by Penny Jordan
‘I can’t really see that there is any point,’ Christie started to tell him acidly.
‘Perhaps not, but I should appreciate the opportunity to see you nevertheless.’
His calm determination confused her. It wasn’t what she had expected. Or wanted?
She held the receiver away from her ear, and said shortly to Saul, ‘It’s Leo von Hessler. He wants to speak with you.’
It was a good fifteen minutes before Saul replaced the receiver. He was frowning, his face blank of all emotion.
‘What is it … what did he want?’ Christie asked him.
‘He wanted to tell me that Hessler Chemie has no interest in acquiring Carey’s, and that in fact Davina James was speaking the truth when she said that their fathers knew each other.’
‘And you believe him?’
‘Yes,’ Saul told her tersely.
‘But you didn’t believe Davina.’
‘No,’ he agreed, and now his expression had changed, his reactions not quite quick enough for him to conceal what he was feeling for her.
Christie looked away from him, swallowing down her own pity.
‘Oh, I told him you’d meet him at the Grosvenor.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘You’ve got just under an hour. Would you like me to drive you?’ Now it was his turn to read her thoughts. ‘That is what you want, isn’t it … to see him?’ For a moment Saul thought she was going to lie and deny it; her eyes were wild with the same feral intensity he remembered from her childhood, and his heart ached for her.
‘Whatever he has to say, it can’t make any difference,’ Christie told him doggedly.
Saul said nothing. He would have to go and see Davina, of course. Apologise … explain. Explain? Explain what? And how?
Well, even if he couldn’t explain, he still had to apologise. He stood up, removing his suit jacket from the back of the chair.
He was halfway towards the door when the phone rang again.
Christie answered it. He heard the quickening concern in her voice, the sharp anxiety as she said firmly, ‘Now, calm down and …’ He was opening the door when she covered the mouthpiece of the receiver and called out quickly to him, ‘Saul, it’s Karen. There’s some problem with Josephine. I think you’d better speak to her.’
It took him close on five minutes to decipher what Karen was saying. She was half hysterical, blaming him, accusing him, complaining that she had not even known where to get in touch with him; that he cared nothing for his children; that he had abdicated his responsibility towards them.
‘She is your daughter, Saul,’ she told him.
‘Yes,’ he agreed calmly. ‘She is.’
‘What is it?’ Christie asked him anxiously when he eventually hung up.
‘Josey’s been suspended from school for possessing drugs. According to Karen, they’ve been having problems with her for several months. My fault, apparently, because she’s my child. Karen seems more concerned with what her neighbours and boss are going to think than in helping Josey.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Christie asked him gently.
Saul shrugged. ‘What the hell can I do? Josey has always made it plain enough what she thinks of me. Now, according to Karen, she’s shut herself in her room and is refusing to see or speak to anyone.’
‘Go and see her, Saul,’ Christie suggested. She saw the indecision in his eyes and pressed, ‘She needs you.’
‘I can’t,’ Saul told her. ‘I have to see Davina James, and I have to get this deal tied up. If I don’t … There’s no point in my going anyway, Chris. What the hell can I do to help her? If she won’t talk to her mother … You’d better leave if you’re going to get to Chester in time to see von Hessler,’ he told her, changing the subject.
He saw the uncertainty in her eyes and shook his head. ‘You can’t do anything for Josey by staying here.’
‘No,’ Christie agreed heavily. ‘I don’t suppose I can.’
Ten minutes later, having watched her drive off, Saul closed the front door. It was all right Christie’s saying ‘go’, but his relationship with Josey was not like hers with Cathy. She knew that. The last person Josey would want now was him. Her contempt for him had never been something she’d bothered to hide, her duty visits grimly hostile spaces of time she treated as something unpleasant that had to be endured, like him.
And even if she had wanted him, how the hell could he go?
