Cruel Legacy (7 page)

'I was drunk... It was Dutch courage...'

'Not the next day when you rang up to ask me if it was still on for dinner, it wasn't,' he reminded her with a grin.

'All right, so I finally got tired of waiting for you to do the asking, but I don't recall ever hearing you say no.'

They were both laughing as he leaned over to kiss her. Last night had been good between them, Deborah reflected happily as she finished getting dressed. Very good! She loved it that their sexual relationship was so harmonious; it made her feel complete, wholly, fully alive and fully a woman. She would hate to have the kind of lover who bullied or domineered her... the kind of lover that a man like Ryan would be, or the kind Emma complained that Toby had become.

'So.. .you're looking very pleased with yourself today... good night last night?'

Deborah smiled vaguely, tucking a strand of her sleekly bobbed chestnut hair behind her ear. 'Yes, as a matter of fact it was; we had dinner with some old friends.'

She knew what Ryan was trying to do, but she wasn't going to be tricked into playing that game.

He had brought her to one of the area's most exclusive and expensive restaurants for lunch and it hadn't escaped ho
^-
notice that the majority of the other lunchers there were very obviously couples.

'Nice place, this, isn't it?' he asked her. 'You should see the bedrooms, all four-poster beds and the fabrics all silk and velvet...very sensual...very tactile...very romantic.'

Deborah refused to respond. She knew from experience that sooner rather than later he would lose interest and stop baiting her. And halfway through their main course he did.

'I like you, Deborah,' he told her, 'and I like the way you work. You're intelligent and ambitious and you know how to get the best out of people... how to handle than, and that's something that's very important in our line of work. We're dealing with people at their most vulnerable and volatile and therefore at their most dangerous... It's just as well Andrew Ryecart committed suicide before we were appointed and not after. It wouldn't do the firm's reputation a lot of good to have that kind of thing splashed all over the papers. You'll know that we've been appointed to handle the liquidation?'

'Yes.'

'It's going to be a tricky one; there are no assets to speak of, and there is some suggestion of misuse of company funds before he killed himself. The bank are reasonably securely covered; there's a fairly large equity in the house, plus the value of the site—we'll never be able to find a buyer for the business as a going concern, of course, and the trade creditors won't get much.'

'And the workforce?'

'Preferred creditors.' He gave a small shrug. "That will be the first thing you'll have to do, of course: issue them all with redundancy notices. Then it will be a matter of going through the books and...'

Deborah's heart had started to thump heavily with excitement but she fought to control it, asking carefully, 'Does that mean that you're putting me in charge of the liquidation?'

Ryan put down his cutlery. 'Is that what you want?' he asked her quizzically. Deborah laughed. Even now he still could not resist flirting with her.

'It's certainly a step in the right direction,' she agreed demurely.

'Mmm...' he agreed softly. 'I thought it might be.'

Careful, Deb, Deborah warned herself as she caught the undertone in his voice, but before she could make any comment he had started outlining what he planned to do, the staff he intended to put under her authority.

'This one might seem easy, but that doesn't mean it
will
be,' he warned her. 'There's going to be a lot of bad feeling stirred up locally; the widow doesn't have a clue about what's going on or the fact that she's virtually going to be out on the street. Luckily there's family money there.'

They discussed the procedures involved over the rest of their lunch and when they finally got up to leave Deborah's heart was singing with excitement. She couldn't wait to get home and tell Mark her good news. They had made a rule not to have any contact with one another at work of a personal nature, and she knew what he would say if she broke it, even for something as important as this. Unlike Ryan's, Mark's ethics were fixed and wholly reliable.

'There will be an increase in salary, of course,' Ryan told her as they left the restaurant. 'Oh, and a new company car. What's Mark got?' he asked casually. Absently

Deborah told him, cars were not something that interested her very much.

'Ah, well, yours will be the more upmarket model, but I'm sure you'll be able to find a way of soothing any hurt male pride.'

Deborah looked at him. What on earth was he talking about? Mark simply wasn't that kind of man. No, Mark would be as thrilled for her as she would have been for him if their positions had been reversed. She and Mark had a totally equal and loving relationship in which neither of them competed with the other, but supported and protected one another instead.

Mark...Mark. Oh, she couldn't wait for tonight... They would really celebrate... not at some expensive restaurant, but at home, together...in bed. She hugged the anticipatory pleasure of what she was thinking to herself as Ryan drove them back into town.

'I
f
D
ad s
really dead does that mean that we can come home and live with you and go to school there?' Daniel said to her.

Philippa closed her eyes as she felt the weakening rush of relief surge inside her. All the way on the drive up here to their school she had been worrying about the boys' reaction to Andrew's death, but now as she stood with her arms around both of them, her face resting protectively against Daniel's head, she was forced to recognise that the distance and uninterest with which Andrew had always treated his sons was reciprocated in their calm acceptance of his death.

She had gently urged Andrew repeatedly to spend more time with them, to involve himself more in their lives, but he had dismissed her fears about the gulf she could see between them as typical feminine over-reaction.

'Boarding-school will be good for them,' he had insisted. 'It will teach them how to be men. You're too soft with them. Always kissing and cuddling them.' The rest of the family had supported his decision.

'Boys need discipline,' her elder brother had told her, adding disapprovingly, 'You're far too over-indulgent with your two, Philippa. If you're not careful you're going to turn them into a pair of '

'Of what?' she had challenged him quietly. 'A pair of caring, compassionate human beings?'

