To Leonie’s horror she heard Jonah suggesting a short rest on his bed first, but to her overwhelming relief this was vetoed.
‘No, thanks,’ said Rachel, her voice suddenly unsteady. ‘Look, Jonah, I meant what I said in the car. I’m sorry to burden you like this, but now you know you must see that the situation’s impossible. Under the circumstances I really must resign. Frankly, I don’t know how I’ve carried on so long. So in the morning I’ll give your father my notice.’
There was a rustle, and Leonie felt suddenly sick as she realised Jonah had taken Rachel in his arms. ‘I understand,’ she heard him say, with a note of tenderness which cut her to the heart. ‘But will you be all right? You know I’ll do everything in my power to help.’
‘Then persuade your father to let me go as soon as possible,’ said Rachel thickly. ‘I’ll be forty-one in a week’s time, a bit past it for first-time motherhood. I’m exhausted. And it’s getting to be an uphill struggle to disguise the fact that I’m more than six months pregnant.’
‘Six months!’ Jonah swore softly. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me before?’
‘I haven’t told anyone.’ There was a pause. ‘I’ll have to let Tom and Frances know, of course. But otherwise, Jonah,’ added Rachel, in a commanding voice, ‘no one must ever know the truth.’
‘That’s impossible—’ said Jonah fiercely.
‘No,’ was the peremptory interruption. ‘You know perfectly well why. She must never know. Swear you won’t tell her, Jonah. It would break her heart. You know it would. I can cope with everything else. But not that.’
The moment she was sure they’d gone Leonie got up to dress, blinded by tears, trembling so much she was all fingers and thumbs. She rang for a taxi, then took her luggage back downstairs to the hall to wait, and when the cab arrived told the driver to take her to a hotel near Heathrow. She sat like a statue on the journey, checked in at the hotel, then lay limp as a rag doll on the bed, blind to her surroundings as she came to terms with her discovery.
Rachel, the much-loved aunt she’d always looked up to with such enormous admiration, was expecting Jonah Savage’s child. The child of the man Rachel’s niece had been due to marry. Leonie let out a cry of sharp, physical pain and turned on her face.
Rachel Dysart was a handsome woman, tall and fair, like her brother Tom, with a lithe figure women years her junior envied, her body shape lending itself to pregnancy without revealing the fact too early. Leonie shuddered, remembering how she’d teased Rachel about putting on weight, how Rachel’s usual power-dressing had given way to softer clothes that draped and concealed. She’d even accused her aunt of having a secret lover…
Leonie bolted suddenly for the bathroom and surrendered to violent retching which went on and on until she was shivering uncontrollably, her misery so intense she would have traded her soul to run home to Friars Wood and hurl herself into her mother’s arms. But that was impossible. Because Rachel was involved. Leonie gritted her teeth. She would just have to bear her pain alone and go back to Florence. When she was there, and she felt a bit calmer, she’d write to Jonah and tell him everything was over between them. The letter would be waiting for him when he got home from New Zealand. The delay would be all to the good. By then she’d be hardened to the idea of him as ex-lover. She’d get rid of the cellphone he’d given her, and if he rang the school she’d leave instructions that she was unavailable. Her only hope of recovery would be never to see or speak to him again. And she would volunteer to work at the school’s summer camp in Umbria to keep out of Rachel’s way when the baby was born. Jonah’s baby. At the prospect Leonie’s renewed storm of weeping was so prolonged that her eyes were still swollen when she arrived in Florence, and she had to lie about a cold.
Jonah heard Leonie out in complete silence punctuated only by a furious gesture of denial at certain points in her story. When she’d finished he got up without a word and went from the room. She stared after him, biting her lip, wondering what to do, but to her surprise he returned with a bottle of whisky and two glasses.
‘I know you don’t like it,’ he said, forestalling her refusal. ‘Unless your tastes have changed, of course,’ he added curtly. ‘But I think the situation calls for something a lot stronger than coffee.’
Jonah was furiously angry, Leonie realised with resentment. As though she were the one at fault.
