Читать книгу Now or Never - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 8

‘What do you mean, a man telephoned asking for me?’ The anger in Laura’s voice made Joey cower away from her.

‘What man, Joey?’ Laura demanded. ‘What did he say?’ She could feel the heat in her face. Her heart was hammering against her chest, driven by anger. Anger and not excitement, no way was she going to allow it to be excitement.

Her fingers curled into her palms, making tight fists. It had to be Ryan. It couldn’t possibly be anyone else. He must have got the number from Human Resources. He had no right to ring her. No right to …

‘What did he say? Did he tell you his name?’ Her voice rose, sharpening with each word, frightening Joey even more. He had intuitively picked up on Laura’s antagonism towards his mother and that increased his fear of her.

‘Did he tell you his name?’ Laura was shouting now, too wrapped up in her own fear to be aware of Joey’s. Right now he was just an irritating child who, through either malice or stupidity, was refusing to give her the information she so desperately needed.

‘Joey?’ Laura exploded, grabbing hold of him and giving him an impatient little shake before she could stop herself. Almost immediately she released him, but it was too late. Just as she did so Nicki walked into the kitchen.

‘Let go of him! Let go of him, Laura!’

Furiously Nicki rushed to protect her son, kneeling down to gather him up in her arms as Laura released him.

‘How dare you? How dare you touch my child?’ she blazed. ‘Joey, it’s all right, it’s all right, you’re safe now,’ she comforted her son, rocking him in her arms as Laura looked on in a mixture of contempt and bitterness.

‘That’s right!’ she threw at Nicki. ‘You rush to protect your precious child—but you can’t always be here to protect him, Nicki. After all, I haven’t forgotten that there was no one to protect me from you!’ Instinctively Laura tried to defend herself and her actions.

‘What? I never did anything to hurt you!’ Nicki denied immediately.

‘You’re lying,’ Laura spat out, giving her a thin-lipped, acid smile. ‘But then you would, wouldn’t you? Anyway, for your information, I wasn’t hurting Joey. And if I were you, instead of treating him like a baby, I’d spend a bit more time making sure he knows how to take a telephone message properly.’

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Joey protested from the comfort of Nicki’s arms. ‘The man didn’t say any name. He just asked if you were here.’

Laura had been terrifying her son half to death simply because of a phone call? Nicki’s mouth compressed.

‘Whoever he is, Laura, if he wants to speak to you enough he will ring back.’

Laura’s face burned even hotter as Nicki made no attempt to conceal the smugly superior tone of her voice. Immediately she reacted to it, saying fiercely, ‘It’s typical of you to think what you’re obviously thinking, but you’re wrong. I don’t want him to ring back. In fact, I don’t want to speak to him at all. To speak to him or to see him. You see, unlike you, I have no intention of becoming involved in an affair with a married man or having sex with him behind his wife’s back.’

As she listened to Laura’s outburst Nicki’s face went white. Releasing Joey, she told him huskily, ‘Joey, go up to your room and watch your videos for a while before it’s time for school, will you, darling?’

Over Joey’s blond head their glances fought, neither of them allowing herself to give way. As soon as the door had closed behind Joey Nicki demanded, ‘What is it exactly that you’re trying to say, Laura?’

Laura shot her a bitterly cynical glare, hating what was happening but powerless to stop it. The words, the pain, the anguish had been dammed up inside her for too long to be controlled, now that she had released them.

‘What do you think I’m trying to say? You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. And don’t bother trying to lie about it. I was there! I heard you. They’d sent me home from school because I wasn’t feeling well. I tried to tell them that there wasn’t any point because there wasn’t anyone there to look after me.’ She gave a mirthless smile. ‘After all, my mother had only been taken into hospital a few days earlier. To give my father a rest, that’s what they’d said when I went to see her. But it wasn’t a rest he was getting, was it, Nicki? He wasn’t resting on the bed in the guest room at all, was he? No. He was lying there whilst you—’

‘Stop it.’ Appalled and sick with shock, Nicki covered her ears, her shock increasing as Laura flew at her, tearing her hands from her ears as she screamed.

‘No! You will listen, just as I had to listen to the pair of you! Have you any idea how disgusting it sounds hearing your own father sobbing with sickening lust whilst his whore relieves him? I heard every word. Every sound … every sound,’ Laura stressed savagely.

Tears of rage were pouring down her face—a face that was contorted into an expression of fury and loathing, the strength of the emotion emanating from her such that Nicki could almost feel it heating the air between them.

In contrast she felt icy cold with shock. She could feel herself shivering as the nausea churned unpleasantly in her stomach. She tried to defend herself, to stop the flood of obscenity pouring from Laura’s mouth, protesting, ‘Laura, it wasn’t like that! You don’t understand …’

‘No, I don’t!’ Laura agreed furiously. ‘I don’t understand how my father could have possibly wanted to take you to bed in my home, my mother’s home, whilst she was dying in a hospital bed. I don’t understand how he can ever have wanted to touch you, never mind do the things he did to you.

‘You couldn’t wait, could you, Nicki? You wanted to desecrate my home, my mother, so badly that you couldn’t even wait for him to undress you. I heard you begging him, screaming to him to take you, to fill you. I heard him … My mother was dying and the pair of you were shagging each other like animals. You couldn’t wait for her to die, could you, Nicki? You couldn’t wait to take her place. You didn’t wait, did you?’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Nicki protested, white-faced. ‘Laura, please listen to me.’

‘Listen to you?’ She gave a mirthless laugh. ‘That’s what he wants me to do! My boss … the reason I have had to come here, the one place where I know I’ll be able to resist the temptation to give in to him, because you’re here, Nicki, and every time I look at you I remember what you did and how much I hated you then and still hate you now for it.

‘A married man with a dying wife. Was it good for you, Nicki, knowing that she was dying? Did that add that extra bit of something to your enjoyment? Did you think of her when my father was—?’

Laura gasped in shock as Nicki slapped her face. The sound ricocheted through the kitchen as her head snapped back.

Her eyes glittering with contempt, Laura ran to the back door, pulling it open.