Francesca didn’t say a word. She turned her back and almost ran to her platform. She felt hot, sick and desperate to get back to her flat.
Employing Helen Scott behind her back seemed the ultimate betrayal. Would she end up in his bed as well? Francesca wondered feverishly.
She spent the next week hibernating, too lethargic to do anything and with too many thoughts on her mind. They weighed her down, made her sluggish and tearful.
She didn’t want to think about Oliver, but she did. She didn’t want to think about Helen Scott, but she did. And then there were all those other equally consuming worries—like how she was going to cope and how she could tell her father. An uneasy silence now lay between them—her doing, she knew, but uneasy silences were the hardest to break, and this news was the worst possible way of breaking this one.
She was sitting with a cup of tea on Friday night, with the television switched on, half following a complicated plot which seemed to involve a lot of running around and a lot of baffled faces of detectives trying to solve a string of murders but mostly thinking, when there was a sharp knock on the door.
She took a deep breath, frowning at the intrusion, opened the door and stood still in shock.
‘What are you doing here?’ she whispered, with panic in her voice.
Oliver’s pale eyes were cold, but his mouth smiled, and he said lightly, ‘Is that any way to greet your ex-boss?’
Francesca made no move to pull open the door. ‘Why have you come?’
‘To find out how you are, of course,’ he said in the same light voice, while his eyes remained cool and hard. He reached out and pushed back the door, and then walked into the room, leaving her two options—either to close the door behind her and muster up some kind of self-composure, or else to stand by the open door and yell at the top of her voice that she wanted him to leave.
She closed the door behind her and he prowled around the small room, pausing to look out of the window, which offered a particularly uninspiring view of the street below—not a tree within sight, no patch of green, but then this was London.
‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ she asked awkwardly, and he nodded.
‘If it’s no bother.’
‘No bother at all.’ They sounded like two distant acquaintances who had unexpectedly found themselves thrown together in an artificial situation and were trying to make polite conversation.
She made a cup of coffee, handed it to him, then sat down on the chair, hitching her legs up, and contemplated him with as much detachment as she could muster. Wasn’t facing a problem, she told herself, the first step to curing it?
‘So how are you?’ he asked, sipping some of his coffee and giving her the full blast of that off-putting stare of his.
She said a little defensively, ‘I’m fine.’
‘Told your father that you’ve left?’ he asked, still casually, and she shook her head.
‘I haven’t spoken to him since… Well, I’ll do that next week,’ she murmured vaguely.
‘Difficult breaking bad news, isn’t it?’ He gave her a cold smile and stared at her, which made her feel uncomfortable and suddenly very resentful of his presence in her flat. She had not asked him to come. She had certainly not wanted to see him. All she wanted was to forget about him.
‘Have you started looking for something else?’ he asked, and she shook her head.
‘I’ll start next week,’ she muttered.
He said with heavy sarcasm. ‘Busy week ahead of you, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. She felt oddly threatened by his tone, like someone who had suddenly spotted a shark in the swimming pool.
‘There’s a vacancy at the company,’ he said, looking at her closely. ‘Maria Barnes has left to work for her brother-in-law, and Gerald Fox, one of the financial directors, is looking for a replacement. The job is yours if you want it.’
‘No!’ She spoke quickly and loudly. Return to that company? It was utterly impossible. She couldn’t have taken that job if she had been down to her last penny and had nothing else in the offing.
‘No?’ He shook his head, and she could tell from the expression on his face that her answer had not surprised him in the slightest. He had expected it.
She wished that he would go. She felt so nervous that her fingers were gripping the sides of the chair and the heavy beating of her heart was making her feel faint.
‘Why did Maria decide to leave?’ she asked, licking her lips and knowing that if she could keep the conversation on an impersonal level she might be able to get through it. ‘I thought that she liked working there.’
‘Oh, she did,’ Oliver agreed, running his finger round the rim of the cup. ‘But her brother-in-law’s firm isn’t doing too well, and he can’t afford a full-time secretary even though he needs one. She’s going to take a big cut in her salary, in return for which they’re going to give her the top floor of their house so that she doesn’t have to pay any rent.’ He raised his eyes to hers, and there was hard irony there. ‘Desperate situations sometimes need desperate solutions, don’t they, Francesca?’
He stood up and placed the cup very gently down on the table in front of him. ‘You look a little tired,’ he said, moving across to her. ‘Shall I leave you in peace now?’
She nodded, relieved, and he said, still very calmly, ‘I won’t come round again, if you’d rather I didn’t.’
She nodded again, putting her feet to the ground to see him out, but he said immediately, ‘Don’t get up. Please.’ He smiled, and there was definitely something very alarming about that smile now. He leaned forward, over her, resting his hands on either side of her chair.
‘We wouldn’t want you to tire yourself even more, would we, Francesca?’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked faintly.
