Ruthless Passion

by Penny Jordan

  As he bent down to pick up the file he told her emotionlessly, ‘I thought I had everything, and then one morning I woke up and I knew … I knew I had nothing. What is reality and what is an illusion, Christie? How do any of us ever know?’

  ‘By our instincts,’ she told him shakily. ‘They tell us. The trouble is, we don’t always listen to them.’

  ‘Perhaps with good reason. Most of us are too afraid to listen to what they have to say.’ As he kissed the top of her head he said quietly, ‘Thanks, Christie.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For resisting the temptation to say “I told you so”,’ he told her sardonically, and then laughed at her expression. ‘Hard work, was it?’ he mocked. ‘Well, I dare say I would have deserved it, but thanks for not saying it, all the same.’

  ‘You’re my brother. I love you.’

  ‘And love tempers righteousness with compassion and makes indulgent allowances for weaknesses and flaws. That was my biggest mistake of all, Christie … in not understanding what is and what is not real love.’

  His words stayed with her for a long time after she had gone to bed, moving her to tears and filling her with an aching loneliness for which she could not find a cause.

  Saul too was awake.

  Once he had believed his father loved him and that all his plans and ambitions for him had been motivated by that love. If accepting that this might not have been so was hard, then accepting that his father had been human and fallible, then gently and carefully removing him from the pedestal on which he had kept him for all of his life, then accepting his reduced stature, and going on loving him as the man he had been with ordinary flaws and weaknesses, was harder.

  He tried not to think that his father must have known how he felt about him, must surely have recognised how vulnerable their relationship would one day make him. Had he not, then, loved him enough to remove that pedestal himself, to show himself to his son as he really was, and in doing so to give Saul himself permission to be human and fallible? And what about his own son … his own daughter? What about the love they had every right to expect to receive from him?

  He moved restlessly in his bed, wishing the acquisition of Carey’s were already behind him and that he was free to leave Alex with a clear conscience, the acquisition of Carey’s payment for preventing him from acquiring Harper & Sons.

  Free to turn to his children, to show them his love, to ask them to forgive his omissions, to begin a new way of life that was his and no one else’s.

  * * *

  ‘Has Giles arrived yet?’

  Giles winced as he heard Davina asking for him. Both his mind and his body felt stupid, numb with the pressure of trying to process too much information, and as Davina walked into his office he felt guilty and uncomfortable.

  Guilty for making love to his own wife?

  Lucy had been up before him this morning. It had been a shock to go downstairs and find her in the kitchen, and even more of one to find that she had made his breakfast. He couldn’t remember the last time he had actually seen her in the morning before going to work; what he did know was that he had been glad when she had finally taken to staying in bed until after he had gone, because that at least meant that he could start his day without one of the arguments that seemed to erupt the moment they were together.

  This morning she had been very withdrawn. She looked as though she had been crying. For Nicholas?

  When he had tried clumsily to thank her for his breakfast she had shrugged his thanks away, telling him curtly, ‘I couldn’t sleep. I don’t suppose it’s up to Davina’s standards.’ Her mouth had twisted, and he had tried to stop her, but she had ignored him, adding, ‘Oh, it’s all right, Giles. I know how you feel about her. What is it you want? A nice, quiet, civilised divorce? A neat tidying up of all the loose ends? That is what yesterday was all about, isn’t it?’ she had challenged him. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she had told him. ‘I’m not going to make things difficult for you. Not any more. Why should I?’

  He had left the house half an hour later, wondering why instead of feeling relieved he had actually felt disturbed and distressed, his emotions still raw from the emotional outpouring of the previous day.

  He felt angry and cheated, as though she was denying his need to share with her his grief over Nicholas, and he felt guilty because he had never known how deep and painful her own feelings had been.

  And now here was Davina, smiling gently at him, reinforcing his guilt.

