Lingering Shadows. PENNY JORDAN

on a little longer at Carey’s.’

      ‘So it was Giles’s decision, was it?’ Lucy demanded tauntingly.

      Davina heard the bitterness in her voice and her own heart suddenly felt unbearably heavy. It had been wrong of her to persuade Giles to stay, but what alternative had she had? If he left, the company would collapse. There was literally no one else who could take over. She tried to explain as much to Lucy, but Lucy did not want to listen.

      ‘Giles isn’t doing this for Carey’s, Davina,’ Lucy interrupted her angrily at one point. ‘He’s doing it for you. You know it and I know it. Even Gregory knew it.’

      Davina couldn’t hide her shock. It was reflected in her eyes, in the way her body tensed, her colour fluctuating as she demanded huskily, ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘Oh, come on, Davina. Giles must have told you about the arguments he and Gregory had about the way Gregory was running the company. Giles didn’t approve of the way Gregory was playing with the firm’s money. He was concerned for your future … your security. He even threatened Gregory that he would tell you what was going on. If Gregory had lived he would have sacked Giles, and Giles knew it. Do you honestly think Giles did any of that because of Carey’s? It isn’t Carey’s Giles cares about, Davina. It’s you.’

      ‘No … no, that isn’t true,’ Davina denied, but she felt like Judas, not only denying Giles, but also denying Lucy the right to express her bitterness and pain.

      When she left it was with the feeling that all she had done was to make things worse. The last thing she would do would be to have an affair with another woman’s husband, especially when that woman was a friend; surely Lucy knew that? She liked Giles, of course she did. And yes, she was flattered … comforted even by his obvious concern for her, but that was as far as it went.

      Except that she had used Giles’s concern for her to persuade him to stay on at Carey’s. Except that, in being concerned for her, Giles was very obviously hurting Lucy. And hurting other people was the very last thing Davina wanted to be responsible for.

      From an upstairs window Lucy watched Davina drive away. She ought to hate Davina, but she couldn’t. She felt too afraid. What would she do if Giles did leave her? She loved him, she had always loved him and she always would, but so much had changed between them, and she knew that she herself was sometimes guilty of almost deliberately trying to drive him away, but she hurt so much inside. The pain was unbearable, eating into her, driving her into a frenzy of despair so that she had to lash out at someone, and that someone was inevitably Giles.

      No, she couldn’t blame him if he left her for Davina. Davina was older than her but she was still young enough to give him children … sons.

      The scene beyond the window blurred as her eyes filled with tears. Sons. Men needed them … craved them. They were always more important to them than daughters. Lucy had learned that when she was six years old. The day her mother told her that her father had left them to go and live with someone else.

      Lucy hadn’t understood at first when her mother had told her that she wasn’t her father’s only child. That she had half-brothers, two of them, five years younger than Lucy. Twins … two boys … two sons. How could one daughter ever be important enough to a man to hold him against competition like that?

      ‘When is Daddy coming home?’ she had asked her mother over and over again until at last she had turned on her and screamed,

      ‘Never! Do you understand? Never. He doesn’t want us any more. He doesn’t want you. He has other children now … two sons, and they’re more important to him than you and I could ever be.’

      Lucy had been afraid then; afraid because she knew that somehow being a girl meant that she would never, ever be loved as much as if she had been a boy.

      She was a rebellious child, difficult, her mother said. Her teachers complained about her wilfulness and blamed it on her red hair. Lucy didn’t care. When she was naughty people couldn’t ignore her. When she was naughty she was almost as important as if she had been a boy.

      Tall for her age, thin and gawky, she was almost fifteen when suddenly, overnight almost, she was transformed from an ugly duckling of an overgrown schoolgirl into a stunningly sensual young woman.

      Suddenly she had a figure, breasts, a waist, hips. Suddenly her legs, so thin and coltish, were enviably long and slender. Suddenly her eyes seemed to develop a mysterious slant, her mouth a soft pout. Suddenly Lucy discovered the power of her sexuality, and equally suddenly boys discovered her.

      Now things were different. Now Lucy discovered that one look from her bewitching eyes, one toss of her red curls, one tantalising pout was enough to have every boy in the neighbourhood at her feet.

      Suddenly she had something that others wanted, and because of it she was valued … loved … or so it seemed to the emotionally starved child who still lived inside the quickly developing body of the new Lucy.

      For a while Lucy was happy. People … boys … wanted her and said they loved her, and then three months before her seventeenth birthday her mother announced that she was remarrying. The man she was marrying did not, it seemed, want a seventeen-year-old stepdaughter, and it had been decided that Lucy would go to live with an aunt of her mother’s in London.

      Lucy told everyone at school that London was ‘quite definitely the place to be’, and she even pretended that she had actually persuaded her mother to let her go and live with her great-aunt.

      Lucy had become very good at pretending, like when the boys who said they loved her fumbled clumsily with her clothing, their hands hot and sweaty on her body. She pretended to herself that she enjoyed what they were doing; that she liked the way they touched her … wanted her, when in fact what she really felt inside was very afraid and very alone. She would never admit that to anyone, though. Not to anyone.

      At eighteen Lucy left school and then drifted casually from job to job. Jobs were plentiful in London and Lucy was too busy enjoying herself to think about things as dull and boring as the future.

      She was no longer living with her great-aunt. Now she shared a flat with three other girls; and not always the same three other girls. Life was casual, careless; Lucy was popular and sought-after. By the time she was twenty-one she had been engaged three times and had turned down several other proposals.

      But deep down inside, despite her popularity, Lucy was afraid … afraid that somehow she was not worthy of being loved, afraid that when men said they loved her they did not mean it. Her father had said he loved her but it had not been true. He had left her. And so had her mother.

      Lucy was determined that if there was any more leaving to be done she would be the one to do it, and she did.

      She had turned from a pretty girl into a stunningly beautiful and sensual young woman. Men were fascinated by her. She was more cautious now, though, more wary; less inclined to give anything of herself. She had learned that men valued best that which was the hardest to obtain. Lucy took care to make sure that she was very hard to obtain. Impossibly hard, in most cases.

      And then she met Giles.

      She was working for an upmarket London PR firm. Giles worked for a recruitment agency which was headhunting for a new advertising director for the company.

      He came in one afternoon to see Lucy’s boss. And then he returned, the next day and the next, for the rest of the week in fact, until he finally plucked up the courage to ask her out.

      He wasn’t Lucy’s type at all, too shy, too quiet, but he continued to besiege her until finally, out of a mixture of exasperation and amusement, she went out with him.

      It was only after her fifth date with him that Lucy admitted to herself that, while he might not be her type, she was enjoying the way he treated her, the way he spoiled and pampered her. Not in the financial sense—Lucy wasn’t particularly impressed by money as money, although she had a love of rich things that made her sensually materialistic. No, it was the way Giles bathed her