‘You were determined to pull him down off it,’ Dee reminded him fiercely. ‘You’re the last person who should be on his committee, Hugo,’ she told him starkly, ‘and I don’t think I’ll ever forgive Peter for what he’s done. You have no right...’
She stopped as she felt her emotions threaten to overwhelm her.
How many times in the past had they argued like this? How many times had Hugo forced her into a corner from which she had had to defend her father to him?
As she started to turn away, out of the corner of her eye Dee saw a car pulling up next to her own, and the doctor getting out. Ignoring Hugo’s sharply authoritative, ‘Dee, wait,’ Dee walked quickly to her own car. She was literally trembling with angry emotion. She felt sick with the force of it. Shakily she set her car in motion.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THREE HOURS LATER, when she walked into her office in Rye-on-Averton, the first thing that Dee saw lying on her desk was the file she had so carefully and optimistically prepared with Ward’s help, outlining her proposals for the way the charity could help the town’s young people.
Her heart was still pumping fast with adrenalin. The drive home had done nothing to reduce her sense of injustice—or her anger against Hugo. She wasn’t used to having her plans thwarted, to not being in total control of her life or her own decisions. But anger alone wasn’t responsible for the tension that had her pacing the floor of her office with all the pent-up energy of a caged tigress.
How dared Hugo interfere in her life, her plans? How dared he tell her what she could and could not do?
Hugo knew nothing about the problems of small-town living; how could he? How would he feel were she to try to tell him his business? If she were to claim that...?
‘Oooohhh,’ Dee made an angry growl of female protest as she paced her office floor with renewed fury.
There was no point in blaming Peter; he was ill...getting old... She could just imagine how Hugo must have coaxed him to give him that Power of Attorney, Dee reflected darkly.
Perhaps it wasn’t just the university’s money Hugo was after for the United Nations aid programme. Dee smiled grimly to herself as she gave in to the temptation to give full rein to her ignoble thoughts.
Peter was unmarried, with no family, and had a very healthy portfolio of investments—she should know; she was the one who had advised him on them. There had always been a tacit understanding between them that his money would be willed to her father’s charity, but perhaps Hugo had other ideas.
Even though she knew she was allowing her anger to drive her thoughts and suspicions down extremely illogical routes, Dee refused to let go of them. Common sense told her that Hugo, even if he wasn’t the scrupulously honest person she thought him to be, would not risk his reputation by doing something so potentially dangerous. Peter’s money would be the merest drop in the ocean compared with the millions that Hugo would have under his control.
She looked at her desk. She was supposed to be seeing Ward this weekend, so that they could go over her proposals together for one final time.
To her consternation Dee felt the hot, painful tears of anger and disappointment filling her eyes.
Still prowling the room, she stopped her restless progression to study the large photograph of her father which she had had blown up and framed and which hung above the room’s fireplace.
It was one of her favourite ones of him. In it he
was just starting to smile, so that one could see the warmth in his eyes. He had been looking directly at her when the photograph had been taken—coincidentally, as it happened, by Peter—and whenever she felt really low Dee always drew strength from standing in front of it, right in his line of vision, so that she would feel again the warmth of his smile and his love.
This time, though, it wasn’t totally effective. This time, knowing...remembering...how much her father had loved her could not totally ease the pain from her heart or the discord from her mind.
‘You know nothing about my father...you despised him...’ she had accused Hugo. It wasn’t strictly true. What Hugo despised was the world he considered her father had represented: the world of money and prestige, of placing more importance on possessions than people. But her father hadn’t been like that. He had been good with money, yes, and proud, very proud, but he had also been compassionate and caring, and it had hurt her more than she had ever been able to say to either of them that he and Hugo had not got on better together.
‘But, Daddy, I love him,’ she had told her father helplessly when he had questioned the amount of time she was spending with Hugo.
‘You don’t know what love is,’ her father had objected. ‘You’re a girl still...a child...’
‘That’s not true. I know I love you,’ Dee had defended herself firmly. ‘And I’m not a child, nor even a girl now. I’m over eighteen...an adult...’
‘An adult? You’re a baby still,’ her father had scoffed, and then added gruffly, ‘My baby...’
‘Oh, Dad,’ Dee whispered now, her eyes refilling with tears. She had tried so hard to bring Hugo and her father closer. Too hard, perhaps. Certainly the harder she had tried, the more both of them had become entrenched in their suspicions of one another.
‘How can he claim that he loves you?’ her father had demanded once. ‘What plans has he made for your future? The last time I spoke to him he told me that as soon as he’d finished his Ph.D. he was planning to take himself off to some desert or other.’
‘Dad, he isn’t so very different from you,’ she coaxed her father. ‘You both have very philanthropic natures and—’
‘Maybe, but I would never have left your mother or you to go traipsing off all over the world,’ her father interrupted her sharply.
Dee took a deep breath, knowing that the moment she had been putting off for so long could not be put off any longer.