He closed his eyes, and suddenly he could hear the echo of the emotion in Davina’s voice when she had told him, ‘People are more important than possessions; than wealth, or ambition. People matter, all of them, and if you deny them the right to that importance then you take away from them one of their most basic human rights, you demean and devalue them, and in doing so you demean and devalue yourself as well.’
Behind his shuttered eyelids dark images formed: Josephine as a baby, a toddler, a child. Josey, the last time he had seen her, almost on the brink of womanhood, her eyes blazing contempt and resentment, her face set with rejection, her body willing him not to come near her; to touch her.
How long had it been since he had last touched her, held her, shown her how much he loved and valued her?
But she didn’t want his love; she never had; even as a small child she had turned from him fiercely, denying him the right to claim his fatherhood.
‘You’re not my father,’ she had spat at him once. ‘I don’t have a father and I don’t want one.’
But she was his child.
Without intending to, and certainly without wanting to, he found he was asking himself how Davina would react in the same circumstances. Why did he even need to ask the question?
There was a notepad on the table. He sat down and wrote quickly on it, folding the piece of paper before reaching for a fresh sheet and writing on that as well.
He found an envelope on Christie’s desk, and put the folded note in it, sealing it. He then placed it with the second note in the middle of the kitchen table where Christie couldn’t miss it.
There was no point at all to what he was doing, he told himself as he climbed into his car; no point. It would probably lose him his job and destroy his career, and it meant he was breaking all the rules he had ever set for himself about seeing a task through to its completion; about grimly keeping to whatever path he had set for himself.
And it certainly wouldn’t help Josephine, who would probably refuse to see him, which would mean he would have to get straight back in his car and drive all the way back to Cheshire.
But he still headed for the motorway, grimly trying to ignore the thudding message of his tyres on the tarmac, which seemed to sound out a flat, hard chant of ‘It’s your fault … your fault … your fault …’
* * *
Christie was not a nervous woman, nor one given to awkward self-consciousness, but her self-confidence had not been easily won, and as she walked into the Grosvenor she was suddenly reminded of an occasion as a child when her mother had taken her shopping and then on to meet her father as he left work.
She remembered how excited she had been; how thrilled and proud. They had waited outside the building for him. She had wanted to go in, but her mother had told her that her daddy didn’t like being interrupted at his work.
Christie had known that this wasn’t true. Saul often spent Saturday morning at the office with their father; a treat which had never been permitted her. But this unfairness was forgotten when her father had finally emerged from the building. Christie had broken free of her mother’s hold and run up to him.
‘Christie, for goodness’ sake, why do you have to be such a hoyden? Jean, can’t you do something about this wretched child’s hair, and why are her socks dirty?’ As she listened to him, all Christie’s excitement had faded. In its place had come guilt and misery; the knowledge that in so many ways she displeased her father and was not the child he wanted. Now for no reason at all she remembered those feelings and what it had been like to know that she was not wanted … not lov
ed.
It was dark inside the hotel foyer after the sunlight outside, and she shivered, suddenly afraid and uncertain, turning instinctively back towards the exit.
‘Christie.’ His voice, the light detaining touch of his hand on her arm, her sensitive awareness of the height and breadth of him, the subtle dismayingly familiar personal scent of him, held her rigid.
She turned round, unaware of how clearly her eyes betrayed her contradictory emotions.
What he saw in them made Leo catch his breath. She really was the most extraordinary woman. Her eyes now held pride and anger, the knowledge of maturity and self-awareness, and yet with them was the innocence and pain of a child.
‘I’m glad you came.’
Something in his voice soothed her, broke the imprisoning spell of the past.
‘I didn’t want to,’ she told him, ‘but Saul thought I should.’
Leo looked gravely at her. ‘And you, of course, always do as your brother suggests.’
Christie had the grace to laugh. The sound of her laughter, spontaneous, rich and warm, gave Leo hope.