  He avoided looking directly at her, shuffling some papers on his desk, frowning as he responded tersely to her greeting. Immediately aware of his tension, Davina paused for a moment. He looked pale and drawn. She could see the way his hand trembled a little as he moved his papers. For some reason her presence was making him feel defensive and edgy. Hardly the behaviour of an eager lover, she reflected wryly as she calmly made a couple of mundane comments about the weather, watching as his tension eased a little.

  She had learned long ago, first with her father and then with Gregory, how to project an air of calm, safe unawareness of other people’s darker moods, and she used that facility automatically now, appearing to Giles’s unaware eyes to be supremely oblivious to either his guilt or his discomfort at being with her. She was nowhere near as sensitive to his moods as Lucy, he decided. Lucy would have known immediately that there was something wrong and would have questioned him until he revealed what it was to her.

  Davina had not even made any reference to the weekend. She was talking about some problem with the drains in the ladies’ lavatories, and he had to subdue a wild desire to take hold of her and tell her exactly how he had spent the previous afternoon. Anything to break through that stultifying placid calm.

  Stultifying? Wasn’t it her very calm placidness that had attracted him to her in the first place?

  Irritably he promised that he would get someone in to sort out the problem, his irritation increased when Davina told him sunnily, ‘Oh, it’s all right. I’ve already organised a plumber.’

  Giles frowned at her. If she had already solved the problem, then why was she bothering him with it? Why was she bothering with it at all, when they had far more important things to worry about?

  He failed to see the wry glint of amusement in Davina’s eyes as she left, but it was an amusement spiked with sharp self-knowledge.

  Oh, Matt, what have you done to me? she asked herself ruefully as she walked back to her own office. Am I being impossibly idealistic, or just a little unfair? It isn’t, after all, Giles’s fault that his worthiness isn’t leavened by a sharper sense of humour … or a sense of the ridiculous.

  What did she want in a man? she wondered as she sat down. What were the qualities that were important to her? Not ambition; not aggression; not the childish demand of an outsized ego; not a man who would demand that she step into the shadows so that he could absorb more than his fair share of the sunlight. In fact, it was easier to say what she didn’t want rather than what she did.

  Certainly it wasn’t anything to do with looks—she was well beyond that stage of her life; kindness, then, compassion … yes, but with a certain amount of strength as well. Her mouth twitched a little as she acknowledged the deep-rooted feminine perversity of that. Sexual attraction and compatibility. Yes, she would want those. Laughter, friendship, mutual respect and love. All of those, but most of all she would want a man who was strong enough, sure enough of himself and of her to accept her as the woman she was; to accept that she needed her independence and yet at the same time that she would want to know he was there for her to lean on if needed; to accept that, while it gave her pleasure to be a home-maker, it was neither her duty nor her sole responsibility to single-handedly run their home; to accept that she had individual needs and desires that might not tally with his, to give her support in times of weakness and to share her joy in times of triumph; to be her partner in every aspect of their shared lives; to be her lover in bed, accepting her sexuality as the rich vein of intimac
y and pleasure that it was, and perhaps most important of all to love and respect her enough to let her fully and wholly into his life, its pain as well as its pleasure.

  Was there such a man? She laughed at her own fantasy. Hardly likely, and if there was she would probably reject him as being too perfect … too ideal, not really human. But enough of dream men; she had other and far more important things to attend to.

  * * *

  Saul judged the timing of his telephone call to Davina’s bank very carefully. It was a skill that over the years had become part of the arsenal of tactics responsible for his reputation as a man not merely capable of considerable shrewdness and machiavellian planning, but one also possessed of an almost mystical foresight. The City, like any other ancient institution, had its legends and folklore and was vulnerable to superstition, so that to its collective awe at Saul’s carefully honed human skills it had added the aura of prophecy and the status of seer, and the effects of his reputation had become self-perpetuating.

