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Cressy nodded, her face set. ‘I’ve brought my laptop down with me. Tomorrow I’ll start looking—finding out how bad things really are.’
There was a tap on the door and Mrs Berryman came in with a tray. The scent of the coffee, and the sight of the pile of ham sandwiches, the plate of home-made shortbread and the rich Dundee cake accompanying them, reminded Cressy how long it was since she’d eaten.
She said warmly, ‘Berry—that looks wonderful.’
‘You look as if you need it.’ The housekeeper’s glance was searching as well as affectionate. ‘You’ve lost weight.’
‘Berry’s right,’ her aunt commented when they were alone again. ‘You are thinner.’
Cressy was pouring coffee. ‘I expect it’s an illusion created by my Greek suntan. Although I did do a lot of walking while I was out there.’ And swimming. And dancing…
‘My dear, I’m so sorry that your holiday had to be interrupted like this,’ Sir Robert said heavily. ‘But I felt you had to be told—even before James collapsed.’
Cressy forced a smile. ‘It was time I came back anyway.’ Her mouth tightened. ‘You can have—too much of a good thing.’ She handed round the coffee and offered the plate of sandwiches. ‘I’d have been here sooner, but of course it’s the height of the holiday season and I couldn’t get a flight straight away. I had to spend a whole day in Athens.’
It had been a nervy, edgy day—a day she’d spent looking behind her constantly to see if she was being followed. She’d joined a guided tour of the Acropolis, mingled with the crowds in the Plaka, done everything she could to lose herself in sheer numbers. And all the time she had been waiting—waiting for a hand on her shoulder—a voice speaking her name…
‘Cressy, I worry about you,’ Lady Kenny said forth-rightly. ‘You don’t have enough fun. You shouldn’t have your nose stuck to a computer screen all the time, solving other people’s tax problems. You should find yourself a young man. Start living.’
‘I like my job,’ Cressy said mildly. ‘And if by “living” you mean I should be swept away by some grand passion, I think we’ve seen enough of that in this family.’ Her face hardened. ‘Watching my father make a fool of himself over someone as worthless as Eloise taught me a valuable lesson. I’ve seen at first hand the damage that sex can do.’
‘He was lonely for a long time,’ her aunt said quietly. ‘Your mother’s death hit him hard. And Eloise was very clever—very manipulative. Don’t be too hard on him, darling.’
‘No,’ Cressy said with sudden bitterness. ‘I’ve no right to judge anybody. It’s all too easy to succumb to that particular madness.’ As I know now.
For a moment she saw a cobalt sea and a strip of dazzling white sand, fringed with rocks as bleached as bones. And she saw dark eyes with laughter in their depths that glittered at her from a face of sculpted bronze. Laughter, she thought, that could, in an instant, change to hunger…
Suddenly breathless, she drove that particular image back into the recesses of her memory and slammed the door on it.
She would not think of him, she told herself savagely. She could not…
She saw her aunt and uncle looking faintly surprised, and went on hurriedly, ‘But I shouldn’t have let my dislike of Eloise keep me away. Maybe if I’d been around I could have done something. Persuaded Dad, somehow, that Paradise Grove was a scam. And he might not be in Intensive Care now,’ she added, biting her lip hard as tears stung her eyes.
Sir Robert patted her shoulder. ‘Cressy, you’re the last person who could possibly be blamed for all this. And the doctor told me that James’s heart attack could have happened at any time. He had warning signs over a year ago. But he wanted to pretend he was still young and strong.’
‘For Eloise,’ Cressy said bitterly. ‘Oh, why did he have to meet her?’
Lady Kenny said gently, ‘Sometimes fate works in strange ways, Cressy.’ She paused. ‘I’ve prepared a room at our house if you’d like to come back and stay. You shouldn’t be on your own at a time like this.’
‘It’s sweet of you,’ Cressy said gratefully. ‘But I must remain here. I told the hospital it was where I’d be. And I shan’t be alone with Berry to look after me.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Sir Robert sighed. ‘I’m afraid Berry may be another casualty of this debacle.’
‘Oh, surely not,’ Cressy said in swift distress. ‘She’s always been part of this family.’ One change that Eloise had not been allowed to make, she added silently.
Sir Robert finished his coffee and put down his cup.
‘My dear.’ His tone was sober. ‘I think you must accept that nothing is ever going to be the same again.’
He was right, Cressy thought as she stood on the steps an hour later, waving her aunt and uncle an approximation of a cheerful goodbye.
Everything had changed quite momentously. Beginning with herself.
She shook herself mentally as she went back into the house.
She had to forget about those days of golden, sunlit madness on Myros, and how near she too had come to making a disastrous mistake.
