‘But the company isn’t worth anything,’ she told him slowly. ‘My father knows that…’
‘I’ve managed to convince him otherwise,’ Kyle told her coolly, ‘And in point of fact it could be worth something to me eventually, if only from the point of view of its excellent reputation.’
‘But we’re window-dressers…you don’t own any shops.’
‘Not at the moment, but I am building, or rather developing, a small and very exclusive arcade of boutiques in Bath which will be let out under an umbrella scheme to ensure that anyone who rents one will conform to the very high standards we intend to set. The service we will provide as management could well benefit from the inclusion of a specialist window-dressing service.’
It all sounded so plausible, and yet Heather knew that her father’s business was virtually worthless.
‘How much did you pay him?’ she asked hesitantly, her mouth dry.
Immediately his face closed up against her, his mouth thin and harsh.
‘I can’t tell you that. It’s something between your father and myself.’
Instantly she felt as though a door had been slammed in her face; she felt shut out and rejected, a feeling she was intensely familiar with from her childhood and, as she had done then, she retreated now behind a protective barrier of sarcasm.
‘Nothing’s changed, has it, Kyle? You still resent me just as much as I resent you. You’re just smarter at hiding it, that’s all.’
‘That’s certainly one way of looking at it, I suppose,’ he agreed after a long silence. He was looking at her in an odd and unfamiliar way; as though something about her…hurt him…
Shrugging off the thought, Heather glared belligerently at him.
‘I’m not going to let you provoke me into a row, Kyle. I can’t pretend to see what it is my parents see in you, other than the fact that you’re male,’ she told him bitterly, unwittingly betraying her own carefully hidden insecurity. ‘But for their sakes…’
‘Is that really it?’ Kyle asked her softly, not allowing her to finish. ‘Is it my masculinity you’re envious of, Heather?’
‘No!’ Her exclamation was an instant and vehement denial of the cynical implication she could read in the bitter twist of his mouth. She was more than happy with her femininity, and the implication behind Kyle’s soft words brought a furious scorch of colour to her face.
‘No…nothing like that.’ She swallowed hard, knowing that she had unwittingly allowed herself to stray on to very dangerous ground.
Kyle was watching her like a cat at a mousehole, and he wasn’t going to let her escape without at least a token explanation.
Remembering the advice of her counsellor, she forced herself to swallow down her pride, and to ignore her natural inclination to keep her most intimate and personal thoughts hidden. Instead, she said huskily, ‘Once…before you came to live with us, my mother lost a baby. It…he would have been a boy. I once overheard someone talking about it. She…they implied…or at least I interpreted their conversation to mean that my parents considered a daughter very much second-best.’
She waited in horror for him to taunt her with her revelation, but instead he said nothing.
She had delivered her husky, proud admission to the fireplace, not daring to look straight at him, and now as she caught his movement on the periphery of her vision she automatically flinched, as though waiting for a blow.
‘I was wrong,’ she heard him saying in a harsh voice. ‘You have grown up.’
‘You don’t sound very pleased about it.’
How idiotic to sound
so peevish! But she needed to scuttle back into the safety of their normal acid exchanges to be able to cope with the emotional intensity of what had gone before.
‘Perhaps I’m not,’ he agreed, and then, before she could speak he added quietly, ‘Since it seems to be confession time, I might as well admit that I resented you as well. It wasn’t easy for the child that I was to accept that your parents loved me simply for myself. It wasn’t something I’d experienced before, you see. You know that my father deserted my mother—he’s dead now, by the way—and that my mother died. It took me a long time to accept that your parents loved me for myself and not because they simply wanted to be seen to be doing “the right thing” in giving a home to someone like me.’
‘But you walked out and turned your back on them.’
There was a long silence. She could feel the tense thud of her heart. They were on the verge of a new beginning, of a new relationship; so much depended on him being honest with her now.
‘I left because I thought I was doing the right thing for them,’ he told her flatly. ‘You were their natural child, it was plain that the two of us could never live in harmony. After you…after your accident, I knew it couldn’t go on any longer. So I left…’
‘For their sakes?’
He made no response, but Heather knew it was the truth. It was what she had known all along, and she felt the tension ease out of her in the knowledge that he now respected her enough to feel that he could speak the truth. They could never be close in a fraternal way, but for the sake of two people whom they both loved perhaps it would be possible for them to make a new beginning, Heather thought, exploring the idea cautiously.