He handed her a glass with an inch of whisky in it and told her to drink it down. Leonie obeyed, grimacing at the taste, but glad of the warmth as the spirit did its work. Jonah sipped his more sparingly, and sat, legs outstretched, on the battered leather fender, his face inscrutable.
‘Quite a story,’ he observed at last.
‘But the gospel truth,’ she snapped, infuriated by Jonah’s lack of remorse.
‘Only part of it.’
Leonie frowned. ‘Are you denying that Fenny’s your daughter?’
‘Of course I deny it,’ he said scornfully. ‘When—or if—I have a child, you can be damned sure I won’t leave it to someone else to bring up.’
Leonie gazed at him dumbly, shaken to the depths. She’d arrived fuelled by blazing certainty about Jonah’s sins, yet his denial had the unmistakeable ring of truth. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said at last, more from habit than conviction.
‘Would I lie about something like this?’ he demanded.
Leonie stared at his taut, angry face. ‘But she’s the image of you. The shiny black hair, those unmistakable eyes—’
‘Kate’s eyes are hazel, too,’ he reminded her.
‘Hers are more gold, not green like yours—and Fenny’s.’ She drew in a deep, ragged breath and held out her glass. ‘Could I have some more?’
‘No. I prefer to restore you to your parents in relatively sober condition.’
Leonie stood up. ‘Then restore me right now, please.’
‘Stay where you are,’ he ordered. ‘You don’t get off that easily, Leo.’
‘I know you’re angry, Jonah—’ she began, but his hand made a chopping motion, silencing her.
‘Angry?’ He gave a bark of derisive laughter. ‘You just don’t get it, do you? You took it on yourself to ruin two lives when a simple explanation would have put everything right between us in minutes. You bet I’m angry, Miss Dysart. And you’re damn well going to sit there until you know the truth. Though it’s too late to mend anything now. Things could never be the same between us again. Despite,’ he added, with a look in his eyes which brought the blood rushing to her face, ‘our continued rapport in the sex department. I won’t deny that I still lust after you. But right now, Leonie, I don’t like you very much.’
His words acted like salt on an open wound, but she lifted her chin proudly and motioned him to go on. ‘Have your say, then, and I’ll go.’
‘Sit down,’ he ordered.
Leonie resumed her place on the sofa, partly because she felt at a disadvantage with bare feet, but mainly because she was filled with sudden dread. If Jonah wasn’t the father of Rachel’s child, who was?
Jonah took some time to begin. He stared down into his glass, as though looking into a crystal ball which revealed the past. ‘I admit I was very fond of Rachel,’ he began at last. ‘But I didn’t look on her as a contemporary. She was my father’s right hand, and knew far more about the business than I did when I joined the firm. I’d worked on various building sites during university vacations and so on, but when it came to management I was still wet behind the ears.’
Rachel Dysart, personal assistant to James Savage, the founder of JS Developments, had been a great help to Jonah from day one as he’d begun to work his way up through the company. Often she’d acted as buffer between her boss and the heir apparent, when their formidable temperaments had clashed, and it had been Rachel who’d trained up an efficient secretary for Jonah when he’d reached the status which required one.
‘Then one day Rachel invited a few JS people to a drinks party at her flat and included me. And you surprised he
r by turning up out of the blue.’ Jonah eyed her quizzically. ‘I assume you remember the occasion?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Leonie said dully. ‘One way and another, how could I forget?’
‘She’d never asked me to her place before—because I was the boss’s son, I suppose. And unless you were staying with her,’ he added with emphasis, ‘I was never there again. The only other place I ever met Rachel, apart from the office, was at Friars Wood once you and I were engaged.’
‘But the day I went back to your flat—’
‘Rachel had shocked everyone by passing out while she was taking the minutes of a meeting.’ Jonah smiled grimly. ‘All the suits were in a right old panic, including my father, so I picked her up and carried her into my office. Father wanted to send for a doctor, but Rachel came round quickly and asked to leave to see her own. I volunteered to drive her, but she was so ill in the car I took her to my place until she felt fit enough to make it to hers.’
‘I know,’ said Leonie despondently. ‘I heard you talking.’
‘Unfortunately you didn’t hear everything,’ he retorted. The bright, cold eyes locked with hers. ‘And of course you know what happened after that.’
