Christmas Nights (35 page)

She had no idea just when Jon had returned from abroad but she had not been surprised when he had not got in touch with her, and, even though on a chance meeting in the street Louisa had apologised for not listening to her when she had originally tried to explain that Harold had been lying about the supposed relationship between them, no mention had been made of her brother and Heaven had not felt able to ask about him.

Over the last few months she had had the scales so well and truly ripped from her eyes where the male sex was concerned that she had few illusions left, and besides, right now she had far more important and immediate concerns to deal with.

Things like making sure that Harold Lewis paid for what he had done to her. Oh, not in money. No, something far more satisfactory… Something that would damage his reputation, his self-esteem, his standing in the eyes of the world, just as he had damaged hers.

‘The proof of the pudding,’ she reminded herself, muttering the words under her breath so that Janet shook her head slightly.

‘I’m sorry.’ She apologised again to her friend. ‘It just makes me so mad, that’s all. He gets away scot-free with what he’s done and I’m left not just without a job but also without a reputation. What sane woman is going to employ me now when the whole world knows the risk she’d be taking? When everyone thinks I’m a cook from hell, the kind of employee who is more interested in making the man of the house than in making the dinner? Well, it’s my turn now and fate has given me an opportunity to well and truly butter his bread for him. It’s almost too good to be true…’

‘Mmm…’ Janet agreed doubtfully. ‘Tell me in more detail what you plan to do.’

‘Just let me get these puddings on,’ Heaven said. ‘I’ve got an order for fifty to fill and get sent off by tomorrow.’

‘Fifty…’ Janet groaned, watching as Heaven moved deftly around the kitchen.

‘Right,’ Heaven announced when she had finished. ‘As you know I’ve been advertising in the classified ads as Mrs Tiggywinkle, selling figgy puddings, but saying that I can cater for private functions as well. Well, I got a phone call three days ago from someone who introduced herself to me as Tiffany Simons. She said that she was desperate to find someone to cook a special celebration pre-Christmas dinner for her fiancé who was returning from the States with a couple of important business clients who he wanted her to entertain along with some close friends and business associates. None of the agencies could supply her with a cook so close to Christmas and at such short notice—so she was literally ringing round every number she could find in the hope of getting a cook from somewhere.

‘To add to her problems, as well as dropping this dinner on her it transpired that her fiancé had also left her with full responsibility for getting the work completed on a house he was having renovated for them both.

‘We arranged to meet to have lunch and discuss everything. And that was when I knew…’

‘When you knew what?’ Janet questioned her.

‘When I knew that she—Tiffany—must be engaged to Harold… She was wearing Louisa’s old engagement ring,’ Heaven told her simply. ‘I recognised it straight away. Louisa threw it back at him the day she walked out. Later she told me that she’d never liked it and had always considered it too vulgar. It was a huge brilliant-cut solitaire. Very flashy.’

‘Louisa’s engagement ring and now this Tiffany’s wearing it?’ Janet gasped.

‘Yes, but I doubt that she knows it was Louisa’s. She’s very young—I feel quite sorry for her. She’s obviously terrified of doing anything to annoy or upset Harold and it’s typical of him that he should have sprung this dinner thing on her—and typical as well that the fee he’s willing to pay the cook he’s told her to hire is nowhere near enough—not for the type of meal he’s ordered her to organise.

‘She’s panicking like mad that the guest bedrooms aren’t going to be finished on time. She confided to me that Harold’s refusing to pay the interim payments he promised the designers and suppliers unless they get everything ready ahead of schedule. I don’t know who these people are he’s so keen to impress but they must be pretty important to him…’

‘More important than his new fiancée,’ Janet suggested shrewdly.

‘Oh, much more important,’ Heaven agreed. ‘I could tell from the way she was talking about him that she hardly knows him at all. There’s some kind of distant business connection between Harold and her father, apparently, and that’s how they met.

