by Penny Jordan
Except several blank pages in the photograph album she remembered her mother carefully compiling; an album which had contained photographs taken from before and during the war, and nowhere could she find any mention of her father’s service in Germany, even though she knew he had been there.
Only her father could have destroyed those photographs, those records, and the weight of knowing just why he might have done so bowed her shoulders, and slowed down her movements so that initially she was slow to react to Saul’s insistent pounding on her front door.
The sensitive nerves that would normally have alerted her and warned her were blocked by the knowledge she had gained. How could any possible threat or alarm which lay outside her doors match that which lay within them, within her heart, her soul, her blood? She shuddered as she stood up slowly. Even that was tainted, diseased, by what her father had been.
How could he have borne to use that research, knowing how it had been gained?
She could not allow herself the false comfort of pretending that he might not have known. Her father had been many things, but he had never been a fool. She wondered bitterly just how much of von Hessler’s past he had actually known. A man would have to be very desperate indeed to part with something as potentially valuable as that research. She doubted, for instance that her father had merely caught Heinrich von Hessler out in some small petty crime.
According to Leo, his father had covered his tracks well. There was no proof that he had ever been anything other than what he had claimed to be, merely rumour, and, from what Leo had told her about his father, he had obviously been the kind of man well used to bluffing his way out of a treacherous situation.
So she suspected her father, in order to blackmail him successfully, must have known what he actually was … might have learnt von Hessler’s name from the dying camp prisoner pictured in the newspaper article Leo had mentioned.
Which had come first: von Hessler’s offer of the research in return for her father’s silence, or her father’s decision to blackmail him?
As she went downstairs her gorge rose. One thing was obvious to her, and that was that once her father had accepted that information he was as bound to silence and secrecy as von Hessler himself.
Had he ever once thought, when he was reaping the financial benefits of marketing that drug, just how it had been discovered, just what pain and suffering had been inflicted on those poor souls who had been used for ‘medical experimentation’?
Her stomach rolled at the thought; at the knowledge that she too, even if innocently, had benefited from that torture. Even to think about it made her experience a desire to rip her clothes from her back, to tear at the skin that covered her own bones, a wild, primitive need to destroy everything that her father had tainted.
No wonder Carey’s labs had always been so ill equipped, their technicians so apparently carelessly recruited. That hadn’t been carelessness at all. Her father must have deliberately chosen not to employ anyone who might accidentally stumble on the truth, or to question too deeply the provenance of the original research.
Leo’s father had taken the opposite road, of course, using the research to build a vast pharmaceutical empire. But then, as Leo had grimly pointed out to her, he had no way of knowing if the details of that particular drug had actually been the only research his father had had access to.
Davina shuddered as she went downstairs.
Leo had been right to say that they were now linked by one of life’s most powerful bonds. He should not have told her, should not have burdened her, he had said unhappily, but she had shaken her head. In a strange way she was glad that she did actually know. It freed her from the last of her bonds of guilt and pain that in not loving her father she had been at fault, and it made it far easier for her to follow the dictates of her own heart and to walk away without looking back. It had also solved the problem that had been taxing her ever since she had discovered just how much money she personally had been left; money which originally had come from the company, even if it was his unorthodox use of it which had caused it to multiply so greatly.
She herself wanted nothing to do with it, could not bear the thought of its contaminating her life any longer. But she was having to fight hard to assure herself that the money as such was inanimate and free of the burden carried by those who had generated it and that in donating it to various charities she would not be condemning the recipients to share in her own burden of dread and guilt.
And as for Carey’s … One half of her wanted the entire business destroyed, its very buildings razed to the ground and the earth itself decontaminated; the other knew that she could not sacrifice the livelihoods of those who worked there simply to appease her own conscience. All she could hope for was that Alex Davidson wanted Carey’s enough to meet her terms; and that, she knew, was a very forlorn hope indeed.
The lights were already on in the hall. She opened the door automatically without having formed any thoughts as to who might be outside, staring in confusion at Saul Jardine as he thrust his way into the hall and slammed the door behind him.
That he was angry she recognised immediately, but she had no awareness that she was the cause of his anger until he said savagely, ‘You lied to me, didn’t you? Didn’t you? All that rubbish about wanting to protect your employees … all those high-minded principles; those fake claims about not wanting anything for yourself—they were just so many lies; just a clever technique for pushing up your price. You don’t give a damn about the people you’ve got working for you, you never have. You were just using them, and me, to get what you wanted. You knew all along that Alex would never agree, didn’t you … didn’t you?’
Davina stepped back from him in alarm. Her heart had started to beat frantically fast; she could hardly equate this furious, passionately intense man with the same cool, controlled opponent of Philip Taylor’s office, nor the man to whom she had hesitantly and stupidly confided her passionate belief that it was her duty to protect those who worked for Carey’s, to put their needs above her own, and yet strangely she was not actually physically afraid of him. She had gone through too much for that, she suspected, her body and her brain’s ability to respond to any more pain blessedly numbed.