  A small Cheshire town could be a long way from the City of London, especially to someone who was not part of the underground of interlinking business networks, as Davina wasn’t, and when her bank manager telephoned at half-past five, asking to speak to Giles, he was put through to her instead. When he informed her that he had been approached by someone representing a potential buyer for the company and that a meeting had been arranged to discuss the proposed purchase at the bank at nine in the morning, instead of sitting down to work out the best deal she could achieve for herself as the main shareholder, as Saul had intended she should do, what Davina did was to sit down and carefully start to prepare a list of the terms under which she would want the business to be sold; terms which had nothing to do with any financial benefits she might receive.

  Saul, who had carefully timed his call to give her and her advisers the minimum amount of time to prepare themselves, suspected he knew what would happen at the meeting. It would be put to him that Carey’s was an extremely valuable acquisition, which he would counter with the fact that they were virtually on the edge of bankruptcy. From there they would negotiate down until they reached a figure that he judged would be satisfactory to Alex. He doubted that after paying off the bank and their other debtors Davina James would come out of it with anything other than a handful of loose change. She had, after all, nothing to bargain with.

  Davina rang Giles at home to tell him what had happened—he had left work early for a dental appointment. She hesitated for a second before dialling the number.

  Lucy answered the phone, and Davina asked if she could speak to Giles. She was glad that Lucy couldn’t see the guilty burn of colour staining her skin. Not that she actually had anything to feel guilty about. She and Giles had not been lovers and she had never actively encouraged him to leave Lucy.

  But she had not actively deterred him either, had she? It had been unnerving speaking to Lucy while she remained silent, and Giles was so long in coming to the phone that she began to wonder if in fact Lucy had gone to find him.

  ‘Davina.’ He sounded edgy and nervous. The guilty husband, thrown off balance by his lover’s phone call to his home?

  But she was not Giles’s lover, Davina reminded herself firmly as she told him what had happened.

  ‘A prospective purchaser … Who?’ Giles demanded sharply. He was cursing under his breath. Why the hell had this had to happen when he wasn’t there?

  ‘I don’t know,’ Davina told him. ‘Apparently whoever it is is not prepared to reveal their identity as yet. A meeting’s been arranged for the morning, Giles; that’s why I’m ringing you. Nine at the bank.’

  ‘Nine.’ Giles swore audibly this time. ‘That doesn’t give us any time at all to prepare anything. You can bet whoever it is knows to a pound just what Carey’s position is. They’ll want to get the company at a knockdown price.’

  ‘I don’t care how little they’re prepared to pay just as long as they’re prepared to maintain the workforce and improve working conditions,’ Davina told him sharply.

  Giles sighed. ‘Look, Davina. That isn’t the way things work. You’ve got to convince these people that we’re in a hell of a lot better financial shape than we actually are, otherwise … they’ll be like sharks after bloody meat.’

  ‘I doubt we’ll have much chance of that if they’ve already talked to Philip Taylor,’ Davina pointed out quietly.

  ‘Taylor has no right to reveal our financial position to anyone else. It’s his duty to—’

  ‘It’s his duty to protect the bank’s interests, Giles,’ Davina interrupted him quietly. ‘I suspect that the very fact that these people, whoever they are, have gone through the bank rather than approach us direct suggests that they are well aware of our financial position. I’ve told you before, I’m not interested in getting any kind of personal profit from Carey’s. What is important to me is securing the future of our employees.’

  ‘No purchaser would ever take on board that kind of commitment,’ Giles warned her grimly.

  ‘That depends how much they want the business, doesn’t it?’ Davina countered quietly.

  ‘What business?’ Giles started to ask her, but Davina had already hung up.

  Lucy came into the room as he cursed under his breath. ‘Lovers’ quarrel?’ she asked him, acid-sweetly.

  ‘There might be a buyer for Carey’s,’ Giles told her, ignoring the gibe. He was standing in the sitting-room; the flowers he had crammed into the jugs yesterday had been carefully rearranged, and he noticed something else as well.

  On the small table, right where it could be seen every time anyone walked in or out of the room, was a photograph of Nicholas.

  Lucy saw him looking at it.