‘Anyway, once she told me what was happening, I realised that if I took on the job of cooking this dinner for her it would give me the ideal opportunity to get my own back on Harold. He always did have a sweet tooth,’ she added inconsequentially, a wide, cat-like smile curling her mouth as her eyes danced.

‘Heaven…’ Janet said uncertainly. ‘You’re not thinking of doing anything too over the top, are you?’

She was suddenly remembering the scrapes her friend’s irrepressible sense of humour had got them into as schoolgirls and remembering too just how much reason Heaven had to want to punish Harold for the damage he had done to her.

‘That depends,’ Heaven answered soberly, but Janet could see that her eyes were still gleaming with amusement.

‘On what?’ she asked warily.

‘On what one considers to be too over the top,’ Heaven replied promptly, but unsatisfactorily—at least so far as Janet was concerned.

Janet tried again.

‘What I meant was, you’re not planning on doing something illegal…?’

‘Illegal?’ Heaven’s eyebrows rose. ‘Certainly not,’ she denied emphatically. ‘What I have in mind is designed quite simply to hurt Harold’s pride, to damage it just as he damaged mine. Poisoning him and ending up in prison for it—if that’s what that anxious mother-hen
look in your eyes means you’re worrying about—is the last thing I’d want to do, although…’ A thoughtful far-away look in her eyes made Janet’s anxiety increase. ‘There are certain hallucinogenic mushrooms which I could—’

‘No, no, you mustn’t do anything like that,’ Janet intervened quickly.

‘No, I mustn’t,’ Heaven agreed, adding with mock primness, ‘It would be quite unethical.

‘No, what I’ve got in mind will teach Harold a much more salutary lesson than anything like that…’

‘If he doesn’t recognise you and throw you out,’ Janet warned her.

‘He won’t recognise me,’ Heaven assured her positively. ‘For a start Tiffany only knows me by my new professional name of Mrs Tiggywinkle and she obviously hadn’t a clue who I was when we met. She was at great pains and rather embarrassed to ask me if I would mind keeping a very low profile—apparently Harold wants his guests to think that she cooked their meal.

‘He would, of course, since he’s obviously being too mean to take them out to an expensive restaurant or pay the fees charged by the kind of frantically up-market caterers he’d enjoy boasting about hiring. He’s decided it will give him more kudos to have his victims—sorry, his guests—believe that poor Tiffany has cooked their dinner, so I’m to lie low in the kitchen whilst she serves the meal.

‘Knowing Harold as I do, I very much doubt he’ll come anywhere near the kitchen—for a start he’d think he was demeaning himself and no doubt he’ll try his best to get away with delaying paying me for as long
as he can—I’ve asked to be paid cash on the night. No, Harold won’t see me to recognise me.

‘It won’t matter, not so long as they eat their dinner—and they will.

‘Revenge is sweet, so they say, and, as I’ve already told you, Harold has an extremely sweet tooth, so he shall have an extremely generous portion of revenge,’ Heaven told her, giving Janet a kind smile when she saw that she was still looking anxious.

‘I wish you weren’t doing this,’ Janet told her.

‘I don’t,’ Heaven responded cheerfully. ‘You can’t imagine how much better I’ve felt these last few days knowing that at last Harold is going to get his comeuppance, or rather his just deserts! Do you know, I think I’m going to enjoy Christmas this year after all?’ she added conversationally as the timer on her oven pinged and she went to attend to the puddings she had made earlier.

‘All alone here?’ Janet asked her doubtfully. ‘I wish you would change your mind and come with us to Lloyd’s parents’. I know they’d make you welcome.’

‘No… I want to be alone… Next year is going to be my year and I want to be ready for it.’

‘Those puddings smell marvellous,’ Janet told her.

‘Mmm… they do, don’t they?’ Heaven agreed with a small smile that made Janet’s maternal heart beat even more anxiously.

‘I
HOPE
you don’t intend to allow him to get away with this.’

Louisa gave her brother an unhappy look as he put down the letter he had just been reading. She had received it from her ex-husband’s solicitor only that morning and had telephoned Jon straight away to tell him what had happened.