‘Well, don’t think you’re going to get any more out of von Hessler than you would out of Alex; they both want Carey’s for the same reason; and you know exactly what that is, don’t you? You’ve got to know.’
He seemed almost to be speaking more to himself than to her, Davina recognised as her heartbeat steadied slightly.
Saul had no idea how von Hessler had found out about the proposed government grant. No doubt in much the same way as Alex, and she had to know or have guessed something as well, to be playing them off so skilfully against one another.
Once he might have admired such astuteness, but that had been before … before he had confronted the truth about himself and what he really wanted from life.
Somewhere at the root of the anger that possessed him lay vulnerability and the pain from which it had grown; the knowledge not just that he had been deceived by her, but that the virtues he had thought he had seen within her, virtues which he had admired and envied as well as resented, could simply not exist; but he didn’t want to acknowledge that vulnerability’s existence, preferring to give vent to his anger instead, to take refuge in it almost.
‘Von Hessler, Alex—you don’t care which of them rips Carey’s apart and throws it to the dogs, do you, just so long as the fat from the deal ends up with you?
‘You must have known all along about this meeting with von Hessler. He must want Carey’s very badly to negotiate the deal himself, or is it simply that he wants the whole thing kept safely secret until after the new legislation comes in?
‘What were you going to do? Wait until I came back with Alex’s rejection of your terms before putting the pressure on?’
He took an aggressive step towards her.
‘Well, for your information, I have a littl
e pressure to apply of my own. As far as this legislation is concerned, it’s essential that Carey’s changes ownership as a going concern.’
He wasn’t sure if that was the truth, but he was willing to take a gamble that she didn’t know either. He could see from the look on her face that he had shocked her. That knowledge gave him a savage sense of satisfaction, helping to dispel some of the rawness of what he was actually feeling.
‘You know as well as I do how close Carey’s is not just to bankruptcy but to actually being closed down. Your accident and health record, for instance. All those cases of contact dermatitis.’
He saw the way she blenched and told himself she had deserved that threat, reminding himself that she was an expert manipulator and well practised in the art of deceit.
‘Alex intends to have Carey’s, and it’s my job to make sure that he does. And as for this … this rubbish you palmed off on me …’ He waved a roll of paper in front of her and Davina realised numbly that it must be the terms she had prepared so carefully and protectively. Her stomach lurched sickly as she tried to gather her thoughts together.
She watched in silence as Saul tore the papers in half and then in half again and let them fall to the floor.
‘Just as well I discovered the truth in time, isn’t it … before I made a most complete fool of myself with Alex? How you must have been laughing at me. Now we can really get down to business.’ He gave her a thin, biting smile. ‘Alex wants Carey’s and I intend to see that he gets it, no matter what I have to do to achieve that … and if you don’t believe me …’
Davina found her voice at last.
‘Oh, I believe you,’ she told him shakily. She was angry herself now; angry not just with him but with herself; with her life, with her vulnerability and her guilt, and most of all with her father and the legacy he had left her. ‘But you’re wrong, you know. Leo von Hessler didn’t come here to make me an offer for Carey’s.’ Her voice was shaking, she recognised, and so was her body. She took a deep breath, locking her muscles and willing herself not to lose her self control.
‘Don’t lie to me, dammit.’ He was over-reacting, Saul knew, but he couldn’t stop himself, couldn’t stop the venom, the anger pouring out of him, couldn’t suppress the intensity of his disillusionment and bitterness.
‘I am not lying,’ Davina told him stubbornly. ‘If you must know … not that it’s any business of yours, Leo and I …’
She stopped, turning her head away, avoiding looking at him, and, as he watched her, for one half-second of time Saul thought she was actually going to try to tell him that she and the German were lovers, but then she looked back at him, her eyes defiant, filled with a mixture of pain and shock, which he knew could not possibly be genuine, but which looked so real that it increased his rage to almost demoniac proportions.
‘Our fathers knew one another. We … they … they met during the war.’
He watched as she shuddered, derision twisting his mouth; even she couldn’t get that patent falsehood out without physically reacting to it.
‘Like hell they did,’ he told her flatly.
His contempt hit Davina like a blow. Impulsively she tried to push past him, intending to open the front door and demand that he leave, but, to her shock and his, he caught hold of her, forcing her back against the wall.
Such was the speed of his action that Davina closed her eyes instinctively, tensing as she waited, almost expecting to feel his hands imprisoning her head and forcing it back against the plaster. She was shaking inside with fury; too angry herself to be conscious of any fear; too shocked by the unexpectedness and speed of what was happening to react with caution as she lashed out at him with a small bunched fist in a blow that made no impact at all against the solid muscularity of his imprisoning arm, but which helped relieve a little of her own impotent rage.