‘We can’t talk here,’ he told her. ‘The hotel management has been kind enough to lend us a small spare conference-room. I thought you’d prefer to talk there.’
Rather than in his room? He was extraordinarily sensitive and tactful, she had to give him that, Christie acknowledged.
‘How did you manage that?’ she taunted him. ‘Or do I need to ask?’
‘I merely explained that I needed privacy for a short space of time to talk with someone,’ Leo told her, unruffled by her cynicism. He acknowledged it, though, adding gently, ‘Contrary to what you seem to think, Christie, I do not wield the power of the von Hessler name round me like a war mace. I never have. Personally I find that good manners, consideration and honesty are much more effective.’
‘Honesty?’ Christie challenged, her expression suddenly hardening.
As though he sensed that she was about to change her mind and walk away from him, Leo took hold of her. He had a surprisingly firm grip, she recognised as he guided her along a small corridor and stopped outside a polished wooden door.
‘You can let go of me now, Leo,’ she told him as he opened the door with his free hand. ‘This isn’t Germany circa 1940-odd, and you aren’t the SS.’
It was a childish taunt, but its effect on him was immediate and intense. His face went white as he released her, his eyes suddenly blank and unfocused as though he couldn’t bear to look at her.
Against her will she wished she had been less abrasive, but as always her stubborn pride refused to allow her to say so.
‘You wanted to talk to me,’ she said palliatively instead. ‘To explain. Although why you should think it necessary I can’t pretend to understand.’ She was back on the defensive, her chin tilting as she refused to admit what they both already knew; trying to reduce what had happened between them to something of no importance.
Instead of reacting to her challenge, as her father might have done, to her surprise, Leo laughed. ‘You are very British, Christie, aren’t you?’
Caught off guard, Christie stared at him suspiciously. ‘What does that mean?’
Leo’s smile deepened. ‘Wasn’t it a British admiral who raised his telescope to his blind eye and claimed, “I do not see the signal”?’
To her consternation, Christie knew that she was blushing. Blushing. Something she hadn’t done since she had left her teens behind. Just for a second she was tempted to try to bluff her way out, driven by stubbornness and pride, and then she reminded herself that she was supposed to be mature enough now to have conquered or at least controlled those betraying petty vices.
‘I simply meant that I could see no point in resurrecting something which, with hindsight, both of us know wouldn’t …’ She stopped abruptly, biting her lip. Now she had said … betrayed far more than she had intended, and she cursed her stupidity and her vulnerability silently.
‘I didn’t lie to you deliberately, Christie,’ Leo told her quietly.
If he was aware of her self-betrayal either he was too tactful to show it or, more probably, he didn’t want to get involved in that kind of emotional issue, she decided.
‘I had decided to tell you the truth about who I was.’
‘It wasn’t not telling me your name,’ Christie retorted. ‘You let me confide in you … tell you things … air views you must have known I would not have shared with you had I realised who you were.’
She couldn’t bring herself to say how much he had hurt her by letting her believe he shared those views, or at least some of them, that he was sympathetic to what she felt, when he couldn’t possibly be. Not with the position he held in Hessler’s.
‘Yes,’ he agreed quietly. ‘But I am a man, Christie … an individual. I might share my name with the corporation, but I am not that corporation.’
‘But you work for it, you stand at its head; you are not forced to do that, Leo. You must have chosen that role at some stage in your life. Just as you must have known when we were talking that I would never …’ She stopped, unable to go on. ‘There isn’t any point to this,’ she told him flatly. ‘I don’t even know what I’m doing here. After all, what really happened? We had dinner together. I wanted to have sex with you.’ She gave a small shrug, forcing herself to meet his eyes. ‘I made a mistake, drew the wrong conclusions, and, although at the time it was an embarrassing as well as frustrating mistake, it’s hardly the end of the world.’
‘I wanted you,’ Leo told her quietly. ‘I wanted you then and I want you now. Would you like me to prove it?’
