The Bachelor's Bargain. Jessica Steele

didn’t get it,’ he said glumly, and, dropping the shopping down on the kitchen table, ‘How about you—did you get it?’

      He meant the money, she knew. ‘N-no, actually, I…’

      ‘Merren!’ he exclaimed hoarsely. ‘You couldn’t sell Mother’s ring? Oh Lord, this is the end!’ He collapsed on to a kitchen chair, his head in his hands, his despair total. ‘That’s it—I’ll go to prison, Carol will divorce me, I…’

      ‘Robert!’ Merren cried. Prison! This was the first she’d heard of the mention of prison! ‘You’re just being dramatic.’

      ‘You don’t know the half of it!’

      ‘You’ve been in trouble before? Financial trouble?’

      ‘You try bringing up a family—and maintaining a wife with expensive tastes,’ he said bitterly.

      As she looked at him, Merren saw for the first time that her big, dependable brother didn’t seem so big and dependable after all. For the first time she noticed a certain weakness around his mouth. But that didn’t make her love him less. He had their father’s mouth. In fact he suddenly seemed a lot more like her father than her warm, generous-hearted mother.

      ‘You have a lovely wife and a lovely family,’ Merren reminded him, not liking at all that he seemed to be taking a snipe at his wife.

      ‘And I’ll have the not so lovely bailiffs hammering on the door if those outstanding bills aren’t settled by Monday,’ he retorted sullenly. ‘Are you sure you haven’t got that money, Merren? You promised you’d sell that ring; you know you did.’

      ‘I did sell it,’ she confessed, but before she could tell him how the money had been stolen from her, his face was lit by a tremendous look of relief.

      ‘You little terror!’ he exclaimed, his face all huge smiles suddenly. ‘You’ve been winding me up, Merren Shepherd! How much did you get for it?’

      ‘T-two thousand, but…’

      ‘Two thousand. Great!’ He beamed. ‘You were robbed, of course,’ he said of the jeweller, Merren winced at the accuracy of the remark. ‘But two thousand, as you know, will settle the blighters. Oh, Merren, it feels as if a ton of weight has been lifted off my shoulders. For a while there, you wicked imp, I felt quite suicidal.’ Oh, heavens. Merren quailed at the enormity of what he had just confessed. ‘Where is it?’ he asked.

      Good question. She felt tears prick the backs of her eyes. She turned away from him, knowing that, suicidal or not, she was going to have to douse that look of tremendous relief. ‘I w-was…’ she began, and half turned. It was a mistake to look at him. She loved him; he was her family. ‘I’m—er—getting it tomorrow,’ she heard herself state.

      And Robert opined, ‘Honestly, you’d think a jeweller of all people would have two thousand in cash on the premises, wouldn’t you?’

      ‘You would,’ she agreed, and found she was taking up Robert’s notion that she was going to have to go back to the jeweller’s tomorrow because they normally paid via cheque and didn’t deal much in cash. ‘It’s a security thing apparently.’

      The conversation came to an end then, when Queenie and Kitty raced down the stairs and into the kitchen chorusing, ‘I’m starving.’

      Robert looked at Merren, who would normally have seen to their appetites, but she was reeling under the enormity of what she had done—and what she was panickingly realising she was going to have to do now.

      ‘I’ve a letter I need to post,’ she excused, and, finding a stamp in the bureau, went upstairs to collect the letter she had written to her father.

      She stayed in her room some minutes, contemplating her options while the words ‘prison’, ‘suicide’, ‘divorce’, ‘family break-up’ whirled around in her head. She couldn’t allow any of that to happen. So what options were there?

      She’d post her letter to her father, though since he hadn’t even bothered to reply to Robert’s letter, she saw little hope that any plea from her would fare any better.

      As if trying to avoid thinking of the man whose parting words had been, ‘If you change your mind about the money—give me a ring,’ she dwelt on the eldest member of their family, Uncle Amos.

      Amos Yardley lived a ten-minute drive away, was her mother’s brother, and Merren thought the world of him. He had been more of a father to her than her own, even before her parents had separated.

      Dear Uncle Amos. ‘Are you all right for money?’ he’d asked when her mother had died. Merren had determined he would never know how the funeral had nearly cleaned her out; only the best had done for her mother.

      ‘Absolutely!’ she’d assured him. His two up and two down cottage was collapsing about his ears—he was poorer than they were.

      It was partly because she hadn’t wanted him to worry, when she knew he could do nothing to help, that she hadn’t told him the true reason Robert and his family had moved in with her. She had let Uncle Amos believe it was because it was so quiet and empty with her mother gone that she had asked Robert to move back to the family home.

      But Uncle Amos, who was an inventor and often quite vague about matters outside his work, had given her a shrewd kind of look, as if suspecting she was doing a little inventing herself. To her mind, though, hers was a necessary invention. For, while Uncle Amos’s inventions earned him nothing—he seemed to subsist by writing articles for clever magazines and barely scraped a living for himself—so Merren knew she would not be approaching him to help Robert out.

      Which left her with the one option she was trying to avoid. She flicked her glance to the dressing table where, without so much as bothering to read it, she had dropped the man Jarad’s card. A sick feeling entered her stomach. She didn’t want to do it; she didn’t.

      Merren went over to the dressing table and picked up the card, and read it, and, oh, grief! She worked for an electronics company herself—only a tiny one by comparison, but large enough for her to be familiar with the name Roxford Waring, one of the biggest and most highly respected multinationals in the electronics field. The man Jarad had given her his personal business card, which also listed his home number. Oh, heaven’s above, Jarad Montgomery was a director of Roxford Waring! Was she really contemplating contacting one of their board members with a view to borrowing some money from him?

      Merren needed to think, so she escaped from the house and posted her letter, and, knowing the utter futility of it anyway, called in at the police station and reported having been mugged. She thought it unlikely they would catch the criminals, and knew she would never see her bag again.

      Which, as she bowed to the inevitable and searched for a telephone kiosk—no way could she make this call from home—reminded her that she didn’t even have the price of a phone call with her.

      She didn’t want to make that call; she didn’t, she didn’t. What she wanted to do was to go home, go to bed, and stick her head under the bedclothes—and stay there.

      But there wasn’t only herself to think of here. By reminding herself she had a deeply stressed brother, a deeply depressed sister-in-law, two young nieces and a baby nephew, Merren located a phone box.

      She went in, grabbed at what courage she could find, quickly dialled the operator and asked the operator for a transfer charge call. And, even while she knew her name wouldn’t mean a thing to Jarad Montgomery, she gave it to the operator—and waited.

      The operator went off the line and Merren, feeling all hot and wishing she wasn’t doing this, started to feel certain that even if Jarad Montgomery didn’t refuse to accept the call from her, he most definitely wouldn’t be expecting her to take him up on his offer of, ‘If you change your mind about the money.’

      By the time she heard his ‘Hello’ on the line, Merren was battling with pride—she didn’t want his money anyway.