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www.millsandboon.co.uk
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
THE man was standing in the hospital corridor when Fler came out of the room where they’d put her daughter. They’d told her he was there, that he’d brought Tansy in. She couldn’t recall whether he’d been there when she arrived. She’d been too intent then on getting to Tansy’s side, finding out her chances, being there for her, to notice anyone—anything—that wasn’t directly related to her daughter’s survival.
Now she smelled the antiseptic and polish, saw the cheap prints on the walls and the shine of the green vinyl on the wide floor of the corridor, heard the murmur of voices from the ward office. And saw the tall, grey-suited man straighten from where he’d been leaning against the wall with his arms folded, and come towards her.
With a curious detachment she noted the thick brown hair, brushed neatly back, the slight furrow between his dark brows, the hazel eyes and pronounced cheekbones, the cheeks appearing rather hollowed by contrast. His nose was classically straight but a shade long, and his mouth wasn’t thin but looked firm and decisive. There was something surprising about that mouth.
He looked older than she’d expected, and briefly she wondered if she was mistaken, but he said, ‘Mrs Hewson? My name’s Kyle Ranburn...’ And she knew there was no mistake.
He seemed surprised too, she noticed. From being oblivious to her surroundings, she’d suddenly become hypersensitive to every irrelevant detail. A nurse walked by them, and she heard the hushed squeak of rubber on the well-shined floor. She noticed that Kyle Ranburn wore no tie, that his rumpled shirt had three buttons undone, and a pulse was beating under the lightly tanned skin of his throat, revealed by the open collar. His eyes were flecked with brown around the irises, more green towards the edge. And he hadn’t shaved. A musky male scent underlaid the faint sharpness of sweat. He probably hadn’t had a chance to wash, either. She supposed she ought to be grateful that he had obviously lost no time answering Tansy’s call in the night.
He held out a hand to her and she looked down at it, saw his fingers were long but blunt-ended, the nails cut short.
When she didn’t take his hand, he withdrew it, saying evenly, ‘How is she now?’
‘They think they’ve got rid of the pills. She’ll probably be all right, if there’s no liver damage. They’re going to keep her in for a couple of days to be sure. But they seem fairly sure they got the drugs out of her system in time. She isn’t going to die.’
‘That’s good.’
‘You must be relieved?’ Fler asked in brittle tones.
‘Yes, of course. Very.’ Unforgivably, he glanced at the leather-strapped stainless steel watch on his wrist. ‘Look, I really have to go, I’m afraid—’
The gesture broke her determined calm. All the varied emotions she’d been tightly reining in for hours, while she hastily dressed in anything that came to hand, made hurried phone calls of her own, ran to her car in the cold dawn and then drove for almost three long, terrified hours, shattered in a flare of shaking, white-hot rage. ‘You callous bastard!’ She wanted to hit him, preferably with a blunt instrument.
He blinked. ‘I’m sorry—’
‘I’m sure you are!’
He looked away for a moment, as if thinking, and then said, ‘I don’t know what Tansy told you, Mrs Hewson, but—’
‘She’s told me about you!’
‘—I didn’t do anything to her. She did it to herself.’
‘You know damned well you were responsible!’ Tansy’s broken, tearful, half-conscious mutterings had made that unmistakably clear. ‘How old are you?’
He looked taken aback. ‘What?’
‘I said, how old are you? You must have known that Tansy is only eighteen.’
‘If that has anything to do with—’
‘You must be at least ten years older.’
‘I’m thirty,’ he said. ‘Look, Mrs Hewson, Tansy has a problem—’
‘Yes, she does. You!’
He ran a hand over his hair, and looked about them. An orderly was wheeling a frail, grey-haired man down the corridor towards them, and two nurses came through the swing doors and walked past, chattering. ‘This isn’t really the place to discuss it. And I do have to go.’
‘I don’t think I have anything to discuss with you,’ Fler said. ‘Thank you for bringing Tansy in,’ she added stiffly. He’d probably saved her life. But it wouldn’t have needed saving if this man had any sense of decency, if Tansy had never had the misfortune to meet him.
He looked as though he wanted to say something more, but then he made an exasperated gesture with his hands, nodded to her curtly, and left.
‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ the nurse coming out of Tansy’s room offered.
She shook her head. ‘May I go back and sit with my daughter?’
‘Yes, of course. She’s sleeping it off now. Not likely to wake again for some time. Maybe you should get yourself something to eat at the cafeteria.’
‘I will later,’ she promised. Just now she had to be with Tansy, hold her hand and feel its inert warmth in hers, assure herself that her daughter was really breathing, really alive after that brush with deliberately induced death.
She could scarcely believe that lovely, bright, talented Tansy, with all her future before her, had really tried to kill herself.
They said she’d emptied the medicine cupboard in the bathroom of the flat she shared with three other students, all of them away for the weekend. She’d taken everything she found. The medical team had managed to get that much information from her, and from the man she’d finally called before the cocktail of drugs she’d swallowed took deadly effect. He’d had the sense to collect up the bottles and bring them into the hospital with her.
‘She’s lucky,’ they said. ‘He did all the right things.’
It didn’t make her feel any more kindly towards Kyle Ranburn. What must the man have done to poor Tansy, to make her so desperate?
And why, darling, Fler thought, staring at the pathetically tangled fair hair on the pillow and the waxy pallor of her daughter’s face, why didn’t you call me, tell me what was troubling you? Whatever it was, we’d have worked it out. We will, when you’re better, she promised silently. And found tears running hotly down her cheeks.
There was a basin in the small room, and she got up to rinse away the tears. It wouldn’t help Tansy for her to crack up now.
She splashed cold water over her face and dried it with a paper towel. In the mirror over the basin she looked almost as white as the girl in the bed, her clear green eyes dulled and bloodshot with worry and the aftermath of tears. Her hair, several shades darker than Tansy’s, was a mess. Automatically she took a comb from her bag and smoothed it back over her ears in the sleek style she’d adopted when she got it cut a few years ago.
Tansy had objected. ‘I liked it long.’
‘It’s a nuisance,’ Fler had told her. ‘I have to pin it up every day, and I haven’t got the time.’
‘Leave it loose,’ Tansy had suggested. ‘It’s pretty.’
‘I’m too old for that.’
‘Thirty-four isn’t all that old,’ fifteen-year-old Tansy had assured her endearingly. ‘And anyway, you don’t look it.’
She was thirty-seven now, and this morning she looked every day of it, she was sure. The fine lines at the corners of her eyes and on her forehead were more pronounced than usual, and there were blue shadows beneath her eyes. Even her mouth was pale. She fumbled a lipstick from the bag and used it. If Tansy woke soon, she wouldn’t want to find her mother looking as though she was in need of a hospital bed herself.
She closed the bag and went back to the bed, gazing at the oblivious girl for a few minutes, then going to the window to stare out at the view, what there was of it.
A hum of morning traffic rose from the invisible streets of Auckland. Several floors down she could see people hurrying from a car park to the hospital buildings, some of the women wearing white or green uniforms, most clutching jackets or coats against a wintry breeze, although the sun glinted off the windows of the parked cars. Between a jumble of anonymous tower blocks she glimpsed a few round-headed trees, and in the distance a wedge of blue sea.
She’d take Tansy home, she thought. Home to Northland, away from Auckland and its impersonal big-city atmosphere. Away from men like Kyle Ranburn.
Kyle Ranburn. A name that months before had begun to crop up with disturbing regularity in Tansy’s infrequent letters, her rather more frequent collect calls home. At first Fler had thought he was a fellow student. It was some time before she’d discovered he was on the staff of the university, before she had begun to be uneasy about his influence on her daughter, and Tansy’s obvious dependence on him.
Before she’d realised that her daughter was engaged in a full-blown love-affair with a man who, she became increasingly certain, was probably enjoying having an ardent, inexperienced young girl on a string but who was bound eventually to break her heart.
When Tansy was home for the May holidays, Fler had tried tactfully to voice her concern.
‘I know you think a great deal of this man,’ she said. ‘But he must be a few years older than you. What sort of person is he?’
Apparently he was some kind of demigod, from Tansy’s rapturous description. But it didn’t really tell her much.
