Ruthless Passion

by Penny Jordan

  If he hadn’t wanted to have sex with her then why bother deceiving her? It wasn’t logical; it wasn’t how she knew the male mind worked and it wasn’t in line with the character her anger and pain had built for him to superimpose over the ache of her memories of the evening they had spent together. Face it, she derided herself as she listened to Cathy’s chatter about her day, it was about as effective as trying to stop a heart attack with a placebo.

  * * *

  Davina was in the kitchen when the phone rang. Despite the fact that it was gone six o’clock, a fierce thrill of sensation ran through her as she had an instant mental image of Saul Jardine.

  She had had to endure both the bank manager and Giles lecturing her about the folly of what she had done. Dealing with Giles had been harder than dealing with Philip Taylor, even though Philip had been the more irate and more acerbic of the two.

  In Giles’s eyes she had seen the beginnings of an awareness that she was not perhaps, after all, worthy of the pedestal on which he had placed her. She had hurt him, she acknowledged as she listened to him, if only by default.

  Yesterday after Saul Jardine had gone Giles had rung her, his voice stiff and distant as he explained to her that he was staying at home for a few days.

  This week had seen the anniversary of their baby’s death, he had informed her, and he had felt that he owed it both to Lucy and the baby they had created together to be with her.

  ‘She’s been very upset,’ he had told her, and Davina had caught the note of guilt in his voice, of self-justification almost. Giles needed to be leant on, she recognised. It made him feel strong and able, and she had leaned on him since Gregory’s death.

  She had smiled a little wryly to herself, wondering if Saul Jardine had ever felt the need to have someone dependent on him, already knowing the answer. He was simply not that kind of man.

  She didn’t ask herself how she knew so much about him on so short an acquaintanceship, much less why she should be thinking about him in the first place. And now, as the sharp command of the telephone sliced through the silence and her stomach lurched with tension, she was equally wary of asking herself questions she knew she wouldn’t want to answer.

  She picked up the receiver, forcing herself to smile, hoping that by doing so she might displace some of her tension.

  ‘May I speak with Davina James, please?’

  The voice at the other end of the line, while male, was unfamiliar, the English so perfect and accentless that she knew immediately it was not the speaker’s first language.

  ‘Speaking,’ she announced, waiting uncertainly, trying to ignore the abrupt cessation of the adrenalin surge that had brought her to the phone.

  Leo had rehearsed what he would say to Davina many times, and the words, the brief explanation that he believed their fathers had been friends during the war rolled easily enough from his lips, but much less easily from his heart.

  Even without seeing her, he could sense Davina’s surprise and uncertainty; and knew that it was good manners rather than conviction that led to her offering him the invitation he had blatantly fished for.

  If she was startled by the way he responded so immediately and decisively to her hesitant agreement to his request that she agree to see him she managed to hide it.

  He was relieved when she confirmed that she was free that evening. The less time he had to spend in Cheshire, the better; not so much because he was afraid that he might run into Christie—that, after all, was hardly likely. No, what he feared was that he might ignore all the arguments he had had with himself, all the logic which warned him that things were better, safer left as they were, even the knowledge that if his own control slipped to the point where he was in danger of using her physical desire for him to get closer to her he could easily endanger her and not just himself, and be drawn, lemming-like, into a storm of emotion that could engulf Christie as well as himself.

  The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her, and yet incontravertibly he knew that, for her, to love him would be ultimately to be hurt because she could never adapt her life, her beliefs to accommodate the way he had to live his life.

  It was bad enough for him, suffering the suppression of his own deeply held convictions, in the knowledge that he had to do so if he was to remain at the head of Hessler Chemie, and that to abdicate that responsibility in favour of his brother was to accept that the corporation with its great power could quite easily become corrupt, even to the point where people, their health, their lives were far less important than the profits the corporation generated; and even more important to Wilhelm than money was power. It was not his fault. He was addicted to it, had been force-fed that addiction all his growing life by their father. By his father, Leo corrected himself mentally.

  No, to become a part of his world would ultimately destroy Christie. And yet wouldn’t living without her destroy him?

  He smiled grimly to himself as he thanked Davina for agreeing to see him and replaced the receiver.

  Frowning slightly, Davina wandered slowly back into the kitchen. Leo von Hessler. She had recognised the name, of course, but it was news to her that her father had ever even known, never mind been friendly with his.

  Davina had known her father well, or, rather, she had thought she had. He had not been the kind of man who would have kept quiet about such a prestigious friendship. Never, as far as she could remember, had anyone with that name written to or contacted her father, and her father had never contacted him. Neither had he ever visited Germany since the end of the war.

  Davina’s frown deepened as she recognised that she ought perhaps to have questioned Leo von Hessler’s assumption that they had known one another a little more closely. But there had been something about his calm certainty, about the quiet way he had stated their friendship as an established fact, that had lulled her into accepting that it must be so.

  No, with hindsight she sensed something odd, something unknown and somehow slightly disturbing about the phone call.

  And yet why should she feel like that? Leo von Hessler himself had sounded calm, pleasant and somehow reassuring, so why did she have this odd shiver of tension, of unease?

