what do you want to talk about? How you’re going to pay for the repairs to my car? My car, Philippa, not Computex’s.… Oh yes, Computex belongs to me. I made good after all you see.… You should have stuck with me; despite being disinherited I made it after all. My godfather helped me, and with that and a large slice of good luck I managed to hold on to Garston. Just think if you hadn’t run out on me you’d be mistress of us both now… Garston and me… I always did wonder which of us meant the most to you.…’
‘Neither.’
‘No, of course not. I was forgetting about Geoff. How easily you deceived me.… Did you enjoy it, you bitch, letting me think you loved me when all the time…?’
‘Scott… about your car.’ She wet her lips nerving herself for the admission she had to make. ‘I’m afraid that I… I just don’t have that sort of money.…’
‘How very unfortunate for you.… So… what do you suggest I do? Simply wipe it off—put it down to “experience”?’ He shook his head, baring his teeth slightly in a vulpine grimace. ‘You’ve already cost me far too much under that heading. ‘Oh, no,’ he said softly, ‘this time I’m going to do some recouping. You made a laughing stock out of me eleven years ago, Philippa, and now it’s my turn to turn the screw a little.’
‘Simon! You can’t punish him because.…’
‘Who said anything about punishing the boy? It’s you I want to punish, Philippa. You who’s going to pay, and if you can’t pay in cash then you’re going to have to pay in kind, as they say.’
A kind of numb terror seemed to hold her in its grip, a complete inability to reason logically, a primeval dread that made it impossible for her to shake off the spell Scott’s voice was weaving round her. All she knew was that Scott had the power to hurt her son, and that somehow she must stop him from doing so no matter what the cost to herself.
‘Scott, please.…’
‘Please what? Spare your son? Very well… but only at a price, Philippa.’
‘What is it?’
‘You work as a secretary in London I understand, for Merrit Plastics.’
Philippa nodded her head, perplexed both by his question and the fact that he knew so much about her.
‘You will give your notice in and come and work for me here at Garston.’
‘As your secretary?’
‘That…’ he paused and added significantly, ‘and other things.’ Blood stormed her face as he looked at her, assessing and stripping her, making his meaning all too plain.
‘Never.’
The bitter denial reverberated between them, his eyes darkening, going cold and hard as he breathed softly, ‘Think again, Philippa… I’ve ached for an opportunity like this, an opportunity to get even with you and humiliate you the way you humiliated me… and now that I’ve got it I won’t let go easily. Either way you make a sacrifice. It’s up to you whether it’s you or your son.…’
‘But I can’t work for you and.…’
‘Share my bed? Of course you can, isn’t it what you did for Rivers? You were working for him when you started sleeping with him weren’t you? A holiday job I believe you called it. I want your answer and I want it now, Philippa, otherwise I’m taking your son to the police to make a statement. I doubt they’ll let him off leniently.’
‘Scott, don’t make me do this… I’ve got Simon to think of. I can’t.…’
‘You can and you will, and if the boy doesn’t know what manner of woman his mother is by now, I suspect it’s time he found out. Don’t try to tell me that Geoff was the last man in your life. A woman like you who takes two lovers at a time could never.…’
He caught her hand as it arched towards his face, grasping her wrist painfully, making her cry out with the numbing agony that shot down her arm.
‘Make your mind up, Philippa. Either you come to me and let me use you for whatever purpose I desire, or I take your son to the police.…’
What choice did she really have? Her very silence confirmed her submission, and as she looked up and saw the triumph glittering in Scott’s eyes she recognised that either she had never really known him, or the man she had known was gone for ever. Was she to blame for that? Was she to blame for what Scott seemed to have become—a cold, hard stranger who talked so calmly of revenge, and making her pay, a man who seemed to have no room in his life for either pity or compassion? It seemed that Scott thought she was and she shivered, partly in pain, partly in fear, wondering how she could have miscalculated all those years ago.
She had been so sure that he would marry Mary; so sure that she had been doing the right thing. So sure… and so wrong. But it was too late to go back now, far far too late.
She looked into his face and the thought struck her that perhaps if she stayed she might be able to put right the past, to make Scott see that what she had done she had done not to hurt him but because she had thought it was right, not against him but for him, and it was to this tenuous hope that she clung as she said slowly, ‘Very well, Scott … if that’s what you want we’ll stay, but I’ll have to find somewhere to stay… a school for Simon.…’
‘What’s the matter with the local grammar school, or isn’t that good enough for Geoff’s bastard? His son, his legitimate son should I say, is down for Harrow, so I’m told, but of course men don’t lay out good money to send their bastards to public school, do they?’ He turned towards the door, and then paused, looking back at her over his shoulder as he said coolly, ‘Don’t worry about finding somewhere to stay, you’ll both be staying at the house with me.…’ He saw the expression in her eyes and laughed softly. ‘Yes, it will cause quite a stir in the village, won’t it, but nothing to the stir we’re going to cause… nothing to the stir you caused when you dropped me and went off with Geoff. You should have heard my grandfather crow after you’d gone.’
His eyes were bitter and Philippa sensed that Scott was looking back to that time when he first came to Garston and was very much an outsider, very much the unwanted grandson taking the place—usurping the place—of the favourite dead one, his grandfather bitterly resentful of him and taking no pains to conceal his resentment.
‘I’ll be back tomorrow to take you and the boy up to the house. Don’t try running out on me, Philippa, I’ll come running after you and I won’t be in any mood to be generous.’
The sound of his car had died away completely before Simon came downstairs. Philippa gave him a shaky smile and he came over to her, putting his arm around her waist, so very like his father in the quiet seriousness of his gaze that her heart ached. She ruffled the dark hair. ‘He’s gone then?’
‘Umm.…’
‘And he doesn’t know?’
Something in his tone alerted her, some inner voice urging her to tread carefully. ‘Know what?’
Simon looked at her directly. ‘That he’s my father,’ he said quietly. ‘You didn’t tell him that I’m his son? I saw it on my birth certificate,’ he told her quickly, ‘ages ago, but it never really