She had regretted her outburst later, especially when she had walked past the open study door and heard Robert telling her husband, "That's the trouble with Philippa; she's always been inclined to be over-emotional; but then that's women for you, bless 'em.'

The condescension in her brother's voice had made her grit her teeth, but years of being told as a child that girls did not argue or lose their tempers, and that pretty girls like her should be grateful for the fact that they were pretty and not go spoiling themselves by being aggressive and argumentative, had had their effect.

She often wondered what her parents would have said if she had ever turned round and told them that she would cheerfully have traded in her prettiness for the opportunity to be allowed all the privileges of self-expression and self-determination that her brothers possessed. That her blonde hair and blue eyes, her small heart-shaped face with its full-lipped soft mouth, her slender feminine figure and the fact that by some alchemic fusing and mixing of genes she had been given a set of features that combined to make her look both youthful and yet at the same time alluring were not in fact assets which she prized but a burden to her. People reacted to the way she looked, not the person she was, and she found this just as distressing; it made her feel just as vulnerable and undervalued as it would have done a girl who was her complete physical opposite. People only saw her prettiness; they did not see her; they did not, she suspected, want to see her. It had been her father who had been the strictest at forcing on her the role model of pretty, compliant daughter, praising her when friends and family commented on the way she looked and curtly reprimanding her when her behaviour did not conform to that visual image of sweet docility.

'Oxford... are they out of their minds?' her father had demanded when the head of the small all-girls' school she had attended had written to him suggesting that she felt that it might be worth while, that with a little extra coaching she believed that Philippa could win a place there.

And after that Philippa had found that the precious time she had needed for that extra study was somehow whittled away with family duties she wasn't allowed to evade.

There were other limitations imposed on her as well. Her father did not approve of girls or women who were self-confident and noisy, women who held opinions and freely voiced them, women who took charge of their own lives.

Philippa had felt very angry sometimes when she was growing up, not just with her father but with her mother as well, who stood by her husband and agreed with everything he said.

Philippa had realised even before her younger son's birth that her marriage had been a mistake, an escape from her family which inevitably had been no escape at all, but simply a deeper entrenchment in the role her father had already cast for her. But by then it had been too late to do anything about it. She had her sons to consider and she was determined that somehow she would provide them with the happy, secure, enriching childhood she herself had been denial. And for boys especially a father was an important, an essential part of that childhood.

Now, as she realised how little emotional effect the news of their father's death was actually having on them, she wondered if perhaps after all she might have been wrong, and that maybe if she had been strong enough to brave the avalanche of family disapproval a separation from Andrew would have caused she might have found that not just she, but the boys as well would have had easier, happier lives.

Because there was no getting away from it: life with Andrew had
not
been easy. Materially comfortable, yes; easy, no, and happy—never.

And yet she had married him willingly enough.

Yes, willingly, but lovingly... She flinched a little. She had believed she loved him at the time...had wanted to love him, had looked upon marriage to him as a secure haven after the pain, the agonising misery of...

'Can we come home with you now, today, Mum?'

Philippa pushed aside her own painful thoughts and smiled at her elder son. 'No, I'm afraid not, Rory.'

Much as she would have loved to have the comfort of them at home with her, she did not want them exposed to all the gossip and speculation that Andrew's suicide had caused locally. Their fees were paid until the end of the current year and she had already decided that it would be best if they remain here until then. That would give her time to sort things out at home.

She had rung Robert almost immediately after the police had left that fateful morning. He had been in a meeting, his secretary had informed her, but she had rung back later to say that Robert would ring her that evening.

He was going to the factory today, but had already complained to her that he was a very busy man, with Ins own business to run and that he could ill afford to take time off to sort out the mess his brother-in-law had made of his life.

'You realise, of course, that the company's virtually bankrupt,' he had told her angrily when he had called round after the visit to Kilcoyne's.

She hadn't, although she had wondered, worried especially about the money Andrew had borrowed, but years of conditioning, of being subservient to the men in her life, had programmed her into not exposing emotions they did not want to handle, and so she had simply sat silently while Robert told her.

'This whole mess really is most inconvenient. It couldn't have happened at a worse time for me—you do know that, don't you? I'm putting myself forward for selection as our local parliamentary candidate and this whole unsavoury business is bound to reflect badly on me.

'Of course it's typical of Andrew; he always was a trifle melodramatic for my taste. He should never have bought Kilcoyne's in the first place. I did try to warn him. You might have told me he was likely to do something like this.'

Philippa had stared at her brother, willing back the angry tears she could feel prickling her eyes as she swallowed down the huge swell of anger threatening to overwhelm her.

'I didn't
know,'
she told him quietly.

'Don't be ridiculous. You
must
have had some inkling. You were his wife. An intelligent woman, or so you've always claimed. You
must
have guessed...'

'I knew he was having financial problems, but he wouldn't discuss them with me,' she had told him woodenly.

'The whole world and his wife knew he was having financial problems. I told him months ago that there was no point in panicking the way he was doing, letting everyone know that he couldn't hold the business together. I warned you at the time against marrying him, Philippa,' he had added critically, while Philippa had gritted her teeth and then said as slowly and quietly as she could,

'No, you didn't, Robert. You
wanted
me to marry him. You said he would be a good husband for me.'

'Rubbish... I never said any such thing.' He'd given her an angry look. 'Not that it matters now. What's past is past, and what we have to do now is to get this whole mess cleaned up as quickly and quietly as possible.'