by Penny Jordan
Davina winced at the tone of his voice but shook her head. ‘No,’ she told him huskily. ‘But I know how you feel. Carey’s … the thought of ever having to go there again makes me feel physically sick … like this house … like everything bought with my father’s money, and yet if I desert Carey’s now …’ She paused and looked at him. ‘I expect you know that we’re on the verge of bankruptcy. You seem to know so much else.’
Leo nodded, and suddenly Davina wanted to ask his advice. He was a stranger, and yet in many ways he had come, through what he had told her, closer to her than if they had been born twin souls.
‘I have been approached by someone who wants to buy the company. The bank wants me to sell, but I can’t do that until I have categoric assurances that everyone’s jobs will be safe and that their working conditions will be improved. Saul Jardine—’
‘Jardine?’ Leo questioned abruptly.
‘Yes.’ Davina hesitated uncertainly. ‘Do you … do you know him?’
‘No,’ Leo told her.
‘He … he works for Sir Alex Davidson,’ Davina continued.
Leo frowned. He knew of Alex Davidson, an entrepreneur who was more pirate than anything else, a man with a good nose for a weak or unprotected business, but what could he possibly want with Carey’s?
Leo was not surprised by Davina’s admission that Carey’s was on the verge of bankruptcy. What had surprised him was that someone, anyone should want to buy her out.
‘We’ll never really know, will we,’ Davina asked him tiredly, ‘about our fathers, I mean?’
‘No,’ Leo agreed sombrely.
‘We were never close … we never really got on. I always knew he didn’t love me, and I didn’t particularly like him,’ Davina admitted. ‘But I never actually hated him before. How could he …?’
Leo didn’t try to comfort her; he knew there was nothing he could say that would offer comfort.
‘Thank God he’s dead,’ Davina said passionately at last. ‘If he weren’t …’
‘I know,’ Leo agreed.
‘What will you do now?’ Davina asked him.
He shook his head. ‘There is nothing I can do; for the sake of the corporation, I cannot expose my father’s past. I’m sorry you have been involved. I should not perhaps have burdened you with such knowledge.’
‘No,’ Davina told him fiercely, and as she said it she knew it was true. ‘I’m glad in a way that I do know. It makes it easier somehow, knowing that perhaps, after all, I was not at fault for not loving him.’
‘I understand,’ Leo said grimly, and, looking at him, Davina had the feeling that he did.
‘It can never be wholly confirmed, you know,’ he told her gently. ‘At best it is only surmise. I have been discreet,’ he added. ‘My enquiries will not put you at any kind of risk, although I am not sure now if my motives in seeking you out were quite as I had believed. I had told myself it was simply that I had to have confirmation of my suspicions of my father’s guilt, but now I wonder if I wasn’t also looking for someone to share with me the horror that goes with them.’
Davina touched his arm lightly. There was a bond between them now that could never be severed; it would be deeper and more binding than any bond of love or blood … as deep perhaps as the bond of guilt and deceit that had linked their fathers?
‘I could still be wrong,’ Leo persisted. ‘There is no real proof.’
Davina shook her head. ‘My father was the proof,’ she told him quietly. ‘And you are not wrong. What will you do now?’ she asked him.
‘Go back to Hamburg and pray that our fathers’ crimes remain buried with them,’ he told her grimly. ‘And you?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. First I must find a buyer … the right buyer for Carey’s.’ Only when she had done that would she be free to walk away from the burden of her father’s guilt … his blood money.
She shuddered a little, knowing that she would never be entirely free of its taint, but she could not go back and alter the past.
The future was a different matter.
After his death Matt’s solicitors had approached her, discreetly and very carefully, to advise her that he had left her a small legacy. In the letter they had given her he had written,
If you have not already found it, then let this be your passport to your own freedom. It is a gift of love, Davina … the love I should have shared with you, but was afraid to admit.
She had never touched the money, investing it instead. It wasn’t a large sum, but it was enough—more than enough for her to live on while she trained for some kind of occupation … enough to enable her to rent a small house or flat for long enough for her to start to make her own way financially.
It seemed almost prophetic that Matt, who had already given her so much, should also have given her this.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Leo began, but Davina shook her head.
‘No … I’m glad you told me and … and … I’ll go through my father’s papers just to check. You’re staying at the Grosvenor … How long for?’
‘I’m leaving tomorrow, but I’ll give you my number in Hamburg, and not just in case you do find something. I want us to keep in touch, Davina.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed shakily. ‘So do I.’
He stood up and held out his hand to her to shake hers and then abruptly changed his mind, taking hold of her and hugging her. It was not a sexual embrace in any way, but it was one that was full of warmth and compassion.
‘Don’t feel you must share their guilt,’ he told her.
‘Don’t you?’ she asked him quietly.
As he released her Davina gave him a wan smile. ‘If I discover anything I’ll let you know,’ she promised him as they said their goodbyes.
