скачать книгу бесплатно
Kendal’s teeth sank into the inner flesh of her bottom lip. ‘You wouldn’t be that callous,’ she whispered.
‘Try me.’
‘You’d never get it!’
‘Why not?’ That hard, cruel mouth pulled down on one side. ‘An incarcerating and unfaithful husband,’ he said, using her own description of him, ‘doesn’t necessarily make for a poor father in English law.’
He was right, of course, and he would use every shred of power and influence he possessed to see it turned out his way. She knew from experience that Jarrad Mitchell always got what he wanted.
‘Get lost!’ she breathed, turning away, battling against an inner surge of panic.
‘No, that’s been your prerogative, darling.’ She heard his voice coming mockingly from behind her. ‘But not any more. Aren’t you rather forgetting something?’
She stopped in her tracks and turned back to him, frowning.
‘The address of where you’re staying,’ he supplied emotionlessly. And then, when she hesitated, he said, ‘Unless, of course, you’d prefer to give it to my solicitor.’
He meant it! Oh, dear heaven.
As he got to his feet she wanted to claw his arrogant face with her carefully lacquered nails, because, of course, he’d been right when he’d said she had hoped that seeing her would soften him into submission. But Jarrad Mitchell never submitted to anyone, she remembered bitingly. He only ever controlled.
Well, get this! she thought, leaning on her small green handbag and scrawling the address of her new flat in the notebook she always carried, which contained the names of useful contacts in the design world. I’m going to take up your challenge of a fight and just for once I’m going to win!
Nevertheless her spirit masked a very strong element of doubt and not a little fear as she tore the page out of her notebook and flung it in the direction of her husband’s daunting figure, unaware of his cool amusement as the page fluttered under his desk from the sudden draught caused as she swept out of his office.
‘So what did he say?’
There was eager anticipation in Chrissie Langdon’s question as she watched her sister sip the sweet, hot tea she had made her.
‘You wouldn’t believe it!’
Five years older than Chrissie, Kendal wasn’t usually one to pour out her troubles to her sister, especially since, during the past year or so, Chrissie had had enough problems of her own. Today, though, it was obvious to Chrissie that her sister was clearly in a state.
‘Oh, I would! Believe me, where Jarrad Mitchell’s concerned, I would!’ Chrissie breathed, rolling large brown eyes emphasised by her small face and her short, spiky brown hair. She darted a glance to eighteen-month-old Matthew, whom she had been looking after that morning, and who had just discovered that hurling a book across the carpet was far more exciting than turning its pages. ‘Go on. Fire away.’
Kendal put down her cup and saucer on the wicker table which formed part of the rustic, bohemian furnishings that Chrissie loved. In fact, when Chrissie had moved into the Victorian semi with Ralph three years ago—newly married and spending money like water—Kendal recalled how she had tried to help her economise, suggesting cost-cutting ways with the design.
Now, though, being in the same position as Kendal was, and between jobs as an office receptionist, Kendal knew that if it hadn’t been for the proceeds of their old home—half of which she had released to Chrissie on her last birthday, the other half of which she had put in trust for Matthew—her sister would have had difficulty keeping up payments on the house even when she was in full-time employment.
Now she sat back, took a deep breath and said, ‘He’s going to sue for custody.’
Chrissie whistled under her breath. ‘What? If you go abroad? Or in any case?’ she appended, suddenly looking aghast, and Kendal groaned. She hadn’t actually considered that he might do it regardless.
‘I think he meant if I take this job.’
‘So what will you do?’ Chrissie sank down onto the low floral-patterned sofa opposite her older sister. ‘Not bother?’
Kendal gave her an exasperated look. ‘Chrissie! That would just be giving in to him. I’ll go—and with Matthew—and I’ll fight Jarrad every step of the way!’
‘You might live to regret that.’ Chrissie picked up the cup of herbal tea she had made for herself. ‘The man’s a fighter, Kendal. And the worst possible kind. He doesn’t take any prisoners. He’ll chew you up and spit you out and have you crawling back to him for mercy before it ever comes to court. Jarrad Mitchell can do anything!’
