Ruthless Passion

by Penny Jordan

  Saul continued to stare at her. The last thing that he had expected was that she would reveal herself so openly to him. He had anticipated subterfuge; deceit; feigned reluctance to admit what she really wanted behind the smokescreen of implausible and outrageous demands she had thrown up around herself. What he had not anticipated was that she would actually genuinely want those terms; them and nothing else.

  Did she really honestly believe there was any chance of getting Alex or anyone else to agree to even one of the things she was demanding?

  ‘Alex will never agree to your terms,’ he told her bluntly.

  Davina flinched as she heard the conviction in his voice. ‘Then I shall have to find someone else who will, won’t I?’ she challenged him defiantly.

  ‘There isn’t anyone else,’ Saul told her. ‘Don’t you think we already know that?’

  ‘If Carey’s is of value to your Sir Alex then it will also be of value to someone else. Or do you think I’m naïve enough to believe that the Davidson Corporation is so mighty and unassailable that it doesn’t have any rivals or competitors?’

  ‘You still don’t understand, do you?’ Saul told her angrily. ‘Alex ultimately will have Carey’s; there’s nothing you can do to stop that. All you can do is to negotiate with him now and—’

  ‘But I thought that was exactly what I was trying to do,’ Davina interrupted him quietly.

  Saul felt helpless in the face of her seeming inability to understand her own vulnerability; helpless and angry … resentful almost of her clear-eyed honesty and sincerity. It irked him, irritated him, made him want to tell her exactly what Alex would do to her precious company, and at the same time somehow made him want to protect her from that knowledge. It made him feel almost as much envy as he did irritation; envy and a heavy awareness of how long, if ever, it had been since he had been motivated by that kind of selflessness.

  It did no good telling himself that the wheels of commerce were oiled by deceit and intrigue and that someone like Davina James would be destroyed in such a world within days, if not hours. Just looking at her increased the weight of the burden he was already carrying to an almost intolerable level.

  ‘It won’t work,’ he told her harshly.

  She tilted her head and looked at him. ‘Because you won’t let it,’ she challenged.

  ‘As you’ve already pointed out, I don’t have that kind of power. But if you don’t believe me … ask your lover.’

  ‘Giles is not my lover.’

  The swift denial shocked them both. Davina looked away from him, her face flushing.

  ‘Nothing you can say to me will make me change my mind about my terms of sale,’ she told him quickly.

  ‘If that’s true then you’re a fool,’ Saul told her.

  It was just as well she had no idea what Alex intended to do with Carey’s. If she had she would never sell, but then soon she would not have any option … any choice … others would force the decision on her, Saul reminded himself grimly.

  ‘I’ll put your terms to Alex, of course, but I can tell you now that he won’t agree.’

  As he started to turn away he paused.

  ‘By the way,’ he told her, ‘I see that you’ve recently cancelled several of your employers’ liability policies. That leaves Carey’s rather exposed, doesn’t it, should any of your employees decide to sue you for, say … unsafe working practices?’

  Davina watched him suspiciously. How had he learned about that? The premiums on those policies had become so high that Giles had insisted they would have to cancel them. She had been uneasy about having to do so, but both Giles and Philip had told her she had little option.

  It worried her that so many of the women who worked for Carey’s seemed to develop contact dermatitis, although Giles had assured her that no link had been found between their work and the skin disease.

  Saul was starting to walk away from her now, but then he stopped and turned his head.

  ‘One last thing.’ He was smiling slightly now and a frisson of nervous tension ran down her spine, lifting the tiny hairs at her nape. ‘That suit … A word of advice: the next time you wear it …’

  Davina stared at him, refusing to give in to the swift tug of atavistic tension that gripped her.

  ‘… wear it the way that it was designed to be worn—without a bra.’

  His glance dropped quite deliberately to her breasts and rested there a second, and then he was turning away, leaving her shaking with fury and resentment and bitterly aware that she was too angry to risk giving vent to what she was feeling.

  That last comment had been deliberately contentious, deliberately demeaning almost, and he had known it.

  She heard the slam of his car door and then the engine firing.

  ‘Alex will never agree to your terms,’ he had told her, and she had known that he believed it.

  Suddenly her body ached with tiredness. She felt alone and very, very afraid. Was she doing more harm than good? Should she have been less aggressive … more passive? Was she wrong to trust her instinct that something was being withheld from her; that the acquisition of Carey’s was in some way far more important to Sir Alex than she was being allowed to see?

  She ached for someone to talk to; someone to confide in; someone to lift her burdens from her shoulders? she questioned herself wryly. Was she really so weak, so afraid that she was ready to give up at the first confrontation? What had happened to this morning’s elation … this morning’s determination?

  So Saul Jardine was a very powerful and subtly manipulative man. So what? He was only a man. He had to have some vulnerabilities, didn’t he?

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  LEO’S original plan following the end of the conference had been to drive straight from Edinburgh to Cheshire and once there to discreetly make contact with Davina Carey, or Davina James as she now was, but meeting Christie had thrown him so far off balance that instead of taking the direct motorway route south he opted to travel at a more leisurely pace through the countryside.

