Читать книгу Lesson To Learn - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 5

SARAH settled herself comfortably against the trunk of the willow and closed her eyes. Letting the soft gurgle of the stream gently lull her towards sleep, she firmly ignored the pangs of guilt trying to remind her that she was supposed to be thinking about her future; about her superiors’concern that because of her lack of detachment, her apparent inability to stop herself from becoming emotionally involved with her pupils, she was seriously hindering her career as a teacher.

Ignoring the niggling reminder that her cousin had given her this morning, that sleep could sometimes be used as an anodyne against depression, she told herself that it was as a result of the stress of the recently ended term that she felt so exhausted, so drained, so completely unable to take charge of her life and direct it firmly back into the ambitious channels she had planned for herself during her time at university.

Then it had all seemed so simple: she would get her degree, she would go into teaching; she would progress up her career ladder, perhaps even moving into the private sector for a while before applying for the challenging position of head teacher, and she would attain that goal before her thirtieth birthday.

And yet here she was at twenty-seven, acknowledging—or, rather, being forced to acknowledge—that in her original formula for her career she had neglected to take into account one vital factor, namely that she would become so involved with her pupils, so concerned for them, that her own needs, her own plans, her own life, would become completely submerged in her desire to help them.

Exhaustion was how her doctor had sympathetically described the intense physical and mental weakness which had overtaken her midway through last term; stress—the stress of modern living and of a job that made far too many demands upon her.

Her superiors had confirmed that diagnosis, but had been less sympathetic, telling her that her problems were self-inflicted; pointing out that no one had asked her to take on the extra responsibility of organising out-of-school activities for the twelve-year-olds in her care; that no one but herself was to blame for the fact that she seemed to have no defences against taking her pupils and their problems to her heart and suffering with them.

The enormous comprehensive where she worked had a far too rapid turnover of staff, quickly disillusioned by the problems caused by dealing with such vast numbers of children; the children themselves, many of them from disadvantaged backgrounds, were sometimes difficult to deal with, Sarah had to acknowledge that, but most of them, given time and encouragement, would respond…

She gave a small sigh. Forget about your job, her doctor had advised her. Take yourself off somewhere relaxing; lie in the sun…unwind…

Of course, that would have been impossible. Teachers did not spend the entire long summer break without any work to do, as so many people outside the profession seemed to believe, but then had come the news that, even if she was not actually being formally suspended, her future as a teacher was in grave doubt. Which was why she had come here to Shropshire to stay with her cousin and her husband in their quiet country village, where Sally, her cousin, had promised her she would find all the peace and relaxation she needed.

Ross and Sally had been married for two years; Ross worked for an innovative engineering firm in Ludlow, and Sally was an illustrator, working from a small downstairs study in their pretty ex-farmhouse.

Both of them had made Sarah welcome, but their jobs meant that she was left very much to her own devices during the day. Which was what she wanted…or at least what her doctor had said she needed. And it was true that since she had come to Shropshire two weeks ago the problems of her pupils, and the anxieties caused by her over-involvement with them, were beginning to lessen their grip on her, but even that was causing her to feel guilt, to remind herself that they, unlike her, were not fortunate enough to have kind cousins living in idyllic country surroundings, so that they too could escape from the enervating, choking heat of a city simmering under a very un-English and long-lasting heatwave.

On the news at night there were photographs of parched dry fields and parks, of empty streams, and city streets with melting tarmac, and hard blue skies.

A small plopping sound from the stream caused her to open her eyes and focus on the fish jumping out of the water to catch flies. It was a fair-sized trout, and the sight of it made her smile, remembering childhood fishing trips with her father and brother.

Her parents were in Canada now, visiting John and Heather and their twin sons…which was why Sally’s invitation had been such a godsend.

Sarah had always got on well with her cousin. Sally was her senior by three years and there had always been a bond between them. She had been chief bridesmaid at Sally and Ross’s wedding two years ago, although it had been over a year since she had last seen them.

The shock Sally had tried to hide when she had met her from the train had been quickly followed by her cousin’s verbally expressed concern over her loss of weight and the tension dulling her skin and her eyes.

When she had first arrived no one seeing them together would ever have believed that she was the younger, Sarah acknowledged, but now, as she gave in to her body’s demand for rest and relaxation and tried to put aside her mental and emotional guilt at being so self-indulgent, she was slowly starting to regain some of the weight she had lost so that her five-foot frame looked more slender than gaunt, and her skin had begun to lose its city pallor and strain. That was the trouble with being a redhead: at times of emotional, physical or mental upset one’s skin did tend to reflect those stresses and become so pale in contrast to one’s hair that the effect was over-dramatic.

