A Little Seduction Omnibus (22 page)

Personally, Dee found him smarmy and totally unappealing, but she had no wish to widen the rift developing between her and her father by telling him so. Her father had informed her that Julian worked as a freelance financial consultant, and, at her father’s instigation, Julian had been invited to join the committees of two of the charities her father was involved with.

The two men seemed to spend a good deal of time together, and Dee acknowledged as she watched the familiar way Julian dropped into one of the sitting-room armchairs that it irked her that he should be so much at home in her father’s house. Almost immediately as he sat down Julian began a conversation with her father which totally excluded Dee, eventually turning to her and apologising insincerely.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Dee...we must be boring you. Finance isn’t of any interest to you students, is it? Unless you’re agitating for larger grants.’ He guffawed loudly at his own joke, and to Dee’s irritation she could see that her father was actually smiling.

It was very tempting to tell Julian that, far from not having any interest in finance, she had managed very successfully to turn the modest investments she had begun with into a very respectable amount of money.

The two men were discussing the charity her father had begun to set up to benefit the local townspeople.

It was obvious to Dee from what was being said that Julian Cox was expecting to play a very major role in the control of the foundation’s assets. Dee found this information disquieting.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ Hugo had asked Dee when she had tried to explain her instinctive dislike of Julian to him.

‘He makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up,’ was all Dee had been able to tell him.

‘Dee,’ Hugo had teased her, ‘I thought only
I
could do that.’

‘It’s not the same,’ Dee had objected. ‘When you do it it’s because...because I love and want you, but when it’s him, it’s because... He makes my skin crawl, Hugo... there’s something about him that I just don’t like. I don’t trust him...’

‘Tell your father, not me,’ Hugo had counselled her.

‘He wouldn’t listen,’ Dee had admitted uncomfortably.

Hugo’s eyebrows had risen, his mouth curling cynically as he’d commented, ‘No...but according to you your father is a man of reason and compassion, a man who is
always
willing to listen to the views of others. Others, but not, it seems, to me or to you...’

‘Hugo, that isn’t fair,’ Dee had protested. ‘We’re talking about two different things. My father—’

‘Your father is jealous because you love me,’ Hugo had told her flatly, ‘and until you accept that fact I’m afraid you and I are never going to see eye to eye over him.’

‘Now you’re doing what you always complain my father does,’ Dee had told him angrily. ‘Now you’re trying to put emotional pressure on me. Hugo, I love him...he’s my
father
and I want so much for the two of you to get on well together...’

‘Have you told
him
that?’ Hugo had asked her wryly.

It was an argument that was destined to run and run, and of course it had.

* * *

‘Have you told him yet?’ Hugo asked Dee that evening.

‘Yes,’ she acknowledged tiredly.

‘And...’ Hugo prodded. ‘Or can I guess?’

‘He wasn’t very happy,’ Dee admitted.

‘So, tell me something I don’t already know,’ Hugo drawled. ‘I suppose he claimed that you would be wasting your degree and the government’s money, that you’d be exposing yourself to almost certain death, that I was being a selfish so-and-so and that I should stay at home and get myself a proper job...’

His comments were so acutely right that Dee felt her eyes prick with vulnerable tears.

‘Hugo, he’s my father; he loves me. He’s just trying—’

‘To come between us?’ Hugo suggested bitterly.

‘He just wants to protect me,’ Dee protested. ‘When you...we...have children, you’ll feel the same.’

‘Maybe I shall, but I certainly won’t put emotional pressure on them or try to control their lives for them,’ Hugo told her tersely.

‘Julian Cox arrived whilst I was there. It sounds as though he’s trying to persuade Dad to put him on the Foundation committee.’

‘So?’ Hugo questioned.

‘I don’t trust him, Hugo. There’s something about him.’

‘He’s not my type, I agree,’ Hugo replied, ‘but then I’ve never been into making money, so...’

‘Maybe not, but that’s because
you’ve
never needed to be,’ Dee responded, with an unusual touch of asperity. ‘You get an allowance, Hugo, as well as your grant. One day you’ll inherit family money—even though you claim your parents aren’t wealthy. My father has had to make his own way in life. He’s proud of what he’s achieved and so am I, and I hate it when you go all aristocratic and contemptuous about him. There’s nothing wrong about being good at making money.’

‘Isn’t there?’ Hugo asked her quietly. ‘ My great-great-grandfather made his from coal, from sending people deep down into the earth to dig for black gold for him. There’s a plaque outside the colliery that he owned. It commemorates the deaths of twenty-nine men who were killed making my great-great-grandfather a millionaire. He gave their widows a guinea each. It’s all there in his accounts. Like your father,
he
had a good head for money. I used to dream about them sometimes, those men, and how it must have felt to die like that.’

