A Daughter For Christmas

by Cathy Williams

  ‘But,’ he conceded, leaning back and appearing to give the matter a great deal of thought, ‘you’re absolutely right, of course. Amy doesn’t know me from Adam, as you’ve said, and she is the one whose future happiness has to be considered.’

  ‘Yes!’ Leigh sagged with relief that he had come to his senses, though she was still immensely angry that he had managed to get her into such a state of anxiety.

  ‘Which is why I have a proposition to make to you.’

  ‘What kind of proposition?’ Leigh asked cautiously.

  ‘There’s no need to look so suspicious,’ he told her, which instantly fuelled her suspicions yet further. ‘What I’m about to propose makes perfect sense.’ He paused for a few seconds, valuable time during which she wondered whether she hadn’t just leapt from the frying-pan into the fire.

  ‘Oh, yes...’

  ‘I gather that your job leaves something to be desired. You were forced into it by circumstances. Presumably you had other plans for your life before all this happened.’

  ‘Well, yes. I was studying graphic art. I had anticipated—Well, what’s the use telling you all this? Events overtook me.’

  ‘But you’d like to give up your job and pursue the education you were forced to cut short.’

  ‘I prefer not to deal in dreams.’

  ‘You’ve answered the question. There’s no need to expound on the subject.’ He pushed his chair back slightly so that he could cross his legs.

  ‘It’s sometimes possible to deal in dreams, but it takes money, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I hadn’t planned on using any of your money for myself!’

  ‘The immediate concern would, however, have been a roof over your head.’

  ‘Immediate and only concern,’ she amended, resenting his implication that she would have jumped on the bandwagon and allowed him to pay for her as well.

  ‘From my point of view, I have a child and now that the initial shock has worn off I don’t intend to shove my responsibilities into some convenient little compartment. I want her to move into my house with me.’

  ‘What? Have you taken leave of your senses? It’s out of the question! I won’t have you...snatching Amy away from me!’

  ‘You’re overreacting,’ he responded, his voice like a whiplash. ‘You haven’t heard the rest of what I have to say.’

  ‘I’m overreacting? You want to take my sister’s child away from me and you tell me that I’m overreacting? What do you expect me to do? Smile, offer you a cup of tea and discuss packing arrangements?’

  ‘For God’s sake, woman, shut up! And listen!’

  Leigh made a furious, inarticulate sound, then sat down and pressed her balled fists against her mouth. Her hands were shaking.

  ‘I’m not going to take Amy away from anyone!’

  ‘Then why did you—?’

  ‘I want you to move in with her. That way, all problems will be solved. You’ll have the roof over your head that she needs and financial security. You can continue with your college degree, or whatever it was you were doing before your life was turned upside down, and you can pack in the job.’

  ‘I can’t sponge off you.’

  ‘Take it or leave it.’ He let the impact of those words settle in. ‘I have a Victorian house in Hampstead. The basement is accounted for but there’s more than enough space for us all to co-exist, and I won’t consider you sponging off me because I intend to employ you.’

  ‘As what?’ She asked in a whisper, closing her eyes as his words sank in.

  ‘As a nanny,’ he offered cooly. ‘And before you argue with my proposal I suggest you consider the alternatives very carefully indeed. Amy is my daughter, and I’ll fight for her if I have to. And I never lose a fight.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NICHOLAS had known precisely what he was doing. From every possible angle there was no way that he could lose, and no way that Leigh could refuse his offer.

  And that, she reflected two weeks later, had been just the beginning.

  During that time he had visited twice, installing himself in Amy’s affections by bringing her, Leigh thought acidly, gifts which were guaranteed to dazzle the most hardened of children. He had stayed in the house, casually making small talk with her, but his attentions were all for his daughter. He was determined to win her over and, displaying the sort of instinctive charm which has no age barriers, he was succeeding.

  ‘You can’t come here with a gift every time you visit,’ Leigh had told him when, for the second time, he had appeared with a present, this time a wildly extravagant set of Barbie dolls, equipped with a better wardrobe than most adults possessed.

  ‘Why not?’

  Amy had retired to bed for the evening, exhausted, clutching the three Barbie dolls with their ludicrously dazzling ensembles, and there were just the two of them in the sitting room, Leigh had a teacloth in one hand because she has spent most of the two hours of his visit lurking in the kitchen, ruing the day she had contacted him.

  ‘Because what you’re doing is buying her,’ she said bluntly, disregarding the cool glint in his eye.

  ‘That’s your theory, anyway.’

  ‘It happens to be perfectly true. Give her too much too soon and all that’ll happen is that she’ll depend on you to give her whatever she wants. When the time comes to instil some discipline she’ll bitterly resent it as a form of betrayal.’

  ‘And where do you get your child psychology from?’

  ‘From experience,’ Leigh answered coldly. ‘You seem to forget that you’re slightly newer at this game than I am.’ She stared straight into his eyes and felt, not for the first time, a giddy sensation of falling. She had noticed it the very first time they had met, and with every subsequent meeting that unsteadying feeling seemed to get more pronounced. She would have to get used to him if she was going to be living under the same roof.

