weren’t checked, could easily carry him into hysteria. Instinctively Sarah bent down and picked him up, lifting him in her arms, so that his face was buried in the hollow of her throat, his small arms wrapping fiercely round her as she rocked and soothed him.
As she talked quietly to him she heard his father cursing under his breath.
He shot back a cuff and glanced at his watch, and the sympathy she had started to feel for him fled as Sarah heard him say edgily, ‘That’s enough, Robert. Look, I’ve got a meeting in half an hour…’
He must have seen the contempt, the dislike that flashed through her eyes, Sarah recognised, because he stopped speaking, his mouth firming into a hard angry line before he told her acidly, ‘I’m a businessman as well as a father. I have a responsibility to my workforce as well as to my son. The outcome of an important new contract is in the balance here, and this meeting is a crucial one. Without it…well, let’s just say that without it I could have to let some of the workforce go. Why on earth he had to choose today of all days to play up like this… You do realise that Mrs Jacobs is out of her mind with worry, don’t you?’ he demanded of his son. ‘She had to ring me at work to tell me you’d gone missing, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that Ben saw you heading for the stream path…And as for you…’ he gave Sarah an angry, bitter look ‘…surely you realise that a child of his age, on his own, has to have left home without those responsible for him knowing where he is, and instead of encouraging him you could at least have attempted to take him home.’
His accusation took Sarah’s breath away, but before she could deny his statement he was speaking to his son again, reiterating curtly, ‘We’re going home, Robert.’
But, as Sarah had known would happen, Robert refused to let go of her, clinging desperately to her when his father tried to take hold of him.
It was, she knew, out of necessity and nothing else that the man was obliged to stand so close to her, close enough to put his arms around her as he tried to unwind Robert’s hands from behind her neck. She could smell the hot man scent of his skin, see the tiny pores of his face, dark where his beard would grow, his lashes a thick and enviably long fan against his skin as he frowned over his impossible task.
Uncomfortably aware of just how she was reacting to him, of the tiny female ripple of unexpected and unwanted response that jarred through her body, Sarah tried to step back from him, driven, as much by her need to put some distance between them as by her desire to help his son, into saying huskily, ‘Look, it would be much easier if I came back with you.’
She could see the refusal…the rejection…and his dislike in his eyes as they focused brilliantly on her. He was still far too close…far, far too close, she realised as she felt her breath stop in her throat, and her heart started to pound unevenly.
‘I’m not going back. I want to go and live with Mrs Richards,’ Robert was protesting, still clinging to her, adding piteously, ‘Don’t let him take me. I hate him.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake! Very well, then, you’d better come back with us. It’s this way.’
Some people had no sense of gratitude, Sarah reflected grimly as he turned on his heel, patently expecting her to follow, but to her surprise he stopped, lifting back the branches of the tree so that she could step through, and then picking up her rucksack before saying more quietly to Robert, ‘You’ve got two legs, Robert, and you’re far too heavy for…’
‘Sarah. Sarah Myers,’ Sarah supplied automatically for him.
‘…for Miss Myers to carry you all the way back to the house.’
‘Don’t want to walk,’ was Robert’s response, his bottom lip jutting out stubbornly as he turned his head and looked at his father. Sarah’s neck was wet from his tears and she felt a wave of tenderness and concern wash over her as she willed his acerbic parent to at least try to understand and to have some compassion for him.
‘Very well, then, if you won’t walk I’ll carry you.’
As she felt the way Robert shrank back from his father Sarah’s tender heart ached for the little boy.
‘Why don’t you show me the way, Robert?’ she suggested, gently putting him down but protectively keeping her own body between him and his father as she took hold of his hand.
As she turned her head she saw that her gesture had not been lost on Robert’s father. His mouth was curved into a line of bitter cynicism.
‘Quite the little mother, aren’t you?’ he goaded her grimly. ‘What is it about your sex that makes you so obsessively unable to behave with any kind of logic where children are concerned? Can’t you see that he’s—?’
‘That he’s what, Mr…?’ Sarah intervened furiously, challenging him.
He looked at her, frowning as though surprised by both her attack and her desire to know his name.
‘Gray. Gray Philips,’ he introduced himself flatly. ‘And you must be able to see that Robert is deliberately working himself up into a hysterical state.’
Quietly, so that Robert couldn’t overhear her, Sarah contradicted equally flatly, ‘No…what I see is a little boy who’s lost everyone who loves him…a little boy who has apparently been left in the charge of a woman who neither likes nor cares about him…a little boy who has no one he can turn to other than his dead mother’s housekeeper.’
Sarah knew that she was being deliberately emotive, but she couldn’t help it. There was something about this impatient, critical man that pushed her into needing to bring home to him his child’s emotional plight. ‘What I can also see is that you don’t appear to know very much about children, Mr Philips.’
Sarah drew in her breath at the way he looked deliberately at her own bare left hand before taunting softly, ‘And you do? Do you have children of your own, then?’
To her mortification, Sarah felt her skin flushing as she was forced to admit, ‘No…no, I don’t.’
‘Then I suggest you wait until you do before you start handing out the homespun advice,’ he told her grittily.
Thoroughly incensed by his attitude, Sarah corrected him impetuously, ‘I might not have any children, but professionally—’
‘Professionally?’ Gray Philips cut in sharply, frowning at her. ‘What exactly does that mean? What exactly is your profession?’
‘I’m a teacher,’ Sarah told him, wondering even as she said the words just how much longer they would be true, and then pushing her fears and doubts behind her as she felt Robert’s hand trembling in her own.
No matter how much she might dislike his father, she was not helping Robert by allowing her antagonism to take hold of her.
He ‘hated’ his father, Robert had said with childish intensity, and Sarah had not missed the brief look of pain that had touched Gray Philips’s mouth as he had listened to his son’s rejection of him. Despite her sympathy with Robert, she had to acknowledge that his father had every right to insist on taking the little boy back home.
She could not stop him from doing that, but what she could do was to go with him and to satisfy herself as much as she could that it was the confusion and grief of losing those people that he loved that was upsetting Robert