How the days she had spent outside had given her a warm peachy glow, and Ross had jokingly remarked over dinner the previous night, and Sally had commented as she was coming out this morning, that she was once again starting to look like the stunning sexy redhead who had generated so much male curiosity and comment at the wedding.

Sarah had pulled a face and grimaced at her. She personally would never have described herself as either sexy or stunning. She moved, trying not to recall the problems she had had when she had first entered teaching and some of her male colleagues, and even the older male pupils, had refused to take her seriously because of her looks. It was the combination of red hair and startlingly intense green eyes, plus the high cheekbones and pointed chin she had inherited from her mother, that was responsible for the unintentional sensuality of her looks.

In her teens those looks had caused her endless problems, often antagonising her own sex and making it difficult for her to make friends, and equally often leading the boys she met to assume that she was far more sexually aware and adventurous than was actually the case.

At university she had found that the best way to deal with the problem was to adopt a firm no-nonsense manner in such direct contrast to her looks that it immediately made it obvious that she was at university for the serious business of studying and obtaining her degree and not to have a good time.

By the time she had left university and started her first job she had learned to tuck her long hair into a neat chignon, and to play down her facial features by wearing only a minimum of makeup. She always chose sensible, sturdy clothes, suppressing her own unruly and dangerous urge to wear something more feminine and appealing.

Sally had grimaced with distaste when she had met her from the train, immediately condemning the beige shirtwaister dress she was wearing as unbelievably frumpy and sexless.

Sarah had started to point out that, as a teacher, the last thing she wanted was to be regarded as sexually provocative, but she had been too exhausted, too drained, to bother. Just as she had been unable to find the energy to resist when Sally had dragged her off to Ludlow and ruthlessly insisted on replacing almost everything in the sparse wardrobe she had brought with her.

Which was why today she was dressed in a skimpy halter-necked white top and a pair of cut-off denim jeans, her bare feet thrust into a pair of trainers, her hair caught up on top of her head in an untidy pony-tail to keep it off the back of her neck.

This heatwave was so enervating. It was an effort to think, never mind to move, or was it more because she was so exhausted that it seemed so much simpler to let others direct the course of her life, to simply give in and let herself go with the flow?

Behind her, upstream, a small creature disturbed by the passage of someone along the path made a noise that set the birds off in sharp shrill cries of warning.

Immediately Sarah felt her own muscles tense in response. This path was so quiet that she had almost begun to think of it as her own private retreat. As she drew herself further into the protection of the willow’s overhanging branches she hoped that whoever was coming towards her would walk past her without stopping to chat.

It was a new experience for her, this reluctance to involve herself with anyone. A result, perhaps, of the lecture she had received from her superiors when they had warned her that her over-involvement with her pupils was detrimental to her career.

She closed her eyes, determinedly blotting out the sound of someone approaching her hiding-place, but it was impossible to ignore the timid and very youthful voice that said uncertainly and very anxiously, ‘Excuse me, but is this the right way to Ludlow?’

Unwillingly she opened her eyes.

A child…a boy, no more than six years old at most, was standing watching her. He was fair-haired and blue-eyed, a little too thin for his age and with an anxiety about him that her senses quickly registered and recognised.

Even while she was telling herself that, whoever he was and whatever he was doing here all on his own on this remote country footpath, it was nothing to do with her, and that all she had to do was to answer his question and set him on his way, another part of her, that compassionate, caring, womanly part of her that had already caused her so many problems was wondering who he was, and why he was here, so very, very much alone, and so very, very young.

As she sat up and studied him she fibbed, ‘I don’t really know, but I’ve got a map somewhere here with me…if you’d like to come and sit down for a moment I’ll have a look at it.’

That was true at any rate, she did have a map, and she also had the very generous lunch that Mrs Beattie, Sally’s wonderful daily, had packed up for her that morning.

Reluctantly the child took a step towards her, looking backwards over his shoulder as he did so. Now there was fear in his eyes as well as tension.

