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‘Nine-thirty, why—?’
‘Wait there!’ swallowed Lisi, and left the receiver on the bed while she rushed into Tim’s bedroom. What was the matter with him? Why hadn’t he woken at his usual unearthly hour? Had Philip Caprice climbed in through one of the windows in the middle of the night and kidnapped his son?
But to her relief her son was sitting on his bed, engrossed in playing with some of his new birthday toys. He looked up as Lisi flew into the room, and smiled.
‘Lo, Mum-mee,’ he said happily. ‘Me playing with tractor!’
‘So I see! And a lovely tractor it is too, darling,’ said Lisi, charging across the room to drop a kiss on top of his head. ‘Mummy’s just talking to Marian on the telephone and then we’ll have a great big breakfast together!’
But Tim’s head was bent over his toy again and he was busy making what he imagined to be tractor noises.
On the way back to speak to Marian, Lisi reflected how different things felt this morning. She no longer felt weak or intimidated by Philip. He had decided that he wanted contact and there was nothing she could do about it—but he could do all the legwork. She would just be polite. Icily polite.
Because during the middle of her largely sleepless night she had come to her senses and a great sense of indignation had made her softly curse his name.
He had been so busy attacking her that she hadn’t really had time to consider that he had shown no remorse about betraying his wife. Nor any shame for his part in what had happened. Philip obviously wanted to make her the scapegoat—well, tough! He should look to himself first!
She picked the phone back up. ‘Hello, Marian—are you still there?’
‘Just about,’ came the dry reply. ‘Where did you go—Scotland?’
‘Very funny.’
‘You sound more cheerful today,’ observed Marian.
‘I am,’ said Lisi. ‘Much happier!’
There was a short pause. ‘I don’t know if you’re going to be after what I’m about to tell you.’
A sudden sense of foreboding filled Lisi with dread. This was something to do with Philip. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s Philip Caprice.’
Exasperation and impatience made Lisi feel like screaming—until she reminded herself that the worst had already been exposed. There was nothing he could do to hurt and upset her now. ‘What now?’ she asked.
‘He wants you to show him round a property later this morning.’
‘He has to be kidding! Did you tell him that I’m off now until after Christmas?’
‘I told him that yesterday. Lisi, has something happened between you two?’
‘Apart from the very obvious?’ she asked tartly.
‘You know what I mean.’
Yes, she knew what Marian meant and she guessed that it was pointless keeping it from her boss—especially as she had already guessed that Philip was Tim’s father.
‘I told him,’ she said flatly.
‘You told him?’
‘He guessed,’ Lisi amended.
‘And?’
Lisi sighed. She had planned to get onto the phone first thing and tell Rachel all about it, but just then she badly needed to confide in somebody, and Marian was older and wiser. Lisi suspected that she had known straight away that a man as discerning as Philip would be bound to guess eventually.
‘He wants to be involved.’
‘With you?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Lisi with a hollow laugh. ‘Definitely not with me. With Tim.’
‘I see.’ Marian’s voice sounded rather strained. ‘That explains it, then.’
That sense of foreboding hit her again. ‘Explains what?’ she asked, her voice rising with a kind of nameless fear.
‘He really does want to buy somewhere here. In Langley.’
Lisi’s mouth thinned. ‘I see.’
‘And that’s not the worst of it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He wants you to show him around a property—’
‘But I’m on holiday, Marian!’
‘I already told him that.’
‘And even if I weren’t—I don’t want to show him around a property!’
‘He’s…well, he’s insisted, dear.’
‘He can’t insist,’ whispered Lisi. ‘Can he?’
Another pause. ‘He is the customer,’ said Marian apologetically, and suddenly Lisi understood. Marian was a businesswoman—and business was business was business. Philip Caprice was a wealthy and influential man and if he said jump, then presumably they would all have to leap through hoops for him.
She thought of all the times when Marian had let her have the morning, or even a couple of days, off work. When Tim had been ill. Or when she had taken him to have his inoculations. She was an understanding and kind employer, and Lisi owed her.
‘Okay,’ she sighed. ‘I can probably arrange for Rachel to look after Tim. When does he want to look round?’
‘Later on this morning. Think you can manage it? You can even leave Tim in here with us, if it’s difficult.’
‘I’m sure Rachel will be able to have him.’
‘Good!’ Marian’s voice grew slightly more strained. ‘There’s just one more thing, Lisi.’
Lisi tried to inject a note of gallows humour into her voice. ‘Go on, hit me with it!’
‘The property in question…it’s…it’s The Old Rectory.’
The world spun. It was a cruel trick. A cruel twist of fate. Was he planning to hurt her even more than he already had done? Lisi heard herself speaking with a note of cracked desperation. ‘Is this some kind of joke, Marian?’
‘I wish it was, dear.’
Lisi didn’t remember putting the phone down, she just found herself sitting on the bed staring blankly at it. He couldn’t, she thought fiercely. He couldn’t do this to her!
The Old Rectory.
The house she had grown up in. The house her mother had struggled to keep on, even after the death of her father, when everyone had told her to downsize and to move into something more suitable for a mother and her daughter on their own.
But neither of them had wanted to. A house could creep into your heart and your soul, and Lisi and her mother had preferred to put on an extra sweater or two in winter. It had kept the heating bills down at a time when every penny had counted.