When the eulogy appeared to be over she said, keeping her voice light, ‘I expect half of your friends have a crush on him, too, if he’s as wonderful as you say.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Tansy declared impatiently, the age-old pronouncement of youth to a parent. ‘It’s not like that at all. Kyle and I have a...a relationship.’
A relationship? Did she mean—? ‘What kind of relationship?’ she asked.
Mistake. She’d meant it to sound like a matter-of-fact woman-to-woman question. It had come out sharply, almost an accusation, definitely mother-to-possibly-wayward-daughter. ‘Are you going out together?’ she asked more casually.
‘Sometimes. Well, we don’t exactly go out much, you know. I see him in class, of course, and he takes some of the tutorials himself. But Kyle has to be careful. Discreet, you know? He couldn’t let anyone think he’s favouring me. He’s got to think of his position.’
Does he, now? Fler thought grimly. It sounded as though Tansy was quoting him. He didn’t want to be seen with her in public. That was obvious. ‘You know, it’s not exactly ethical for a lecturer to seduce one of his students,’ she said.
‘Kyle hasn’t seduced me!’
Maybe not yet, but Fler would have laid odds it was on his agenda. With the emphasis Tansy had given it, the remark was ambiguous. She asked a blunt question. ‘Are you sleeping with him?’
‘What if I am?’ Tansy flushed, looking boldly at her mother. ‘I’m over the age of consent, so there isn’t a thing you can do about it.’
That gave Fler a nasty little jolt. She said, ‘How serious is this, Tansy?’
‘I love him,’ Tansy said, her eyes wide and defiant.
As gently as she could, Fler said, ‘Darling, are you sure you’re not fooling yourself?’
Tansy had been immediately defensive and angry, and they’d had their first major quarrel in years. It had ended with Tansy in tears, accusing Fler of not wanting to let go of the apron strings, of being jealous of her daughter having a man when she didn’t, of wanting to ruin Tansy’s life as she’d wrecked her own.
Of course Fler had taken it all with a healthy pinch of salt. Tansy was still young and didn’t mean half of what she said in temper. But the accusations were a disturbing echo of her own insecurities. Maybe there was a grain of truth in them. So she’d trodden carefully from then on, wary of alienating Tansy, terribly afraid for her, and holding herself ready to be available for comfort and support when the inevitable break finally came.
Now it had, with stunning force. Never in a million years would she have expected Tansy to attempt suicide. She felt sick with shock. And guilty, too. Because she hadn’t foreseen anything like this, although she’d thought she and Tansy were close.
But mostly, she felt a hot, vengeful rage against the man who had carelessly, cruelly, for some whim or because it fed his masculine ego, brought her lovely, loving daughter to the brink of self-destruction. Quite simply, she wanted to kill him.
CHAPTER TWO
‘KYLE?’
Tansy’s voice was scarcely more than a whisper.
Fler instantly crossed to the bed, her anxious eyes on the gold-tipped lashes struggling to open. ‘Tansy...’ She took the slack hand again in hers, smoothed the fine hair away from the clammy forehead. ‘It’s all right, I’m here.’
Tansy’s brow briefly wrinkled. She managed to open her eyes for a moment before they closed heavily. ‘Mummy!’ The old childhood name. ‘Wha’ are you...?’
‘The hospital called me.’ The early morning call, the calm, impersonal voice on the line... ‘Your daughter has been brought into hospital...an overdose...’
‘Where’ Kyle?’ Tansy whispered.
Fler tamped down a fresh spasm of rage. Calmly she said, ‘He had to go. Don’t worry about it now.’
A tear appeared under the closed lashes and ran on to the pillow. Fler said almost fiercely, ‘Don’t cry, darling! Everything’s going to be all right. You’ll see.’
I will kill him, she thought dispassionately. One of these days I damned well will.
* * *
As a serious proposition, the resolution faded overnight. Regretfully, Fler acknowledged that she wasn’t the stuff of which murderers were made. It didn’t stop her from fantasising about doing serious harm to Kyle Ranburn. More realistically, she contemplated laying a complaint with the university authorities, but knew that her own relationship with Tansy might suffer badly from that. And what Tansy needed now was support and rest, not to be unwillingly involved in a vendetta which might well turn public.
