A Paper Marriage (3 page)

Had she experienced the smallest doubt about that, then that very small doubt evaporated into thin air when she went down to breakfast and saw that, while she had slept only fitfully, her father looked like a soul in torment and appeared not to have slept at all.

`And what are you going to do today?' he forced a cheerful note to ask. And she wished that she could tell him, Don't, Dad, I know all about it. But her father's pride was, mammoth, and she could not take that away from him. Time enough for him to know when she came back from seeing Jonah Marriott and was able to tell him-if all went well-that Jonah would ring her father's bank and tell them, hopefully, that he would take on his debt.

`I haven't seen Aunt Alice in ages,' she answered, Aunt Alice being her mother's aunt, in actual fact, and therefore Lydie's great-aunt. `I thought I might take a drive over to see her.'

`You're picking her up for the wedding next week, aren't you?"

'She doesn't want to stay away from home overnight.' Lydie tactfully rephrased part of what her great-aunt had written in her last letter.

`We, your mother, Oliver and me, are going to a hotel overnight, as you know. Your mother's idea,' he muttered, but added dryly, 'Hilary will be sorry her aunt won't be staying here.'

Lydie grinned. She thought Aunt Alice brilliant; her mother thought her a stubborn pain. Lydie was not grinning after breakfast, though. Dressed in a smart suit of powder blue, her dark hair pulled back from her delicate features in a classic knot, she got out her car ostensibly to make the twenty mile drive to her aunt's home in Penleigh Corbett in the next county.

While facing that she did not want to make the journey to the London head office of Marriott Electronics, since make it she must, she wanted to be early. For all she knew she might have to wait all day, but if Jonah Marriott was in the building and refused to see her, then, since he had to come out at some time, she was prepared to wait around to speak to him on his way out.

Her insides had been churned up ever since she had opened her eyes that morning, but the nearer she got to London, the more her churning insides were all over the place.

When the traffic started to snarl up she found a place to park her car and made it to the Marriott building by foot, tube and lastly taxi.

But once outside the building she experienced the greatest reluctance to go inside. For herself, perhaps having inherited her father's massive pride, she would have galloped in the opposite direction. Only this wasn't for her; it was for him.

Lydie had to do no more than recall her father's drawn look at breakfast and she was pushing through the plate-glass doors and heading for the reception desk.

The receptionist was busy dealing with one person and there was someone else waiting. `Mr Marriott's PA is on her way down to see you.' The receptionist put down the phone to pass on the message to the suit-clad man she was dealing with.

Lydie closed her ears to the rest of it, her glance going over to where the lifts were. One started up and, from the changing numerals, she saw that the lift was making its way down from the top floor.

Without being fully aware of it, Lydie edged over to that lift. When the doors opened and a smart-looking woman of forty or so stepped out, and with a smile on her face went over to the man at the desk, Lydie stepped in and pressed the button for the top floor.

She knew she could quite well have got it wrong, but if her hunch was right, that had been Jonah Marriott's PA. If she had just come down from the top floor, then, to Lydie's mind, on the top floor was where she might find Jonah Marriott.

The lift stopped; she got out. She felt hot, sick, and knew that this was the worst thing she was ever going to have to do in her life. Instinct took her to the end of the carpeted corridor. With what intelligence her emotions had left her, it seemed to her that the man who was head of this corporation would have his office well away from the sound of the lift going up and down.

There were doors to offices on either side of the long corridor. Lydie ignored them and at the bottom of that corridor turned round a corner which opened out to show two doors blocking her way. Lydie hesitated, but only for a moment. She was by then starting to feel certain she had got it all wrong. Somehow, churned up, anxious, worried, she had got it all wrong, all muddled; she knew that she had. She went forward and, placing a hand on the handle to the door to the right, she paused for about half a second, then turned the handle.

Shock as the door swung inwards and she saw a man seated at a desk in front of her kept her speechless and motionless. He looked up, and as colour surged to her face so, his glance still on her face, he rose from his chair and began to come round his desk and over to her.

She was five feet nine inches tall, he looked down at her and-to her utter astonishment commented, `Still blushing, Lydie?' He remembered her, her blushes, from seven years ago?

