Cruel Legacy

by Penny Jordan

  He had never needed or wanted Sally more in all his life, but the minutes and then the hours had ticked away and still Sally hadn’t come, nor had anyone answered at Daphne’s even then.

  Now his fear had turned to anger, and, although he wanted to call back his words when he saw Sally’s white face, somehow he just couldn’t do so.

  Not man enough, an inner voice taunted him, but before he could answer it the ward doors swung open and a nurse came hurrying towards them.

  ‘Ah, Sally, you finally made it,’ she greeted Sally, and then, turning her back on her, she addressed herself to Joel, telling him, ‘It’s all right, Mr Bruton. The specialist is sure that it isn’t appendicitis. He thinks it’s more likely to be a particularly virulent strain of stomach bug that’s been doing the rounds recently, but we’ll keep her in overnight just to be on the safe side.’

  Sister Fuller had never liked her, Sally acknowledged. She was one of the old school, devoted to her young patients, but thoroughly disapproving of mothers who worked, even if it was in the field of nursing.

  ‘You can see your daughter now if you like,’ she continued, still keeping her back to Sally and addressing herself to Joel.

  A movement at the far end of the corridor caught Sally’s eye and as she turned her head she saw Paul coming towards them. When he saw the nurse talking to Joel he tensed and started to run.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Joel reassured him, reaching out to him before Sally could say or do anything, putting his arm around his shoulders and drawing him protectively towards him as he told him, ‘Cathy’s going to be OK.’

  Watching the two of them together, the way Joel’s arm curved protectively around his son’s body, the warmth and reassurance in his voice, the closeness and intimacy between them, Sally suddenly felt like an outsider, unwanted and unnecessary, an intruder into their private circle—a world she no longer had the right to enter. Hot tears stung her eyes and burned her throat.

  Over Paul’s shoulder Joel suddenly noticed Sally’s downbent head and the betraying shine of tears in her eyes. Remorsefully he gently started to push Paul to one side and reach for Sally.

  He had been unfairly hard on her. It wasn’t her fault she had been too preoccupied this morning to see how ill Cathy had been. It was only fear and panic that had made him speak so savagely to her, the knowledge of how completely helpless and alone he had felt… how much he had needed her.

  He called her name softly, but she was already turning away from him and heading towards the ward, walking so quickly that she was almost at the ward doors before he could catch up with her, stiffly holding herself aloof from him as he fell into step beside her.

  * * *

  ‘I’m sure there’s really nothing to worry about,’ the specialist was telling them gently a few minutes later as he met them outside the ward. ‘Although your husband was quite right to bring her in.’

  ‘I panicked,’ Joel admitted gruffly. ‘I didn’t know what to do when she was in such pain.’ He shook his head, unable to find the words to express what he had felt.

  Sally watched him. Reaction had started to set in, her body cold with the realisation not of the fact that Cathy was safe and only suffering from some bug, but what she would now be feeling had her appendix really burst.

  As a nurse she knew better than most how important time was in diagnosing an inflamed appendix, so important that minutes and sometimes even seconds could make the difference between life and death. But she had been away, unavailable, oblivious, uncaring, unknowing, unreachable for hours. Hours when the fight for Cathy’s life could have been waged and lost.

  A cold, numbing sensation spread through her, her head threatening to burst under the pressure of her thoughts as she tried to imagine how she would have felt walking into the hospital which was so familiar to her to learn that her child had died while she…

  What kind of mother was she…? What kind of person…?

  ‘Sister said that you wanted to keep Cathy in overnight,’ Joel was saying.

  ‘Yes, but that’s only as a precaution,’ the specialist was reassuring him.

  ‘I want to stay here with her… tonight…’ Sally announced croakily. ‘I——’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ Joel interrupted her, reminding her, ‘You’ve got an early shift in the morning…’

  ‘I really wouldn’t advise either of you to stay. I promise you it isn’t necessary and, besides, I’m afraid we just don’t have the room,’ the specialist informed them. ‘You can see her now, of course.’

