her when they married, and she had loved him … had wanted him. He flinched a little as he recognised the direction his thoughts were taking, shifting his weight slightly as his body was jolted into a sudden sharp and dangerous awareness of how alone he and Davina were, and how much he desired her. When he had kissed her last Christmas she had felt so light in his arms, so small. He had wanted desperately to go on kissing her … holding her.
‘Please, Giles,’ she repeated huskily now, and he knew that he couldn’t refuse her.
Lucy often said things she didn’t mean; often lost her temper and gave him ultimatums which within hours she had forgotten. In fact, he had been surprised that she actually cared what he did. Sometimes recently when she looked at him he felt almost as though she hated him, there was so much anger and bitterness in her eyes.
‘I’ll … I’ll think about it,’ Giles promised her.
Davina smiled her thanks at him.
Outwardly she might appear calm, but inwardly her stomach was churning; inwardly she felt full of despair and guilt. How could she be doing this to Giles, using him … using what he felt for her? But what alternative did she have? It wasn’t for her own sake. Owning Carey’s meant nothing to her. She felt no possessive pride of ownership in the company.
But what she did feel was a very powerful and strong sense of responsibility towards its employees, an awareness of how guilty she had been over too many years of turning a blind eye to what was going on.
She could have overridden Gregory’s refusal to let her come to Carey’s. She could have insisted on doing so, but she had, as always in her life, taken the easy way out.
Well, there was no easy way out now … not for the people who depended on Carey Chemicals’ survival for their living.
She was all right. She had the money her father had left her, money that had been left untouched since his death—a good deal of money, in her eyes, but Mr Taylor had explained patiently, almost a little condescendingly to her that, as far as Carey’s was concerned, it was little more than a drop in the ocean.
He had told her then the extent of the company’s overdraft, an overdraft secured by Carey Chemicals’ premises and land, and she had blenched at the extent of it.
The money had been lent to Gregory some years ago by his predecessor, he told her grimly. An advance that should never have been made and certainly would not have been made in today’s harsh financial climate.
That advance, together with Carey Chemicals’ profits, Gregory had used to fund his money-market gambling.
Why had he done it? He had always been a man who enjoyed taking risks; who craved their dangerous excitement. That was, after all, why he had died. He had been driving far too fast for the road conditions, the police had told her, and yet there had been no need. He had not been expected anywhere. No, it had been the thrill of driving at such an excessive speed that had excited him, and killed him and the woman with him, just as his greed and reckless addiction to danger was now killing Carey’s and threatening the livelihoods of everyone involved with it.
Davina stood up, and so did Giles.
They both walked to the door. Giles opened it for her. She thanked him, taking care not to stand too close to him, guiltily aware of the way his hand trembled slightly as he opened the door.
‘Give my love to Lucy,’ she told him. ‘I haven’t seen her for ages.’
She felt uncomfortably hypocritical for mentioning Lucy’s name, as though she had no knowledge of Giles’s feelings for her.
They left the building together, walking to their separate cars, Giles waiting while Davina unlocked and got into hers.
Carey’s was within easy walking distance of the village, its two-storeyed buildings surrounded by the lush Cheshire countryside. The site on which her grandfather and father had originally set up the business had once been occupied by a corn chandler’s. The original two-storeyed Cheshire brick mill was still there. It had a preservation order on it now, because of its age.
Face it: Carey’s doesn’t look like a profitable drug-producing company, Davina reflected as she drove off. She surveyed the jumble of buildings that housed the company, contrasting them with photographs she had seen of the premises of the huge multinationals that dominated the drugs market.
Carey’s, she had to admit, was an anomaly. But for her grandfather’s discovery of that heart drug, Carey’s would never have existed. At home she had his notebooks with his meticulous descriptions of the drugs and potions he had made up for his customers, human and animal. When he had been a young man there had been no National Health Service and very few ordinary people had been able to afford the fees of a doctor, so men like her grandfather had doctored them instead.
She thought it was a pity that her own father had been so reluctant to talk about his childhood and his parents. It had been her mother who had told her about her grandfather, and she had only known him for a couple of years, as he had died shortly after she and Davina’s father had married.
There was a portrait of Davina’s father in the room that was used as the boardroom, and Davina had always thought that there should have been one there of her grandfather as well.
There never would be now, of course. If she was lucky enough to find a buyer, the last thing they would want would be portraits of the original founders of the company.
She drove home, worrying about whether or not Giles would stay with the company, and trying to quell her guilt at the way she had manipulated him.
And then, even more guiltily, she found herself wondering what her life would have been like if she had married someone like Giles instead of Gregory.
IT HAD been Davina’s father who had been responsible for Davina’s meeting Gregory.
Gregory had come to work for Carey’s as their technical salesman and her father had invited him to one of the dinners he occasionally gave for certain members of his staff.
Davina had been busy in the kitchen when everyone arrived. These dinners were always something of an ordeal for her. Her father was a perfectionist and Davina dreaded his disapproval if everything was not as he wished it to be.
She had spent virtually all week preparing for this dinner, shopping, cleaning, polishing the silver, washing, starching and then ironing the table linen. And picking flowers from the garden and then arranging them. Her father would never countenance wasting money on buying flowers.
He personally selected the menus he wished Davina to serve, and they were always complicated. Her father was a fussy eater, preferring small, delicately cooked dishes, but on these occasions he liked to impress with lavish cordon bleu meals.
Sticky and uncomfortable from the heat of the kitchen, praying frantically that she had correctly judged the timing and that the hot soufflé her father had insisted on for the first course would not deflate before everyone was seated, Davina heard the kitchen door open. Expecting to see her father walk in to tell her that she could serve the soufflé, she was astonished to see instead a very good-looking young man.
He smiled at her, a warm flashing smile that showed the whiteness of his teeth. His skin was tanned; his brown hair shone. He was tall and lean, and there was a warmth in his brown eyes as he smiled at her that made her face burn even more hotly than the heat from the kitchen.
‘Hello, I’m Gregory James,’ he said to her, introducing himself and holding out his hand.
Automatically Davina extended hers and only just stopped herself from gasping out loud at the frisson of sensation that struck her as he slowly curled his fingers around hers and shook her hand.
No one had ever affected her like this before. In her naïveté her skin flushed darker, her whole body trembling as she succumbed