  He needed time, he recognised, not only to prepare himself for what might lie ahead when he met Davina James, but also, just as importantly, if very much more personally, to adjust to the unexpected, almost unwanted in some ways, shock of Christie’s impact on him.

  Had he once as a young man daydreamed with idealistic fervour and ignorance of falling instantly and devastatingly in love with someone, of turning his head and seeing her and knowing immediately and incontrovertibly that she was The One? If so, it had obviously not occurred to him that she might not share his ideals, his emotions, and it had certainly not occurred to him that she might be the independent, firm-minded kind of woman who had relegated that kind of emotional immaturity very much to a past part of her life and who now placed his sex in predetermined and sharply divided sections of her life and kept them there: this man a friend, this one a colleague … this one a lover and this one an enemy.

  Christie had touched some nerve within him he had thought long and mercifully anaesthetised, or even dead. Meeting her had proved to him that it was very much alive. He had found her physically attractive, almost instantly, overpoweringly so in a way that was disconcertingly unfamiliar to him, but he had witnessed the effects of ‘conference fever’ on his colleagues far too often for him initially to be anything other than startled and rather wryly amused that he himself had finally and unexpectedly succumbed to it.

  But then he had found himself thinking almost compulsively about her, wanting to see her; to be with her. And then he had taken her out to dinner.

  Long, long before the meal was over he had known the truth: that here was the woman he had ached for, dreamed of and wanted so desperately in the empty painful years of his young manhood, his lover, partner, companion, the other half that alone could make him totally whole.

  He had mocked himself even while the thoughts, the knowledge filled him, and he had known as he’d listened to her just how hard it was going to be to persuade her to allow hi
m into her life in the way he wanted to be there; and not just because of who he was.

  No matter what his role in life, she would have tried to corral him into one role. She might have allowed him to be her friend, but then would never have permitted him to be her lover; he could have been her lover, but then not her friend …

  She was afraid, he saw, afraid in the way that those who had been hurt when they were too young and too giving, too loving to withstand that hurt, always were. He had recognised that fear, that hurt within her because in so many ways it had mirrored his own.

  He had managed to obtain a tape of her speech, and all the way down from Edinburgh he had played it compulsively on the car’s cassette machine so that now he knew every nuance, every small inflexion of her voice. And when she spoke it was almost as though his senses could conjure up her whole image there in the car with him.

  So this was love—this raw agony of pain and helplessness; this knowledge of being totally powerless, totally out of control, while yet seeming to be the very opposite; this awareness that the whole of his life’s course had been changed, this suppressed anger against himself and foolishly, childishly against her, because things could not have been different.

  Things, or her? Would he have been drawn so powerfully to her had she been different—less passionate, less fiercely protective of what mattered to her? Would he really want her tamed and subjected to the same constraints that tied him to Hessler Chemie; to all the demands it made upon him, all the ways it frustrated him and denied him the right to live his own life?

  Even now, here in this car, he could not escape from it. Already there had been phone calls from Hamburg, urgent messages that he return as quickly as possible because his brother was stirring up so much trouble, provoking so many quarrels and so much unease.

  There had even apparently been rumours in the Press about the internal rivalry within the corporation, hinting that a power struggle might be about to develop between the two brothers; hinting that Leo might have used some secret means to pressurise their father into giving him control of the corporation instead of his brother, and Leo suspected that these ‘rumours’ had originally been leaked to the Press by Wilhelm.

  As he battled against his irritation with his brother he reminded himself of how important the corporation had always been to Wilhelm; he had based his whole life around it and nothing mattered more to him, as Anna, his wife, was constantly complaining.

  Leo knew she had a valid complaint and that the power and prestige of being the heir apparent to their father had always dominated Wilhelm’s life.

  Now that prize had been snatched away from him, and by his despised and disliked younger sibling. Oh, yes, Leo could well understand what motivated Wilhelm in this constant guerrilla warfare he was waging against him.

  His circuitous route south took him through the Yorkshire Dales. He stopped there for lunch and to get some fresh air. The landscape had an aura of timelessness and steadfastness about it that must have touched many men’s souls, Leo reflected as he studied the expanse of sky above the bare, rolling hills.

  Here time even more than nature somehow dwarfed mankind. How many countless centuries had gone into the making of these smooth hills, this powerful landscape? It ought to have put his own problems into perspective, but all it did do was sharpen the tensions within him.

  It seemed an extra taunting dagger-thrust of fate that Davina James should live so close to Christie, but Leo knew that he would not make any attempt to see her again.

  The business that was taking him to Cheshire must not be clouded by any other issues, especially not selfishly personal emotional ones. Besides, he could just imagine how Christie would react to the knowledge that he suspected his father might have founded Hessler Chemie on chemical research bought at the cost of the kind of cruel and sadistic practices used in Hitler’s medical experiments. And that only took into account the possibility that his father had somehow merely obtained the information at the end of the war.