To Saul, though, the effect of her touch was immediate and shockingly unexpected, dragging him through the fierce heat of his own rage into a stunningly abrupt awareness of her as a woman; a woman whose flesh felt absurdly silken against his hands, whose bones were almost childishly fragile and fine, whose eyes had dilated with an intense mixture of shock and fury, whose breasts rose and fell with the angry tension of her breathing, whose body-scent was released by the heat that anger had generated, and it was that awareness which provided the dangerous spark for the already volatile cocktail of tinder-dry emotions and sensations churning through him.
The result was inevitable, a surge of physically driven hunger he had forgotten it was possible to experience and which took him so off guard that Davina was aware of its existence before he recognised it himself.
She sensed the change in him instinctively. Between one heartbeat and the next she felt rather than logically knew what was happening and reacted to it, so that her reaction simply added to what was already there.
Her body stiffened as his shifted balance, as he leaned forward, his heat engulfing her, overpowering her, dizzying her senses and her resistance. It was a mixture of anger and excitement that made her tremble so weakly, and not fear; and it was that same anger, coupled with a furious resistance to what he was doing, that held her immobile as he lowered his head towards her, and the grip of his fingers against her flesh changed so subtly that its meaning was perceived only by their senses and not by their brains.
‘You lied to me,’ he told her, and he could feel the pain bursting in him like raw salt in a wound.
‘No,’ Davina told him equally furiously, but she made the denial against his mouth, and her response to its silencing punishing pressure was as violent as his.
Later she would wonder a little at her own ability to match his sensual aggression. It was not an expression of physical desire she had learned from Matt, and yet somehow it had answered a need within herself, a dark vein of rage and reaction which had led her to claw furiously at his flesh, enjoying the sensation of his wincing, even somehow enjoying the fierce assault of his mouth and the opportunity it gave her to be equally aggressive back, using her teeth to savage his bottom lip, her fingers locking in his hair in a parody of a lover’s embrace as she tugged furiously at it.
It was the sensation of her breasts pressed flat against his chest, the realisation of how he might be hurting their softness, that and the knowledge that he was so intensely aroused that he could quite easily have made love to her there and then, without any thought in his mind other than that he had to subdue her, to teach her … to punish her for the way she had deceived him, that finally brought Saul to his senses with a sickening jolt of self-loathing which had him releasing her and stepping back from her with one disgusted movement.
Her mouth looked sore and swollen. He could taste the blood on his own and thought at first that it was hers.
She was breathing quickly and shallowly—both of them were, he recognised. His own body was wet with sweat, his arms and legs weak with stress and shock. For a second his vision blurred slightly and he had to look away from the bright defiance in her eyes.
There was an ache in his throat and an even more painful one in his heart. No matter how much she had deceived him—his mind would not allow him to use the word ‘hurt’—there was no excuse for what he had done.
He felt like someone who had been in the grip of an intense bout of fever, shaken, weak, vulnerable and somehow afraid.
He turned towards the door while Davina watched him. Silently he opened it and walked slowly towards his car. He moved like someone in the first stages of recovering from some form of paralysis or a debilitating illness, Davina recognised. Her own body was shaking violently but her mind felt oddly clear, cleansed almost.
She had needed that anger, that release … that safety valve, she acknowledged. As he got into the car and she closed the door and then locked it she tried not to admit that she had needed something else as well. That she had needed that physical contact with him. That a part of her still did … she shivered tensely.
Violent aggressive sex had never
held any appeal for her, quite the reverse, and yet just for a second a part of her had almost been willing him to take hold of her and to expose her body to the angry possession of his hands and mouth; a need so elemental and strong that she would have actually welcomed the fierce thrust of his body within hers.
And he had wanted her. She had almost seen the images burning in his mind, had actually known the exact second when he had nearly reached for her and lifted her against his own body.
She shivered again.
Once Matt had made love to her like that. Not with anger or violence, but teasing her a little, knowing how much she wanted him and rejoicing in it, teaching her not to be ashamed of the strength of her own desire, showing her that the urgency of immediate penetration was not merely a masculine prerogative and that there was a distinctly pleasurable and, for her then, faintly shocking eroticism that her sexuality should hold that kind of power. Later Matt had made love to her again slowly and tenderly, satisfying her senses as well as her body.
What kind of lover would Saul Jardine be after that anger had left him? Dark images suddenly flooded her mind: his head against her breast as he stroked her skin and then kissed the swollen erect points of her nipples. His head against her belly, his face and breath hot, his mouth open as his tongue circled her navel and his hand sought her sex.
Frantically she pushed the images aside, her face overheating with anger and confusion. He was her enemy, not her lover, and it was the dangerous implosion of her own emotions that was responsible for what she was now feeling, and not the man who had touched her.
* * *
Two miles down the road Saul brought his car to an abrupt halt and stumbled out. The night air felt cold against his skin. He was trembling violently, he recognised, and in no fit state to drive, a danger to others as well as to himself. His stomach was churning nauseously with self-loathing and shock. No matter what Davina James had done, it was no excuse for his behaving the way he had. He had never been a violent man, and not even a sexually aggressive one; the urge to physically dominate a woman had always been something that was alien and distasteful to him, and yet just now … for a second of time …