  Although the nurses had done their best to cheer up the children’s ward, it had a spartan, almost bleak appearance, far too reminiscent of Kenneth’s unnaturally perfect rooms for Sally’s comfort. The knowledge of where she had been and with whom while her child lay ill spread across her conscience like a heavy weight she couldn’t remove.

  She needed someone else to help her lift it, she acknowledged, but who was there who could do that… who wanted to do that for her…?

  Not Cathy, who lay still and unnaturally quiet in the pristine white bed, averting her face when Sally approached her; and certainly not Joel, who had done everything bar wave a banner to proclaim her an unfit mother.

  ‘It’s OK, you’re going to be fine,’ she heard Joel saying. ‘But they’re going to keep you in overnight…’

  ‘Oh, Dad. I was so frightened…’

  Sally could hear the emotion in her voice, but when she instinctively reached to take hold of her hand Cathy pulled away from her, ignoring her, her attention fixed on Joel.

  ‘I know. You and me both,’ Joel responded feelingly. ‘But it’s OK now, and your mum’s here…’

  Sally flinched beneath the look Cathy gave her.

  ‘When they let me leave tomorrow you’ll come for me, won’t you, Dad…?’

  Across the bed Joel looked at Sally’s downbent head. He could see how upset she was but now was not the time to tell Cathy off for the way she was behaving.

  He might be flavour of the month now, Joel recognised wryly, but it had been her mother Cathy had cried for this afternoon when she’d come to the leisure centre. Perhaps it was only to be expected that she should want to punish Sally a little now for not being there… even if it was unfair.

  ‘Of course I will,’ he assured her.

  ‘Time to leave now,’ the nurse told them briskly, coming up to bundle them out.

  ‘Dad, I’m hungry—can we go to McDonald’s?’ Paul demanded plaintively at Joel’s side.

  Once she would have been the one he had asked. Not Joel…

  Kenneth was right; they didn’t need her any more… not any of them. There was no place in their lives for her now…

  No place, no need… no desire… no love… no anything.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  ‘AH, DEBORAH, there you are… let me introduce you to Kay…’ Ryan announced with smooth malice. ‘She’ll be joining our accountancy team from next week. The partners have decided that the workload on this side of the business has increased so much that we need to take on new staff…’

  So, Ryan had already picked the girl who would take her place, Deborah reflected cynically as she smiled at the younger woman and shook her hand and then watched as Ryan steered her protectively towards the general office. She was small and blonde and, Deborah suspected, spectacularly curvy beneath her Armani suit. And, to judge from the look Deborah had seen in her eyes, she was by no means as kittenish and naïve as she looked.

  She and Ryan would suit one another very well. Kay would have no qualms about ‘networking’ to promote her career.

  Bitch, Deborah cautioned herself mentally, but what was the point in denying the truth? Her days here now were numbered; they had to be. She could stay and accept that she would never get her promotion, live with the humiliation of being ‘sidelined’, relegated back to the general office and all the speculation and amusement that would go with such a demotion, or she could press sexual harassment charges against Ryan—or she cou
ld do what she suspected Ryan now wanted her to do and find a job elsewhere.

  Had he ever really expected her to sleep with him, or had that unexpected move on her on his part simply been his way of removing her to make way for this other girl? she wondered wryly. Despite what he had said to her, a part of her still refused to accept that he had not known right from the start that she would not sleep with him, and he was, as she had good cause to know—as Mark had often warned her—a master tactician.

  Officially she was still working on the liquidation, still waiting for official recognition of her promotion, but she was under no illusions. Like Kilcoyne’s employees, she too was now effectively redundant.

  She had spent the last few evenings ringing round her old friends and contacts trying to find another job. So far, things didn’t look very hopeful. There was a possibility that there might be a job going at her old firm in London, although of course it would mean a drop in salary, and status.

