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With one last approving look at the window she turned on her heel and opened the shop door.
She was just about to close it behind her when she saw that a man was about to follow her inside.
For a moment, as she looked into his unsmiling face, a tiny frisson of fear ran through her.
He was totally unfamiliar to her, dressed casually in well-worn and very faded blue jeans, and a short-sleeved shirt that acknowledged the heat of the glorious summer they had been enjoying.
His dark hair was untidy and ruffled and he had a smear of oil on one cheekbone. Despite that, he had about him an aura of power and maleness that made her hesitate and then flounder a little before saying quickly, ‘I’m sorry, the shop isn’t open yet. We don’t actually open until Saturday.’
‘So I understand.’ His voice was cool, slightly abrasive, and very, very controlled, as though he was extremely angry.
She looked at him and discovered that he was. She could see it in the cold greyness of his eyes and the hard set of his mouth.
Her own eyes darkened from hazel to tawny gold in recognition of her apprehension.
‘Besides, I haven’t come to buy shoes from you, Ms Carter.’
He hadn’t? Then what did he want? Was he some kind of local official? Some kind of planning official or someone whom she had unwittingly annoyed?
As she frowned her confusion, she said uncertainly, ‘I see. Then … then, why … why have you come to see me?’
‘That,’ he told her curtly, ‘is something I think we can best discuss in privacy.’
Privacy. Her heart pounded. Once, long ago, another man had demanded privacy with her. Lucy had been the result of her acceding to that demand, and, while it was ridiculous to suppose that this man had anything like that in mind, she still could not help the tremor of fear that ran through her, making her tremble visibly.
‘I … I’m afraid that’s impossible,’ she told him huskily. ‘You see, I’m just about to collect my daughter … perhaps if I could make an appointment …’
He laughed harshly.
‘Oh, yes, that would suit you, wouldn’t it? I wonder what’s going through that devious head of yours, Ms Carter? Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any time to waste on conniving females. All I want from you is your assurance that from now on you will cease your relationship with my brother-in-law.’
Tania’s mouth dropped. The man had plainly made a mistake … was perhaps even mad. Anger overtook her fear.
‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you,’ she told him crisply. Really, what on earth was he talking about? He must have confused her with someone else. That could be the only explanation for his extraordinary behaviour.
She realised suddenly, her eyes rounding in shocked fascination, that he had produced a cheque-book from the back pocket of his jeans and that he was flicking it open, his mouth curling disdainfully as he derided, ‘I see. Well, maybe this will help to convince you. As you see, I’ve come prepared, Ms Carter. Naturally I didn’t expect you to cease your affair out of the goodness of a heart I’m quite sure you don’t possess. Shall we say ten thousand pounds?’
‘Ten thousand pounds …’ She felt sick with shock and pain.
‘Not enough? Well, I assure you it’s as much as you’re going to get.’
Bewilderment gave way to shock and shock to anger as she saw the look of glittering contempt in his eyes.
‘Get out of here,’ she demanded furiously. ‘Just get out before … before I call the police.’
She was speaking wildly, dangerously, her brain warned her. The man was plainly mad. Who knew what on earth he might take it into his head to do if she continued to threaten him?
She was shaking visibly as the adrenalin-fuelled fury pumped through her veins.
‘Very clever, but hardly convincing. What exactly will you tell them? That I offered you ten thousand pounds to stop you breaking up my sister’s marriage? They’d think I was treating you generously. This isn’t the city where no one gives a damn how his neighbour lives. I’ll give you twenty-four hours to think over my offer. After that … Well, let’s just say one way or another I’m going to make damn sure you stop trying to wreck my sister’s marriage.’
Speechless with shock and fury, Tania watched in silence as he opened the door and left the shop.
She was still standing where he had left her, bathed in an icy sweat of reaction and fear when Ann Fielding walked in with Lucy a few minutes later.
‘What on earth was James Warren doing here?’ she asked cheerfully as she came in. ‘I know he likes to take a sort of patriarchal interest in everything that goes on locally—that comes of being born into the town’s founding family, I suppose, but I shouldn’t have thought a children’s shoe shop would be of much interest to him. Unless …’
She shot Tania a shrewd thoughtful look, and then exclaimed in concern.
‘Tania … my dear. Lucy, run upstairs and get your mummy a glass of water, will you? I don’t think she’s feeling very well.’
Through stiff lips, Tania demanded thickly, ‘Just repeat that for me, will you, Ann?’