‘I don’t want to. If he does insist on refusing to pay the girls’ school fees they’ll have to change school and Belle is already having a few problems following the divorce… but I don’t know what I can do to stop him.’

‘My God, when I think…’ Jon began, and then stopped when he saw the unhappiness on his sister’s face.

‘I know what you’re thinking, Jon,’ she told him. ‘I admit I have only myself to blame for the fact that Harold has made such a fool of me financially. If I hadn’t walked out on him and insisted on an immediate divorce and if I hadn’t been so desperate to let my pride rule my head I could have obtained a much better financial settlement from him.’

‘The fact that he’s depriving not just you but also his own children of the financial comfort you’ve all every
reason to expect has nothing to do with your pride and everything to do with his greed,’ Jon told her gently. ‘I just wish I hadn’t been working abroad and away so much when the divorce was going through. I’d give a lot to know just how he managed to convince the divorce judge that he didn’t have the assets to give you what you were fully entitled to.’

‘He manipulated me,’ Louisa admitted grimly, ‘by pretending that he was having an affair with Heaven. He tricked me into walking out on him. I should have stayed where I was. After all, it wasn’t as though she was his first affair—not that they were having an affair, of course,’ Louisa corrected herself hastily. ‘She was just as much a victim of his machinations as I was myself—even more of one, really, when I think what that poor girl suffered…’

‘Have you seen her at all since?’ Jon asked her casually, turning slightly to one side as he did so so that Louisa couldn’t see his face.

‘Only once,’ she told him. ‘Not unnaturally I don’t think she really wanted anything to do with me but we literally bumped into one another in the street. At least I was able to apologise to her. Even now, you know, I’ve still got friends who quite plainly don’t believe that she wasn’t involved with Harold even though I’ve told them that it was all a mistake. Harold treated her almost as vindictively as he did me and I’ve wondered since if he did actually make a play for her and got turned down. That would explain the obvious pleasure he took in deliberately blackening her character…

‘Jon, what am I going to do about this?’ she asked her brother, returning to the original subject of her urgent phone call to him. ‘If I accept this reduced level
of maintenance and Harold’s refusal to pay the girls’ school fees, I just don’t know what we’re going to do.’

‘I’m more than happy to cover the cost of the girls’ education. After all, they are my nieces,’ Jon told her firmly.

‘Your nieces, yes, but one day you could well have children of your own, a wife of your own who might not look too kindly on you having to virtually support my children as well as your own.’

‘Any woman who felt like that would never be my wife,’ Jon told her truthfully, and Louisa hugged him.

‘It says in this letter that the reason Harold is seeking to reduce his payments to you is the fact that he is planning to remarry and he and his new wife intend to have their own family…’

‘Has he said anything to you about wanting to cut my maintenance payments?’

‘No,’ Jon told her, shaking his head. ‘I have managed to convince him that I’m more interested in maintaining the friendship I’ve struck up with him than I am in whatever problems you might be facing, but as yet he still hasn’t opened up to me as much as I’d hoped about how and where he’s managed to conceal so much of his wealth. But I am still trying.

‘He’s invited me to a pre-Christmas dinner he’s giving at the end of the week. He faxed me from New York to tell me about it. He’s over there on business at the moment.’

‘A pre-Christmas dinner?’ Louisa questioned.

‘Mmm… his new fiancée is arranging everything, apparently, and it’s being held at the house he’s been having renovated in Knightsbridge.’

‘The house he bought with the profit he made on selling our house,’ Louisa said fiercely.

‘Yes,’ Jon agreed grimly.

‘That poor girl. I hope that, unlike me, she finds out what he’s really like before they get married,’ Louisa told her brother bitterly. ‘Oh, Jon, what am I going to do?’ she asked him plaintively. ‘The parents have offered to help but they’ve already done more than enough, and so has Rory…’

Jon noticed the way his sister’s skin changed colour slightly as she mentioned the old family friend who had done so much to support her both emotionally and practically since the break-up of her marriage. It was no secret to Jon that Rory Stevens loved his sister and Jon suspected that she was now beginning to return his feelings.