What was he running away from? Sarah wondered as she deliberately, very slowly opened the rucksack beside her, and equally deliberately, with nonchalant casualness, removed a can of soft drink and some sandwiches. The child was betraying his youth by his very lack of preparation for his odyssey. His clothes, too, seemed to have been chosen without much regard for their practicality—a pair of heavy jeans, a T-shirt, and on his feet what looked like a pair of baseball boots. The jeans were far too hot and heavy for this weather and they were also too big for him. His T-shirt and his boots, though, were obviously expensive, which ruled out the jeans having been bought with extra growing-room…which seemed to suggest that whoever had bought them had not really been sure of his size.

A tiny frown touched her forehead as Sarah deliberately took her time over extricating the map from the rucksack.

Pretending to be unaware of his tension and the anxious way he kept on looking back in the direction he had just come, she patted the ground beside her, and said easily, ‘Come and sit down. I’m afraid I’m not very good with maps, so it may take me quite a while to find out if you’re on the right path. I’m only on holiday here, you see. What about you? Do you live round here?’

She watched him as he automatically started to respond to her question and then caught himself up after he had started to say, ‘Yes. I live…’ his face suddenly settling into stubborn unhappy lines. ‘I’m staying here,’ he told her gruffly. ‘But I don’t really live here.’

‘Ah.’

Sarah unfolded the map, and then, although she herself was not particularly hungry, she unwrapped some of Mrs Beattie’s sandwiches and started to eat one, pausing to indicate the open foil-wrapped package and to say, ‘Would you like a sandwich?’

He nodded his head, and then said huskily, ‘Yes, please. I am rather hungry.’

He had excellent manners; his speech was almost old-fashionedly formal, as though he had spent a long time with older people. Thoughtfully Sarah watched him as he devoured his sandwich.

She knew already that she would not let him go; that she would have to somehow or other win his confidence and then restore him to his family.

A child of his age on his own…there were so many hazards…so many dangers, from man as well as from nature. His family, whoever they were and wherever they lived, must be going frantic with worry if they knew that he was missing.

She suspected he had not come very far and that the exhaustion she could see so clearly in his eyes came more from misery and fear than from the physical effort of having walked a long way.

He had a scratch on one arm where he had obviously pushed past a bramble, and there were smears of dirt on his T-shirt. He had finished his sandwich and was eyeing the others in the pile with a hungry intensity that made Sarah hide a small smile as she offered casually, ‘Finished? Have another?’

‘You know,’ she told him as he bit eagerly into the bread, ‘I’m not sure that you are on the right path. From this map, it looks as though…’ She paused, frowning, ignoring the tension she could feel emanating from him. ‘I think you could possibly pick up the path half a mile or so further on.’

‘Half a mile; is that a very long way?’

‘Fairly…and then it’s another six or seven miles to Ludlow. Are you going there for something important?’

As she looked at him she saw that he was avoiding her eyes, not wanting to lie to her, but obviously not wanting to tell her the truth either.

‘Never mind…there might be a short cut,’ she offered, re-studying the map. ‘It’s a pity I don’t have a car, otherwise I could drive you there.’

She paused to see how he was going to react to this suggestion, and was relieved to see hesitance and reluctance.

‘I’m not allowed to go in cars with strangers,’ he told her immediately.

Sarah suppressed a small sigh. Poor kid, hadn’t anyone warned him that talking to strangers could be equally dangerous?

‘No, of course not,’ she agreed gravely, investigating the rucksack and offering him an apple. He was still standing up and she patted the ground beside her again and invited, ‘If you come and sit down here you can have a look at the map. I’m not very good at reading them.’

‘No…my mother isn’t either…’ He broke off, his expression suddenly changing. ‘I mean…she wasn’t.’

He had turned his head, tucking it into his shoulder defensively, a betraying tremor wobbling his voice.

Was his mother no longer alive, as his words seemed to imply, or was she merely no longer a part of his life? Sarah was in no doubt now that he was running away and that he was desperately unhappy, but he was still obeying her suggestion and coming to sit down beside her.

He was old enough to have left his baby-fat behind him, but his arms and legs still had the softness of early childhood, and as he sat down beside her he smelled of clean young skin and sunshine.

‘My name’s Sarah…what’s yours?’ she asked him as she moved the map so that he could look at it.

‘Robert,’ he told her, ‘although…’

‘Robert…that’s a very grown-up name,’ Sarah admired. ‘Doesn’t anyone call you Bobbie?’

He shook his head.

‘My…my…Nana used to call me Robbie, but he said it was a baby’s name. He calls me Robert.’ His face suddenly crumpled up, tears shimmering in his eyes, and Sarah respected that the ‘he’ referred to with such anger and dislike was most probably his father.