Kendal grimaced, and yet was unable to contain a fleeting smile as she glanced sideways and saw Matthew, sitting surrounded by the scattered pages of his little picture book, beaming up at her in wide-eyed innocence. ‘You make him sound like some sort of mythical demon,’ she uttered with an inexplicable little shudder as she reached for her cup and saucer. ‘And as though you almost admire him for it!’ she went on to chide disbelievingly, although she knew that wasn’t far from the truth.
From the moment Chrissie had met Jarrad at her own wedding three years ago she had looked up to him with the kind of hero-worship one would expect from a naive teenager—which of course she had been then—and, surprisingly she still displayed it to some degree, despite the brutal way in which he had treated her husband.
’It’s his determination I admire—that scary determination that ensures nobody and nothing gets in his way and makes everybody respect him,’ Chrissie stated almost contentiously. ‘I wish Ralph had had just a quarter of it. Perhaps if he had, we’d still be…’ She shrugged as though she’d learnt from the pains of over a year without the good-looking, quiet-voiced accountant that it was no use wishing.
‘And he’s not a demon—just a man,’ she went on in that same, near-contentious tone, although it took Kendal a second or two to realise that she was still referring to Jarrad. ‘But as I said he’s a very determined one. Determined, tough and a lot more capable of withstanding the sort of emotional pressure that a battle like this is going to put on you. You can’t take him on, Kendal. For heaven’s sake, compromise! Meet him halfway or something.’
Kendal looked at her sister obliquely. ‘You mean give up the chance of this job?’
For a moment something glittered in those dark eyes, and Kendal was struck by Chrissie’s likeness to her father. But then she had inherited his dark hair and complexion too, Kendal thought, remembering the father who had abandoned them without a care. He had left his wife and children for another woman, only to desert again after Jane Harringdale had taken him back—an act, Kendal reflected painfully now, that had proved too much for their mother’s poor health and had ultimately brought on that fatal collapse.
‘Apart from a few months while you were having Matthew, you’ve always been working.’ It was a reproof, and yet it sounded like a complaint, too, from Chrissie.
‘I’ve had to,’ Kendal stressed quietly. When their mother had died eight years ago Chrissie had been just thirteen, and Kendal herself only eighteen, and Robert Harringdale hadn’t wanted to know. It had been a struggle, therefore, bringing up her sister alone, doing office work during the day while studying for her qualifications as an interior designer at night—particularly as Chrissie hadn’t been an easy teenager, always critical of herself as well as others, often questioning her own worth. As one so-called expert had remarked at the time, she had blamed both her parents for leaving her.
Consequently, desperate for love, and despite Kendal’s attempts to be both mother and father to her, Chrissie had married the first man who had come along shortly before her eighteenth birthday. And, with Ralph being ten years older and therefore more mature, it might have worked out, Kendal thought—eventually. If it hadn’t been for that cold, calculated act of Jarrad’s…
‘So what if you win?’ Chrissie was leaning back against the cushions, playing with an overhanging leaf from one of the plants that grew in abundance around the room. ‘You’ll just be a single mum in a strange country. And, looking at it from a rather selfish point of view, when will I ever get to see you?’
Kendal gave her a dry smile. ‘You can come with me,’ she invited gently—tentatively—but Chrissie merely grimaced.
‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ she stated in a rather flat tone, and, sadly, Kendal realised that all her sister wanted—hoped for—was a reconciliation with Ralph.
‘You’ll be working flat out. You’ll have to—to keep yourself and Matthew, ’cos I know you’ll never accept a penny from Jarrad. You’ve said so often enough,’ Chrissie expressed. ‘Though I can’t think why! He’s rich enough to keep you, Matthew and half of London besides!’
And clever enough to know that if I take anything from him I’ll be surrendering my independence to him, Kendal thought, which is what he wants. But she didn’t say it.
