thought he’d had a heart attack...’
Jessica collapsed down on the sofa behind her, sick to her stomach, and bowed her head.
‘She rang me. I saw the tablets and contacted his own doctor, worked out how many he must have taken and between us ... well, we decided the nursing home would be a better choice than the local hospital.’
Tracks of moisture ran unchecked down her cheeks. She wanted to thank the older man for exercising that discretion but she couldn’t find her voice.
‘Now when he came to, he swore he hadn’t been trying to harm himself. He said he was just desperate to stop his mind going round and round and get some sleep and when the first pills didn’t do the trick, he took a few more...’
‘Do you b-believe him?’
‘I’ll know better what to think in a few days when we’ve talked some more,’ he confessed wryly. ‘Well...now I’m here to ask you how to get in touch with this character, Saracini—-’
‘Carlo?’ she gasped.
‘Do you think he’d see me? I want to tell him that Gerald needs criminal charges right now like he needs a hole in the head!’ he delivered grimly.
Jessica was barely thinking straight. But one awareness dominated the morass of emotions tearing her apart. Tonight she might have lost her father. And even if it hadn’t been a suicide attempt, in his current condition, who was to say he mightn’t make such an attempt this week or next week or the week after? If he wasn’t coping now, how could she expect him to cope when the police were involved and the news of his disgrace leaked out? How could he handle all the horrors still to come?
She cleared her throat. ‘There’ aren’t going to be any criminal charges. I... saw Carlo tonight and he was very understanding—’
‘He wasn’t very understanding when he had Gerald tossed out of the building!’
‘I explained how much strain Dad had been under. There won’t be any court case,’ she repeated unsteadily, her slender hands twisting together as she made her decision.
‘But what about the money? I gather that Gerald has no hope of paying all of it back...’
‘Carlo is prepared to write it off—’
‘He must be a very decent sort of man: Dr Guthrie shook his head. ’I honestly thought he would want to nail your father’s hide to the wall as an example to the rest of his employees...’
An inward quaking at that particular image assailed Jessica. She tasted cold fear but this time it was not only for her father, it was for herself as well.
The older man smothered a yawn and stood up. ‘I’ll pass on the good news to Gerald:
‘I’ll come and see him tomorrow.’
Dr Guthrie grimaced. ‘Would you be terribly hurt if I advised you to give him a couple of days to get himself together again?’
‘No,’ she lied.
‘He feels he’s let you down and I don’t think he wants you to see him until he has himself under control again.’
‘No problem,’ she said stiffly.
‘He still has a lot to handle, Jess. He’s lost his job and his self-respect.’
As soon as the older man had gone, Jessica dialled the Deangate Hotel with clumsy fingers. She asked for Carlo’s suite. He answered the call with a growl of impatience in his voice.
‘It’s me...‘ she said tightly. ’I’ve changed my mind:
Silence buzzed on the line for long seconds. It went on and on and on while she trembled at her end of the phone with a heady mix of fear and despair. Maybe Carlo had never expected her to accept... maybe Carlo had been playing some sort of game with her.
‘I’ll send a car over to collect you.’ There was no emotion whatsoever in his response. She couldn’t believe her ears.
‘When?’
‘Now.’
‘Now?’ she echoed incredulously.
‘Now,’ he repeated, his accent more pronounced than she had ever heard it. ‘I waited six years. I won’t wait one hour or one day longer.’
‘I can’t come over to your hotel at this time of night,’ Jessica gasped.
‘Why not?’ His deep, dark voice thickened audibly. ‘You won’t be going home again...’
Jessica was shattered. Now...tonight?
‘And if you don’t come tonight, the deal’s off.’
‘That’s totally unreasonable!’
‘But what I want,’ Carlo asserted.
‘You can’t always have what you want—’
‘Can’t I?’ He laughed softly and the phone went dead.
CHAPTER THREE
JESSICA kept the car waiting an hour. She packed as though she was going away for the weekend. In the back of her mind, a voice kept on saying, You can’t be doing this... you can’t have agreed. The unknown beckoned with all the welcome of a black, endless tunnel. She lifted a photo of Simon off the night stand and stared at it tautly. It had been taken the day he opened the photographic studio. Unusually, he was wearing a suit. A slim, fair man of medium height with gentle brown eyes.
‘It doesn’t matter to me... that sort of thing is really not important,’ Simon had soothed when she sobbed out her shame and despair after that dreadful afternoon when she had almost ended up sharing Carlo Saracini’s bed. ‘Of course I forgive you:
Simon and his family had moved next door when she was ten and he was fourteen. He had been the odd one out in his large, extrovert family. Quiet and unambitious, his greatest interest wildlife photography. Simon had been an oddity to his rugby-mad father and brothers. And Jessica had been a lonely child, painfully conscious from an early age that her mother had no time for her or her father.
Simon had heard Jessica sobbing her heart out in the summer house the day she came home early from school and saw Carole half-undressed with a strange man. Simon had climbed over the wall and she had been so shocked by what she had seen that she had told him. He had been very kind and comforting. He had put his arm round her and listened, showing her the easy affection she craved.
The adult world had come to her door that day. Simon had explained that she mustn’t tell her father or anyone else about that accidental glimpse. He had been naive too in his assumption that her mother didn’t make a habit of that sort of thing. Jessica hadn’t been very much older before she had learnt that there was always another man in Carole’s life and that her father simply tried to pretend not to know about those men.
Indeed she had soon realised that her mother’s frequent affairs were food for the juiciest gossip in town. That knowledge had been an agonising humiliation to live with during the sensitive