‘Hugo, don’t,’ Dee pleaded, white-faced. Hugo rarely talked about his family history, but Dee knew how he felt about it.

As she turned towards him Hugo cupped her face in his hand as he begged her hoarsely, ‘Don’t ever leave me, Dee. Don’t let your father come between us. I love you more than you know. You’ve enriched my life, made my life better in so many ways. Without you...’

‘Without me you’d still go to Ethiopia,’ she told him quietly.

His eyes darkened.

‘Yes,’ he agreed simply, before adding harshly, ‘I have to, Dee. I can’t... I have to. But I shan’t be going without you,’ he added softly. ‘Shall I?’

He was kissing her by then, and so there was no vocal reply that Dee could give other than a soft, blissful sigh as she moved closer to his body.

Later, their bodies closely entwined, Hugo leaned over her propping his head up on his elbow as he told her quietly, ‘Dee, there’s something I have to say to you.’

‘Mmm...?’ she encouraged him languorously.

It wasn’t unusual for him to tease her with this kind of pronouncement, which was usually followed by a declaration of his love or an announcement that some part of her body was filling him with unquenchable desire, and so, smiling back at him, she waited happily.

‘This aid work—it isn’t just something I want to just do to fill in a year,’ Hugo told her abruptly.

Dee sat up in bed. She knew already how strongly Hugo felt about what he wanted to do, but this was the first time he had mentioned it being more than a short-term vocation.

‘I was talking to someone the other day, and they were saying how desperately they need people to take on not just work in the field but fundraising as well.’

‘But you can’t do both,’ Dee objected practically.

‘Not at the same time,’ Hugo agreed. ‘But there’s a desperate need for people to increase everyone’s awareness of how vitally important good aid programmes are, to act as ambassadors for them. Charlotte was saying that I’d be ideal for that kind of role, especially once I’d got some practical hands-on experience in the field.’

‘Charlotte?’ Dee queried uncertainly.

‘Mmm...Charlotte Foster. You don’t know her. She graduated a year ahead of me and she’s been working for a children’s charity. She’s just come back to this country and I bumped into her the other day in town.’

Dee listened in silence.

‘It will perhaps mean that I shall have to spend longer in the field than we’d planned.’

‘You mean it might mean that
we
are going to have to spend longer in the field than
we
had planned,’ Dee corrected him gently. She saw instantly that she had said exactly the right thing.

‘I
knew
you’d understand,’ Hugo exulted as he hugged her tightly. ‘It will mean having to put off having a family for rather longer than we agreed.’

He shook his head and groaned.

‘Charlotte was telling me that they go into the most unbelievable details before taking people on their permanent staff. There have been so many scandals involving people misusing charity money that now they check and double-check to make sure there’s absolutely no chance that anyone they employ carries even the merest whiff of scandal. Charlotte told me that they’ve recently asked one of their executives to leave because his stepfather turned out to have been under suspicion of being involved in some kind of financial fraud. But then, of course, you can understand why they have to be so careful.’

‘Mmm...’ Dee agreed.

‘You’re wonderful. Do you know that?’ Hugo told her happily. ‘The ideal woman for me...the ideal wife!’

* * *

The next few days were busy ones for Hugo. His decision to make his commitment to working for an aid charity a permanent rather than a temporary one meant that, with Charlotte’s encouragement, he was toing and froing from Lexminster to London, seeing people and being interviewed.

‘There’s so much we still need to learn,’ he told Dee excitedly one afternoon, after he had returned from a briefing session with the agency Charlotte had recommended him to.

‘We’re finding that the people themselves actually teach us how we can best help them. Charlotte says—’

It was less than a month until Dee sat her finals. She had been studying when Hugo had rushed in, and, despite Hugo’s insistence that Charlotte was simply a friend, to Dee it was quite obvious that the other woman was in love with him. Her patience snapped.

‘I don’t care
what
Charlotte says,’ she told him sharply. ‘There are other things in life, you know, Hugo, like the fact that I’ve got my finals in four weeks’ time.’

‘You’ll pass them,’ Hugo assured her cheerfully. ‘Look, Charlotte’s invited us out for a celebratory dinner tonight.’

‘A celebratory dinner?’ Dee queried.

‘Mmm... She’s pretty sure that I’m going to be offered a permanent post with the agency. Come on, you can shower first.’