Unwilling to probe too much and to frighten him into silence before she had obtained from him the information she needed, she didn’t push him but said simply and pacifically, ‘Well, Robert is a very grown-up name, and I expect you must be…well, at least eight.’

She could see the way her words caused his chest to swell with pride and his tears to disappear.

‘I’m six,’ he told her. ‘Almost seven. Well, I’ll be seven in May.’

In May. It was only July now, which meant that he was in fact only just six, but Sarah widened her eyes admiringly and commented that she had thought he was much, much older.

‘Won’t your…your nana be missing you, though, Robert?’ she suggested gently. ‘She’ll be wondering where you are, I’m sure. Did you leave her a note?’

Immediately his eyes filled with tears as he shook his head and burst out, ‘Nana’s dead. She died in a car accident with my mother and Tom…and I had to come back here and live with…with him. I hate him. I want to go back home. I don’t want to stay with him any more. Mrs Richards could look after me. She did before when my mother and Tom were away and Nana was ill. I don’t have to stay here with him. My mother told me that. She said I didn’t have to see him if I didn’t want to and I didn’t want to. I don’t like him. My mother said he’d never wanted me anyway…that he only wanted me to get at her.’

As she listened to the jumbled staccato words Sarah fought down the wave of compassion making her own eyes moisten and her heart ache.

From what he wasn’t saying as much as from what he was, she was beginning to build up a clear picture of what must have happened. His parents were either separated or divorced; he had obviously lived with his mother and perhaps his grandmother as well in some other part of the country, and from what he had said it sounded as though he had lost them in a car accident and was now living with his father.A father who, it seemed, had never wanted him and who had perhaps only reluctantly accepted responsibility for him now. Poor child, no wonder he was so unhappy, no wonder he was running away, but, much as her heart ached for him, much as she sympathised with him, she had to find a way of discovering where he lived and who his father was.

‘So you’re going to find Mrs Richards, is that it?’ she hazarded, causing him to nod his head. ‘Where does she live? Is it far away?’

‘She lives in London,’ he told her importantly.

‘London; that’s a long way to go,’ Sarah commented sympathetically. ‘A very long way. Have you been walking for a long time?’

‘I left after breakfast,’ he told her immediately and innocently, causing Sarah a panic of guilt for the way she was deceiving him. But it was for his own good…his own protection. ‘I had to wait until he…my father had gone to work. Mrs Jacobs went out shopping. She told me not to go out of the garden. I don’t like her.’

Mrs Jacobs. Sarah bit her bottom lip. Surely she had heard Mrs Beattie mentioning a Mrs Jacobs who was one of her neighbours in the village? She had gained the impression that the two women were not good friends and that Sally’s cleaner heartily despised and disliked the other woman.

‘Did…did you leave your father a note?’ Sarah asked him.

He shook his head, his face settling into a stubborn mask.

‘He won’t care. He’ll be glad to see the back of me,’ he told her. ‘Mrs Jacobs says I’m a nuisance and that I cause too much dis…dis…’

‘Disruption?’ Sarah suggested. She suppressed a sigh as he nodded his head, plainly impressed by her mind-reading abilities. Much as she sympathised with him, she was going to have to get his address out of him and take him home.

Unpleasant though both Mrs Jacobs and his father sounded, she could see no obvious signs of any kind of physical or emotional abuse about him, and she was experienced enough to have recognised them had they been there. For all his fear and apprehension, he lacked the desperate silence, the smell of fear that seemed to emanate from such children.

But he was unhappy, desperately so, and she could not help wondering a little about his father, questioning what manner of man he was. She had the impression from what Robert had told her that his father saw him as a burden…a nuisance.

‘And that’s why you’re going to London…to find Mrs Richards.’

‘I’d rather live with her than with my father,’ Robert told her, tears filling his eyes as he repeated, ‘I don’t like him.’

Instinctively Sarah opened her arms to him, and he ran into them, his small body shaken by sobs as she held him, soothing him, comforting him. Poor baby, and he was still only a baby, for all his attempts to pretend otherwise.

Soon, when he had calmed down a little, she would try to coax him into agreeing to go home, but for the moment it was more important to win his confidence and comfort him than to question him, and so she let him cry, gently rocking him, while she smoothed his fair hair.