‘Repeat what?’ her friend asked in concerned bewilderment.
‘Tell me again who it was who just left this shop.’
Anne’s frown deepened. ‘Tell you … Well, it was James Warren, of course.’
‘James Warren.’ Tania’s soft mouth twisted bitterly. Well, no need to wonder now whose marriage her unwanted visitor had been so passionately defending. Although she still needed to know exactly why he should imagine that she had the slightest interest in either Nicholas Forbes or his marriage. Come to that, if he was so genuinely concerned about preserving his sister’s marriage, she was the one he ought to talk to, because it was her actions, her behaviour, her habit of publicly and pointedly underlining the differences between her stepbrother and her husband to the latter’s disadvantage which was undermining that marriage.
‘What’s wrong?’ Ann pressed her anxiously. ‘When I came in you looked so pale. I thought you were going to faint.’
Quickly seizing on the excuse Ann was offering her, Tania agreed tensely.
‘Yes. I think it’s the heat.’
‘Yes, and this is an anxious time for you. I remember what it’s like, and from when Tom and I first started up our business. But I’m sure you’ll do well, Tania. And if James Warren should take it into his head to make you into one of his pet causes—’
Tania laughed mirthlessly, her lips tight. ‘The last thing I want or need is any condescending patronage from someone who believes himself to be the local lord of all he surveys. Thanks for bringing Lucy back for me,’ she added curtly, her manner so plainly indicating that she wanted to be on her own that Ann tactfully said her goodbyes and withdrew.
Once she had gone, Tania stood staring into space.
James Warren. So that was Clarissa Forbes all-powerful stepbrother; a very formidable gentleman indeed, but he wasn’t going to intimidate her and the next time he came round, making false accusations against her, she was going to let him know in no uncertain terms just how wrong he was.
How dared he imagine … ? How dared he suggest …? She frowned quickly. But how had he got the idea that she was in any way other than in a business sense involved with Nicholas?
There was only one way she could find out, and the next time he came round here threatening her she intended to have her own ammunition fully prepared and primed. She would ring Nicholas Forbes and discover just how his brother-in-law had got the false impression that they were having an affair.
And what was more she would do it now, before the heat of her anger cooled and she allowed rationality and caution to take the place of righteous indignation and hot-blooded anger.
CHAPTER TWO (#uf001b3b6-0906-5f9c-8db6-bbef0d295d58)
HAVING settled Lucy in their small sitting-room and listened to her happy account of her day, Tania went through into the room she had designated as her ‘office’ and picked up the telephone.
Nicholas Forbes’s secretary sounded uncertain and hesitant when she asked to be put through to him and Tania frowned over this abrupt change in the girl’s manner. Normally she sounded breezy and cheerful, and she and Tania had even got to the stage of exchanging the odd few seconds of conversation.
Nicholas, on the other hand, was obviously pleased to hear from her. Prudence forbade her to discuss James Warren’s visit with him over the telephone and so she asked instead if he could manage to find the time to call round and see her.
‘It is rather urgent, I’m afraid,’ she told him.
‘No problem. I’ll be with you in ten minutes. I was just about to call it a day anyway. Clarissa had a dinner party planned for this evening and I promised her I wouldn’t be late. James is just back from the States and so he’ll be joining us.’
As she replaced the receiver, Tania reflected that if she had been the one serving him the meal she would have made sure it had a good spoonful of something bitter in it.
How dared he come round here, threatening her, accusing her … leaping to the most preposterous assumptions?
Angrily she paced her small study while she waited for Nicholas to appear.
She had been so looking forward to her new life, so happy about it, and now suddenly, like a dark cloud crossing the sun, that happiness had been blighted. Through no fault of her own she seemed to have fallen foul of the town’s most important and influential resident. Well, she didn’t care, she decided mentally, tossing her head. Let him do his worst. He was the one who would suffer the most if it ever came out how he had tried to bribe her, a totally innocent person, to give up a non-existent affair with a man who was nothing more than her legal adviser.
Nicholas arrived ten minutes later. Tania let him in through the front of her shop and then led him upstairs to her study.
They had to walk through her sitting-room to get there, and Lucy turned round, beaming when she saw him.
Nicholas was good with children and they responded well to him. Watching him as he listened to Lucy’s excited account of her day, Tania felt a small shaft of bitterness lodge itself somewhere deep inside her.