Leonie nodded, her eyes bright with unshed tears. Rachel had been coming down with flu when Jonah had taken her home to his flat. By the time Leonie had been back in Florence, and Jonah in New Zealand, Rachel’s flu had turned to pneumonia, which had precipitated the premature birth of her daughter. She had survived only long enough to receive Frances and Tom’s promise to bring her baby up as their own. Grief-stricken, Leonie had begged two days’ leave but had flown back to Florence immediately after the funeral, missing Jonah by hours.
‘I’ll always be sorry I couldn’t make it,’ he said sombrely. ‘My parents were at the funeral, of course, but they drove to Heathrow afterwards to pick me up and took me home with them. The phone I gave you never answered, and the staff at your school, after I finally managed to get through to them, informed me you’d moved to a different apartment in Florence. So I rushed round to my place, sure I’d find a letter from you. And sure enough, I did, but with your engagement ring in it instead of your new address. The rest, as they say, is history.’
Leonie waited after he’d finished speaking, finding it hard to break the lengthening silence to ask the question Jonah had left unanswered. Eventually he roused himself from his reverie and turned to look at her. ‘Didn’t you wonder, sometimes, why an attractive woman like Rachel never married?’
‘Of course—we all did. Dad used to tease her about it all the time. But Rachel always laughed it off, saying she was married to her career.’ Leonie’s mouth twisted. ‘But that was obviously a front.’
‘Do you believe me, Leo?’ he asked abruptly.
She gave him a long, introspective look. ‘Yes, I think I do.’
‘Why?’
She shrugged. ‘It sounds like the truth, I suppose.’
‘Something I could have told you years ago, given the chance,’ he said harshly. ‘Lord knows I tried hard enough to see you, talk to you, ask what went wrong. Your family were very kind to me, but obviously just as much in the dark as I was. And in the end even the most persistent of lovers loses heart. And interest.’
She flinched. ‘Yes. I can see that. Though under the circumstances I can be forgiven for making a mistake—’
‘Not by me,’ he said bitterly.
This news was oddly cheering to Leonie. If Jonah felt as strongly as that he must still care for her a little. She blinked hard, unaware until that moment that she still wanted him to care for her.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
Leonie pulled herself together. ‘The thing is, Jonah, I’m only human. I need to know the truth about Fenny, who her father actually is. Not that it matters from a Dysart point of view. We all think of her as ours, anyway. Another little sister. But with those eyes—’ She stopped dead, staring at him in horror as she remembered someone else with eyes like Jonah’s.
He shook his head, reading her like a book. ‘Wrong again, Leo. Like me, my father’s not the unfaithful kind.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘Fenny’s neither my daughter, nor my little sister; she’s my cousin, too.’
CHAPTER SIX
‘YOU only met my uncle once,’ said Jonah, as Leonie’s eyes filled with dawning comprehension. ‘At the party my parents gave to celebrate our engagement.’
Leonie remembered the beautiful summer day at the Hampstead house only too well. Flora Savage had decided on a garden party, with strawberries and champagne consumed at small tables shaded from the sun by large umbrellas, and for Leonie bliss had pervaded the entire occasion, making it too painful to look back on afterwards. Among the host of people introduced to her that day Leonie remembered Richard Savage for a very good reason. Tall, dark and elegant in a pale linen suit and sunglasses, he’d arrived pushing his wife Helen in the wheelchair she’d been confined to for years.
‘Fenny is Richard’s child,’ said Jonah. ‘But don’t judge him—or Rachel—too severely. He was devoted to Helen, but the physical side of their marriage ended after the brain haemorrhage disabled her. And Richard was a lot younger than my father. He was a man in the prime of life.’
Leonie nodded sadly. ‘He was a barrister, wasn’t he? So how did Rachel meet him?’
‘Dad just happened to invite him to one of the company functions Rachel used to organise so brilliantly. Helen couldn’t always cope with that kind of thing, so on this particular occasion Richard went alone.’
Leonie looked at him sombrely. ‘And he and Rachel had an affair.’
