‘James Warren.’ Tania’s soft mouth twisted bitterly. Well, no need to wonder now whose marriage her unwanted visitor had been so passionately defending. Although she still needed to know exactly why he should imagine that she had the slightest interest in either Nicholas Forbes or his marriage. Come to that, if he was so genuinely concerned about preserving his sister’s marriage, she was the one he ought to talk to, because it was her actions, her behaviour, her habit of publicly and pointedly underlining the differences between her stepbrother and her husband to the latter’s disadvantage which was undermining that marriage.
‘What’s wrong?’ Ann pressed her anxiously. ‘When I came in you looked so pale. I thought you were going to faint.’
Quickly seizing on the excuse Ann was offering her, Tania agreed tensely.
‘Yes. I think it’s the heat.’
‘Yes, and this is an anxious time for you. I remember what it’s like, and from when Tom and I first started up our business. But I’m sure you’ll do well, Tania. And if James Warren should take it into his head to make you into one of his pet causes—’
Tania laughed mirthlessly, her lips tight. ‘The last thing I want or need is any condescending patronage from someone who believes himself to be the local lord of all he surveys. Thanks for bringing Lucy back for me,’ she added curtly, her manner so plainly indicating that she wanted to be on her own that Ann tactfully said her goodbyes and withdrew.
Once she had gone, Tania stood staring into space.
James Warren. So that was Clarissa Forbes all-powerful stepbrother; a very formidable gentleman indeed, but he wasn’t going to intimidate her and the next time he came round, making false accusations against her, she was going to let him know in no uncertain terms just how wrong he was.
How dared he imagine … ? How dared he suggest …? She frowned quickly. But how had he got the idea that she was in any way other than in a business sense involved with Nicholas?
There was only one way she could find out, and the next time he came round here threatening her she intended to have her own ammunition fully prepared and primed. She would ring Nicholas Forbes and discover just how his brother-in-law had got the false impression that they were having an affair.
And what was more she would do it now, before the heat of her anger cooled and she allowed rationality and caution to take the place of righteous indignation and hot-blooded anger.
HAVING settled Lucy in their small sitting-room and listened to her happy account of her day, Tania went through into the room she had designated as her ‘office’ and picked up the telephone.
Nicholas Forbes’s secretary sounded uncertain and hesitant when she asked to be put through to him and Tania frowned over this abrupt change in the girl’s manner. Normally she sounded breezy and cheerful, and she and Tania had even got to the stage of exchanging the odd few seconds of conversation.
Nicholas, on the other hand, was obviously pleased to hear from her. Prudence forbade her to discuss James Warren’s visit with him over the telephone and so she asked instead if he could manage to find the time to call round and see her.
‘It is rather urgent, I’m afraid,’ she told him.
‘No problem. I’ll be with you in ten minutes. I was just about to call it a day anyway. Clarissa had a dinner party planned for this evening and I promised her I wouldn’t be late. James is just back from the States and so he’ll be joining us.’
As she replaced the receiver, Tania reflected that if she had been the one serving him the meal she would have made sure it had a good spoonful of something bitter in it.
How dared he come round here, threatening her, accusing her … leaping to the most preposterous assumptions?
Angrily she paced her small study while she waited for Nicholas to appear.
She had been so looking forward to her new life, so happy about it, and now suddenly, like a dark cloud crossing the sun, that happiness had been blighted. Through no fault of her own she seemed to have fallen foul of the town’s most important and influential resident. Well, she didn’t care, she decided mentally, tossing her head. Let him do his worst. He was the one who would suffer the most if it ever came out how he had tried to bribe her, a totally innocent person, to give up a non-existent affair with a man who was nothing more than her legal adviser.
Nicholas arrived ten minutes later. Tania let him in through the front of her shop and then led him upstairs to her study.
They had to walk through her sitting-room to get there, and Lucy turned round, beaming when she saw him.
Nicholas was good with children and they responded well to him. Watching him as he listened to Lucy’s excited account of her day, Tania felt a small shaft of bitterness lodge itself somewhere deep inside her.
Lucy should have had this as her birthright, should have had a father to whom she could turn with her small pleasures and problems.
Tania had never felt the lack of a man in their lives, but she realised Lucy might feel differently. The absence of her father was a subject which was rarely raised between them. At the large inner city school which she had previously attended, single-parent children had been in the majority, not the minority, and, although Tania had told Lucy as calmly and matter-of-factly as she could the brief circumstances of her conception, editing them so that they could be understood and accepted by a small child, it was as though in some way Lucy had realised it was not a subject her mother cared to discuss and had asked no further questions.
Now, abruptly and painfully, Tania realised that in thinking their lives complete and content she had perhaps been looking at the situation only from her own point of view. It had never struck her before that Lucy might actively miss the presence of a male parent, even though that presence was something she had never experienced.
Now, listening to her laughing and giggling as she responded to Nicholas’s gentle teasing, Tania was struck by uncertainty and apprehension.
Was Lucy perhaps secretly nursing a need to have a man in her life? A father?
‘What’s wrong?’ Nicholas asked her with urgent concern once they were alone in her study. ‘You sounded worried over the phone.’
‘Worried doesn’t begin to describe it,’ Tania told him tartly. She took a deep steadying breath as she felt the tension build up inside her and then said levelly, ‘I had a visit from your brother-in-law this afternoon. He seems to be under the misapprehension that you and I are having an affair and he came here to demand that I stop seeing you. He also offered me ten thousand pounds to do so.’
‘Ten thousand!’ Nicholas whistled. ‘Did you take it?’
Tania stared at him. He was smiling but beneath the smile she could see that he was ill at ease, guilty almost.
‘No, I did not. But that isn’t why I asked you to come here. What I want to know is why on earth he should imagine that you and I are having an affair in the first place, much less attempt to bribe and threaten me into giving you up.’
Nicholas had turned his back on her. He picked up the paperweight on her desk, weighing it absently in his hands, his movements jerky and uncoordinated.
‘Nicholas, what is going on?’ Tania pressed, reading these betraying signs. ‘And please don’t tell me you don’t know,’ she added with dry irony as she removed the paperweight from his hand. ‘Because it’s perfectly obvious that you do.’
For a moment he was silent and then he shrugged and admitted sheepishly, ‘I suppose it’s all my fault … although I never intended—that is, I had no idea that Clarissa would fire James up to such an extent—’
‘Just a minute.’