After her mother had died, Lisi had reluctantly sold the house, but by then she had needed to. Really needed to, because she’d had a baby to support. She had bought Cherry Tree Cottage and invested the rest of the proceeds of the sale, giving just enough for her and Tim to live on. To fall back on.
And now Philip Caprice was going to rub her nose in it by buying the property for himself!
Over my dead body! she thought.
She gave Tim his breakfast.
‘I want birthday cake,’ he had announced solemnly.
‘Sure,’ said Lisi absently, and began to cut him a large slice.
‘Can I, Mum-mee?’ asked Tim, in surprise.
She glanced down at the sickly confection and remembered feeding Philip birthday cake all those years back and her heart clenched. She looked into Tim’s hopeful face and relented. Oh, what the heck—it wouldn’t hurt for once, would it?
While Tim was chomping his way through the cake, she phoned Rachel, who agreed to look after him without question.
‘Bless you!’ said Lisi impulsively.
‘Is everything okay?’
She heard the doubt in Rachel’s voice and wondered if she sounded as mixed-up and disturbed as she felt. Probably. ‘I’ll tell you all about it later,’ she said grimly.
‘Can’t wait!’
Lisi went through the mechanics of getting ready. She ran herself a bath and left the door open and Tim trotted happily in and out. She wondered whether Philip was prepared for the lack of privacy which caring for a young child inevitably brought. And then she imagined him lording it in her old family home and she could have screamed aloud with fury, but for Tim’s sake—and her own—she won the inner battle to stay calm.
She supposed that she ought to dress as if for work and picked out her most buttoned-up suit from the wardrobe. Navy-blue and pinstriped, it had a straight skirt which came to just below the knee and a long-line jacket. With a crisp, white blouse and her hair scraped back into a chignon, she thought that she looked professional. And prim.
Good!
The scarlet dress had been a big mistake last night. He might not like or respect her, but it was obvious that he still felt physically attracted to her. She had seen the way he’d watched her last night, while trying to appear as if he hadn’t been. And she had seen the tension which had stiffened his elegant frame, had him shifting uncomfortably in his chair. It had been unmistakably a sexual tension, and Lisi wasn’t fooling herself into thinking that it hadn’t been mutual.
Later that morning, after she had deposited Tim and some of the leftover party food at Rachel’s house, Lisi walked into the agency to find Philip waiting for her.
His face was unsmiling and his eyes looked very green as he nodded at her coolly. ‘Hello, Lisi,’ he said, speaking as politely and noncommittally—as if this were the first time he had ever met her.
Marian was sitting at her desk looking a little flustered. ‘Here are the keys,’ she said. ‘The owners are away.’
Her heart sinking slightly, Lisi took them. She had hoped that one of the divorcing couple would be in. At least the presence of a third party might have defused the atmosphere. She could not think of a more unpalatable situation than being alone in that big, beautiful house with Philip.
Unpalatable? she asked herself. Or simply dangerous?
‘We can walk there,’ she told him outside. ‘It’s just up the lane.’
‘Sure.’
But once away from Marian’s view, she no longer had to play the professional. ‘So you’re going through with your threat to buy a house in the village,’ she said, in a low, furious voice.
‘I think it makes sense, under the circumstances,’ he said evenly. ‘Don’t you?’
Nothing seemed to make sense any more—not least the fact that even in the midst of her anger towards him—her body was crying out for more of his touch.
Was that conditioning? Nature’s way of ensuring stability? That a woman should find the father of her child overwhelminglyattractive? No. It couldn’t be. Rachel had completely gone off Dave—she told Lisi that the thought of him touching her now made her flesh creep. But then Dave had run off with one of Rachel’s other supposed ‘friends’.
Lisi reminded herself that Philip was not whiter-than-white, either. He had been the one who had been attached—more than attached. He had actually been married, and yet his anger all seemed to be directed at her. His poor wife! It was, Lisi decided, time to start giving as good as she got.
Her rage was almost palpable, thought Philip as he looked at the stiff set of her shoulders beneath the starchy-looking suit she wore. He suspected that she had dressed in a way to make herself seem unapproachable and unattractiveto him, but if that had been the case, then she had failed completely.
‘This is in the same direction as your house,’ he observed as she took him down the very route he had used last night.
She stopped dead in her tracks and gave him a coolly questioning stare. ‘You didn’t know?’
‘I’ve only seen the details.’
‘It’s just down the bloody road from me!’
‘Handy,’ he murmured.
She didn’t want him making jokey little asides. That kind of comment could lull you into false hopes. She preferred him hostile, she decided.
Her breath caught in her throat as they walked past her cottage to the end of the lane, where, beside the old grey Norman church, stood the beautiful old rectory. And her heart stood still with shock.
The place was practically falling down!
The yew hedge which her mother had always lovingly clipped had been allowed to overgrow, and the lawn was badly in need of a cut.
‘Not very well presented,’ Philip observed.
‘They’re getting divorced,’ explained Lisi icily. ‘I don’t think that house-maintenance is uppermost in their minds at the moment.’
He turned away. People sometimes said to him that death must be easier to bear than divorce. When a couple divorced they knowingly ripped apart the whole fabric of their lives. Only anger was left, and bitterness and resentment.
