‘Jemma—!’ She was at the door when his harsh voice brought her to a stumbling halt. She didn’t turn, and there was a tension in the short silence which followed that sent violent shudders of reaction spurring through her body while she prayed that he would just let her go while she still had the strength to do it. ‘Take care of yourself,’ was all he said in the end, quietly and so gently that she almost crumpled in a heap of misery on the floor.
She nodded her downbent head. ‘And you,’ she whispered, then left quickly without looking back.
He didn’t try to stop her again, and for that she was grateful. Her heart was breaking and if she’d stayed in his company a moment longer he would have seen it happen.
* * *
Jemma was sitting at the kitchen table, flicking through the morning newspaper while chewing desultorily on a slice of lightly toasted wholemeal bread when the doorbell rang.
‘I’ll get it!’ Trina called from the hallway, and Jemma grimaced with relief, glad to be doing what most pregnant women did first thing in the morning and keeping as still as possible while she coaxed her stomach not to give up on the meagre amount of food and liquid she had managed to swallow.
Only most women lost this inconvenient malady three months into their condition. Jemma, on the other hand, was now well into her fifth month with no let-up in the sickness. Morning sickness, afternoon sickness, evening sickness—you name it, she suffered it.
It showed, too, she grimly acknowledged as she felt that old familiar churning begin in her stomach. For an otherwise perfectly healthy pregnant woman, she looked hagged to death. The inability to hold down more than half of her daily intake of food had certainly taken its toll.
She weighed less now than she had at the beginning of her pregnancy. And, although her hair shone with a thick golden lustre that her doctor assured her was the clearest sign that she was doing fine, the rest of her looked thin and gaunt—except for the bulge forming in front of her, that was. She glanced at it. Her mound, she called it. ‘The lump’. ‘Leon’s parting gift’, since he had never quite managed to come up with anything for that one special gift he owed her.
But as for the rest of her—she wouldn’t give it mirror-space if she could avoid it: bruised eyes, pale cheeks. And a distinct lack of energy which seemed to require every ounce of determination to get her through each day.
It really wasn’t fair.
A bad dose of the flu just after she’d broken off with Leon hadn’t helped. If she’d thought the virus she hadn’t had had been bad enough, then the real thing had proved to be twice as awful. Trina blamed it on all the emotional stress she had been under. And Jemma could not really argue with her about that. It had seemed, that day she’d challenged misery to do its worst and told Leon that she was not prepared to uproot her whole life for him, that the emotional stress could not get any worse. She had been wrong. The constant sickness kept her in a permanent state of taut readiness for the next bout. Fear for the baby’s health had her creeping about like an invalid, afraid that at any moment she would dislodge the poor thing with her constant retching. And if the doctor had not assured her that despite it all—the flu and the sickness—the baby was doing fine, she had a suspicion she might well have given up the ghost and taken to her bed to die languidly.
She felt so rough. And she missed Leon. It hurt most of the time even to think about him. Yet she thought about him constantly, a never-ending circle of self-inflicted misery which in no way helped her present condition.
On a brighter note, Leon’s take-over of the huge American shipping company had made the headlines several times this week, the papers singing the praises of the Greek tycoon who had managed to turn the company’s fortunes around with such devastating speed. This morning’s article said:
Leon Stephanades, the strong arm of the Leonadis Corporation, has worked a miracle on the old company. With heavy investment and a bomb up the backsides of all those who believed themselves to be on to a cushy number under the old regime, he has managed to secure contracts that have set all those mocking doubters in his own family by their ears. His father took time off from his second son’s wedding celebrations to concede last night, ‘Leon has a nose for a good risk’, as their stock on the market hit an all-time high. What Dimitri Stephanades forbore to add was that this success came despite the way he had tied his son’s hands over the last year by refusing to give him carte blanche on this venture. One must ask, though, if it is sensible to tie the hands of a man like Leon Stephanades. And whether maybe it is time the old man abdicated his power to his elder son.
Jemma had read and re-read the article, simply because it told her more about Leon than she had ever learned from the man himself. Namely the fact that there was someone above him who could tie his hands. Then there was the fact that he had a brother at all.
‘Well, lump,’ she murmured to her slowly steadying stomach, ‘your daddy is certainly a clever devil. No wonder I was worth dropping if this was what he was going after.’ And she stared down at the two aerial photographs where the vast square acreage of part of New York’s dockland was shown in ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparison. One photo showed its dry docks half deserted of both products and people, but in the other the whole place seemed to be a veritable hive of constructive activity.
‘Jemma...’ Trina’s voice sounded tentative to say the least.
‘What?’ she asked, glancing up from the newspaper article.
‘Trouble,’ Trina bluntly announced and put an envelope down in front of her.
Jemma stared at it, a cold shiver of alarm skittering down her spine. Like Trina, she recognised the bold scrawl instantly. And, like Trina, she knew it could only mean trouble. ‘Hell,’ she muttered.
Trina pulled out the chair beside her and sat down. ‘What can he want?’
‘I don’t know.’ In all honesty, she had not expected to hear from Leon again. This had come as a shock.
‘Hadn’t you better open it and find out?’
I would much rather not, Jemma thought ruefully, but even as she was thinking it her fingers were working tremulously at the seal. Dry-mouthed, she stared at the few hastily scrawled lines before their meaning began to sink in. It said:
I am due in London Friday. I would like to see you. Have dinner with me? Shall call for you at eight. L.
Her heart gave a pathetic little leap, then began to palpitate so fast that she could barely breathe, her lips going as dry as her mouth. The mere idea of him being so close as in London made her want to weep with longing. Then she was instantly hardening herself. There was no room in her life for that kind of weakness now.
‘What does it say?’ Trina asked.
‘Nothing,’ she said, and handed the note to Trina.
Trina read it slowly, her usually open face studiedly impassive, then she looked at Jemma. ‘I think you should go,’ she elected q