  Perhaps in the end, like Mark, she might have to do temporary filling-in work until she found something suitable. The thought depressed her. She was in her late twenties now; what if she hadn’t made the next rung up the ladder by the time she was thirty…? She decided to go home for the day.

  When she got to the flat, tiredly Deborah turned her key in the lock and walked inside, shrugging off her jacket and then opening the sitting-room door.

  ‘Mark!’

  She stared at him in disbelief, frowning. ‘What are you doing here… how did you get in…?’

  ‘I still have my key. I’m sorry if I gave you a shock…’

  A shock! Quickly Deborah turned her back on him, not wanting him to see the emotions she suspected were all too clearly revealed in her eyes.

  He had been standing by the fireplace but now, as she turned around, she saw that he was walking towards her.

  Immediately she made a tense, defensive movement with her body, and Mark stopped.

  ‘Can we talk?’ he asked her quietly.

  Deborah pushed her hand into her dark chestnut hair. Mark looked tanned and well, making her feel depressingly aware of her own weary tension. She started to shake her head. What, after all, was there for them to talk about? But Mark stopped her.

  ‘Please, Deb. I promise it won’t take too long.’

  Wearily Deborah nodded her head. It would be easier to listen to him than to argue with him.

  As she sat down on the settee she saw him frowning. ‘You look tired,’ he said abruptly.

  ‘Thanks,’ Deborah told him drily, and then reminded him, ‘You said you wanted to talk.’

  ‘Yes.’ He sat down opposite her, the soft fabric of his jeans stretching against his thighs. Her body gave a small, dangerous jerk of sexual recognition which she instantly suppressed.

  Ryan would probably not believe it, but as far as she was concerned, when it came to male visual and physical sex appeal, in any contest between them Mark would have won hands down. She remembered how once in their early days together he had laughed at the way she had buried her face in his chest, nuzzling at his flesh and breathing his scent.

  ‘I love the way you feel,’ she had told him then. ‘Like a lovely firm, cuddly, soft teddy bear… You’re so gorgeous to snuggle up to, Mark—so warm and safe…’

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ he had laughed, but she had meant what she said; to her his body—firmly muscled, broad-shouldered and softly furred with light golden hair—was overwhelmingly sensually appealing.

  It was the combination of sexuality and security which he represented to her that had made it possible for her to express her own sexuality with far greater freedom than she had ever known before.

  Now, watching him sitting there in front of her, legs apart as he leaned forward, watching her earnestly, she could feel the aching need flooding her body.

  Funny how easy she had found it to resist Ryan, she reflected absently, and how very, very hard it was to stop herself from going over to Mark and…

  ‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently, Deb, a lot of heart-searching and trying to be honest with myself. When I left it was because I’d convinced myself that you were the one who was responsible for my problems.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I suppose the truth is that I couldn’t bear to admit, even to myself, what was so obvious to you: that I felt threatened by your success, jealous of it and afraid that it would take you away from me.

  ‘I resented the fact that your success demeaned me in the eyes of the other men, and because of that…’ He paused.

  ‘I thought that by walking away from you I was being a man, proving myself… and in reality all I was proving was that I was a fool, throwing away something of irreplaceable value… someone of irreplaceable value.

  He looked up at her.

  ‘I still love you,’ he told her emotionally.

  Deborah closed her eyes. The longing to go over to him, to touch him, to hold him, to be touched and held by him was so strong that it rocked her body like a giant hand trying physically to propel her towards him.

  ‘You said you didn’t want me,’ she reminded him quietly. ‘You didn’t want to make love to me…’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed.

  ‘You were punishing me, Mark, withholding sex from me… using sex and my need for you to try and control me… We can’t go back,’ she told him, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘It wouldn’t work… Sooner or later we’d be facing the same problems all over again. I can’t live with that fear hanging over me; you know how important my career is to me… That won’t change. I can’t change, and I can’t live with the fear of wanting professional success and yet dreading how you’ll react to it:

  ‘Can’t you see what would happen… how I’d be compelled to start pretending… playing down my career… creating an unreal persona, a disguise for myself in case the real me threatened or upset you…?