'I'm L-Lydie Pearson,' she heard herself say inanely from somewhere far off.

`I know who you are,' he answered smoothly. `Come in and take a seat,' he invited, and as she took a couple of steps into the room he closed the door behind her and touched a hand to her elbow.

In something of a daze she found she was seated on a chair some way to the side of his desk before she had got herself anywhere near of one piece.

`Haven't I changed at all in seven years?' she asked, her head still a little woolly that he had so instantly recognised her.

`I wouldn't say that,' Jonah replied pleasantly, his eyes flicking a glance over her still slender, but now curving deliciously in all the right places, shape. `Elaine, my PA, made a note that a Lydie Pearson phoned last Tuesday. I recalled one black- haired, green-eyed Lydie Pearson with one hell of a superb complexion. It had to be you.' He paused, and then, while she was feeling a touch swamped that he thought she had a superb complexion, `You're still Lydie Pearson?' he enquired. Having thought she had her head more together, Lydie wasn't with him for a moment or two. `Um...' she mumbled, then realised what he was asking. 'I'm not married,' she answered, and, with a quick glance to his ringless left hand, `It doesn't look as if anybody's caught you either.'

His rather splendid mouth quirked upwards at the corners slightly. `I have very long legs,' he confided.

`You sprint pretty fast at the word marriage?'

He did not answer. He didn't need to. `So, how's the world treating you?' he asked.

Lydie looked away from his fantastic blue eyes and over to his laden desk. He had not been expecting this visit and from the look of his desk was extremely busy catching up on a backlog of work. Yet he seemed to have all the time in the world to idly converse with someone he barely knew, someone he had only ever clapped eyes on once-and that was seven years ago.

'Er-this isn't a social call,' Lydie stated abruptly.

`It isn't?' he questioned mildly-when she was sure he must know that it wasn't.

She experienced an unexpected urge to thump him that surprised her. She swallowed down that small burst of anger, but only when she felt marginally calmer was she able to coldly state, `My father seems not to have fared as well, financially, over the last seven years as you yourself appear to have done.'

Jonah nodded, every bit as if he already knew that-and that annoyed her-before he coolly commented, `That's what comes from constantly bailing out that brother of yours.' How dared he blame Oliver? `Oliver no longer has his own business!'

`That should make things easier for your father,' Jonah Marriott shot back at her, cool still.

Honestly! Again she wanted to hit him. `My father's own business has gone too!' she retorted pithily, and saw that at last Jonah Marriott was taking her seriously.

`I'm very sorry to hear that. Wilmot is a first class-'

`So you should be sorry!' she interrupted hotly. `If you'd had the decency to honour that debt...'

`Honour that debt?' Jonah queried toughly, just as if he had not the first clue what she was talking about.

`You're trying to say that you have totally forgotten coming to my home seven years ago and borrowing fifty thousand pounds from my father?"

'I'm hardly likely to do that. If it wasn't for your father-'

`Then it's about time you paid that loan back!' she interrupted his flow hotly. And, suddenly too het-up to sit still, she jumped to her feet-to find Jonah Marriott was on his feet too, and was standing looking down on her. She saw him swiftly masking a look of surprise-at her nerve, no doubt. But she cared not if he thought she had an outrageous sauce to burst in on his busy morning without so much as a by your leave and demand the return of her father's money. Her father's peace of mind was at stake here. `If my father doesn't have that fifty thousand pounds by the end of today's banking,' she hurtled on, `we, that is my mother and father, will lose Beamhurst Court!' 'Lose...'

But Lydie was too angry to let him in. 'Beamhurst Court has been in my family for hundreds of years and my father has until only today to see that it stays in the family!' she charged on.

`You're exaggerating, surely?' Jonah Marriott managed to get in evenly, his eyes on her angry face, her sparking green eyes.

`I love Beamhurst! Does it look as if I'm exaggerating?' she erupted. But calmed down a little to concur, `It's true my father invested heavily in Oliver's company, but my father didn't know his own firm was going to suffer a downturn.'

`So he borrowed as much as he could from the banks, putting Beamhurst Court up as collateral,' Jonah took up. `And when your brother's firm went belly-up, and your father settled his son's creditors, there was nothing left in the kitty to settle his own debts.'