Just for an instant she had a brief mental image of them; of him taking hold of her, kissing her, touching her, lifting her against his body, while he groaned with need. She could almost feel his arousal; taste his kiss. Her own body ached sharply, her skin hot.
Just in time she managed to snatch herself back to reality.
‘No, I would not,’ she told him fiercely. ‘That isn’t why I came here, Leo, to have sex with you.’
‘Good,’ he told her unequivocally. ‘Because it isn’t sex I want from you, Christie. It never has been.’ He saw her face and his mouth curled. ‘Surely you knew that—otherwise what has this been about? You may be wrong about my motivation for being with the corporation, but you are right about my inability to leave it, and you, I think, are not a woman who would count the rest of the world well lost for love.’
For a moment she was almost too shocked to speak. Even though she had known how she felt about him, a declaration of love from him was the last thing she had expected. She had fought against her feelings, denied and stifled them, and now suddenly he was making her feel as though she was almost guilty of murder, of destroying something rare and precious.
Valiantly she tried to fight back.
‘Would you?’ she challenged him. ‘Would you give up everything to be with me, to live a life you knew was alien to you, a life that went against all your beliefs, a life that would suffocate and destroy you? Is that what you expect me to do, Leo?’
‘No,’ he told her quietly. ‘And it was because of that that I left you at your bedroom door, Christie. Because I knew that if once I touched you … held you … loved you I would have moved heaven and earth to keep you with me, done anything—’
‘Except give up Hessler’s,’ Christie interrupted him quickly. She dared not let him say any more; already her heart was beating far too fast, her body, her soul aching with a fierce need to reach out and claim what he was offering her, to beg him, plead with him to take the responsibility for the decision away from her, to compel her physically, with the drug of his body, if necessary, to say that she would stay with him.
It was like standing on a bridge over swirling water, wanting to lean forward and simply let oneself fall, the lure of self-destruction so inviting, so strong that it was almost irresistible. Almost. It only took one step to move back from the danger, and in the end Leo himself helped her make it by sa
ying quietly, ‘Except that … I am not free to make that decision, Christie,’ he told her.
She tried to smile, knowing that her eyes were brilliant with the tears she could not allow herself to shed. ‘You mean you will not allow yourself to be free to make it,’ she told him, and then she opened the door.
As she walked through it she stopped.
‘There isn’t anything else we can say to one another, is there, Leo, other than that I wish you had had sex with me that night, and that it had been the worst sex I had ever had in my life?’ She saw his face and smiled bitterly. ‘You say you love me, but you couldn’t even do that for me, could you?’
It was unkind and unfair, but her own pain was so great that she had to have some means of releasing it. And she was crying so much as she drove home that she had to pull into a lay-by.
While she was there a plane flew noisily overhead. It couldn’t, of course, be Leo’s flight, but nevertheless she watched it until it had disappeared.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
‘MAY I come in?’
Davina frowned as she recognised her visitor. Christie Jardine. She looked, Davina recognised, as though she had been crying, and recently. Her heart gave a frantic jolt. Saul—had something happened to him? She shuddered, recognising the self-betrayal of her own thoughts.
Unable to speak, she nodded as she opened the front door wider.
‘Saul asked me to call,’ Christie told her. ‘He’s been called away on … on some urgent family business. He left you a note.’
Mentally deriding herself for her stupidity, Davina took the note. It was habit and the good manners instilled in her as a child that prompted her to offer Christie a cup of tea. She was surprised when Christie accepted, automatically leading the way into the small sitting-room and inviting Christie to sit down.
In the kitchen she made the tea quickly, Saul’s note still unread. What did it contain? More threats? Her hand shook a little. Her mouth was still slightly bruised and sensitive. To be kissed by him now would be like making love after a night spent sharing every lover’s intimacy; pleasurable almost to the point of over-sensitivity. Her body shuddered as she cut herself off from her thoughts.
