Cruel Legacy (31 page)

He felt at home with her... at ease and yet at the same time fiercely buoyed up by the sexual tension he could feel building between them.

He wanted her, he acknowledged... he wanted her very, very much indeed.

'You must go,' Philippa told him quickly as she stepped away from him. 'I hope everything works out... at home for you.
I
'm sure it will.'

If he bent his head now, he could still kiss her, Joel decided. But if he did... once he did...

Reluctantly he moved away from her. Didn't he have enough problems as it was without... ?

Without what? He was a normal man with all the normal male urges, but he had never once been tempted to be unfaithful to Sally before, had never felt this fierce surge of sharp desire for another woman before.

After he had gone, Philippa walked back to the kitchen and picked up the damp towels he had used, lifting them to her face. She could still smell him on them, the scent of his skin, his maleness. With a small shudder she dropped the towels back on the floor.

Thank goodness she wasn't likely to see him again. Just now, standing next to him, she had sensed his awareness of her and his desire, had known that all she had to do was simply to turn towards him.

Joel had almost reached the town centre when he suddenly heard someone calling his name. Stopping, he turned his head and saw Duncan hurrying towards him.

The youth had changed since he had last seen him. His body had begun to fill out and he walked with more confidence, holding his head up instead of shuffling along with it downbent.

'Joel, how are you?'

'I'm OK,' Joel responded. 'And you... ?'

'Great, especially since I joined this club they're running down at the leisure centre for people who are out of work... You ought to come along; they...'

'Can't afford it, mate,' Joel told him.

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'It's free,' Duncan announced, adding, 'Look, I'm on my way there now—why don't you come along? Quite a few of the lads from the factory do; as well as being able to use the leisure club's facilities, there's all kinds of voluntary work you can do if you want to,'

'Voluntary work?'

'Yeah. They've got me going down to the hospital visiting some of the old folks they've got in there, doing a bit of shopping and the like for them...'

'Oh, that's where you've got those muscles, is it...doing a bit of shopping?' Joel commented drily.

Duncan flushed and then grinned. 'No.,.I've been working out at the gym... Might as well, since it's free. Helps to pass the time and you get a bit of company.'

He fell into step beside Joel. Grinning, he told him, 'Why don't you give it a go, get a few muscles of your own?'

Joel laughed. 'Watch it...' he warned him.

He opened his mouth to tell Duncan that he couldn't go with him, then closed it again. After all, what had he really to go home for? Sally would still be out at work, the kids would be out with their friends. All that was waiting for him was the television and Sally's list of chores... might as well go with Duncan. That way at least he wouldn't be wasting money on electricity..,
Sally's
money.

It was gone six o'clock when Joel left the leisure centre. He glanced guiltily at his watch. He still hadn't been round to see Daphne and Sally would kill him when she got home if he didn't.

He had been surprised to discover how many of his workmates from the factory were making use of the leisure-centre's policy of free entry for people who were unemployed. It seemed that it had become something of an unofficial meeting place for quite a large group of them.

Like him, none of them had managed to find a new job, but as he'd listened to them and contrasted their attitudes to his own Joel had discovered that they had something he didn't. They certainly seemed to be a lot more optimistic and to be getting a lot more out of their lives than he was.

On his way past the swimming-pool he'd stopped to look inside.

'You used to be a keen swimmer, didn't you, Joel?' one of the others had commented.

Joel had frowned in surprise.

'You used to swim for the school team,' the other man had reminded him.

'That was a hell of a long time ago,' Joel had pointed out.

'Maybe, but you woe good...I remember watching you. They're looking for volunteers to help coach the junior team they've started here and to give swimming lessons to beginners. You'd be good at that. I remember watching you teaching that lad of yours...'

Joel had shrugged uncomfortably. Teaching his own son and daughter was one thing; teaching others... 'They'll be scraping the barrel if they can't find someone better than me to do it,' he'd retorted curtly.

But as he was walking home he remembered how his games teacher at school had told him that he was a natural athlete. He had wanted him to train for the school swimming and diving team, but he had told the teacher that he wasn't interested.

It hadn't been true... he had ached to accept, but what was the point...who would work the allotment if he wasn't there, who would make sure that the others had food on their plates, and how the hell was he supposed to pay for the kit he would need?

No—better to have people think that he wasn't interested than to risk the humiliation of revealing the truth.

A swimming coach...
him...
As he'd said to George Lewis, they'd have to be scraping the barrel to want him... Still, wouldn't do any harm watching the kids practise... It would be something to do to help pass the time, and if young Duncan really thought that he couldn't work his way around a gym any more...

Grinning to himself, Joel headed for home.

'It's
the bank who are paying our fees, Deborah,' Ryan stressed. 'You might just try remembering that the next time you feel yourself coming all over bleeding hearts.'

Angrily Deborah stood up.

'What are you trying to say, Ryan—that I'm not being professional?'

'No, of course not; if I didn't think you were up to the job I wouldn't have recommended you for it in the first place. I'm just warning you not to get emotionally involved, that's all.'

'Just because I'm aware of and concerned for the problems that redundancy is bound to cause those who've lost their jobs, it doesn't mean that I'm becoming emotionally involved,' Deborah protested.

Any moment now Ryan was going to start accusing her of reacting like a woman—the ultimate put-down that men like him always threw at women when they wanted to bring them to heel and to remind them who was the boss.