It made her heart ache that every time she went into the room she saw the tense expectancy in Tansy’s face turn momentarily to disappointment before she put on a smile for her mother. Neither of them mentioned Kyle Ranburn again, but he was always, Fler was grimly aware, there in spirit, like a spectre at the feast.
The staff told her he hadn’t visited, and although she was sure that it was better for Tansy not to see him again she was furious all over again at his heartlessness. She covertly inspected the card on a basket of flowers that appeared on the bedside locker late on Sunday, but it was from Tansy’s flatmates.
That evening, when they had told her that Tansy would be discharged in the morning, she found him at the ward door when she was on her way out.
She halted abruptly at the sight of him, and said, ‘Have you come to see her at last?’
He shook his head. He looked grim and slightly uncomfortable. As well he might, she thought.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Actually I hoped to see you.’
Her head went up sharply. ‘Why?’
‘I thought...we should talk about your daughter.’
A group of visitors brushed past them, carrying flowers and magazines, and he lightly took her arm, moving her to one side.
Fler pulled away from him, her mouth tight.
He said, ‘Can I buy you a cup of coffee? Somewhere that we can talk with a bit of privacy.’
She said, ‘I’ll buy my own coffee, thanks.’ She didn’t want to take anything from this man. ‘But I’d like to talk to you, too.’ She had a few home truths to tell him.
* * *
They walked to a coffee bar. He seemed to know the area, and while the place he chose wasn’t upmarket it was clean and cosy and the coffee was good. He led her to a booth and saw her seated before he slid in opposite her. He asked her what the doctors had said, and she told him that they didn’t expect any permanent after-effects.
He nodded and said formally, ‘I’m glad. That must be a burden lifted for you.’
Fler didn’t answer. The booth was small, and she was conscious of his masculine aura, a sense of controlled power, of assurance about the straight dark brows, the clear-cut mouth, the broad shoulders under a faultlessly cut charcoal suit. Today he wore a grey tie patterned with tiny red diamonds, and his paler grey shirt was pristine. When he spooned half a teaspoon of sugar into his coffee she saw a gleaming cufflink in his sleeve, a tiny dark red stone set into one corner of an initialled gold square. Not many men of his age used cufflinks these days. His hands looked smooth but strong and masculine, and he wore no rings.
Although not spectacularly handsome, he had an indefinable low-key attraction. She wasn’t surprised that Tansy had fallen for him. It had probably been all too easy for him to dazzle her, not least because a lecturer was someone she would naturally look up to.
He sat thoughtfully stirring the drink in front of him. When he leaned back and put down the spoon he asked abruptly, ‘Just what did Tansy tell you about me?’
Was he anxious about his job? she wondered. It wouldn’t look good for him to be known to have caused one of his students to attempt suicide. There’d been a time when Tansy had told her everything, but lately they had tacitly refrained from discussing him.
‘Does it matter?’ she asked. ‘You needn’t worry that I’m going to make trouble. For myself, I’d love to see you come thoroughly unstuck. But Tansy’s welfare is my main concern, and I don’t think she needs any more stress right now.’
‘Is it any use telling you that I’m not responsible for what she did?’
‘Legally, I’m sure you’re in the clear. Morally—’
‘Is she getting help?’
‘Help?’
‘Psychiatric help,’ he said bluntly.
‘It’s good of you to be so concerned—at last,’ Fler said. ‘The hospital crisis team talked to her.’
‘Crisis team?’
‘Nurses who liaise with a psychiatrist, but they didn’t feel it was necessary for her to see him.’
‘No?’ He was looking at her in a slightly bothered, undecided fashion. ‘She’s not normal, you know.’
Fler gave him a hostile stare. She’d seldom heard anything so ridiculous. Tansy wasn’t the only girl in the world to over-react when her first love-affair went wrong. No one had suggested she was mentally ill. ‘If you mean that she’s mad to think that you are worth trying to kill herself over, I’d have to agree.’
She saw him quell a spurt of temper. He said levelly, ‘It’s not just that. She’s been—’ he spread his hands ‘—fantasising about things.’