‘I don’t mind working. I need it,’ she tagged on, unable to add, I need it to help me forget him. To stop driving myself mad with thinking about him. And if I’m abroad he can’t find me so easily. Can’t hurt me any more.
‘It’s not just Matthew. He wants you as well. You know that, don’t you?’ Chrissie interrupted her thoughts as if she had read them. ‘Oh, Kendal, you could have so much if you’d only swallow your pride and give him another chance.’
Her cup suspended in mid-air, Kendal stared at her sister aghast. ‘Go back to him, you mean? Take him back? Like Mum did with Dad!’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! Jarrad’s nothing like him!’ the younger girl stated adamantly. ‘You could do worse, you know. And it would be a proper family life for Matthew. I don’t suppose you can blame him for wanting that.’
Kendal looked down at her son, who was chewing the cover of his book and gurgling contentedly to himself. Wasn’t that what she wanted for her child? A stable home? She wanted it more than anything. Did her sister imagine that it had been easy these past twelve months? Because it hadn’t been. It had been hell…
‘And what about me? What are you suggesting, Chrissie? That I shouldn’t have left him? That I should have been content to be his housemaid and his dutiful little sex slave while he carried on with that patronising Lauren Westgate behind my back?’
‘Of course I’m not suggesting you should be that,’ Chrissie was quick to respond. ‘Although I don’t think you should pretend you didn’t enjoy the role, or that part of it at any rate—sleeping with him, I mean—because you were besotted with him. Everyone could see it. You worshipped the ground he walked on!’
A flame, which Kendal had thought successfully banked down until she’d faced Jarrad in his office today now leapt to sudden, vibrant life again, way down in her loins.
‘More fool me!’
‘And you were hardly his housemaid.’
No. There had been the long-standing Teeny Roberts to cook and clean. He hadn’t intended her to do all that—even if she had had the time. And perhaps that might have been the problem, in part…
‘As for Lauren, she did rather throw herself at him,’ Chrissie reminded her. ‘And a man with his looks is going to get that every day of the week! It would take a monk to resist that constant barrage from the opposite sex. And I’m not prepared to believe he was even having an affair with her. He’s never actually admitted it, has he?’
No, he hadn’t, Kendal thought. But she had found those receipts in his study from the hotel where they had stayed when he had told her simply that he was away working, had led her to believe he’d gone alone. Oh, they’d been under separate names—and in separate rooms—it was true. But then anything else wouldn’t have looked too good if those receipts had wound up in his accounts office for Ralph to find! Only they hadn’t needed to. Being caught together in Jarrad’s office, as they had been by her brother-in-law that night, was all the evidence that mattered!
‘He’s never actually denied it either.’ How could he? When such a denial would have been a blatant lie! ‘I don’t know how you can defend him, Chrissie! After what he did to Ralph!’
Chrissie lowered her gaze, looking so unhappy suddenly that Kendal wished she hadn’t said anything.
‘I’m sorry,’ was all she could utter, wishing she could wave a magic wand and make everything all right, for her sister at least.
‘Oh, that’s all right. I’m getting used to it now,’ Chrissie expressed resignedly, although Kendal knew she was just putting on a brave face. ‘Perhaps he did fire Ralph because he thought he was checking up on him. I don’t know,’ she went on to remark disconsolately. ‘But I think a lot of the blame for what happened has to rest with Ralph himself.’
She glanced away, picking distractedly at the edging of one of the plump multi-floral scatter cushions, looking decidedly uneasy. ‘I think it got to the stage where he couldn’t—couldn’t cope with—things…’
‘What sort of things?’ Kendal enquired, frowning. She knew her sister wasn’t the easiest of people to live with.
‘Oh…just things in general,’ Chrissie remarked evasively, continuing to pick at the blanket-stitched cushion with unusual agitation. But then Matthew ran up to her, waving one of his little striped socks, and laughingly she hauled him up onto her lap.