‘Do you think Harold believes that you want his friendship and that you approve of what he’s done?’

‘He seems to,’ Jon told her, ‘but I must admit I had hoped by now to at least have some proof for you that he deliberately concealed the major part of his assets in order to pay you far less money than he should.’

‘We already know that he did,’ Louisa pointed out fiercely.

‘We know it, yes, but we can’t prove it,’ Jon reminded her patiently.

Later, as he set off back to his own apartment—a set of traditional and old-fashioned rooms in Fulham which he owned along with a home in the Scottish Borders where he spent as much time as he could, and another large apartment in a renovated Belgian château which
he used whenever he had business in Brussels—he was still thinking over his sister’s financial problems.

It infuriated him that a man like Harold could use the law as he had done and he had to admit it was getting harder and harder to keep his real feelings about the man to himself whenever they were together.

He had no idea why Harold should be so keen to pursue their ‘friendship’, unless he felt that in doing so he was somehow or other getting one up on Louisa.

Well, Jon was damned if he was going to let Harold get away with cheating Louisa and more importantly their children out of their financial due a second time, especially when Harold could well afford to be far more generous with them than he had been. At the very least Louisa should have had the family home—would have had it if she hadn’t been manipulated into walking out on him.

When he opened the door of his car Jon froze momentarily as a girl walked into his line of vision, thick dark curls bouncing softly on her shoulders as she hurried down the street wrapped up against the raw December wind in a coat which looked three or four sizes too big for her slender frame.

And then she turned her head and he saw her face. When was he going to stop doing this? When was he going to stop reacting blindly and ridiculously every single time he saw a woman who bore the slightest resemblance to Heaven?

Heaven. What a name… what a woman. He had been attracted to her the moment he saw her, attracted to her, enchanted by her, instinctively aware of the importance of not rushing her… not panicking her by coming on too strong too soon. He could still remember the way
her lips had quivered so softly and tellingly under his, still see the way her eyes had opened and widened as she’d looked back at him, unable to conceal what she was feeling.

God knew where she was now, but wherever it was it was obvious that she wanted nothing to do with him. The man whose sister had been responsible for the destruction of her reputation, the man whose brother-in-law had dragged her name through the tabloids, publicly labelling her as his mistress—publicly and completely untruthfully. Jon had known that immediately and instinctively but by then it was too late. She had gone and no one had seemed able to tell him where.

Her parents, when he had approached them, had been polite but pointedly determined. Their daughter had told them quite categorically that she wished to have no contact whatsoever with anyone connected with Harold—no matter who—and they’d been afraid that they could not tell him where she was or how to get in touch with her.

At one point he had actually thought of employing a private detective to find her for him but just in time he had come to his senses and recognised what an appalling intrusion of her privacy that would be—but that hadn’t stopped him searching every even half-familiar face glimpsed in the street just in case…

Did she still have that irrepressible sense of humour, that impish smile? He hoped so. Had she got over the trauma of what had been inflicted on her? Did she ever think of him? Somehow he doubted it.

Grimly he climbed into his car and started the engine. It was pointless now cursing the fate that had led to him being out of the country when the whole nasty
affair of Harold’s manipulation of Louisa’s vulnerable emotions had blown up, but of course that didn’t stop him from doing so.

They had only shared one date… a few chaste kisses… and two far more memorable ones that had been anything but chaste… but that had been enough to have him comparing every woman he had been tempted to date since with Heaven and finding them wanting—and finding himself even more wanting for being so emotionally hung up on a woman he had known so briefly and so tenuously.

Thank goodness for that, Heaven puffed, heaving a sigh of relief that the last of the large batch of puddings she had received orders for had been passed over to the post-office clerk for onward despatch.

It was a fine if cold winter’s day, the sky a pale smudgy blue over the steel-grey waters of the Thames as she walked back towards the house. As always the river fascinated her, causing her to stop and look at it.