  ‘OK,’ he said after a longish pause, ‘I take your point.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Take your point,’ he repeated in an aggravatingly measured voice. ‘Now, if we could discuss schooling...’ he continued, as though the two were linked in some way.

  ‘What about schooling?’

  ‘It’ll be too far for you to take her to the school she’s in now when you move to Hampstead.’

  ‘I’ll start looking at the situation soon.’

  ‘Soon might not be soon enough.’

  ‘Don’t you think Amy will have had enough changes, without throwing a change of school in as well?’

  ‘Some might say that it’s better to do it all in one go so that there are no more nasty surprises in store.’

  ‘Some might,’ Leigh agreed, her voice implying that she wasn’t to be counted in that number.

  ‘There is an excellent independent school twenty minutes’ drive away from my house.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ Leigh muttered vaguely, pulling open the front door just in case he didn’t get the message that it was time for him to leave.

  ‘No need,’ Nicholas said smoothly, stepping out into the darkness. He leant so that he was close to her and his breath was fanning her cheek. ‘I’ve already sorted it out. Amy will start there after the Christmas holidays. All you really need to do is check out the business of school uniforms.’

  ‘What? Why are you doing this? Why are you running our lives? When I came to you I didn’t expect you to jump in and take over!’

  ‘No, you most certainly didn’t, did you?’ he responded silkily. ‘You simply expected me to hand over the necessary amount of guilt money and leave you in peace to get on with things. Well, lady, you misread the situation completely. We are not talking about donations to a good cause and we’re not talking about any damn child. We’re talking about my child, and I fully intend to get involved so that when I decide that the time is right to tell her who I am she will already have accepted my role in her life. Do you understand me or do I need to repeat what I have just said?’

  Was it any w
onder, she thought, that I dislike the man?

  She had opened a door, not knowing what was behind it, and now it was too late to shut it back. Nicholas Kendall had taken over. It made no difference that he had offered her the best escape she could have hoped for; it made no difference that he had every right to sweep his daughter into his life.

  Logic and reason compelled her to acknowledge everything he was doing on Amy’s behalf, but his aggressive intrusion into their lives unsettled her. He unsettled her. When she was around him her entire body seemed to shift into another gear and she didn’t like the feeling.

  Leigh looked at her watch with mounting exasperation. Nicholas was due to collect her and take her to his house so that she could put her mind at ease that Amy wasn’t going to be living in some terrible den of iniquity. What about me? she thought, not for the first time since this wonderful idea had been unveiled. What about me? She hated herself for being selfish, but she felt as though she had somehow been railroaded into a situation which she had neither invited nor wanted, and the worst of it was that she had no choice in the matter because the welfare of her niece came first, and quite rightly so.

  She had begun stage two of the waiting game, and was pacing the floors of the sitting room when she heard his car pull up outside, then the slam of the car door and the sound of footsteps up the front path. She didn’t give him time to use the buzzer. Instead, she flew to the front door, pulled it open and said tersely, ‘You’re late.’

  He had taken the day off work and was wearing a thick cream pullover, greenish trousers and his Burberry, which he hadn’t bothered to button up. Nor had he shaved. There was a hint of stubble on his chin. It gave him a rakish, piratical air of decadence, which seemed to her entirely appropriate, given his personality. Just the sort of man to enjoy looting and plundering and generally making himself unpopular.

  ‘Eight minutes,’ he said, looking at his watch.

  Leigh didn’t answer. She turned her back on him, flung on her coat as well as a trench coat—but black and of an infinitely cheaper variety than his—and gathered up her knapsack from the table in the hall.

  ‘Have you told Amy anything yet?’ he asked, once they were in his car and slowly heading down roads which didn’t look in the least familiar to her.

  ‘No.’ The answer sounded so stark that she felt morally obliged to expand. ‘She’s all caught up in Nativity rehearsals at school. It just didn’t seem the right time.’ Naturally, she wanted Nicholas to go to the play. He impressed Amy, Leigh knew, and it was not just the abundance of gifts that he had thus far trailed in his wake. He impressed her the way he doubtless impressed most of the female sex, whatever their age. And perhaps, Leigh conceded, she was subconsciously trying to find another father figure. Little did she know.

  ‘And when exactly is this “right time” going to come about?’ he asked, and she could hear his temper just beneath the surface. He was allowing her to take the lead, even though the decisions had been made, his decisions, but his patience wasn’t going to hold out for ever. Right now he was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt because circumstances dictated it, but she was on probation. He somehow managed to make that patently clear.

  ‘This isn’t the easiest situation in the world, you know.’

  ‘And you’re not exactly helping matters either, are you?’ He shot her a glance out of the corner of his eye and Leigh’s lips tightened in self-defence.

  When Amy was around they could just about manage to sustain their facade of politeness, but without her there they were like two adversaries, circling one another, ready to attack.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, his voice hardening. ‘I should take Amy aside myself and tell her the truth, that she’ll be coming to live in my house, that she’ll be changing schools—’

  ‘No!’ Leigh looked at him with horror. ‘It’s taken her a long time to climb out of the shell she built around herself when Roy and Jenny died. I want to break it to her gently, a bit at a time.’