‘What do I mean? I’ll tell you what I mean. Did you think that I wouldn’t find out? You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT TOOK a little while for that to register. For a few seconds Francesca’s mind went completely blank, but then it started working again and her face whitened.
‘Who told you?’ There didn’t seem any point playing games. For one thing the dark rage on his face, which she realised now had been lurking there all along, was frightening her, and for another he would be able to find out easily enough that she was pregnant. All he had to do was watch her, and as sure as day broke and night fell he would see her putting on weight.
When she had found out that she was pregnant her immediate thought had been that she had to resign, but her thought processes seemed to have ended there. Now they sensibly moved one step further, and she realised that there was a good chance that he would have found out anyway. He knew her father, and no doubt they would have arranged to meet again, and then it would all have come out.
She had not planned on telling her father the identity of the baby’s father, but that would have been immaterial. Oliver would have worked it out for himself. It would only have taken some elementary mathematics.
She put her hand to her forehead, and he pulled it away and pinned it to the chair with his fingers.
‘How did you find out?’ she asked faintly, and he bared his teeth in a cold smile.
‘Does it matter? Helen Scott, one of the girls who works in the company, mentioned that you had been looking sick for the past couple of weeks and said that she thought you might be pregnant.’
That was a bitter pill. She closed her eyes and wondered when these little confidences had taken place and where. At his desk, with her sitting provocatively on the edge? Over a drink in a bar somewhere? In bed?
She should have known that Helen would have suspected, and now that little cryptic comment at the station about finding another job—whether she would be able to—made a lot more sense than it had then.
At the time she had thought that the other girl had been making some guarded, spiteful remark based on an ill-founded suspicion that the reason she
was leaving was because she couldn’t handle the job, but she had been much closer to the mark than that, hadn’t she? In fact, she had scored a bull’s eye on the first shot.
‘Why didn’t you say what you wanted to say the minute you walked through the door?’ Francesca asked resentfully. ‘Why the charade?’
‘I thought I’d give you time,’ he said savagely. ‘I thought I’d beat around the bush enough so that you would come right out and tell me, if that was what you intended doing, but you didn’t.’
‘Why should I?’ Francesca asked tightly, looking up at him. ‘It’s not your concern.’
That, she realised, had been a poor choice of words. His face darkened, and she began to stammer incoherently. ‘What I mean is…what I meant to say…’
‘I know exactly what you meant to say, Francesca. But you’d better get it through that head of yours right now that it is my concern!’
‘It’s your baby,’ she agreed heatedly, ‘but that’s about it. I don’t want anything from you. In fact, I wish you’d just vanish out of my life. I wish you’d never come here in the first place!’
She really did too. He would never understand how he had ruined her life, because what she had given him was much more than a night of love-making, and she couldn’t see how she would ever be able to recover from the wreckage and start piecing her life together again if he saw the baby as his concern, and decided that he was to be a permanent fixture on the scene.
If at the beginning she had not seen beyond handing in her resignation and optimistically thinking that he would never find out, her thought processes had now jumped ahead by several leagues, and she imagined a life ahead of her with him appearing in it regularly, so that he could keep in contact with his child—keep in contact even when another Imogen Sattler came along. How was she going to face that?
If Helen had wanted to deliver a final piece of misdirected spite, she could not have chosen a more effective way—to usurp her job and to disclose her pregnancy. He had allowed the first and now he would destroy her for the second.
‘Well, I’m here now, lady, and if you think that you’re going to get rid of me then you’re mistaken.’
‘But why…?’ she asked in a raw voice. She rubbed her wrist where he had been holding it, and risked another quick glance at his face to see whether some of his anger had subsided. It hadn’t.
‘Why? You must think I’m a number-one bastard if you believe I can casually get a woman pregnant and then walk away from my responsibility as though it didn’t exist.’
So this is what it feels like to be someone’s responsibility, she thought. Not a very pleasant feeling. Almost as gut-wrenching as being someone’s mistake.
He raked his fingers through his hair and went back to the sofa, sitting down heavily, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands lightly clasped together.
The funny thing about dreams, she thought, was that they rarely ever bore any resemblance to reality. She had always dreamed when she was young that life would pan out in a very normal manner for her—she would fall in love, she would get married, she would start a family, and every step of the way would be wondrously happy.
Yet here she was—in love all right, but with the wrong man, and starting a family all right, but in a loveless relationship. What a laugh. Except she wasn’t remotely amused by any of it. She felt utterly miserable.
‘You said that you were using contraception,’ he said, breaking into her thoughts, and she looked across at him with an expression that was half defensiveness and half guilt.
‘I lied,’ she admitted, twisting her fingers together. ‘I didn’t think that anything would happen.’ She saw his expression of impatient disbelief and rushed on, more in defence now than guilt, ‘Well, it’s not as though I sleep around! Why should I be using any contraception? On the off chance? Anyway, I didn’t think that I would have the bad luck for this to happen on the one and only time I made love.’