  She glanced at her watch. He would be here within an hour. She wondered if she ought to offer him something to eat—and, if so, what?—wryly acknowledging that this concern could quite easily be a way of displacing the tension she felt and of pushing it to one side so that she wouldn’t have to deal with it.

  It irritated her a little that the habit of self-evasion, which she had developed as a means of protecting herself, was still something she hadn’t entirely escaped from even now when it was no longer necessary.

  ‘Lie to the world if you have to,’ Matt had once counselled her, ‘but never lie to yourself—about anything.’

  And now she was lying to herself, and not just about her unease over Leo von Hessler’s imminent visit either.

  He arrived on time, as Davina had expected. She watched him drive up from an upstairs window, noting the controlled way he parked the car.

  Physically he wasn’t what she had expected; more relaxed, less … less Teutonic than she had imagined from his voice, and startlingly good-looking, much more so, for instance, than Saul Jardine, whose hard bone-structure, while rendering him powerfully and very intensely male, did not possess the almost film-star good looks of this man.

  Davina blinked a little as she watched him walk towards the front door. He moved easily and elegantly, but there was a slight air of tension about him, a hesitation almost before he rang the bell.

  Quickly she hurried downstairs, her own tension increasing.

  He was sensitive as well as good-looking, she decided ten minutes later, having welcomed him in and observed the way he kept a non-threatening distance from her, touching her only briefly and accidentally when he handed her the flowers he had bought for her. Freshly cut locally grown cottage-type blooms, Davina noticed approvingly, and not the too perfect, almost unreal hot-house ones she det
ested so much. Perhaps because they reminded her of Gregory and the early days of their marriage.

  ‘Please come in,’ Davina invited, leading the way to the sitting-room after she had placed the flowers in water in the kitchen. ‘I wasn’t sure whether or not you would have eaten.’

  ‘Yes, earlier. Your afternoon tea … I had not realised it would be so filling.’

  ‘The Grosvenor prides itself on its food,’ Davina told him. She was conscious of the fact that they were both making small talk, both hesitant and wary, both on guard almost.

  ‘You mentioned a friendship between your father and mine,’ she encouraged him, taking the plunge and then discovering that she was holding her breath, her heartbeat just a little too fast and shallow.

  ‘Yes.’ Leo looked gravely at her. ‘You knew nothing of such a friendship, I take it.’

  ‘No,’ Davina admitted. ‘I knew, of course, that my father was in Germany at the end of the war …’

  ‘Yes. He was with the first of the British forces there, I believe.’ He mentioned the name of her father’s regiment and where they had been stationed, and Davina looked at him uncertainly.

  ‘You seem to know more about his war service than I do,’ she admitted. ‘My father wasn’t … that is, he and I … He was a rather reserved man,’ she told him hesitantly, groping for the right words to tell him just how little she knew about her father’s past without betraying her real feelings towards him and their relationship.

  ‘Something else our fathers seemed to have in common. Mine also was … reserved,’ Leo told her quietly.

  Something else they had in common? Davina watched him carefully. She could almost feel the tension increasing, and she wasn’t sure which of them was generating it, or were both of them doing so, and if so why?

  ‘Something else?’ she questioned.

  ‘They both founded drug companies,’ Leo told her sombrely.

  Davina frowned. ‘My father didn’t actually found Carey’s. It was my grandfather, his father, who did that. He was the one who accidentally discovered the formula for the heart drug.’

  ‘When … when did he “accidentally” discover this formula?’

  The sharpness of Leo’s question took Davina slightly off guard. ‘I’m not sure exactly,’ she admitted. ‘Some time before the war, I suppose, because my father was at university at the time. He opted out and volunteered … joined the army,’ she explained, ‘and then when he returned …’

  ‘He did what?’ Leo pressed her. ‘Did he go back to university, take his degree?’

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ Davina frowned and told him defensively. ‘But neither did many others in the same position. I think there was a general feeling among them that they had experienced too much to go back.’

  ‘But you don’t know why your father did not complete his degree?’ Leo persisted.

  Davina shook her head. ‘No, it was something we never discussed.’ She moved restlessly in her chair. ‘My father was … he was a very private man. He never talked much about himself … about his past.’

  ‘But he did tell you that the drug formula was originally discovered by his father.’

  ‘No. Not exactly,’ Davina admitted. ‘It was my mother who told me.’ She frowned and then as she caught sight of Leo’s expression her stomach lurched. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ she demanded anxiously.

  Helplessly Leo watched her. She obviously knew as little as he had done himself. Less, and suddenly he desperately wanted to protect her from the truth, but as he watched her he knew that he couldn’t. That he had already said too much.

  Inwardly he cursed himself for being so obsessed with his own need to find the truth. It was too late now to retract. Davina was waiting anxiously for him to give her an answer, and if he refused to give her one … No, he could not do that.

  ‘I don’t suppose you have a copy of the … of your grandfather’s original notes anywhere, do you?’ he asked her tonelessly.