‘Hugo, I can’t go out...not tonight,’ Dee protested, indicating the books in front of her. ‘I’ve
got
to study. Look, you go,’ she told him in a gentler voice. She hated having to spoil his pleasure, but she still had to break the news to her father that they would be gone longer than they had originally planned, and that Hugo intended to make a permanent career in the aid field—which meant that they would be travelling the world for most of their married lives, Dee suspected. There was no way she could study with Hugo prowling the flat in his present electrified, excited state. She would be able to work far better if she was on her own.

‘Well, if you’re sure you don’t mind,’ Hugo said.

‘Mmm...I love you,’ he whispered to her half an hour later, just before he left. Smiling at him, Dee returned his kiss.

‘You can show me how much later,’ she teased him.

Oddly, once he had gone she found it almost impossible to settle back into her work. On impulse she went over to the telephone and dialled her father’s number.

He answered almost straight away, and Dee could tell from the way he said her name that he had been hoping that she might be someone else. That alone was enough to make her frown. Her father was
never
too busy to speak to her when she phoned—in fact he was always complaining that she didn’t ring often enough— and besides, some sixth sense, some daughterly awareness, made her instantly pick up that something was wrong.

‘Dad—’ she began urgently, but he was already cutting her off, telling her curtly,

‘Dee, I have to go. I’m expecting another call...’

‘Dad,’ she protested, but it was too late. He had already hung up.

Dee waited ten minutes and then rang again, but the line was engaged. It was still engaged when she tried a second time and then a third.

It was now nearly ten o’clock, but, late though it was, Dee knew that she just had to see her father.

Scribbling Hugo a note, she hurried out to her car.

CHAPTER EIGHT

T
HE
PHONE
RANG
abruptly on Dee’s desk, breaking into her thoughts of the past. Automatically she reached for the receiver. Her caller was Ward Hunter, and after Dee had asked after Anna’s health, Ward began, ‘Look, I’ve been thinking. It might be a little unorthodox, but if you’d like me to come along and talk with your committee, explain to them how we’ve gone about things and—’

‘Ward, I’d love you to, but I’m afraid it won’t do any good. There’s a problem.’

Briefly Dee outlined to him what had happened.

‘You say this man has somehow persuaded Peter to give him Power of Attorney? Who is he, Dee? Is he related to Peter or—’

‘He’s not related to him but they are old friends,’ Dee interrupted him. ‘In fact, I...I actually know him myself,’ she added reluctantly.

‘Oh. I was just thinking that it might be worthwhile making some enquiries to see if he had put any kind of pressure on Peter to...’

‘No. No, I don’t think there’s any question of that. He’s very high up in one of the main aid agencies, Ward, and from what I know of him...’ She stopped, unwilling to go on. No one in her present life knew anything about Hugo, and that was the way she wanted things to stay. After all, what was the
point
in them knowing?

‘Mmm...what I can’t understand is why this Hugo, whatever his name is, has decided to oppose your plans, when anyone with any sense can see how beneficial they would be.’

‘Hugo thinks he’s on a moral crusade,’ Dee told him wryly.

‘Well, don’t give up yet,’ Ward encouraged her. ‘Surely there’s still a chance that you can persuade the rest of the committee...?’

‘A very remote chance,’ Dee agreed. ‘A
very
remote chance.’

Five minutes after she had said goodbye to Ward the telephone rang again. This time it was Beth who was telephoning her.

‘Dee, how are you?’ she asked cheerfully. ‘I saw you in Lexminster today. Why didn’t you call and see me?’

Beth and her husband-to-be were living just outside the town in a pretty eighteenth-century farmhouse they had recently bought. Alex was the university’s youngest chair. He lectured in Modern History whilst Beth still owned and ran the pretty glassware shop in Rye-on-Averton with her partner, Kelly, which she rented from Dee.

‘I would have loved to but I didn’t have time,’ Dee fibbed.

‘No, I understand. Anna mentioned that you’re busy with your plans to open a workshop along the lines of Ward’s. Well, if you want someone to teach your teenagers all there is to know about making glass, Alex’s aunt is due over this summer, and, believe me,
no one
knows more about it than she does.’

Dutifully Dee laughed. She had met Alex’s aunt, and she knew that she was very much the matriarch of the Czech side of Alex’s family.

‘Look, I was wondering if you might be free for supper on Saturday night. I know it’s short notice, but Alex is having to entertain someone—something to do with setting up a new scholarship.’

‘If this someone is a he and you’re—’ Dee began firmly, but Beth anticipated her and laughed.

‘He is a he, but I promise you I’m not trying to matchmake. Please, Dee.’ Beth was beseeching her.

Unwillingly Dee gave in. The last thing she really felt like doing was being sociable.