Lucy should have had this as her birthright, should have had a father to whom she could turn with her small pleasures and problems.
Tania had never felt the lack of a man in their lives, but she realised Lucy might feel differently. The absence of her father was a subject which was rarely raised between them. At the large inner city school which she had previously attended, single-parent children had been in the majority, not the minority, and, although Tania had told Lucy as calmly and matter-of-factly as she could the brief circumstances of her conception, editing them so that they could be understood and accepted by a small child, it was as though in some way Lucy had realised it was not a subject her mother cared to discuss and had asked no further questions.
Now, abruptly and painfully, Tania realised that in thinking their lives complete and content she had perhaps been looking at the situation only from her own point of view. It had never struck her before that Lucy might actively miss the presence of a male parent, even though that presence was something she had never experienced.
Now, listening to her laughing and giggling as she responded to Nicholas’s gentle teasing, Tania was struck by uncertainty and apprehension.
Was Lucy perhaps secretly nursing a need to have a man in her life? A father?
‘What’s wrong?’ Nicholas asked her with urgent concern once they were alone in her study. ‘You sounded worried over the phone.’
‘Worried doesn’t begin to describe it,’ Tania told him tartly. She took a deep steadying breath as she felt the tension build up inside her and then said levelly, ‘I had a visit from your brother-in-law this afternoon. He seems to be under the misapprehension that you and I are having an affair and he came here to demand that I stop seeing you. He also offered me ten thousand pounds to do so.’
‘Ten thousand!’ Nicholas whistled. ‘Did you take it?’
Tania stared at him. He was smiling but beneath the smile she could see that he was ill at ease, guilty almost.
‘No, I did not. But that isn’t why I asked you to come here. What I want to know is why on earth he should imagine that you and I are having an affair in the first place, much less attempt to bribe and threaten me into giving you up.’
Nicholas had turned his back on her. He picked up the paperweight on her desk, weighing it absently in his hands, his movements jerky and uncoordinated.
‘Nicholas, what is going on?’ Tania pressed, reading these betraying signs. ‘And please don’t tell me you don’t know,’ she added with dry irony as she removed the paperweight from his hand. ‘Because it’s perfectly obvious that you do.’
For a moment he was silent and then he shrugged and admitted sheepishly, ‘I suppose it’s all my fault … although I never intended—that is, I had no idea that Clarissa would fire James up to such an extent—’
‘Just a minute.’ Tania stopped him, curtly frowning at him. ‘You mean that it’s Clarissa who has told her stepbrother that we’re having an affair? But what on earth gave her that idea … ? Everyone knows that you’re devoted to her and—’
‘That’s the trouble,’ Nicholas interrupted her bitterly. ‘I’ve allowed her to make a doormat out of me for too long. I’m sick and tired of her carping, her criticisms, of being held up to ridicule … of being made to feel a fool. I’ve already told her that if she doesn’t love me any more then we should separate. Even though, for the children’s sake, I feel … Anyway that isn’t what she wants … or so she says. In fact, she got so wrought up when I suggested it that I began to wonder if I could perhaps make her jealous, make her believe that another woman was interested in me … a woman who didn’t despise me or constantly compare me with another man. She’s always had a very jealous nature … and it’s obviously worked better than I imagined.’
Tania couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
‘You mean you deliberately allowed Clarissa to believe that you and I are having an affair, even though there’s not the slightest truth in such a suggestion?’ she asked, appalled.
Nicholas had the grace to look embarrassed.
‘I’d no idea she’d take things so far. I didn’t say we were having an affair. I just talked to her about you, told her how much I admire you … You know the kind of thing. I had no idea she’d involve James. I suppose I ought to have done, though. She’s forever running to him with her problems. He’s more important to her than I am—’ He broke off, flushing and biting his bottom lip, and Tania recognised that Clarissa wasn’t the only one suffering from jealousy.
Something unpleasant and distasteful stirred deep inside her at what she was hearing.
‘You’ll have to tell her the truth,’ she announced flatly. ‘And you have to tell your brother-in-law as well.’
He had gone pale and was avoiding her eyes.
‘I will do,’ he told her. ‘But not just yet. If I can just get her to realise—’
‘No,’ Tania protested. She was furious with him. How dared he use her like this and without either her knowledge or her consent? ‘I can understand that you want to save your marriage,’ she told him firmly. ‘But I don’t believe this is the right way to go about it. What’s wrong with simply sitting down and discussing the whole thing honestly with Clarissa? Tell her that you love her and that you resent being compared with her brother. Tell her that you want to make a success of your marriage. After all, you’ve every incentive to do so, both of you. You must have loved each other when you married … you have two beautiful children.’