  ‘You’ve always known what I am, Mark, what I want from life… I’ve never tried to deceive you about that…’

  ‘No,’ he replied quietly. ‘I’m the only one who’s been guilty of deception… not just of you, but of myself as well… But not deliberately, Deb—never that… It’s different now, though—I’ve——’

  ‘How can it be different?’ Deborah demanded painfully. ‘It’s only been a few weeks. People don’t change just like that…’

  ‘No, they don’t,’ he agreed. ‘I’m not trying to claim that I’ve changed, only that I think I’ve come to terms with myself, with what I am and what I’m not, with what’s important to me and what isn’t… with whose definition of what it takes to be a real man is most important to me—mine, or that of people like the Ryan Bridgeses of this world. I’m not competitive, Deb. I never have been, but these last few months I’ve felt as though that lack of competitiveness made me a failure as a man…’

  ‘Oh, Mark,’ Deborah protested sadly. ‘I thought you knew that in my eyes it made you more of a man, not less of one, that you never needed me to put you up on some kind of pedestal, to make a false pretence of deferring to you, to boost your ego at the expense of my own, to have to hide from you how I felt about my career. To me those kinds of needs are a male weakness, not a male strength, and most other women feel the same.

  ‘I admired and respected you more because you didn’t need those false trappings of manhood, because you didn’t follow the herd, bow down to the rules men have imposed on society… I loved you because of what you are, not in spite of it,’ she told him.

  ‘Loved me?’ he repeated quietly.

  Deborah turned away from him. What point was there in allowing him to know that she still loved him? What point could there be in their love if it was always going to be in conflict with her other needs? There was no point in deceiving either herself or Mark; she could not make him the whole focus of her life, become dependent on him and live only for him, and she had thought that he understood; that his love for her was like hers for him; that he loved the person she was and had no desire to
change her.

  ‘I can’t give up my ambitions, my career…’

  ‘No… How are things going, by the way…?’

  ‘Fine,’ she told him.

  ‘Liar.’

  Deborah stared at him.

  ‘I had a phone call this morning from Gil Bennett and he wanted to know why I hadn’t been in touch to let him know we were coming back to London. He’d heard on the grapevine that you were looking for a new job…’

  ‘You know I’ve always preferred living in the city,’ Deborah hedged. ‘The only reason I moved out here was because of you…’

  ‘Because of me and because the promotion prospects were better,’ Mark corrected her.

  ‘All right, all right… I admit it, Mark, you were right and I was wrong. The only reason Ryan offered me promotion was because he wanted to get me into bed. Satisfied…?’

  ‘What…? You—he’s trying to force you out because you wouldn’t sleep with him…?’

  At any other time the outrage on Mark’s face would have been welcome, but it had hurt to have to admit the truth to him.

  ‘Not force me out exactly, but he’s made it plain that I won’t be getting any promotion,’ Deborah admitted wearily. ‘Go on, gloat, Mark… I’m sure you must want to…’

  ‘Gloat? That’s the last thing I feel like doing… You can’t let him do this to you, Deborah. It’s sexual harassment and——’

  ‘And what? I could take him to court? Would you, in my shoes…? Oh, yes… that would look good on my c. v., wouldn’t it? No, I shan’t do a damn thing about it and he knows it… He even had the gall to introduce me to the other girl whom he’s hired to train in my place. Apparently my managerial skills aren’t all that they might be… I don’t handle people very well…’ She gave a small bitter smile as her feelings broke through her control.

  ‘Balls,’ Mark told her forcefully. ‘That’s not true and you know it. You deserved that promotion, and if he’s trying to renege on it now… Why didn’t you let me know…?’