‘Seven-thirty for eight, then,’ Beth informed her, ringing off smartly before Dee could change her mind.

* * *

It was dark by the time Dee eventually let herself into the house that had been her father’s. It had been dark too the night she had driven home in such anxiety, slipping her key into the lock and hurrying into the hallway, calling her father’s name.

He hadn’t answered her, and it had been a shock to go into the kitchen and find him sitting there, immobile and silent.

Equally shocking had been the sight of a bottle of whisky on the table beside him and an empty glass. Her father rarely drank, and when he did it was normally a glass or maybe two of good wine.

‘Dad...Daddy,’ she pleaded anxiously, her heart plummeting as he turned his head to look at her and she saw the despair in his eyes.

‘Daddy, what is it? What’s wrong?’ she asked him, running over to him and dropping to her knee in front of him. They had never been physically demonstrative with one another, but almost instinctively Dee took hold of his hands in both of hers. They were frighteningly icy cold.

‘What is it...are you ill...? Dad, please...’ she begged him.

‘Ill...?’ His voice cracked harshly over the word, sharp with bitterness and contempt. ‘I
wish
...
Blind
, that’s what I’ve been Dee, corrupted by my own pride and my vanity, my belief that I knew...’ He stopped, and Dee realised that the tremors shaking her own body were coming from his. It shocked her immeasurably to see him like this, her father, who had always been so strong, so proud...

‘Dad, please—
please
tell me what’s wrong.’

‘You shouldn’t have come here. What about your finals...? Where’s Hugo...?’

‘He...he had to go out.’

‘So he isn’t here with you?’

She could see the relief in his eyes.

‘At least I’m spared
that
, although it can only be a matter of time and then everyone will know.’

‘Know what?’ Dee demanded.

‘That I’ve been taken in by a liar and a cheat, that I’ve given my trust to a thief and that he’s... Gordon Simpson rang me last week,’ he told her abruptly.

Gordon Simpson was the manager of the local branch of their bank, and a fellow committee member with her father on the local branches of two national charities.

‘He’s been going through the charity accounts with the accountant, and certain anomalies have come to light.’

‘Anomalies...what, accounts mistakes, you mean?’ Dee asked him, perplexed. She knew how meticulous her father was about such matters, and how annoyed with himself he would be at having made a mistake, but surely not to this extent.

‘Accounting mistakes? Well, that’s one way of putting it.’ He laughed bitingly. ‘Creative accounting is how the gutter press prefer to refer to it—or so I’m told.’

‘Creative accounting.’ Dee’s blood ran cold. ‘You mean
fraud
?’ she asked him in disbelief. ‘But that’s
impossible
.
You
would never—’

‘No,’ he agreed immediately. ‘
I
would never...but Julian Cox... He deceived me, Dee, took me in completely. He’s cheated the charity out of a good few thousand pounds already, and all under my protective aegis. Oh, Gordon told me that no one would hold me to blame...he said he’d been as convinced of the man’s honesty as I was...but that doesn’t matter.
I
am still the one who was responsible for allowing him to become involved. I am still the one who vouched for him.

‘Of course, I’ve repaid the missing money immediately, and Gordon and Jeremy, the accountant, have given me their assurance that the matter won’t go any further.

‘I tackled Cox immediately, and do you know what he had the gall to say to me? He told me that...he tried to blackmail me, Dee. Me! He threatened to go to the press and tell them that I’d supported him, encouraged him, unless I agreed to let him get away with it.

‘Gordon and Jeremy said there was no point in pursuing him legally, and that to do so would bring the matter into the public arena and damage people’s faith in the charity. They said that since I’d offered to refund the money the best thing to do was to simply keep the whole thing quiet.’

‘Oh, Dad,’ Dee whispered helplessly. She knew how strongly her father felt about matters of law and morality, and how much it must be hurting him to have to tell her. It wasn’t just his pride that had been damaged, she knew, it was his whole sense of self, his whole belief about the importance of honesty.

Dee tried her best to comfort and reassure him, but she felt helplessly out of her depth. He was, after all, her father, and a man, and he was also of a generation that believed that it was a father’s and a man’s duty to shield and protect his womenfolk from anything that might cause them pain.

He had, Dee recognised, always sheltered her from the unpleasant things in life, and it frightened her to see him so vulnerable, so alarmingly unlike himself.

She spent the night at home with him. When she rang Hugo to tell him what she was doing there was no reply to her call, and, illogically, some of the anger and resentment she felt against Julian Cox she transferred to Hugo, for failing to know of her need and thus failing to meet it.