  The other possibility, that his father might actually have been actively involved at a more personal level, caused Leo the same kind of gut reaction he had experienced as a child when he knew that his father was about to hit him: a churning mixture of panic, fear, pain and self-disgust. And it wasn’t any easier to bear now than it had been then.

  He got back into the car and started the engine. He had made his own booking for the hotel in Cheshire, telling his assistant simply that he was going to spend a few days with an old friend.

  His slow, cautious research into the past—cautious because it had to be if he wasn’t to arouse other people’s curiosity, and slow because there was no one he could trust to do it other than himself—had done nothing to alleviate his suspicions. Alan Carey was dead and could not answer his questions. He had left behind a daughter. Would he have confided to her the truth about the past, told her how he had come by the knowledge on which his business had been founded? Not if he had been anything like his own father, Leo admitted.

  Davina James had recently been widowed. Leo frowned, remembering what his careful enquiries had revealed about her husband and his infidelities, and then his frown deepened.

  Before Alan Carey’s death there had been a fire at the company’s premises which had virtually gutted his office. No one seemed to know how the fire had originally started; the company had not even made a full claim against their insurers for recompense. It had been shortly after this event that Alan Carey had allowed his son-in-law to take virtual control of the financial running of the business. Because he recognised that he himself was beginning to grow older, or because his son-in-law had put pressure on him to do so?

  That fire. Had it been an accident, an older man’s momentary carelessness, or had it been something more? The blackmailer, blackmailed?

  Why was it that evil seemed to have this way of reproducing and perpetuating itself?

  Leo frowned, suddenly aware that he had reduced speed slightly as though subconsciously he was reluctant to reach his destination.

  He had a momentary aching mental image of Christie. No need to ask himself how she would react to what he suspected his father had done.

  Christie Jardine. Why the hell did he have to have met her?

  * * *

  Less than a hundred miles away Christie was thinking very much the same thing about him. The physical ache tormenting her was something she could control, subdue; the emotional pain she was suffering—that was something different, and, because it was and always had been her greatest fear and dread, her anger and resentment against Leo was all the more intense. After her childhood and then Cathy’s birth she had promised herself that she would never be vulnerable through her emotions again; that she would make sure she avoided the kinds of relationships that would lead to her being hurt, and she had stuck to that decision. Until now …

  As she fought frantically against her emotions she told herself that what she was experiencing, or what she thought she was experiencing, simply couldn’t exist; that it was impossible to meet a man and, over the course of one meal with him, a handful of hours spent in his company, somehow allow him to become the entire focus of your life. But it had happened, and her fear and panic fuelled the anger that drove her.

  Every time her thoughts veered treacherously in his direction she reminded herself of the way he had deceived her, and of the kind of man … of human being this made him.

  She also reminded herself of how different their lives were, of how far apart their goals and aims. He could not be the head of a corporation like Hessler’s without having absorbed and approved the kind of fallacious moral decisions that gave such organisations their life-blood; his outlook on life completely opposed hers. He represented everything she most detested. They were on opposite sides of a line which for her had been drawn very clearly and sharply for almost all of her adult life. She simply could not allow herself to cross that line, not out of desire, need and wanting; not even out of love! If she did she knew tha
t ultimately she would choke on the poison-laden atmosphere she was polluting with her own betrayal of everything she believed in.

  Not that Leo had asked her to cross that line; nor, in fact, shown any indication of wanting to ask her. But if all he had wanted from her had been impersonal sex, then why had he rejected her, walked away from her?

  Only she knew how much that had surprised and hurt her, how she had raged against him and the tormenting ache of her own need alone in her bedroom.

  Tomorrow was her birthday, her thirty-fifth. Saul was taking her and Cathy out to dinner at the Grosvenor Hotel in Chester.

  Cathy was almost giddy with excitement at the thought of being treated almost as a grown-up. All she wanted to do was to hide herself away somewhere and to block out everything and everyone, but most especially of all Leo von Hessler. The last thing she wanted to do was to go out for a meal that might all too painfully remind her of another night out, another meal … and a man who had left her at her bedroom door with her body aching for him and a pain in her heart which had begun as innocently as a tiny thorn prick but which was now poisoning the whole of her life.

  She didn’t want to feel like this about him; and at the back of her mind lay the knowledge that it wasn’t just because her emotional and physical response to him contravened the rules she had laid down for herself for the way she wanted to run her life that made her so afraid.

  No, her fear went deeper than that, was more deep-rooted, and sprang from that small seed of misery and self-loathing which had been sown by her father’s rejection of her in favour of Saul.

  A long time ago, deep within her psyche, the connection had been made between loving a man and not having that love returned, being rejected by him, and it was that fear that fuelled her anger against Leo now; that and the knowledge that he had deceived her, deliberately and calculatedly.

  And yet that knowledge, which should have made it so much easier for her to cut herself free of all that he had made her feel, somehow only added to the intensity of her emotions.