  ‘Fine. Then I expect you to have started doing just that the next time I see you.’

  ‘And if I don’t? If I decide that Amy will be better off living without you on the scene?’

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because I say so.’

  Leigh shot him a withering glance, but what else could she say? Her hands were tied and they both knew it.

  ‘Have you handed in your notice as yet?’ he asked, after a while.

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘Does that mean no?’

  ‘I shall do it some time this week.’ Were there no areas of her life that hadn’t been taken over by this man? Although she had to admit that handing in her notice would be something of a pleasure.

  ‘And you can recommence your art course.’

  ‘You remembered,’ she said, surprised, and he glanced briefly in her direction.

  ‘I have no idea how old you are, but you look barely out of your teens. I should imagine that your life has been immeasurably altered by what’s happened. If you had any sense you would stop trying to fight me and start seeing this arrangement as an opportunity to return to something you loved.’

  ‘I would rather have done it on my own,’ she told him bluntly.

  ‘But you can’t,’ he countered smoothly. ‘I’m employing you to look after Amy and giving you the freedom to pursue your art during the day when she’s at school. Surely that’s the best of all possible worlds.’

  Leigh didn’t say anything. She looked at him surreptitiously, resenting his control over her life. ‘Why are you offering to pay me for something I would do voluntarily?’ she asked, and he shrugged.

  ‘Do you want the truth?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because, despite what you so obviously think, I’m not in favour of taking advantage of people. I have no intention of compromising your pride. It must have taken a great deal to come to me in the first place.

  ‘And what if you decide to sack me?’

  ‘The situation won’t arise.’

  ‘Oh, let me guess. Because you say so, and we lesser mortals must simply trust in your greater wisdom.’

  He laughed. It was the first time she had heard any real amusement in his voice, and the sound of his laughter sent disturbing little waves racing through her. For a fleeting instant she could see very clearly the charm, lying just below the surface, and this, like his unexpected laughter, was also disturbing.

  She hadn’t noticed the car slowing down and turning through a handsome pair of gates, more suited to announce entry to a country house instead of a Victorian house in the heart of London.

  When Nicholas had told her that he lived in a threestorey house she had mentally struck off the penthouse idea and replaced it with a red brick affair stuck in the middle of other similar properties. She had been very far from the truth. The car glided between the gates and stopped in front of a magnificent house with a garden—and not just an apology for a garden, but a proper garden—with grass and fruit trees and a greenhouse at the side.

  ‘I thought,’ he said, looking at the expression on her face, ‘that we’d have a quick look around. I’ll show you where you and Amy will be. Then I’ve made an appointment for you to see the school. We can have lunch somewhere and you can ask me any questions you want to.’

  Inside, the house was warm after the chill outside. It wasn’t a mansion, but there was something indefinably tasteful and cosy about it. They were in a smallish hall, carpeted in deep red and with just the right amount of antique furniture to stop short of looking cluttered. Upstairs, there was the sound of a vacuum-cleaner, and Nicholas, following the direction of her eyes, said as he walked through one of the doors, ‘Mrs MacBride. She comes in every day to do the cleaning and keep things ticking over.’

  Leigh wasn’t really listening. She was silently absorbing the house. The decor was impeccable. The furniture, the rugs strewn here and there, the paintings on the walls, all spoke of the elegan
t understatement that money could buy. There was nothing ostentatious anywhere.

  He showed her around, not at great speed but not stopping anywhere to linger either, until they were on the third floor, where he showed her the rooms that she and Amy would be occupying—two bedrooms, with a small sitting room between them, and a bathroom, which was almost as big as the sitting room.

  ‘It’s completely self-contained,’ he said. ‘Occasionally it’s been used for guests who stay overnight, but not very often. Most of the people I know live in Central London, and those who don’t stay over at the country house.’

  ‘The country house?’

  ‘Didn’t I mention it? My parents left it to me. It’s in Warwickshire. Somewhat more sprawling than this.’

  They went back downstairs, and Leigh turned to him and said in an embarrassed rush, ‘Look, I feel I ought to mention this. I’m not altogether happy about... sharing a house with you.’ He stared at her and she wished he wouldn’t. It only succeeded in addling her still further. ‘I know that you’re rich and powerful and I expect that London is riddled with minions running around who would do anything for you, but I really don’t know what kind of person you are.’

  He relaxed with his hands in his pockets and his head slightly inclined, as though trying to read unspoken messages behind the words.

  ‘I can’t possibly tell you what sort of person I am. How the hell can I? In this sort of situation, you simply have to trust.’

  She didn’t look at him but her cheeks were flaming red. ‘I also read, scouring through the newspapers, that you have something of a...reputation.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  She inhaled deeply and forced herself to meet his eyes.

  Now, to her further humiliation, he began to smile. ‘My intentions, I assure you, are perfectly above board.’ He looked frighteningly sexy when he smiled, she thought with a shiver of awareness. ‘I give you my word that you can rest safely tucked up in your bed at night, without fear that I’m going to burst through the door in search of sex.’