`You know this?' she asked, starting to feel her anger on the rise again that he should be aware of the situation and still refuse to repay her father.

`I didn't,' Jonah replied, defusing her anger somewhat. `From what you've said, that seems the most likely way it went.' And disconcertingly he asked, And what's your brother doing in all of this?'

Lydie did not care for his question. It weakened her argument. Her father was distraught-while Oliver did nothing. 'He... I haven't seen Oliver. I only came home on Tuesday,' she excused, and defended her elder brother. `Oliver's getting married a week tomorrow. There's a lot to arrange. He's staying with his fianc�e's people to help with any last-minute problems they ...' Her voice trailed away.

`Let's hope he makes a better job of it than he made of his business,' Jonah commented, but, before she could take exception, `Big do, is it?'

Lydie could have done without that remark too. In the instance of her family being on their uppers-and she was coming to realise more and more that her father constantly financing her brother's business was largely responsible for that-it did seem a bit over the top to have such a pomp of a wedding.

`The bride's parents are paying for everything,' she felt obligated to admit, her pride taking something of a hammering here. `Look, we're getting away from the point!' she said snappily. `You owe my father money. Money he needs, now, if he is to remain in the only home he has ever known, the home he loves.'

`Fifty thousand pounds will assure that?' Jonah asked, doubting it.

`My father has sold everything he can possibly sell in order to meet his debts. All that remains is an overdraft of fifty thousand pounds at the bank that he knows, and they know, he cannot find-nor has any likelihood of finding. They have given him until today to try to find that money anyway. He cannot,' she ended, and her voice started to fracture. `A-and he looks t-terrible.'

Abruptly she turned away from Jonah, knowing that her emotions as she thought of her dear distracted father had brought her close to tears. She went to stare unseeing out of the window and swallowed hard as she fought for control. Her pride would never survive if she broke down in front of this hard man.

When she felt she had control she turned towards the door, knowing instinctively that she had pleaded her father's cause in vain. It had been a long shot anyway, she realised. Had Jonah Marriott the smallest intention of repaying that money, he would have done so long before this.

She took a step to the door-but was halted when Jonah, having not moved from where she had left him, stated, `Obviously your father doesn't know you've come here.'

Lydie turned. `He's a proud man,' she replied with a tilt of her head.

`His daughter's pretty much the same,' Jonah said quietly, his eyes on her proud beauty.

She wished she could agree. Albeit she had not come to the Marriott building for herself, she had not been too proud to come here today-even if that money was still owing. `Should you ever bump into my father, I'd be obliged if you did not tell him I came here,' she requested coldly.

For answer Jonah Marriott went round to his desk. `I won't-but I think he'll know,' he drawled, to her alarm. And, even while she was instantly ready to go for Jonah Marriott's jugular, he was opening a drawer in his desk, taking out a chequebook, and asking, `Who do you want the cheque made out to, Lydie?"

'Y-you'll pay?' she asked, shaken rigid, but in no mind to refuse-no matter how little he offered. He did not answer but picked up his pen. She went over to stand at the other side of his desk. `My father. Would you make it out to my father, please?' she said quickly, before he could change his mind.

It was done. In next to no time the cheque was written and Jonah was handing it to her across the desk. Hardly daring to breathe, lest this be some sort of evil game he was playing, Lydie inspected the cheque. It was made out to Wilmot Pearson. The date was right. The cheque was signed. But the amount was wrong. Jonah had made it out for fifty-five thousand pounds!

'Fifty-five thousand... ?"

'The bank will be adding interest-daily, I don't doubt. Call it interest on the debt.' He meant his debt, of course. Feeling stunned, then beginning to feel little short of elated, Lydie looked up and across at him. She was about to thank him when she looked at the cheque again and noticed that it was not a company cheque, as she would have thought, but a personal cheque and a large chunk of her elation fell away. Anybody could write a personal cheque for fifty-five thousand pounds, but that did not necessarily mean there was any money in that bank account. Was this some kind of sick joke Jonah Marriott was playing, to pay her back for her impertinence in daring to walk unannounced into his office and demand he paid what he owed?