Absorbed in what she was doing, she missed the warning signs of the birds’ flight as an intruder disturbed them, so that her first intimation of his arrival was when the protective fronds of the willow were swept aside, and she looked up to see a very tall and very angry man standing glaring furiously at her.

‘Robert.’

The curt demand for the child’s attention gave away their relationship even before Robert started trembling against her, clinging on to her.

‘It’s all right, Robbie,’ she whispered, soothing him, anger darkening her own eyes at Robert’s father’s lack of sensitivity.

‘If you would kindly let go of my son…’

The words were a demand rather than a request, and immediately Sarah felt herself reacting against them, her already low opinion of him dropping several more notches as she reflected on his poor handling of the situation, and his apparent inability to see that his attitude was simply terrifying and upsetting his son.

‘You must be Robert’s father,’ she commented, forcing back her anger and trying to stand up. Not an easy feat with Robert still clinging to her, but somehow or other she managed it, automatically assuming her classroom manner, forgetting how inappropriately it went with her casual clothes and almost childish pony-tail and makeup-less face, until she saw how at first angrily and even contemptuously she was being observed.

‘Yes, I am,’ he agreed flatly. ‘But I’ve no idea who you are, or what you’re doing with my son. However, I’ll have you know that the police take a pretty dim view of child abduction.’

Abduction… Sarah sucked in a mouthful of air, too stunned by what he was implying to be able to respond verbally.

Robert was clinging even harder to her now, and she wasn’t sure which of them was shaking the most, Robert from fear or she from anger.

As she swallowed the air she had gulped she retaliated with some heat.

‘Yes, and they take an equally dim view of…of parental cruelty.’

‘Parental cruelty?’

He had started to walk towards them, and now he came to an abrupt halt. His skin was tanned but suddenly his face had lost all its colour. Not from shame or guilt, but from rage. She could see it glittering in his eyes. He had very, very pale blue eyes, like shards of ice, she had thought at first, but now suddenly they were burning so hot that she could almost feel the searing lick of that heat against her skin.

Unlike Robert, he wasn’t fair-haired but much darker, although she noticed that his thick dark hair was touched faintly with gold at the ends as though he had at some time or other spent a long, long time in a very hot climate.

Surprisingly, though, facially he was very like his son, or, rather, Robert was a miniature version of him. They had the same bone-structure, the same nose, the same mouth, but whereas in Robert that full bottom lip trembled with baby emotion and vulnerability, in his father it betokened a sensuality and sexuality which made Sarah itch to distance herself physically from him, her body alive to a sense of danger that went far deeper than any immediate and conscious awareness of his anger and irritation. She didn’t allow herself to ponder on this, though; she was far too concerned about Robert and his panic-stricken reaction to his father’s arrival on the scene to have the time to concentrate on her own atavistic awareness of his father as a man…no, not as a man…as a male…a hunting, arrogant, sexual male being to whom she was a natural form of prey.

‘Parental cruelty,’ he repeated grimly now, jerking her attention back in focus. ‘What the hell are you trying to say? What has Robert been telling you?’ he demanded.

Without making any move towards her, without either raising his voice or using any kind of aggressive force, he was nevertheless attempting to intimidate her, and she responded immediately to that attempted intimidation, raising herself to her full height, her chin firming, her eyes steely and cool as they held his gaze.

‘Robert hasn’t said anything,’ she told him not quite truthfully. ‘He was in far too distressed a state. He’s a very unhappy little boy,’ she added pointedly, adding, to reinforce the point, ‘He was on his way to Ludlow…to London.’

She saw the way the blood surged up under the other’s skin, and knew how much he hated being confronted with the truth. In other circumstances she might have felt sorry for him. He was wearing an expensive business suit, and she noticed that his hands were badly scratched, and his shoes covered in dust, as though he had pushed his way relentlessly down the narrow stream-side path, desperately seeking his missing son. But motivated by what? Anger? She could certainly see that in his face, along with impatience and irritation, but what she could not see there was any love, any remorse, any guilt.

‘Come here, Robert,’he was demanding tersely now, frowning when his son refused to obey him. He was plainly unused to dealing with children, Sarah suspected, and, thinking of the child clinging piteously to her side, she said quietly,

‘Perhaps if I came back with you…?’

Immediately the tanned male face tightened in rejection, the blue eyes cold and biting as they studied her. She could see the refusal forming on his lips, but before he could speak Robert burst out frantically, ‘I won’t go back. I won’t go with you…I hate you…I hate you…and Mummy hated you too.’