‘One of whom was conceived before we were married,’ Nicholas told her, astounding her. ‘Oh, I wanted to marry her. I was desperately in love with her, but Clarissa … Well, I’ve never been sure whether she married me because she loved me or because she was pregnant. Sometimes I even wonder if Alec is mine. You see, she was involved with another man—a married man—when we first met. She was using me to prevent James from finding out about her affair. He’s very strict about such things, very moralistic.’
Tania felt sickened by what she was hearing. Mingled with that sickness was pity for Nicholas, tinged with a little contempt, and as for Clarissa …
‘You’re going to have to tell her the truth, Nicholas,’ she insisted curtly. ‘Your brother-in-law has given me twenty-four hours in which to make up my mind about his bribe. After that if I refuse to give you up he assured me that he will find some way of making me do so.
‘He’s a very powerful man locally. I can’t afford to have him as my enemy, no matter what my private opinion of a man who accepts the accusations of someone without making the slightest attempt to find out for himself if they’re true. I can’t help you with your marriage, I’m afraid, and, to be honest with you, if you don’t make sure that he knows the truth, then I shall.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Nicholas told her, ‘but it won’t be easy convincing Clarissa.’
‘Really?’ Tania was coldly, icily angry with him now. ‘You do surprise me. You appeared to have no difficulty in convincing her that we were having an affair. Surely informing her of the truth should be even more easy?’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Nicholas reiterated, but, as she saw him out, Tania wished she could have felt more confident of his determination to make sure Clarissa knew and accepted the true situation between them.
As he got in his car to drive away, she called out urgently to him, ‘So you’ll make sure she knows everything, won’t you, Nicholas?’
The smile he gave her was forced and painful, but she dared not allow herself to waste any sympathy on him. He certainly had not spared a thought for her when he had so recklessly and unwisely involved her without her knowledge in his private affairs.
She had gone from feeling sorry for him for the sad state of his marriage to feeling that perhaps he and Clarissa deserved one another after all. She had nothing but contempt for adults who so cruelly played childish games with one another’s emotions.
Surely any good marriage—any worthwhile relationship—demanded total trust, mutual respect, mutual honesty, if that feeling that the human race described as love was going to be allowed a chance to grow to maturity.
If the kind of relationship Nicholas and Clarissa shared was marriage, commitment, then she was glad she had never experienced it.
But then she thought of Lucy, Lucy whom she was perhaps unwittingly denying a very important part of her growing up. Would her daughter as an adult have difficulty in relating to the male sex? Would she have emotional problems and hang-ups because of her lack of a male parent, a male influence in her life?
Uncomfortably she dismissed her thoughts as unproductive, but, later on that evening when Lucy was chatting animatedly about her afternoon at the Fieldings’, describing to her how Tom Fielding was making his daughter her very own personalised stencil for decorating her newly painted bedroom walls, she wondered if she was being over-sensitive in detecting a trace of wistful envy in her daughter’s voice. Lucy’s room in their new flat, while a tenfold improvement on the claustrophobic and damp room she had occupied in their city tower block, was as yet undecorated. Because of the necessity of opening in time for the autumn term trade in new school shoes, there hadn’t been time to do very much as yet with the flat. Once the shop was open and running, then she would be able to turn her attention to making their new home more comfortable.
She had plenty of ideas, plenty of plans, and, determinedly trying to banish James Warren and his threats from her mind, she tried to concentrate instead on discussing with Lucy just how they would decorate her new room.
After Lucy had had her bath and gone contentedly to bed, Tania looked around her sitting-room, mentally giving the plain walls a coat of fresh sunny yellow paint. A pretty stencil frieze around the top of the walls would add a little individuality to the décor; she had taught herself a good many domestic skills over the years, out of necessity more than anything else, and she eyed their comfortable settee she had originally bought second-hand, recognising that it was perhaps time it had a new loose cover, perhaps in a plain damask this time now that Lucy was growing up and the importance of a fabric which would not show every mark was no longer essential. Because her great-aunt had refused to modernise the building in any way, the flat still retained its open fireplaces with their nineteenth-century firebacks.
Worth a fortune now, Ann Fielding had told her enviously, and well worth keeping.