Half of her already suspected that she wouldn’t. Surely her father would not have made that kind of mistake? But then, in keeping the equations in their original form, Leo’s father had. Greed was a strange and powerful force and a very destructive one.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE evening was not turning out to be a success. Of the three of them, only Cathy seemed to be enjoying herself, Christie acknowledged, thankful when the meal had finally come to an end and they were free to leave. Saul had been abstracted all evening and she herself had not been in the mood to enjoy herself.
She was walking ahead of Saul as they left the restaurant and moved into the reception area, but Saul was right behind her so that when she froze at the sight of the man standing with his back to her as he spoke to the receptionist, and whispered rawly, ‘Leo,’ Saul heard her as he almost walked into her.
‘What is it?’ he began urgently, but Christie wasn’t listening. She could hear Leo speaking to the receptionist, asking her to make sure that if there was a telephone call for him from a Mrs Davina James he was paged.
Now it was Saul’s turn to tense and watch as Leo turned away from the reception desk.
He saw Christie the moment he turned round.
‘For God’s sake, let’s get out of here,’ Christie implored Saul rawly as Leo automatically started to walk towards them, turning quickly on her heel and almost running over to the exit.
‘Mum, what is it? What’s wrong?’ Cathy was anxiously asking as she and Saul caught up with her outside.
‘It’s nothing, “Christie lied abruptly, and then, seeing Cathy’s face, tried to soften her own tension a little by adding, ‘I was just feeling slightly queasy, but I’m all right now that I’m outside.’
Leo, here in Chester, but obviously not because of her. What did he want with Davina James? She frowned, remembering Saul’s own interest in Carey’s.
Saul, after one look at her face, made no attempt to engage her in conversation on the drive home, and Cathy, obviously still sensing her tension, went to bed quietly, the expression in her eyes quickening Christie’s heart with guilt and pain.
No matter what her own emotions were and no matter how much the unexpected sight of Leo had shocked her, she had n
o right to put her own feelings before those of her child.
As she pushed Cathy’s soft hair off her face and bent to kiss her her eyes burned sharply with tears.
‘I love you, Mum,’ Cathy whispered as she hugged her. Wordlessly Christie hugged her in return. Although she was far too young truly to understand or recognise what she was experiencing, her daughter was now past the age when she could be deceived by a small white lie, Christie recognised as she heard in Cathy’s words the knowledge that she knew quite well that it was more than a fictitious bout of nausea which had prompted Christie’s hurried exit from the hotel.
When she went back downstairs and found Saul waiting for her in the kitchen she wasn’t sure whether she wanted him there or not.
‘Want to talk about it?’ he offered.
‘There isn’t much point,’ she told him tiredly. ‘There isn’t really anything to talk about.’
The look he gave her made her muscles tense defensively.
‘All right … all right … I met him in Edinburgh; we shared a taxi to the hotel. We went out together for dinner.’
‘And?’ Saul prompted. He had never seen Christie like this before. Normally her passion was wholly reserved for her daughter, her beliefs and her work. He had seen how after Cathy’s birth she had distanced herself emotionally from his sex, separating emotion from desire, and then as she matured controlling even that aspect of her personality, so that he suspected the discreet physical liaisons she had once shared with like-minded men were now no longer an indulgence she permitted herself.
Once when he had queried this she had told him shortly that she had Cathy to consider, and she wasn’t going to be the kind of mother who paraded a string of male ‘friends’ in front of her impressionable child. ‘Besides,’ she had added wryly, ‘I’m a doctor. How can I take on the responsibility for warning my patients about the dangers of unprotected sex with a variety of partners if I can’t observe those safeguards myself?’
Now, as he watched and waited, he wondered if perhaps Leo von Hessler had been an exception to that personal rule. The man was certainly physically attractive enough, even he could recognise that, and she was perhaps now suffering the after-effects of that self-indulgence.
‘And nothing,’ Christie told him fiercely. He could see, from the way she was tensing her body, the anger and emotions she was trying to control. ‘Nothing happened,’ she continued. ‘Nothing. All evening I’d thought …’
She was pacing the kitchen now, almost unaware of his presence as the words burst from her, small staccato volleys of anger and pain as her control finally snapped.
‘I wanted him, Saul, and I thought he wanted me.’ She swung round abruptly, the expression on her face making Saul wince, taking him back to their shared childhood. The despair and confusion he could see in her eyes now were just adult versions of the emotions he had seen there so often in the past. His throat ached with compassion and the same old helpless feeling of wanting to comfort her but somehow being unable to either do or say anything to show her how much he cared.
‘I made it as clear to him as day that I …’ She swallowed and then asked him rawly, ‘Is it like this for a man when a woman rejects him, or …?’
‘Sometimes,’ Saul told her. ‘It depends on the woman and how much he wants her, how much of himself he’s revealed to her.’
‘He let me tell him so much about myself,’ Christie continued bitterly. ‘I was actually beginning to think …’ She stopped, her skin suddenly flushing, and Saul ached inside for her obvious vulnerability.
She had offered von Hessler her body and been rejected, but both of them knew that there was more to it than that … much more. How much more she had revealed in those few betraying words and the look in her eyes.
‘I’m too old to be feeling like this,’ she said helplessly. ‘God knows, I don’t want to.’
‘To what?’ Saul probed gently. ‘To love him?’