That urgent summons back to England, although devastating, had been in another way a lifeline, dragging her back to reality. Waking her from the dangerous seductive dream which had enthralled her and could have led her to total ruin.
A holiday romance—that was all it had been. As trivial and tawdry as these things always were, with a handsome Greek on one side and a bored tourist on the other. Just for a while she’d allowed herself to indulge a risky fantasy, and then real life had intervened, just in time, returning her to sanity.
For a moment she found herself wondering what would have happened if her uncle’s message had not been waiting at the hotel. If she’d actually called Draco’s bluff and gone back to Myros…
She stopped herself right there. Speculation of that kind was forbidden territory now. Myros, and all that had happened there, was in the past, where it belonged. A memory that one day, in years to come, she might take out, dust down and smile over.
The memory of desire and being desired…
But not now. And maybe not ever, she thought, straightening her shoulders.
Now she had to look to the immediate future, and its problems. She’d have an early night, and tomorrow she would start to sift through the wreckage, see if anything could be salvaged.
And tonight, she told herself with determination, she would sleep without dreaming.
But that was more easily said than done. Cressida’s night was restless. She woke several times, her body damp with perspiration, haunted by images that left no trace in her memory. Nothing that she could rationalise, and then dismiss.
Perhaps it was simply coming back to this house, where she’d been a stranger for so long, and finding herself in her old room again. The past playing tricks with her unconscious mind.
At least this room hadn’t undergone the high-priced makeover inflicted on the rest of the house.
Eloise had been determined to erase every trace of her predecessor, Cressy thought, more with sorrow than with anger. And no expense had been spared in the process—which could explain how James Fielding might have found himself strapped for cash and been tempted to recklessness.
Although, in fairness, this wasn’t the first time her father had sailed close to the wind. Only this time his instinct for disaster seemed to have deserted him.
But that, she thought, can happen to the best of us.
She pushed back the covers and got out of bed, wandering across to the window. Light was just beginning to stain the eastern sky, and the cool morning air made her shiver in her thin cotton nightgown and reach for a robe.
She’d never needed one in Greece, she thought. The nights had been too hot except in the hotel, which had had air-conditioning. Each evening the chambermaid had arranged her flimsy confection of silk and lace in a fan shape on the bed, with a rose on the bodice and a hand-made chocolate on the pillow.
Later, in the taverna on Myros, she’d slept naked, kicking away even the thin sheet to the foot of the bed, her body grateful for the faint breeze sighing from the Aegean sea through the open window.
Moving quietly, she went downstairs to the kitchen and made herself a pot of coffee which she carried to the study.
She’d brought in the computer and set it up the night before, and if she couldn’t sleep then she might as well start work. Begin to probe the real extent of the financial disaster facing her father.
Because it could be faced. She was convinced of that. James Fielding was a survivor. He would get over this heart attack, and the ensuing operation, and take up his life again. And somehow she had to salvage something from the wreckage—make sure there was something to give him hope.
She’d done some preliminary calculations of her own on the plane, partly to prevent herself thinking of other things, she realised, her mouth twisting, and had worked out how much she could afford to contribute. But the outlook was bleak. Even if she sold her London flat, and worked from this house, she’d struggle to pay the new mortgage.
Besides, she wasn’t sure whether she could endure to live under this roof again for any length of time. There were too many bad memories.
Cressida had been a teenager, still mourning her mother, when she had learned of her father’s decision to remarry. And her sense of shock, almost betrayal, had doubled when she’d discovered his choice of wife.
Looking back, she could see that she’d responded intolerantly to the newcomer, staring at her with resentful eyes.
Eloise had been a bit-part actress, her chief claim to fame as hostess on a second-rate TV quiz show. She was tall and full-breasted, her lips permanently set in a beguiling pout, her violet eyes wide, almost childlike.
Until she was crossed, Cressida thought wryly. And then they would narrow like a rattlesnake’s.
As they’d done when she first met her new stepdaughter. The hostility had not been one-sided by any means. Eloise had made it plain that she had little time for other women, and especially for a young girl just beginning to blossom out of gawkiness, although there was no way Cressy could ever have rivalled her voluptuous charms.
Chalk and cheese, Cressy thought with sadness. And I was just a nuisance, someone to be sidelined, if not totally ignored.
And even when, urged by her father, she’d tried a few awkward overtures, she’d found herself completely rebuffed. Eventually she had acquired a reputation for being ‘tricky’, if not downright difficult. And James Fielding, unable to see he was being manipulated, had made his displeasure known to his daughter, creating a rift that had widened slowly but surely over the years.
Cressida had soon realised she was no longer welcome in her own home. Even at Christmas Eloise had usually organised a ski-ing holiday for her husband and herself.
