Lesson To Learn. PENNY JORDAN
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.
CHAPTER TWO
HALF an hour later, as she walked towards her cousin’s house, Sarah was still trembling with a mixture of shock and disbelief. She still could not entirely believe it had all actually happened. That poor little boy. He had been so upset…and his father had been so remote…so…so irritated and impatient…so completely unaware of how to respond to his son’s misery and despair.
Sally was in the garden when Sarah opened the gate, dead-heading her roses.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked with some concern. ‘You look upset.’
Sally was frowning when Sarah had finished explaining to her what had happened.
‘Gray Philips…I’d heard that his son had recently come to live with him. The boy’s mother, Gray’s ex-wife, was killed in a car accident. She was pretty wild, according to local gossip. She was having affairs with other men almost before the ink had dried on their marriage certificate.
‘I never met her, but apparently they separated before the little boy was born. I believe that Gray fought for custody of him, but lost, and that there were difficulties over access, which might explain the child’s apparent antipathy towards his father. It must be very traumatic for him.’
‘Yes, dreadfully,’ Sarah agreed vehemently. ‘The poor little mite was in a terrible state.’
Sally’s eyes rounded.
‘I didn’t mean for the boy, I meant for his father…Gray.’
When Sarah frowned she asked quietly, ‘Think about it. You’ve never been allowed to see your child, never had anything to do with him, and suddenly he’s there living with you…hating you…probably blaming you for his mother’s death. Imagine the state he must have been in when he found out that Robert had gone missing.’
Sarah’s frown deepened. Sally was making her feel quite guilty…as though she had somehow been unfair towards Gray Philips, as though she had deliberately misjudged and condemned him.
‘So you’re going back to see him, the little boy, tomorrow, then?’ Sally asked her.
‘I promised I would, although his father wasn’t very pleased.’
Sally gave her a thoughtful look.
‘You’re such a soft touch,’ she told her wryly, ‘but don’t get too involved, will you, love? Rumour has it that Gray Philips is a man who, because of the breakdown of his marriage, doesn’t have a very good opinion of our sex.’
‘That’s his problem, not mine,’ Sarah responded firmly, and yet she was aware of a sense of dismay as she listened to her cousin’s words, even though they only confirmed what her instincts had already told her.
And yet why should she feel dismayed? Gray Philips meant nothing to her; she hadn’t even particularly liked him, and she certainly hadn’t liked the way he was treating his son.
But she had responded to him physically. She had been very, very intensely aware of him as a man, aware of him in a shockingly sexual and intimate way that was totally foreign to her nature.
She had had a brief love-affair when she was at university, a relationship with a fellow student which had lasted a little over six months, but the sexual side of that relationship had never been as important to her as the emotional one. Even before she was ready to admit that she had fallen out of love with Andy, she had lost all interest in him sexually.
Since then she had been too busy, her life filled with too many other things to allow her the time to develop a committed relationship. She had male friends, went out on dates, but none of the men she knew had ever had one tenth, one hundredth of the effect on her that Gray Philips had had.
Trembling a little, she pushed that knowledge away from her, not wanting to confront or analyse it.
Beside her Sally was saying, ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. Let’s go in and have something to eat.’
OVER DINNER that evening Sally related the events of Sarah’s encounter to Ross.
‘Gray Philips…’ his eyebrows rose ‘…hmm. That’s interesting. What did you make of him, Sarah? He’s very well thought of by the local business community. A sort of local boy made good. He took over an ailing family business when his uncle died, a light engineering concern in Ludlow, and he’s managed to turn it right round and make it very successful. I have met him, although I don’t know him very well. He’s the sort who seems to prefer to keep himself to himself. Doesn’t play golf…and he isn’t a member of the new private sports centre that’s opened outside Ludlow recently, and yet he certainly looks pretty fit.
‘I had heard that he’d got his son living with him. My boss happened to mention the other day that Philips had been in touch with him, asking if his wife could recommend a good agency to supply him with someone to take charge of the child. Apparently he’s been having problems in that direction. A wealthy single man…’ Ross gave a small shrug. ‘It seems the kind of woman he wanted to employ is reluctant to work in a household without another woman in it, and the kind that does want the job seems to be more interested in keeping him company than his son. He has got a housekeeper now, though, I believe.’
‘Elsie Jacobs from the village,’ Sally told him, pulling a face. ‘And you know what she’s like. Hardly the ideal person to have charge of a small child.’
‘Mm. So what did you think of him, then, Sarah? Impressive, isn’t he?’
‘If you happen to like arrogant, bad-tempered and completely insensitive men, then I suppose he is,’ Sarah agreed tartly.
Ross loved to tease her, and was constantly telling her that it was time she found herself a man and settled down, so she knew quite well what lay behind his question. This time, though, she wasn’t going to rise for Ross’s very obvious bait, nor his assumed mock-chauvinistic pose.
‘It’s the little boy, Robert, I feel sorry for,’ Sally told her husband. ‘From what Sarah was saying, he was almost distraught. He was trying to run away to London to find his grandmother’s housekeeper. It must have been awful for him to lose everyone he loved, everyone who was familiar to him, like that.’
‘Mm…although by all accounts his mother was far from the madonna type,’ Ross interrupted. ‘People locally don’t seem to have a very high opinion of her, but then, I suppose, with Gray being local and her not, and the marriage only lasting for such a short time…And to deny Gray any kind of access to the boy…’
‘Surely no court would do that without good reason?’ Sarah pointed out, frowning.
‘Well, you’d think not, but get yourself a good enough lawyer and who knows? And apparently she, the mother, was pretty good at putting on a performance when she deemed it necessary, whereas Gray, from what I know and have heard of him, isn’t the type to actively sue for people’s sympathy and compassion.’
‘No, he isn’t,’ Sarah agreed feelingly, remembering