In the morning her father’s air of restless anxiety made her feel equally on edge. He had someone he needed to see, he told her evasively when he came back downstairs for the breakfast she had prepared, but which neither of them ate, but when she asked him who he refused to answer her.

Since she had last seen him he had lost weight, and his face looked gaunt. Dee’s heart ached for him. How could Julian Cox do this to her father?

‘You haven’t done anything wrong,’ she told him fiercely. ‘It’s Julian Cox and not you.’

‘Nothing wrong legally, maybe, but I still let him make a fool of me. I trusted him and, what is worse, I trusted him with other people’s money. Who’s going to believe that I didn’t know, that I wasn’t a party to what he was planning to do?’

‘But Dad,
you
don’t need the money.’

‘
I
know that, Dee, and so do you, but how many other people are going to question my honesty? How many are going to believe there’s no smoke without a fire?

‘You’d better get back to Lexminster,’ he told her wearily. ‘You’ve got your finals in four weeks.’

‘I’ve got plenty of time to study.’ Dee fibbed. ‘I want to stay here with you, Dad. I’ll come with you to this meeting...I—’

‘No.’

The sharpness of his denial shocked her. She had rarely seen him angry before, never mind so frighteningly close to losing control.

‘Dad...’

‘Go back to Lexminster, Dee,’ he reiterated.

And so, stupidly, she did. And that was a mistake; an error of judgement; a failure to understand that she would never, ever forgive herself for.

If Julian Cox was responsible for her father’s death, then she was certainly a party to that responsibility. If she had refused to go back to Lexminster, if she had stayed with him...

But she didn’t... She drove back to Lexminster, desperate to see Hugo and tell him what had happened, running in fear to him, like a child denied the comfort of one strong man’s protection and so running to another.

But when she reached the house Hugo wasn’t there.

He had left her a note, saying that he had been called to London unexpectedly to attend another interview and that he didn’t know when he would be back.

Dee wept in a mixture of anger and misery. She wanted him
there
with
her
, not pursuing some selfish, idealistic dream. She
needed
him there with her, and surely for once
her
needs came first. Was this how it was going to be for the rest of their lives? Was Hugo
always
going to be missing when she needed him? Were other people
always
going to be more important to him than her? She was too wrought up to think or reason logically; it didn’t make any difference that Hugo had no idea what was happening—it was enough that he just wasn’t there.

Anxiously Dee rang her father at home. There was no reply. She tried his office, and gritted her teeth as she listened to the vague voice of the middle-aged spinster he employed as his secretary more out of pity for her than because he actually needed her help. She lived with her widowed mother and three cats, and was bullied unmercifully—both by her mother and the moggies.

‘Your father—oh, dear, Andrea, I’m sorry; I have no idea... He isn’t here—’

‘He said he had an appointment with someone,’ Dee told her, cutting across her. ‘Is there anything in his diary?’

‘Oh, let me look... There’s a dental appointment—but, no, that’s the fifteenth of next month. Just let me find the right page. Oh, yes...here we are. And it isn’t the fifteenth today at all, is it? It’s the sixteenth... No...he
was
to have seen that nice Mr Cox for lunch today...’

She paused as Dee made a fierce sound of disgust deep in her throat. What was loyal Miss Prudehow going to say when she learned just how un-nice ‘nice Mr Cox’ actually was? When she learned just what he had done to Dee’s father—her employer?

Five minutes later, having extracted from her the information that she had no idea where Dee’s father was, Dee replaced the receiver and redialled the number of her father’s home. Still no reply. Where was he...?

* * *

It was later in the day when she knew. Early in the evening, to be exact.

The young policeman who came to give her the news looked white-faced and nervous when Dee opened the door to him. After he had asked to come in, and followed her inside the house, Dee noticed how he was unable to meet her eyes, and somehow, even before he said her father’s name, she knew.

‘My father?’ she demanded tautly. ‘Something’s happened to my father...’

There had been an accident, the young policeman told her. Her father had been fishing. Quite what had happened, no one was sure. But somehow or other he had ended up in the river and got into difficulties. Somehow or other he had drowned.

Dee wanted badly to be sick. She also wanted badly to scream and cry, to deny what she was being told, but she was her father’s daughter, and she could see that to give in to her own emotions would upset the poor young policeman, who looked very badly as though
he
wanted to be sick as well.

Dee had to go back with him to Rye. There were formalities to be attended to but not, thankfully, by her. She wanted to see her father, but Ralph Livesey, his friend and doctor, refused to allow her to do so.

‘It isn’t necessary, Dee,’ he told her firmly. ‘And it isn’t what he would have wanted.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she whispered, over and over again and throughout it all. ‘How
could
he have drowned? He was such a good swimmer and...’