‘Anyway, what I’m saying is I don’t think you should blame him entirely for Ralph losing his job—even if you’d like to.’ She was bent in concentration over the gurgling Matthew, diligently pulling the sock over a tiny foot. ‘And what if he did have one fling? It isn’t the end of the world. And perhaps he did feel neglected. After all, the more he told you he didn’t like you working, the more contracts you seemed determined to take on just to show him—out of sheer defiance.’
Kendal bit her lip. Did Chrissie really think that?
‘I did it for my own sanity,’ was all she could say. Because the truth was that if she hadn’t resumed her profession after Matthew had been born—plunged herself wholeheartedly into her work—she would have gone mad, crazy with doubt and suspicion.
It had been bad enough that she hadn’t felt needed in the home, without Lauren constantly flaunting her success and her very enviable working relationship with Jarrad whenever Kendal, with silent reluctance, had had to preside over dinner parties that included the other woman. It had only just been bearable at first, when she had had her own job, her own career. But those years of domesticity and studying when she had been looking after her sister hadn’t prepared her for the condescending confidence of women like Lauren Westgate.
Consequently, when she’d surrendered her self-sufficiency to have Matthew, and had been insecure as a new mother, Lauren’s belittling remarks about women who were ‘stuck at home’, and Kendal being ‘just a housewife’—coupled with Jarrad suddenly spending more and more time away from home—had all helped drive her back into the safe, secure world of her beloved decor and design. She had wanted to prove herself, and not only to herself but to her husband and the world that she could be just as shining and successful in her own way as Lauren Westgate could. And not only that, but that she could be a success—needed—as a wife and mother as well. And all she had got for her trouble—her foolish, impetuous naivety—was the proverbial slap in the face when her efforts only succeeded in driving her husband right into the other woman’s arms!
‘Anyway,’ she attempted to say lightly. ‘I suppose it’s only natural you should defend him, knowing what you think of women with children working!’
Chrissie clung fervently to the belief that being a housewife and mother was a full-time job, and Kendal knew her sister had settled down enough to take on both roles with avid dedication, which made that last miscarriage and subsequent break-up of her own marriage such a tragedy.
With one shriek their attention was drawn to Matthew who, having pulled off the sock which had been painstakingly restored to his foot, now held it up triumphantly. He squealed a protest as Chrissie tried to clasp him to her, grizzling until she released him, so that he could run on unsteady little legs across the carpet, arms outstretched, to his mother.
‘You’re a scamp!’ Kendal breathed, hauling him up onto her lap. ‘First Chrissie. Now me. You don’t know who you want, do you?’
‘Kissie,’ he gurgled in his baby mimicry, then rewarded Kendal with a chop to the nose with his little flying fist, still tightly clenched around the sock.
Both girls laughed.
‘I don’t know where you get your energy from,’ Chrissie told him as he strained round to look at her, and stuck a determined little foot into Kendal’s groin in the process.
‘Oh, I do,’ Kendal exhaled, wincing, putting a hand under his bottom to transfer him gently to a less sensitive area of her body. He shrieked a protest at even that small amount of restraint. ‘Believe me, I certainly do!’
Because, whether she wanted to admit it to anyone else or not, she couldn’t help but admit to herself that he was very much Jarrad’s child. From that crop of brown hair—growing darker by the day—to the very feet of the long little body that determined that one day he would be tall, like his father, to that burgeoning self-sufficiency that was apparent even in his babyhood. She almost imagined she could already feel that restless determination and energy in him that was so characteristic of Jarrad Mitchell—so characteristic it scared her that she might never be free of the man’s memory.
The only part of her it seemed her son had inherited was those green-flecked, big, beguiling eyes—eyes that Jarrad had once jokingly announced could ‘smite a man at twenty paces’. And with that combination of physical assets and character Kendal could see that Matthew was already destined to break a few hearts.
‘Just like his dad,’ Chrissie supplied—reading her thoughts again, Kendal thought, startled, until she realised her sister was still referring to something they had been saying a moment ago.
‘No, not like his dad,’ she couldn’t help responding nevertheless, on the smallest note of panic, and she clutched her son tightly to her—ignoring his flailing fists now, his straining efforts to free himself—as though she would protect him from the world and anything that threatened to taint him with the same ability to hurt and wound as Jarrad Mitchell had hurt and wounded her. As, similarly, her own father had hurt and destroyed her mother.
