‘Oh, he’s gone?’ Simon appeared at the bathroom door. Somehow the statement came out as a question heavily underlined with disappointment.
‘Yes.’ Olivia walked across to the sink, drew a glass of water and drank it down.
‘Who is he?’
Although she’d also rehearsed a couple of answers to that question, now that it had been asked neither seemed appropriate. ‘Someone I knew when I was seventeen,’ she said lightly, hoping that it didn’t sound too evasive.
Simon nodded, but she hadn’t stifled his curiosity. They had very few visitors, and none who drove Jaguar cars. ‘Is he coming back?’
‘Possibly,’ she said vaguely, setting the glass down. ‘Make yourself a sandwich, darling, and then I’ll hear you read.’
He pulled a face, but he knew the rules. At least, she thought wearily, she didn’t have to worry about television’s influence on him; they didn’t have a set. As he was beginning to point out more and more frequently.
Simon was clever and quick, but in spite of all her efforts he was rapidly losing ground. Olivia was determined that he should have his chance; he wasn’t going to be sentenced to a life like hers, held back by circumstances.
Facing down Drake Arundell was a small price to pay, and why should he refuse to accept his responsibilities when so far he’d got off scot-free?
Later, as she prepared dinner, she tried to work out another plan of campaign for dealing with the man. She hadn’t expected him to be so—so intimidating, she decided after searching for the word. However, it was too late to worry about that now. If he refused to take a DNA test she’d simply raise such a fuss that he’d have to.
After they’d eaten and done the dishes she dragged out the cheap writing pad and a pen.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Writing a letter,’ she said casually.
Simon’s eyes rounded. They never wrote letters—or got them for that matter. ‘Who to?’ he asked with a guarded curiosity that hurt. A year ago he’d have been filled with eager interest.
‘A man,’ she said, narrowing her eyes mysteriously as she dropped her voice to a significant whisper. ‘And I’m not going to tell you who he is—you’ll just have to wait.’
Grinning, he left her to it, sitting on the sofa which was also her bed to ‘read’ a school library book. Listening to him stumble over words, she thought wearily that these first years at school were vital. If he lost too much ground it could take him years to catch up. And he might become so convinced of his inferiority that he’d never make up the gap.
She finished the letter. But although she had made it much more emphatic, she read it with a furrowed brow. There was nothing in it to stop Drake dismissing it with a flick of those lean, strong fingers.
Absently she touched the place on one wrist where he’d held her fast. He hadn’t hurt her, but she’d known she wasn’t going to be able to escape that grip. A frisson of sensation shivered across her nerves, heating them with a forbidden fire.
What would he be like as a lover?
Immediately the dreamy sensuality was replaced by shocked indignation. No doubt her mother had shivered to the same deliciously sinful sensation, asked herself the same wicked question. But Elizabeth Harley had found the answer—and the knowledge had cost her happiness and peace of mind, and ultimately her life.
Look at it whichever way you liked, Drake owed Simon, and it was time that he did something about it.
Setting her jaw, Olivia tore up the letter and wrote another.
Dear Drake,
I’m sure you wouldn’t like to appear on the cover of something like this. I’ll contact this one if that’s the only way I can find the money for Simon’s operation.
Tomorrow she’d buy an old copy of one of those magazines from the secondhand book shop at the end of the row opposite. Drake would discover that she could fight dirty too, when it was necessary.
The next morning she and Simon went off to school, where she discovered that he had been telling the truth about his early arrival home. Only then admitting to herself how afraid she had been that he’d bunked, she returned home with a marginally lighter heart.
On the way, still inflamed with fury and righteousness, she bought a magazine with the most outrageous and embarrassing headline she could find, tore off the cover, folded it into four and stuffed it into the envelope with her letter, then posted it.
Scarcely two hours after the mailman had collected the mail from the box outside the dairy she realised that Drake could quite easily contact her stepfather and tell him where she was.
At first such terror enveloped her that she collapsed into a chair, her stomach quivering with panic, her mouth moving as she said aloud, ‘He wouldn’t—surely?’
Of course he wouldn’t.
No one, not even a man who had repudiated his son, would willingly put a child in jeopardy.
Not even Drake Arundell.
But although she tried to reassure herself, she couldn’t. The loss of her job meant that her days, once busy to the point of bursting, were now long and too full of empty hours—hours in which she could spin fantasies of Simon being torn from her arms by a vengeful Brian Harley. She even went so far as to get all their clothes out onto Simon’s bed and make them into parcels in case they had to flee from the flat.
Reason prevailed and she put them away, but she began to look nervously about her, seeing a threat in every stranger.
There followed two of the most worrying days of her life. In the evening of the third day after she’d sent the letter the knock she’d been expecting came. Swallowing, deliberately steadying her voice, she said, ‘Yes, who is it?’
‘Open the door, Olivia.’
Wiping suddenly damp palms down her thighs, Olivia did as she was told. Cool, clammy air rushed into the flat, its petrol-scented breath evocative of too many people trying to get home through the rain. Drake loomed in the entrance, yet it wasn’t so much his size that disturbed her as that mysterious thing called presence. Drake had too much, and in his case it was spiced with enough danger to impress even the most foolhardy.
Her eyes flicked across to the child who had curled up on the old sofa-bed and fallen asleep with the unexpectedness of childhood. It was too late now to turn back. All she could hope was that she didn’t show just how nervous she was; Drake would pick up any signs and use them to his advantage.
‘Come in,’ she said quietly.
He looked around, once more taking in the landlord’s cheap furniture, the total lack of anything that looked as though money had been spent on it. His eyes came to rest on Simon, snuggled under the blanket Olivia had draped over him. He frowned. ‘Is that where he sleeps?’
‘No,’ she said evenly. ‘He has a bed in the bedroom.’