‘Well, it’s happened, and now we’ve got to decide what we’re going to do about it.’
“‘Do about it”? “Do about it”? What does that mean? If you think that I’m going to get rid of it somehow, then you’re wrong!’
‘Don’t be bloody stupid!’ he bit out harshly. ‘That’s not what I’m saying at all.’
‘Then what are you saying? It’s too soon to start talking about visitation rights. Why don’t we wait until it’s born?’
He ignored that as if he wouldn’t dignify the remark with a response. ‘Like it or not, I’m the father of the child,’ he said calmly, ‘and there’s only one thing for it—we’re going to have to get married.’
‘No!’
‘Why not?’
‘We don’t love each other—’ she began.
‘Stop living in a dream world, Francesca,’ he cut in harshly. ‘This is reality, and the best thing we can do is get married. We can break it to your father in the morning.’
‘We are not going to do any such thing!’ Did he really think that she would agree to marry him, knowing that the only reason he was doing so was because of the baby? ‘Shotgun marriages are always doomed to failure,’ she informed him, and he laughed, but without much humour.
‘And where do you get your statistics?’
‘Everyone knows that,’ she muttered stubbornly. ‘I can manage perfectly well on my own. I don’t need any financial help from you. I’ll go back home and—’
‘You will not go back home,’ he said before she could finish. ‘You will not use your father’s money to bring up a child of mine.’
‘Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do!’
They stared at each other silently, and after a while he said, getting up, ‘I’m going to make myself a cup of coffee. Would you like one?’
‘I’ve gone off it.’
‘A glass of juice, then?’
She shrugged and nodded, and hoped that he would take his time, because she needed to get her thoughts into order.
He came back into the room eventually, handed her a glass of orange juice, and after a few minutes said conversationally, ‘Feeling better now?’
She could see that even if she wasn’t he most certainly was. There was no longer that violent anger on his face. He had regained that formidable self-composure and was looking at her over the rim of his cup, his eyes veiled.
‘Shall we continue this conversation without any hysteria?’ he asked, which made her bristle with resentment, but she didn’t say anything and he carried on with calm confidence, ‘I agree you don’t need any financial help from me, but that doesn’t begin to solve your problems. For instance, what do you think your father is going to say about your condition?’
‘He won’t be overjoyed, I know that,’ Francesca muttered, looking down into her glass as if searching for inspiration. ‘He’ll be shocked and disappointed.’
Which, she thought, was putting it mildly. He had always tried so hard to do what was right for her, to compensate for the lack of maternal guidance.
Through all his long, hard, working hours he had always made time to come to her little school functions, to be there whenever it mattered. That was why he had been so worried when she had finished her secretarial course and had started going out with what he’d seen as entirely the wrong crowd. That was why her rift with him would now be causing him anxiety.
‘He’ll be even more shocked and disappointed when you tell him that you won’t marry me even though I want you to,’ Oliver murmured smoothly, and she glared at him.
‘He’ll understand.’
‘Will he, though?’
‘He’d rather I married for love than for all the wrong reasons.’
Oliver’s lips thinned and he said silkily, ‘Then I shall just have to convince him how much I love you, shan’t I?’ And now her eyes were helpless. ‘There are worse things in life than marrying for the sake of a baby,’ he said in a hard voice, but there was an angry need to persuade her there as well that made her frown. ‘
Two people can start out with stars in their eyes and the marriage can break down in a matter of weeks because there wasn’t enough there to start with. At least we know each other.’
‘In a manner of speaking.’ Francesca put in with a certain amount of bitter sarcasm. ‘Besides,’ she continued, thinking about it, ‘Dad would see through my phoney baloney about love in a minute flat.’
‘No, he wouldn’t. People are very good at believing what they want to believe, and, face it, I’m not exactly the human equivalent of the bubonic plague, am I?’
‘Oh, very modest,’ she snapped, and he laughed, and this time there was a great deal more humour there.
Although she would never admit it, he was right; they did know one another, perhaps better than she cared to say. Or at least she knew him. Wasn’t that why she had fallen in love with him? She had seen the warm charm, the wit, the sense of fair play which were all there underneath the aggressive, terse exterior.
He’d implied that he knew her, though. But did he? He had thought her a child—a spoiled child who had sailed through life on the wings of money.
And she knew that he had not been initially attracted to her at all. She had not been his type. Maybe physically he had revised his opinions, for reasons which she did not know for certain but could make an educated guess at, but she still wasn’t his type. If it hadn’t been for the baby, he would never have dreamt of asking her to marry him. He might have continued sleeping with her, but it would have only been a temporary arrangement.
‘Your father would prefer to know that you were being taken care of, rather than think of you as a single parent, emotionally struggling on her own to bring up a baby. You’re still a child yourself, for God’s sake.’
‘There you go again! Thank you very much,’ Francesca muttered.
To Tame a Proud Heart Page 11