  ‘No. No, I don’t … There was a fire in my father’s office some years ago. Everything in it was destroyed.’ It had been shortly after that that Gregory had announced that he was taking financial control of the company, she remembered.

  She had never been sure just how Gregory had managed to wrest that agreement from her father. Certainly it had led to a great deal of enmity between them; a challenging hostility which Gregory seemed to enjoy and which her father had endured with a bitter resentment.

  She had always assumed that it had had something to do with the fact that Carey’s had not produced any new drugs, but then under Gregory’s control, as she now knew, even less money had been invested in research than during her father’s rule.

  She got up abruptly and walked over to the window.

  ‘Something’s wrong, isn’t it?’ she challenged Leo as she turned round to face him. ‘Our fathers were never friends.’

  ‘Not friends, no … but I very much fear that they might have been accomplices,’ Leo told her heavily.

  As he watched her he found himself wishing that things might have been different. It would become a personal burden for her, this small, slight woman who watched him with such anxious, wary eyes. If his assumptions, his suspicions were right she would feel as he did; as, it seemed, neither of their fathers had been able to feel.

  ‘It’s a long and complicated story, full of gaps and uncertainties,’ he told her quietly.

  Davina had always been a good listener and she listened now, uneasy at first, and then dazed with disbelief as Leo gently told her what he had discovered, or, rather, as he corrected himself, what he believed he had discovered.

  ‘So what are you telling me,’ Davina interrupted him at one point, ‘that my father … our fathers used medical research which had been developed by … by … by experimentation on human beings in places like Auschwitz?’

  ‘Your father was probably only guilty of using it. I wish mine …’

  When Davina saw his face, her own shock and sickening sense of horror was pushed to one side by her instinctive compassion.

  ‘It’s not your fault. Not your guilt,’ she told him fiercely. ‘You are not responsible.’

  ‘For my father, no, but for Hessler Chemie, yes … I am. There have always been rumours about my father … rumours which surfaced briefly over the years and were quickly suppressed. He had always claimed that he was out of Germany for most of the war. And that much is true, he was, but there are those who say that he did not leave Germany because, as he claims, he could not fight for Hitler and yet neither could he fight against his countrymen—but because he was a highly paid spy; someone high up enough in the confidence of others to know exactly what was going on in those death camps; someone even who knew this medical research existed … someone who was perhaps discovered by your father removing this particular research from some secret place.’

  Davina went white. ‘Are you saying … do you mean …?’ Her throat was raw with horror, her voice a thin whisper of protest.

  ‘I have no proof to say whether or not your father blackmailed mine into giving him one of those chemical equations. I do not have enough knowledge of your father to make that kind of accusation. All I can say is that I believe that the formula on which Carey Chemicals’ major—only, in fact—drug is based bears far too close a resemblance to the one I found in my father’s possessions for it merely to be coincidence.’

  He had seen the way Davina’s body had jerked in response to his use of the word ‘blackmail’ and now he looked at her and apologised sincerely. ‘I’m sorry. Believe me … I didn’t come here to distress you. I know what you must feel and, besides, I could be wrong.’

  Davina shook her head. ‘No,’ she told him painfully. ‘I don’t think you are.’ She didn’t know how she knew that his suspicions were correct, but it was as though listening to him had turned the key in a locked door within her own subconscious so that she was illuminatingly aware of just how capable her father could have been of that kind of act. �
�I think you are probably right.’ She shivered a little, trying not to think about the source of the money that now lay in Gregory’s bank accounts, her bank accounts, the same money which had provided for the clothes on her back and the food in her mouth.

  ‘Try not to think about it,’ Leo advised her, correctly reading her thoughts.

  ‘I can’t help it. Those people … the ones in … in those camps. They … their families … they are the ones who should have benefited from the success of these drugs.’ Her gorge rose at the images forming in her brain. ‘I can’t bear to think about it,’ she told Leo rawly. ‘How …?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Leo told her. ‘I’m still trying to come to terms with it myself. Your father was merely guilty of blackmail, of perhaps simply taking the option of not reporting my father in return for the research, while mine … Did he simply come across the medical reports, discover them by accident, or was he looking for them, aware of their existence? Had he …?’

  ‘The heart drug was the only one that Carey’s ever produced successfully,’ Davina murmured. ‘But Hessler’s …’

  ‘Who knows how my father came by the original workings for all the other drugs he claimed came from our laboratories, apart from the original tranquilliser?’ Leo interrupted her painfully. ‘Maybe they were genuinely produced there. I hope to God they were.’

  ‘I can’t bear to think of what they did,’ Davina whispered.

  ‘No,’ Leo agreed. ‘When I first knew, I wanted to destroy Hessler Chemie, to take it and physically scatter every particle of it into the dust, to scream my father’s guilt from the roof-tops, so great was the burden of my own pain; but how can I do that? How can I put at risk the livelihoods of so many thousands of innocent people, people who have no knowledge of what the corporation they are working for was founded on?

  ‘If I were to reveal the truth to the world to appease my own guilt it wouldn’t be my father who would suffer, or so I tell myself.’ He looked broodingly at Davina. ‘Am I a moral coward as well as the son of a sadist and murderer?’