Had her ancestors, her great-grandparents, who had lived in the house before her, been equally fascinated by the ebb and flow of its tides, the magnificence of it?

The weather forecasters had predicted a heavy frost for the next few days and idly Heaven wondered what it must have been like to be alive when the Thames had actually frozen over. She remembered reading that it had once frozen so deeply and so hard that a fair had actually been held on it complete with burning braziers to warm the skaters and provide the excited crowds who had flocked to enjoy the novel experience of actually walking on the solid surface of the river with
tasty snacks. What exactly would they have served? she wondered dreamily.

Eel pie, whelks, whitebait, hot bread and buns, confectionery of all descriptions. She had a much treasured recipe book from the eighteenth century which had been a twenty-first-birthday present from her parents and just reading the lists of some of the ingredients brought forcibly to her a mental image of the merchant vessels which had once thronged the Thames, bringing home their cargoes of exotic and expensive spices and sugar.

This afternoon she was due to meet with Tiffany Simons to go through the menu she had produced for her. With the dinner scheduled for the end of the week that wouldn’t leave her very much time to do her shopping and she still had the kitchen to inspect and to check on.

Her thoughts firmly back in the present, she turned her back on the river and hurried home.

‘Figgy pudding… What exactly is that?’ Tiffany enquired, her forehead crinkling in a small frown.

She and Heaven were seated opposite one another at the table of the kitchen of the house she had explained to Heaven she was going to share with Harold once they were married.

‘My parents are rather old-fashioned,’ she had told Heaven with a small sigh. ‘They wouldn’t be happy about me moving in with anyone before we were married. Mummy didn’t have me until she was forty. They had given up all hope of having a family when she became pregnant with me and so…’ She had paused, but Heaven could guess just how precious she was to her parents and just how protective of her they were—but
not apparently protective enough—not if they thought that Harold would make her a good husband.

‘Figgy pudding,’ she started to explain now in response to Tiffany’s question, ‘it is an old-fashioned, traditional and very rich pudding mixture. Men love it,’ she added when she saw the doubt shadowing Tiffany’s pretty soft brown eyes.

Instantly the other girl’s expression cleared.

‘Oh, do they? Well, in that case that’s all right, then,’ she declared ingenuously, adding, ‘I’m afraid I’m not much of a cook. That’s why Harold said I had to find someone to prepare this dinner.

‘Apparently the people he’s bringing back from New York are some very important new business contacts he’s made. Harold owns his own software company,’ she told Heaven importantly. ‘These Americans want him to sell the business to them. Harold’s brilliantly clever, though,’ she went on, giving Heaven a proud smile, ‘because if he does sell the company to them he’s still going to keep a new software program he’s been working on, although he won’t be able to sell it in America, not at first; but Harold says there’s a huge market for it in the Middle East and Taiwan.’

Heaven had to shade her eyes with her lashes to conceal her true thoughts as she listened to Tiffany’s artless prattle. Knowing Harold as she did, Heaven suspected that the kind of deal he was hoping to pull off with the Americans would not only benefit him financially but would also involve him practising the same sort of deliberate manipulation he had used with his wife, to gain yet another financial victory just as underhandedly as he had Louisa’s divorce settlement.

As she listened to Tiffany enthusing about Harold’s
supposed cleverness Heaven couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. The girl really had no idea what Harold was about at all. Heaven, though, could well understand why Harold wanted to marry her. Her naivety would appeal to him almost as much as her undoubted prettiness.

‘So you’re quite happy with the menu we’ve decided on,’ Heaven checked with Tiffany as she started to gather up the notes she had made, giving the kitchen a thorough professional visual inspection whilst she did so. She hadn’t missed the nervous half-whispered telephone conversation Tiffany had had with the kitchen designer halfway through their own conversation, from which it had been obvious that the designers still had to be paid, not just for their own work but for the units and equipment as well. Well, that didn’t really surprise Heaven, not knowing Harold as she did.