‘I’ve got to take that job, Chrissie,’ she breathed over her son’s angry, lemon-clad little shoulder. I’ve got to get away from him. And more determinedly, aloud again, she uttered, ‘I’ve got to go.’
CHAPTER TWO
AFTER dropping Matthew off with her child minder later that afternoon, Kendal drove out to see some clients for whom she had agreed to do some freelance work, her first since coming back to London. The woman and her husband had approached her through her old firm, having been pleased with the work she had done for them in the past.
She hated leaving her son, particularly twice in one day, because every time she watched him toddle away from her it was like losing a part of herself. But she knew what the alternative would mean—being beholden to Jarrad. Oh, she didn’t mind that for Matthew’s sake, because she knew her husband wouldn’t stop short of providing more than a generous allowance for his son.
But she needed to keep herself too. The savings she had accumulated before leaving the matrimonial home a year ago were now nearly exhausted, and there was no way that she intended to take any money from a man who not only flaunted his mistress openly in her face but who could be so callous as to do what he had done to Ralph—because it had been callous, no matter what Chrissie said.
Forcing herself to forget Jarrad, she focused her thoughts on the job ahead. She had her sketchbook, notepad, colour charts…
She made a quick note in her mind of everything she would need, after negotiating one particularly busy junction, and by the time she pulled onto the drive of the large mock-Georgian house she was mentally as well as physically prepared.
Jill and Peter Arkwright were a middle-aged couple, with two golden Retrievers who sat obediently looking at Kendal from a hopeful distance as she nibbled the oversized slice of rich sponge cake that Jill had insisted Kendal have with her coffee. At the same time, diligently she sketched her plan for the ornamental mouldings and alcoves she had suggested for the lounge, to help take the squareness off the large room.
By the time she left she had a very clear picture of what they needed. An overall classic but country feel that would give the prestigious yet modern estate house some individuality.
Keen to get started, so that the job would be completed if Jarrad did back down and let her take Matthew away—which she very much doubted—she drove straight back home, deciding to pick the little boy up within the hour. In the meantime she had colours to decide on, fabrics to order, painting contractors and carpenters to organise.
Home was a furnished ground-floor flat in an Edwardian terraced house which she was renting on a month-to-month basis until she knew what her definite plans were, therefore the furnishings weren’t at all what she would have chosen herself. It was, however, situated in a quiet street, in a reasonably quiet suburb of the city.
As it was a pleasingly warm day she had the French windows open while she worked, and was enjoying the lucid song of a blackbird above the more distant sounds of afternoon traffic, above the sudden low drone of a car pulling up somewhere along the road.
She answered the phone breezily when it rang. ‘Kendal Mitchell.’
’How did you get on with the Arkwrights?’
The pleasant male voice brought an instant smile to her lips.
‘Tony! Hi!’
‘Was she still as generous with the cake rations?’
Kendal laughed. ‘You’d better believe it!’ She liked Tony Beeson. They were roughly the same age and had worked together at the same design firm until Kendal had married. In fact Tony still worked for them, and it was he who had told her about the job that was going in the States, after visiting his brother’s family in Philadelphia.
‘Made up your mind yet whether you’re going to be leaving us?’ He sounded tentative. In a way he had opened this opportunity for her, but, now that it looked as if it might materialise, Kendal knew he didn’t really want her to go.
‘Not yet,’ she parried, not wanting to go into detail. Tony knew she was separated, but that was all. She didn’t see any point in discussing the obstructions that Jarrad might throw in her way.
‘Have you ever thought about a partnership?’ Tony surprised her by suddenly asking.
Kendal frowned, hesitated. ‘A partnership?’
‘Yes, dumbo. A partnership. You and me. Just say the word and I’d come with you. We’d make a very good team, you know, with your creative flair and my cock-eyed business sense. What do you say? Just the two of us?’