‘Darling,’ she’d said coaxingly when the first one was mooted. ‘Cressida doesn’t want to spend her vacations with a couple of old fogies. She has her own friends. Her own life.’ Her steely gaze had fixed her stepdaughter. ‘Isn’t that right?’
It had been easier to swallow her hurt and bewilderment and agree. She had had friends she could go to, and Uncle Robert and Aunt Barbara had always been there for her, their comfortable, untidy house a second home.
For a long time Cressida had convinced herself that the scales would eventually fall from her father’s eyes and that he’d see Eloise’s greed and self-absorption. But it had never happened. He’d been carried away by his passion for her—a passion that she had been careful to feed.
As for Eloise herself, Cressida was sure she’d looked at James Fielding and seen only a successful businessman, with a settled background and an attractive Georgian house not too far from London.
What she hadn’t understood was that James’s company had struggled to recover from the big recession of the eighties, or that James himself had faltered more than once as chairman, and was being encouraged to take early retirement.
Eloise had been too busy entertaining, enjoying weekend parties with amusing people, and being seen in all the right places.
Even after James’s actual retirement she’d seen no need to scale down their style of living or their expenditure.
Alec Caravas had been a younger man with a foolproof scheme for making them both instantly wealthy. Cressida could see how easily Eloise would have been seduced.
After all, she thought, I was planning to give up my job, my lifestyle, my independence. I shouldn’t judge anyone else.
Her own meetings with her father over the past two years had been mainly confined to lunches in London, with the conversation constrained.
Perhaps I should have made more of an effort, Cressida thought as she drank her coffee. Perhaps I should have played the hypocrite and pretended to like her. Even looked for her good points. Told myself that, whatever my personal feelings, she loved Dad and was making him happy.
Only, I never believed that. I just didn’t want to be proved right quite so comprehensively.
She sighed, and turned resolutely to the computer screen. It was little use rehashing the past, she told herself forcibly. She had to try and salvage something from the present to ensure her father had a future.
She worked steadily for a couple of hours, but found little to comfort her.
Her father’s company pension was indeed all that was left. All his other assets had been liquidised to make him a major shareholder in Paradise Grove. And he’d borrowed heavily too.
If he recovered from his heart attack, it would be to find himself insolvent, she realised unhappily.
His whole way of life would have to be downsized. She’d have to rent a larger flat, she thought, or even a house. Make a home for him—and Berry, who’d be needed more than ever. But how could she afford it?
I won’t worry about that now, she told herself, glancing at her watch.
It was time she took a shower and dressed, and got over to the hospital again.
As she pushed back her chair, she noticed for the first time the small icon at the bottom of the screen indicating there was an e-mail message for her.
Someone else believes in an early start, Cressida thought wryly, as she clicked on to the little envelope and watched the message scroll down.
I am waiting for you.
The words were brief, almost laconic, but they had the power to make her stiffen in shock and disbelief.
She twisted suddenly in her chair, staring over her shoulder with frightened eyes.
The room was empty. And yet she felt Draco’s presence as surely as if he was standing behind her, his hand touching her shoulder.
She said, ‘No,’ and again, more fiercely, ‘No. It’s not true. It can’t be…’
And heard the raw panic that shook her voice.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_61533b21-3bef-5b76-97eb-818951f2cd4d)
THERE was a rational explanation. There had to be.
Someone, somewhere, must be playing a trick on her, and had accidentally scored a bullseye.
All the way to the hospital Cressy kept telling herself feverishly that this was the way it had to be. That it must be one of her colleagues…
Except that they were all under the impression that she was still sunning herself on an island in the Aegean. She hadn’t told anyone from work that she was back.
And, anyway, the message was too pointed—too personal to have come from anyone else but Draco. Wasn’t it?
But how the hell did a Greek fisherman with one small, shabby boat and a half-built house manage to gain access to a computer, let alone have the technical know-how to send electronic mail halfway across Europe?
It made no sense.
Besides, he only knew my first name, she reminded herself with bewilderment. He can’t possibly have traced me with that alone.
Her mind was still going round in ever decreasing circles as she went up in the lift to the Intensive Care Unit. But she steadied herself when the sister in charge met her with the good news that her father’s condition had greatly improved.
‘He’s asleep at the moment, but you may sit with him.’ Calm eyes looked squarely into Cressida’s. ‘You can be relied on not to make emotional scenes, Miss Fielding? He really doesn’t need that kind of disturbance.’
‘Of course not.’ Cressy said steadily. ‘I just want him to get better.’
She fetched some coffee from the machine in the corridor, then quietly took up her vigil, forcing herself to composure. She couldn’t afford to send out any negative vibrations.
And she hadn’t time to worry about mysterious e-mail messages or who might have generated them. Her father was her priority now, and nothing else could be allowed to matter.