  ‘I went out this morning and bought the frame,’ she told him stiffly, turning away from him, her body tense and guarded as though she half expected him to object, he recognised.

  He walked over to the table and picked up the photograph, examining it silently.

  Nicholas. Their son. Such a tiny baby; so obviously frail that it tore his heart just to look at him, and yet he wanted to look at him; he wanted to remember; to feel …

  ‘I hadn’t realised,’ he began rawly. ‘He looked so much like you.’ But when he turned round he realised he was speaking to an empty room and that Lucy had gone.

  Gently he replaced the silver frame.

  * * *

  It wasn’t difficult for Davina to prepare an outline of the terms on which she was prepared to sell the business. What was going to be difficult, she suspected, was convincing Giles and Philip Taylor that she meant to stand by them.

  How much power did the bank have to force her to sell? she wondered, chewing on her bottom lip. She was the major shareholder, but if the bank were to demand immediate repayment of their loans …

  She reached for a piece of paper, scribbling down some figures. She had the house, and the money in Gregory’s bank accounts. Not quite enough, but almost. Certainly enough to hold the bank at bay if they did decide to pressure her.

  She had no illusions about the view Philip Taylor would take. He would advocate selling. She couldn’t blame him really. He was under pressure from his head office to remove their debt from his books.

  And Giles? Giles would want her to sell as well. And if she did it could well be an opportunity for Giles and Lucy to move away and make a fresh start together. If they did, how would she feel? She had valued Giles as a friend, and he had been a good friend, but she suspected that that friendship had been compromised by other emotions. Now it was impossible for them to go back to the relationship they had once had, and she suspected it was equally impossible for them to go on and become lovers. She wasn’t sure if that knowledge caused her relief or disappointment, and neither, she suspected, was Giles.

  It was gone one o’clock when she went to bed, her mind alert and keyed up in preparation for the conflict she sensed was to come.

  * * *

  Power dressing; suits and shirts tailore
d to be as close as possible facsimiles of men’s clothes—wasn’t that what the modern businesswoman was supposed to wear? Davina reflected wryly. Well, there was nothing like that in her wardrobe. Her clothes were more inclined to be plain and useful rather than designed to make a statement about her role in life.

  She frowned as she started to reach into her wardrobe for the neat skirt and jacket she had been about to put on, and instead reached deeper into the cupboard until she found the zippered suit bag for which she was looking.

  Some months before Gregory’s death she had gone shopping to Chester with Lucy. Heaven alone knew why, because she wasn’t normally given to extravagant impulse, nor to allowing herself to be coaxed and chivvied into illogical decisions.

  Perhaps it had been something to do with the fact that it had been a bright sunny day, or perhaps it had been because of the faintly contemptuous, understanding look the saleswoman had given her, as though she was all too aware of how unlikely a customer Davina was for the cream designer suit with its ridiculous gold embroidery forming the four-inch letters that ran round the tiny waist of the jacket, spelling out the words ‘Waist of Money’.

  Well, it certainly had been that, because she had never worn it, and she had known even as she was making the fatal statement that she wanted to buy it that she never would, and what was worse and even more humiliating had been that she was sure the saleswoman had known it as well. After all, what did a woman with her lifestyle want with a suit that said quite plainly that it was designed for someone outgoing and confident, someone who couldn’t care less what the rest of the world thought of her?

  Now, if Lucy had been the one buying the suit … But Lucy had bought a dress instead, bright red with shoestring straps, which ought to have looked dreadful with her hair but which didn’t.

  As she unzipped the wrapper Davina acknowledged that the suit wasn’t merely unsuitable for a business meeting, but that, given the nature of the meeting, it was virtually an act of aggression.

  Well, why not? She had sensed from Philip Taylor’s voice the faint condescension that warned her that her views, her requirements for the sale of Carey’s were not likely to be treated seriously, so why not play the role they had designated for her to its hilt? Let them see that she intended to be taken very seriously indeed and that she did not need to conform to their male idea of what a businesswoman should be to make them do so.