Cruel Legacy

Sally flinched as she saw the bitterness in his eyes, but she was not going to give way and be bullied into making love with him. If he wanted to sulk like a spoiled child, well, then, let him.

‘Sally…’

Gritting her teeth, she ignored him, keeping her back turned until she heard him leave the kitchen. Upstairs in the bathroom, Joel showered angrily, turning the water to its fullest force, welcoming the savage pounding on his skin as a release of his tension. He hadn’t wanted to have sex with Sally, he had simply wanted to touch her… to hold her, to make her focus her attention on him and listen to him while he tried to explain. To explain what? That he was afraid… Oh, she would love that. The last thing she had time to do these days was to listen to his problems.

* * *

She ought not to have been so uptight with Joel, Sally admitted tiredly as she pulled the duvet over herself. She’d make it up to him later… cook him a special supper, bribe the kids to stay out of the way, try to get him to listen while she tried to explain what she wanted from him, needed from him now that she was working.

Yes, they could talk later.

CHAPTER TWO

‘GOODNESS, I’d forgotten how bad London traffic is, hadn’t you?’ Deborah exclaimed. ‘Emma said it was eight for dinner at eight-thirty. Will we make it in time, do you think?’

Without waiting for Mark to reply, she added, ‘I can’t believe it’s over eighteen months since we last saw them. Their moving down to London has made the distance too great between us for frequent visits.’

She gave Mark a quick, amused look as he stamped hard on the brakes and cursed as someone cut in front of him.

‘I told you you should have let me drive the London stretch of the journey,’ she reminded him cheerfully. ‘You know I’m a much better driver than you.’

‘You mean a much more aggressive one,’ he retorted.

‘My driving is not aggressive, it’s simply self-assured,’ Deborah corrected him. ‘I think we have to take a left here, Mark… Oh, no, you missed it. Now we’ll have to go all the way round again. You really should…’ She saw the muscle starting to twitch in his jaw and bit back the comment she had been about to make, saying instead, ‘Ryan told us on Friday that we’re going to be appointed as liquidators for Kilcoyne’s. No official announcement has been made as yet. They’re going to wait until after the funeral for that. Apart from the bank there are quite a lot of trade creditors outstanding. Not that they’re likely to recover very much. The bank seems to have all the security pretty well tied up——’

‘Where did you say we had to turn?’ he interrupted her tersely. Mark had never enjoyed city driving or heavy traffic. Unlike her. She positively revelled in the cut and thrust of it, the tussle of wills with other drivers, the challenge of outwitting them.

‘Wow… do you think we’ve got the right place?’ Deborah asked when they finally reached the address Emma had given her. It was a quiet, elegant square, and, while it might not compare in size or grandeur with some of London’s more famous squares, it was nevertheless very obviously an exclusive and expensive address.

‘Toby must be doing well if they can afford somewhere like this,’ she added as they left the car. ‘Emma said he’d recently bought into an accountancy practice. Quite an upmarket one too, apparently.’

‘Well, that should please her,’ Mark commented sourly. ‘She always was a bit of a social climber.’

Deborah eyed him in surprise. ‘She’s ambitious, that’s all—she wants Toby to succeed.’

‘Of course she does, she wants him to succeed so that she can boast about how well he’s done to her friends. What happened to her career, by the way? As I remember it, she’d got it all planned that she was going to make a big name for herself in the media.’

‘Well, she was doing very well until the TV station she was with lost its franchise. It was a case of last in first out. Since then she’s been doing some part-time PR work for a friend.’

‘Part-time PR work—well, they certainly haven’t bought this place with what she’s earning from that,’ Mark announced as he eyed the elegant façade of the building in front of them.

Deborah watched him thoughtfully as she pressed the intercom buzzer. He had been so scratchy and grouchy lately, so unlike his normal placid, calm self.

Emma came down herself to let them in. Small and vivacious, her tiny frame and delicate features hid a personality that was extremely strong-willed and tenacious. She was not a woman’s woman, and unlike Deborah she had made few friends at university. Deborah had found her competitiveness more amusing than threatening and had often teased her about the streak of conventionality which had made her insist almost as soon as they had left university that she and Toby marry instead of opting to live together as Deborah and Mark had chosen to do.

She and Mark had been invited to the wedding. A lavish affair held at a small, carefully chosen village where Emma just happened to have an ancient relative living. It had been a fairy-tale occasion, and a tribute to Emma’s talents as a master tactician and planner.

‘Mmm… this is really something,’ Deborah enthused generously as Emma ushered them into the apartment. ‘You could virtually fit the whole of our place into your living-room and have space to spare, couldn’t you, Mark?’ she commented as she admired the expensive silk curtains and the specially woven off-white carpet that covered the floor. ‘You must be doing very well, Toby,’ she added when Emma’s husband brought her her drink.

‘Oh, it’s nothing to do with me,’ he told her without smiling. ‘Emma bought this place herself—with her own money.’

Deborah felt her scalp prickle slightly as she picked up on the highly charged atmosphere which had suddenly developed. She looked helplessly at Mark, who was standing looking out of one of the long Georgian sash windows.

‘Don’t pay any attention to Toby,’ Emma advised brittly as she flashed her husband a quelling look. ‘I’ve already told him, if he wants to make a fool of himself by behaving like a spoilt child then that’s his choice.’

Despite the elegant comfort of the antique-furnished traditional dining-room and the excellence of the meal Emma served, Deborah was relieved when it was finally over. Emma and Toby had barely talked to one another all evening other than to make sniping remarks at one another. Toby made constant references to Emma’s money, in between sneeringly putting her down and being irritatingly sorry for himself.

After dinner, while Toby took Mark off to his study to show him his new state-of-the-art computerised set-up, Deborah helped Emma to clear the table and wash the expensive antique dinner service she had used for the meal.