He was crying again, tearing, racking sobs that, if they 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 so much and not any actual mistreatment by his father.

Oddly, despite his antagonism towards her, she could not quite convince herself that Gray Philips was mistreating his child. He had been too angry for that…his reaction to his son’s disappearance too free of guilt and deception to suggest that he knew exactly why Robert had been running away.

He was walking ahead of them now, pausing to hold aside the vicious brambles blocking the path, his frown deepening as he saw the way Robert clung to her side.

It was twenty minutes before they were in sight of the village, but Gray Philips didn’t walk towards it, instead branching off on to an even narrower and more overgrown path, which came to an abrupt end outside a solid wooden gate set into a high brick wall.

Gray Philips opened the gate for her, standing to one side so that she and Robert could precede him through it. Out of good manners, or as a means of ensuring that…that what? That she didn’t pick Robert up and run off with him…What chance would she have had of outpacing a tough adult male like him?

The garden inside the brick wall was overgrown, the brambles even thicker than those on the path outside. Beyond the wilderness of undergrowth a cordon of trees guarded a green lawn and formal flowerbeds, and beyond that lay the house, all mellow brick and unevenly leaded windows.

It was old, Sarah recognised, Elizabethan, and much, much larger than her cousin’s farmhouse.

Whatever Robert’s father might not be, he was quite obviously a very wealthy man. But wealth did not buy happiness, and, even while she was admiring the house, she was not envying him the money that had enabled him to buy it. What good was money when his son was so obviously afraid of him…when his wife had presumably left him? Had she been afraid of him as well? But she must have loved him once. She had married him, after all…they had had a child.

A tiny shudder went through her as she recognised the dangerous course of her thoughts. To question someone’s personal life so intimately and intensely, even within the privacy of her own thoughts, was so alien a response within her that she instinctively recoiled from acknowledging what she was doing.

Robert’s footsteps lagged as they crossed the lawn. He was holding back, dragging his feet. His father stopped, frowning down at both of them.

‘Is Mrs Jacobs still here?’

Sarah found she was holding her breath, praying that Gray Philips would deal sensitively with his son…would hear as she did the thread of fear that ran beneath the words.

If he did, he gave no sign of it.

‘No, she isn’t,’ he told Robert curtly, and then, as though unable to stop himself, he dropped down on one knee in front of the small boy and placed his hands on his shoulders, demanding gruffly, ‘Robert, why did you do it? Why did you run away? You must have known how worried Mrs Jacobs would be. You know you aren’t allowed to go outside the garden…you know.’

Robert was still clinging to Sarah’s hands. He had started to tremble violently, and tears poured down his face as he burst out passionately, ‘I don’t like it here. I want to go home…I want Nana…I want Mrs Richards. I don’t like it here.’

Immediately his father’s hands dropped from Robert’s shoulders. His face was in shadow as he turned slightly away, his voice harsh and low as he said roughly, ‘Robert, your grandmother is dead. You know that.’

He stopped as Sarah made an instinctive sound of shocked distress.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he challenged her. ‘Lie to him? Pretend that none of it happened…that his mother, her lover and his grandmother are still alive?

‘Come on, Robert. Let’s get you inside, and this time no running away.’

As he stood up he took hold of Robert’s arm, firmly taking charge of him, but Robert still clung to Sarah, pleading with her not to leave him.

His father might not be actively unkind to him, but he seemed to have little or no idea of how to deal with him, Sarah recognised as she instinctively tried to soothe Robert’s panic, smoothing the soft hair back off his hot face as she promised, ‘If you’re a good boy and go with your father now, Robert, I’ll come and see you tomorrow if you like.’

‘There’s no need for that.’

She met the look Gray Philips gave her with an equally challenging one of her own.

‘Not according to you,’ she agreed coldly. ‘But Robert—’

‘I don’t want you to leave me. I want you to stay with me,’ Robert said, and burst out crying.

Kneeling down beside him, she tried to comfort him as best she could.

‘I can’t stay now, Robert,’ she told him. ‘My cousin will be wondering where I am, but I promise I’ll come and see you tomorrow.’

She looked defiantly at Gray Philips as she said the words, challenging him to refuse to allow her to see his son, and then, before Gray could say anything to her, and desperately trying to blot out Robert’s tearful pleas to her to stay, she turned her back on both of them and hurried back towards the wooden gate.