‘Love him?’ Christie gave him a bitter, tight smile. ‘How can I possibly love him? He represents everything I most detest, Saul; he even lied to me about who he actually was. I can’t love him. I don’t even think I believe that such an emotion exists … not between adults … and especially not when sex is involved. Oh, we call it love, but in reality …’
Saul watched her gravely. He had heard her propound this theory before, but this time the passion and the belief were missing from her angry words.
‘Chris, come back down to earth,’ he told her gently. He went up to her and took hold of her, surprising them both. They had never been particularly physically affectionate with one another, although they were close in their way. It was almost, Christie recognised, as though in the past something had kept them physically apart. Something, or someone? she wondered, remembering how much their father had always disliked anyone going too physically close to him, sending out signals that both of them had picked up on and reacted to in their different ways.
Now as Saul held her, awkwardly at first and then more easily, she experienced an intense surge of emotion, of being close to him, of the bond of blood and flesh that linked them. It carried her past the barriers of her own self-protection and defensiveness.
‘Oh, Saul, I’m so afraid,’ she told him. ‘I don’t want to feel like this. The whole thing’s so … so ridiculous and impossible. I don’t even know him. He’s all the things I most detest.’
‘He’s still a man, Christie,’ Saul told her quietly. ‘And he must feel something for you to have come here … looking for you.’
Immediately Christie stiffened, pulling herself away from him. ‘He hasn’t come here for me, Saul. He’s come here to see Davina James. I heard him telling the receptionist that he was expecting a call from her.’ Her mouth twisted in a bitter smile. ‘Perhaps, like Alex, he wants to buy her out of Carey’s.’
Now it was Saul’s turn to tense, his brain suddenly as clinically cold as a programmed computer as he slotted the facts into place.
Someone as important as Leo von Hessler didn’t suddenly appear out of the blue to impulsively make an offer for a company like Carey’s. Just to make a slot wide enough in his diary to fit in a trip to Cheshire would take weeks of careful planning. Nor would he just arrive without having first ascertained that the person he wanted to see was at least receptive to his offer. Which meant …
Which meant that all along Davina James had known … must have known of his interest. Had known and had deliberately kept that knowledge to herself … had deliberately lied to him … amused herself with him … played with him by producing that ridiculous set of conditions for sale, knowing all the time that she had another potential buyer, and a far richer and more powerful buyer than Alex, in the background.
No need to ask himself what was in her mind. He already knew: she was going to play them off against each other, skilfully manipulating them both until she got the deal she wanted … a deal that would have nothing whatsoever to do with obtaining security for Carey’s employees.
How could he have been stupid enough to be taken in by her? She was the novice, he the expert, and yet he had actually believed that she was concerned for her employees, so much so, in fact … He took a deep breath as he felt the anger grip him, sharp and savage.
He had believed her, and not just believed her but actually envied her her honesty, her compassion, the moral high ground which she had seemed to occupy so effortlessly and so genuinely. She had made him bitterly and painfully aware of what he saw as his own failure to match those achievements, his own sacrificing of his beliefs, his own betrayal of self, and not even for his own gain but for that of others.
He had believed her and been dazzled, blinded by that belief, and now, confronted with the truth, he succumbed to the savage whiplash reaction of that self-betrayal.
‘Saul, what is it?’ Christie demanded as she saw his expression change.
‘I’m going to see Davina James,’ he told her grimly.
She stared at him in disbelief. ‘
What? You can’t … It’s almost ten o’clock at night. Saul, for heaven’s sake … whatever it is, it can surely wait until tomorrow. You—’
‘This can’t wait,’ he told her.
* * *
All the way to Davina’s he could feel the anger inside him mounting, pulsing against the thin veil of his self-control. He was vaguely aware that he was over-reacting, but his fury pushed him on, overwhelming caution and restraint.
As he misjudged a sharp bend and the car lurched, protesting under the additional pressure on the brakes, he realised he was driving too fast and too carelessly. His knuckles whitened with the strain of imposing some physical control on what he was doing. He had what he knew to be a dangerous, almost insane impulse simply to press his foot down on the accelerator and to give way to the need to let the tension inside him burst past its barriers.
There were lights on downstairs when he reached the house and he experienced a momentary stab of disappointment. He would have liked to wake her from sleep, to have the advantage of surprise, he acknowledged bitterly.
What was she doing? Smugly waiting for him to come back to her to tell her that Alex wasn’t going to accept any one of her terms?
Would she laugh at him, armed by her own duplicity, when he told her about von Hessler’s offer, or would she continue to play the role she had so expertly cast for herself?
Would those extraordinary eyes of hers reflect a false concern and warmth when she told him that someone else was also interested in acquiring the company, the same false compassion and warmth they had reflected when she had told him why she had set such unexpected and unrealistic conditions?
She had taken him in so easily, so cleverly, so completely.
He got out of the car and walked quickly towards the door.
* * *
Davina was in the room where she had stored all her father’s papers when she heard the irate banging on her front door.
After Leo had gone she had come up here to this small, empty box-room and had meticulously gone through everything, but, as she had expected, she had found nothing.