‘About you.’
‘Well...yes.’ He bent his head, almost as if embarrassed, and rubbed a hand briefly at the back of his neck. ‘It’s...a difficult situation,’ he said.
‘You mean, since you lost interest in her.’
‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ he said less patiently. ‘Whatever Tansy likes to think, there was never any great love-affair.’
‘I see. Just a sordid little encounter or two, a bit of harmless fun?’ Her voice was raw with resentment. It hurt to think he had taken so lightly what Tansy had so generously offered him.
‘There was nothing sordid about it,’ he said shortly.
Tansy certainly hadn’t thought so. She’d thought it was the love-story of the century. ‘And it wasn’t harmless either,’ Fler said swiftly, ‘for Tansy.’
‘Look,’ he said, his eyes holding hers. ‘For what it’s worth, I suppose I handled it badly. I tried at first to let her down lightly. It didn’t work. In the end maybe I was too—brutal. What you don’t seem to understand is how unreasonable she was. I couldn’t let it go on. And there was nothing in it. It was all totally one-sided.’
‘Are you saying she imagined all of it?’ This was unbelievable. ‘That you never took her out, never touched her?’
He was silent for a moment. ‘I went out with her,’ he admitted. ‘A couple of times. I didn’t know then that she was a student,’ he told her.
Fler allowed her brows to rise fractionally in disbelief, but said nothing.
He said, ‘She looked all of twenty-five when we met. It was a party. We talked. I took her home. The point is—’
‘The point is, you don’t want anything more to do with her.’ He was obviously bent on denying any real involvement, any culpability.
He hesitated only briefly. ‘In a nutshell, yes. But I’d like you to understand—’
‘I understand perfectly. You’ve been playing my daughter for months like a fish on a line. Now the game’s suddenly turned serious and you want out! Your career might suffer if this story gets about. You even feel a little—just a little—guilty. Are you married?’ It was a suspicion she’d entertained for some time, been afraid to voice to Tansy.
He looked startled at that, and angry. ‘No, I’m not married! If I had been I’d never have gone near the girl in the first place.’
Fler let her scepticism show. His type didn’t change their spots with marriage. He’d probably still be running after nubile students when he was in his dotage, and not able so easily to persuade them into falling in love with him.
‘She’s a nice young woman,’ he said quietly. ‘I liked her. But the whole thing got out of hand.’ He shook his head. ‘I think you ought to persuade her to have some kind of counselling.’
The nurses had suggested it, but when Tansy rejected the idea they hadn’t really argued. The consensus seemed to be that she’d over-reacted and given everyone, including herself, a nasty fright, but that it was unlikely to be repeated.
‘Would that salve your conscience, Mr Ranburn?’ Fler asked him. ‘It’s easy for you, isn’t it? Turn her over to other people to pick up the pieces, and find yourself some other poor little innocent whose life you can wreck.’
He leaned across the small table, the hazel eyes greening with temper. ‘I have not wrecked anyone’s life!’
Ignoring the denial, Fler went on, her own temper rising, her skin heating and the nerve-ends prickling. ‘Is Tansy the first one to go this far? Maybe I should talk to the university board about your activities with female students. People like you ought to be stopped before they do any permanent damage.’
‘I’ve tried to explain,’ he said tightly. ‘But you don’t want to listen—’
‘Has it occurred to you,’ she asked him, going much further than she had ever intended, ‘that Tansy might be pregnant?’
She stopped abruptly there. Until she said it, she hadn’t realised herself that it was a fear that had been lurking at the back of her mind.
She appeared to have stunned him, too. He stared at her for a second, then gave a harsh bark of laughter. ‘If she is, she’d better not try to lay that at my door!’
Fler felt a hot thundering of pure fury in her head. But before it could explode into action, he’d pushed himself out of the booth and stood up. Looking down at her, he said, ‘I don’t think I’ve got through to you any more than I could to your daughter. But if you want a bit of advice, here it is. Because I’m just about at the end of my patience with her. Get her off my back!’
Watching his rapid progress to the door, Fler barely restrained herself from hurling her untouched cup of coffee after him.