her photograph, but what the photo
graph had not told him was how oddly fragile she was, how large and brilliant her eyes, how vulnerable the soft fullness of her mouth.
She was trembling slightly. He could feel the fast race of her heart, and to his own surprise he reacted instinctively to the subliminal messages of her body, tightening his grip on her, realigning his body slightly so that there was less distance between them, and then stopping abruptly as he realised what he was doing, halted by the sudden sharp awareness of how quickly and unexpectedly his physical responses had changed from an instinctive reaching out to fend off her unsuspecting collision with him, an action he would have used to anyone, either man or woman, to something that was only just a hair’s breadth away from outright physical arousal.
What was the matter with him? He was daily in just as close physical contact with dozens of women, beautiful young, desirable women. No one who worked in a city environment could not be. Every day there were countless small incidents of accidental close physical contact, in lifts, on the Tube, in offices. The accidental brushing together of human bodies in the close, confined spaces of modern living was a fact of life, and it was certainly not something that normally disturbed him.
In fact … He grimaced to himself, unwilling to admit how long it had been since he had even fleetingly thought about sex, never mind had it. There just wasn’t the room in his life to form that kind of relationship and just lately there hadn’t even been the need.
‘Let me go.’
The furious words brought him back to reality. He stepped back a little, flexing his fingers, thinking quickly.
Now that she was over her initial shock, she was furiously angry; angry enough, he recognised, to jeopardise all his plans before he had even begun to put them into action. The last thing he needed now was to be reported to the police as a potential prowler or worse.
‘I’m sorry,’ he apologised, smiling at her, using the techniques of body language and control he had learned over the years, stepping back from her but trying to keep his face in the shadows, lifting up his hands, palms open.
Davina’s heart was still beating too fast. He was well spoken, calm and authoritative, and now that he had released her her intuition told her that she was not in any physical danger from him.
‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded quietly. ‘This is private property.’ He might have apologised, he might have released her, but the adrenalin was still surging through her veins; shock and fear had turned to anger laced with the feeling of insecurity that came from being in a situation that was not fully under her own control.
She knew that she was probably over-reacting, but she couldn’t help it. Beneath her anger lay the uncomfortable knowledge that for a handful of seconds, as he held her, she had felt an unmistakable frisson of sexual awareness … of sexual need?
This was ridiculous. She wasn’t some sexually deprived widow, desperate for physical contact with a man, any man, because she had lost her husband.
If she wanted sex she could have it with Giles, couldn’t she?
The earthiness of her own thoughts blunted her anger, filling her with self-distaste.
‘I must have missed the footpath,’ she heard Saul telling her calmly.
It was a good job he had remembered that footpath sign. It gave him a perfect excuse for being where he was. He saw the hesitation in her eyes, and the quick searching glance she gave him. Luckily he was casually dressed.
A walker who had missed the signpost for the footpath. It was quite feasible, of course. In fact, it did sometimes happen, but it was already virtually dark. Too dark for someone who didn’t know where the footpath lay to risk following it?
Contrarily, although she wanted to press him, to challenge him, something made her hold back. Caution … the sense of self-preservation and hesitancy she had developed as a child; an awareness that it might not be wise to ask questions whose answers might provoke the still, placid waters of safety.
‘The footpath is over there,’ she told him curtly, gesturing towards the open fields.
‘Thank you.’ There was nothing in his voice to give rise to the sharp quiver of tension that touched her. His face was obscured by the shadows, but she caught the reflective glitter of his eyes as he answered her.
He was a tall man and lean, but unexpectedly hard-muscled. She shivered a little. It had been a long time since she had been in such close, intimate contact with a man’s body.
Not really since Matt.
Matt … what on earth had made her think of him? There was no similarity between the two men at all. Matt had been just over average height, fair-haired, solid, an amiable, easygoing man, full of laughter and warmth, and her instincts told her that, quite apart from their physical differences, the last thing this man would be was easygoing.
But he had still, however briefly, made her sharply aware of her body’s sexuality.
He was turning away from her now, walking with a long, well paced stride. She watched him until he was out of sight before heading for her car.