Jonah shook his head. ‘No, Leo. They fell madly in love. As people do. But my parents never knew. Nor did I until Rachel told me.’
‘Why did she tell you?’
He smiled wryly. ‘Because when I found out she was pregnant I jumped to the same conclusion as you. For a hideous split-second I thought my father might be to blame. Rachel was seriously unamused. She gave me such a tongue-lashing that day in the car we had to stop for her to throw up. In the end she was forced to tell me about Richard, if only to scotch any doubts about my father. And on the strict understanding that I never told another soul. By then, of course, Richard had been dead for a couple of months, and Rachel made me swear that Helen would never find out the truth.’
‘So that’s who she meant. I thought it was me,’ said Leonie sadly. ‘Poor Helen. And poor Rachel, too.’
‘Richard never even knew she was pregnant. When he was killed in that motorway pile-up she couldn’t forgive herself for not telling him he’d fathered the child he’d longed for so much,’ said Jonah sombrely.
Leonie felt her throat thicken. ‘Mother told me Rachel had been under the weather for a while, but I was so—’
‘So what?’ he prompted.
She stared at him defiantly. ‘So wrapped up in you I never noticed when I came home that Easter. Did you notice?’
‘No, I didn’t. And for exactly the same reason.’ He shrugged. ‘I liked and respected Rachel, but you were the sole focus of my attention. In those days, anyway.’
Leonie felt a stab of pain. ‘Jonah, are you really the only one Rachel told?’
‘I’ve no idea. I always wished I could tell them, but my parents can’t possibly know, otherwise they would have wanted to see Fenny from the start. I can’t answer for yours, of course.’
Their eyes met. ‘They must know,’ said Leonie, with sudden conviction. ‘When they promised Rachel to bring up her baby she’s bound to have told them before—before she died.’
‘How did they explain Fenny to the rest of you?’
‘They didn’t, really—just said Rachel was no keener on marriage than she’d ever been, but had decided to have a baby and bring it up on her own. When she died she trusted her daughter to us, to love as our own little sister. Which was the absolute truth, as far as it went. The others were too grief-stricken about Rachel to do anything but accept it without questions. I, of course,’ add
ed Leonie bitterly, ‘thought I knew better—or worse.’
‘Did it ever colour your feelings towards Fenny?’
‘Oddly enough, no.’ She smiled wryly. ‘One look and I was besotted from the first.’
He nodded. ‘I can understand that. My acquaintance is more recent, but the same thing applies.’
Leonie stared into the fire. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it? That Rachel died and poor fragile Helen survived the tragedy. How is she these days?’
‘Surprisingly well. She wouldn’t leave the house she’d shared with Richard, because he’d had it fitted up in every way possible for her to lead a normal life in it. But these days she lives on the ground floor, and her two widowed sisters share the rest of the house.’ Jonah smiled a little. ‘Helen says it’s like a Chekhov play without the angst. She’s taken up painting. And of course my parents see a lot of her.’
Leonie glanced at her watch and gasped in horror. ‘Look at the time. I must go.’
‘Right.’ Jonah kicked the logs down in the fireplace. ‘Your jacket must be dry by now.’
On the short journey to Friars Wood neither of them said very much. When the car drew up in front of the house their eyes met fleetingly.
‘Will you come in?’ asked Leonie.
‘No, thanks. I’ve still got some work to do. Oh, by the way.’ Jonah reached into his pocket and took out a rolled document. ‘We made a bargain, so this is yours.’
Leonie eyed him with hauteur. ‘I can’t possibly take that from you, Jonah. If we owe you money we’ll pay it.’
‘Consider the debt paid,’ he said flatly, and got out of the car to let her out. ‘I dislike loose ends.’
Which put her firmly in her place. If Jonah had wanted revenge those four cruel little words had exacted it in full measure, if he only knew it. And, knowing Jonah, she thought bitterly, he probably knew it very well.
As they got out the pouring rain drenched them both, then the front door opened and Jonah dived back in the car. ‘Goodnight. Make my apologies to your parents for bringing you home so late.’ He closed the window, then reversed back along the terrace and out of sight.
A Vengeful Reunion Page 6