'And,' she added firmly, 'making sure that such people are aware of their rights is in my view simply good business practice, especially from the point of view of the firm's reputation.'

'Our reputation with whom, Deborah? Our clients...the ones who pay our fees and consequently your wages, or every down-and-out no-hoper... ?'

'They aren't no-hopers,' Deborah protested angrily. 'These people are out of work through no fault of their own; they...'

She stopped abruptly as she saw Ryan's expression. It was a mixture of irritation and boredom, the impatient drumming of his fingers warning her that she had overstepped the boundaries he had drawn for her.

'All I wanted to do was to make sure that the company's ex-employees knew exactly what the situation was with regard to their financial position...'

'And who the hell is going to pay for the extra time you spend doing that: the extra cost of writing individually to them; the ?'

'We had a moral duty...'

'Grow up, Deborah. This is the real world we're living in. We're here to make
money,
plain and simple, and if you can't understand or accept that then you're in the wrong job. I used to wonder what it was you saw in a wimp like Mark; now I think I know.

'I thought you and I were two of a kind...that we'd make a good team. You know how much opposition there's been from the senior partners about my wanting to promote you ahead of people who've been here far longer.'

Yes, she knew it, Deborah admitted. She hadn't thought much at first about what the consequences of her promised promotion might be—she had been far too thrilled and excited—but it was already becoming evident that there was a certain amount of jealousy and resentment among her colleagues.

So far she had managed to ignore it, reminding herself that it was a simple fact of life that when one member of a group was elevated above the others it was bound to cause a certain amount of turbulent negative emotion—for a while. In fact she had optimistically told herself that such a reaction would prove a good learning process for her, that it would enable her to perfect her people-handling skills. But somehow it wasn't working out.

Peer envy she could handle, or at least she had always thought she could, but when it was linked to an ambiguous and somehow elusive-to-pin-down awareness that those peers were putting her promotion down not to her professional skill, but to the fact that Ryan was showing her distinct favouritism, things were not quite so easy.

No one had directly put such a view to her yet, but it was there none the less. However, confronting it was like trying to reach out and grasp a handful of air. To ask outright among her ex-peers if her suspicions were correct would be an admission of insecurity—an admission to herself as well as to others that she did not have the professional skill to separate herself from their opinions. And it would be to admit to than, and to herself, that she did not have the ability to control and command, the ability to earn their respect even if it was given grudgingly.

And now it seemed that Ryan was turning against her as well, criticising the way she was handling the liquidation, undermining her self-confidence.

For a moment she was tempted to challenge him directly and ask him if he wanted her off the account. She had an odd feeling that for some reason Ryan was deliberately trying to unnerve and upset her, by focusing his criticism of her on the one area where women always felt the most vulnerable—her different emotional attitude from that of men.

Deborah had resolved when she'd first qualified that she was not going to allow the established hard core of old-fashioned chauvinistic men who still occupied so many positions of power within every aspect of the business world to trap her into the ultimately demeaning belief that the only way she, a woman, could survive and succeed in such a world was by accepting and adopting their code of behaviour.

She was proud of being a woman; of her femininity.

'Look, perhaps I am going a bit over the top,' she heard Ryan saying more calmly to her. 'But don't go and mess up on me, will you, there's a good girl?'

A good girl; somehow Deborah just managed to swallow down the retort that sprang to her lips as Ryan walked out of her office.

After he had gone, she found her attention wandering from the work in front of her. Was it her imagination, or had Ryan actually been implying something more than the fact that he had selected her to handle the liquidation?

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She got up and walked over to stare out of the window. She knew his reputation, of course, but she had made her position plain enough and basically she suspected that she wasn't really his type. He could be good fun when he set his mind to it, but it was very obvious that he was the one who liked to hold centre-stage, who liked and needed to control those around him, and that kind of man, even if he had been available, even if she had been attracted to him, was not for her.

No... she could never become involved with a man like Ryan, not without losing her respect for him... and for herself.

Ryan had already made one or two taunting comments about her relationship with Mark, implying that she was the more dominant partner, but that simply wasn't true. She and Mark respected as well as loved one another.

She had been so lucky to meet Mark. The depth of her love for him was something that sometimes surprised even her. He was quite literally the rock on which she had built the foundations of her life, and it hurt her unbearably when Ryan tried to put him down.

But, much as she longed to jump to his defence, she resisted doing so, knowing how Ryan would interpret such an action. In his view men did not need their woman to champion or protect them; they did that for themselves.

He was archaic really, a dinosaur, Deborah reflected, but these Chinese whispers infiltrating the office that he had promoted her as a means of getting her into his bed didn't really have any truth to them, surely?

She knew, of course, that he wanted to bed her, but to promote her in order to put pressure on her to do so? No, he wouldn't do anything like that. He must know that she would never give in to that kind of sexual, blackmail.

It was just as well they had the Easter weekend coming up, Deborah reflected grimly as she focused her attention back on her work. The liquidation was proving rather more drawn-out than any of them had initially imagined, and she suspected that she was going to have to spend at least part of the weekend catching up with her other paperwork.

It worried her that Mark was taking the becalming of his own career so badly. She knew how he must feel, of course, but it was, after all, a logical effect of the recession and one which he surely must have been anticipating.