The unexpected encounter had disturbed her more than she wanted to admit.
Saul waited until he was sure she had gone before returning to his own car. There was no point in risking looking around now. She might just decide to come back.
As he started his car the file on the front passenger-seat slid forward, the contents coming out. As he reached out to pick them up Saul saw the photograph of Davina.
On paper Davina James had seemed the least important of the elements surrounding Alex’s desire to buy out Carey’s, but in the flesh … In the flesh she was threatening to complicate matters in a way that made him instinctively fight to suppress his awareness of those complications.
Anger, irritation and the familiar surging panic of somehow no longer being totally in control of every aspect of his life tensed his body.
He pushed Davina’s photograph to the back of the other papers and stuffed them all quickly back into the file before driving off.
* * *
She supposed she ought to make herself some supper but she really wasn’t hungry, Davina admitted as she let herself into the house. Instead she felt charged with an unfamiliar, disconcerting physical and emotional energy, a restlessness that matched her quickened heartbeat and tense movements.
It came to something when an accidental run-in with an unknown man could put her into such an advanced state of reaction, she thought grimly as she stared at her reflection in her bedroom mirror. Her face was slightly flushed, her eyes huge and dilated. Even her mouth seemed softer, fuller. As though she had been kissed.
She banished the thought, irritated that it should have formed at all. What was the matter with her? The last thing she had time for now was idiotic wayward thoughts of that kind. Hadn’t she got enough to worry about without imagining …?
Imagining what? That he … the walker had kissed her? Thank God he hadn’t done. The whole incident had been difficult enough for her to handle as it was.
She stripped off her suit and blouse. Being at Carey’s always left her feeling grimy.
Matt had once told her that, per capita, English women had the best bodies in the world. The trouble was, he had added, that they were also the best at concealing that fact. He had then gone on to describe eloquently and erotically the visual delight a man might enjoy in observing the way an Italian woman wore her clothes and moved her body, or the subtle sensuality of cool hauteur that matched a Frenchwoman’s immaculate grooming and posture.
It had been shortly after that that he had taken her to London shopping, exhausting her with his energy and his enthusiasm, and astonishing her with his concentration on even the smallest detail of not just how clothes were constructed but how they felt to the touch, how they moved, how they embraced a woman’s body.
But then, of course, as an artist, such things had been important to him.
He was dead now, an accident in California. She had read about it in the papers and had quietly mourned his loss. Not as her lover, but
as a gifted and talented man who had also possessed great humanity and generosity.
In her bathroom she stripped off her underwear, glancing briefly at her body in the mirrors. It had been Matt who had taught her not to be ashamed or embarrassed about her femininity, not to seek out its imperfections but instead to celebrate its individuality.
He had been a good man, a kind man, a man she had been lucky to know and whom she had never regretted knowing, but why on earth that walker tonight should have reminded her of him she had no idea.
She tensed as she saw the immediate sexual tension change her body, her breasts swelling slightly, lifting, her nipples erect, flushed with heat, her stomach muscles clenching, her stance altering infinitesimally in the way a woman’s stance did when she thought about the intimate physical contact of standing close to a man she desired.
Irritated, impatient, and too much on edge, she turned away and stepped into the shower, lathering her body with quick efficiency and rinsing off the soap, reaching for her towel, firmly refusing to give in to the temptation of looking at herself in the mirror again.
What was she afraid of seeing?
Defiantly she stared into the mirror, throwing the damp towel to one side. Her body was slim and firm, her skin smooth and unblemished.
If she closed her eyes she could still remember how it had felt to have Matt’s hands touching her, Matt’s mouth on her skin. Matt’s hands, Matt’s mouth, not those of tonight’s stranger, she told herself fiercely.
Matt. Not him … Matt!
* * *
The first time she had met Matt had been one sultry afternoon when she’d returned from shopping to find him lifting the heavy stone slabs that formed what she had always privately considered to be a particularly ugly patio. She had mentioned a month earlier to the owner of the local garden-maintenance company they used that she would like to have that part of the garden redesigned, and he had promised to send someone round to look at it.