'No more thinking.' Her breath was a white cloud in the bitingly cold air as she spoke out loud into the silent, snow-covered evening. 'Just one step at a time.'
Her father was alone, dozing in an armchair next to his bed, when she reached the hospital half an hour later. She had been unable to see Jennifer's car in the car park but as it had been almost full she hadn't paid too much attention.
'Katie?' David White opened tired eyes as she sat down quietly next to him. The sight of him rent her heart. For the first time that she could remember he looked every inch his age, his big, broad-shouldered body strangely vulnerable in the old, thin hospital blanket that someone had tucked round his waist, and his head bowed, as though the effort to hold it upright was too much.
'Hi, Dad.' As she bent to kiss him she prepared herself, subconsciously, for the usual turning away of his head, but tonight it didn't happen. Instead she found her kiss accepted, welcomed even as his mouth met hers, and the shock robbed her of conversation as she leant back in her own chair. 'How are you feeling?'
'How do you think I'm feeling?' The irritable, exasperated voice was the same, however. 'These damn nurses are forever fussing in and out; it's like Piccadilly Circus in here most of the time. How- they expect anyone to get better in this place is beyond me—you need an iron constitution just to survive.'
'Well, you'll be fine, then.' She smiled at him as he glared his irritation. 'Did Jennifer come in to see you?'
He indicated a bowl of grapes on the top of the hospital locker with magnificent disgust. 'She stayed long enough to give me those and then went off in a huff because I told her what to do with 'em,' he said testily. 'If she had to bring anything at all a half-bottle of Scotch would have gone down well.'
Katie closed her eyes for a moment and prayed for patience. 'And you needn't look like that,' he continued flatly. 'You know as well as I do that the only reason she came was out of duty and because you'd badgered her to make the effort.'
'Dad—'
'I know Jennifer, lass.' The pale blue eyes were cynical now. 'And there's no need to make any excuses for her. Unfortunately she inherited most of me and very little of her mother, unlike you.' She stared at him in surprise, her mouth falling open in a little O. 'And she's astute enough to know I read her like a book,' he added quietly. 'Jennifer will always do unto others before they do unto her, whereas you…' His voice faded as he shook his grey head slowly. 'You worry me to death.'
'I worry you?' For a moment she thought she was hearing things. 'Why do I worry you?'
'No matter.' He waved his hand at her, clearly embarrassed, his voice gruff and his face scowling. 'How did you get on with Carlton? Did he find anything of interest?'
'Well…' She hesitated, unsure of how much to say.
'I feel in my bones there is a solution, Katie.' It pained her to see the eagerness in his face, the light of hope in the tired blue eyes. 'And if there is one Carlton is the man to find it He's one of the hardest men I've ever come across but he's fair. Oh, yes, he's fair,' he added almost to himself, nodding with his thoughts. 'He'll find a way out.'
How was she going to tell him? She bit her lip as her stomach turned over. It would have to be now. He would know sooner or later anyway and it would be better hearing it from her than from someone else.
'I was born in that house, you know, lass.' He raised his eyes to hers again and she was shocked to see the suspicion of tears in their watery brightness. 'Your grandparents were never abound much, always partying here and there or away out of the country, but although I didn't have any brothers or sisters I was content with my nanny, living quietly at home. That house sort of became father and mother to me, I suppose.'
'Your mother understood that; yes…' he nodded again '…she understood. And first Jennifer and then you were born under its roof.'
'And here was I thinking you weren't sentimental,' she teased softly, taking refuge in lightness as the ache in her chest threatened to spill out in tears, and when a knock at the door sounded a second later, followed by the entrance of two of her father's old cronies, she had never been more pleased to see anyone.
She sat with the three men for a few minutes before leaving, promising her father that she would call in the next afternoon, and walked out to the car park feeling as though she had just received a death sentence.
She knew what she had to do; she had known it all along, really, from the moment Carlton had made his amazing offer. If her father lost everything, if he was stripped of even his pride and dignity along with the house, he would give up and die. She knew it. And Carlton knew it too.
She remembered his face in the study and clenched her hands together in tight fists as she took big gulps of the icy cold air. He was attracted to her physically, he wanted a certain type of wife quickly, and she fitted the bill. And he was prepared to pay an exorbitant amount of money for the privilege.
She walked slowly to her car, her head spinning. Money was no object to him; he could probably buy and sell them ten times over without even noticing. But it was all so coldblooded.
She sat in the driving seat without starting the engine, her mind numb and desperate. Cold-blooded and inevitable. Could she go through with it? She sat for a moment more before starting the engine suddenly, her face white but her mouth determined. Of course she could. There was no other choice. She would face this as she had faced all the other twists and turns of life over the last thirteen years and draw on her own strength and determination to get her through.
But Carlton Reef? She pushed the sudden panic and fear aside with a ruthlessness her father would have been proud of. He was a man, just a man, whatever her fanciful mind tried to make of him. This feeling that he was different in some way, that he could affect her as no other man ever could or would, was merely the result of long, sleepless nights worrying about her father and their financial catastrophe, of trying to find a way out of the maze of problems and difficulties that formed a living nightmare whether she was asleep or awake.
And
now she had a solution. She negotiated the car out of the hospital gates as her stomach turned over. And she would take it without flinching, with no more hesitation, because lifelines such as this were only thrown once, and if the dark waters of despair and misery closed over her father's head because she had let her fingers slip on the rope she would never forgive herself.
CHAPTER FIVE
'Carlton?' She had rung him as soon as she'd got home. There was no point in delaying the decision and she didn't want him to visit her father and tell him the truth. 'It's me—Katie.'
'Katie?' The deep voice held a note of concern. 'Is anything wrong? Your father is all right?'
'I've changed my mind.' There was a blank silence at the other end of the phone and, after waiting a moment, she plunged on, her voice trembling and her nerves quivering with a sudden fear that it was too late, that he'd already regretted what was, after all, an amazingly generous offer. 'If you still want to marry me, like you said this afternoon, then—' She took a deep breath and prayed her voice wouldn't betray the thick panic that was consuming her. 'Then I agree.'