The Hidden Years (51 page)

That was not the impression she wanted to give at all. She
flicked a glance downwards, frowning, removing a small piece of fluff
from her immaculately tailored suit. It was an outfit she thoroughly
detested; she normally kept it for clients or meetings she didn't
particularly like because she knew it gave her a polished,
sophisticated image. The short, straight skirt subtly emphasised her
sexuality, the long double-breasted jacket adding a sharper,
disconcerting touch of hard-edged masculinity.

The fabric was a fine woollen Prince of Wales check, which
she had been cynically amused to discover had been woven here at her
mother's mills.

Beneath it she was wearing a tailored off-white silk
shirt, and beneath that… beneath that she was wearing the
equally plain and even more expensive silk underwear that was one of
her few material indulgences. She bought it from Rigby and Peller in
London, but over it when she was working—which was most of
the time-she normally wore jeans and an oversized man's shirt. When she
wasn't working she wore virtually the same thing, except when she was
attending the odd and unwanted formal "do" or when she was coming down
here to visit her mother, who expected certain standards to be observed.

Previously Sage had always thought her insistence on these
standards petty-minded and yet another indication of her mother's
refusal to move with the times, but now, after reading her diaries, she
saw things differently, realised how difficult it might be for a woman
raised as her mother had been raised, married so young to a man like
her father, a woman who had known such financial and material
hardships, to let herself go and dress in the casual classless uniform
of which Sage herself was so fond.

If she in turn ever produced a daughter, would she find it
as difficult to understand her—would she in turn not be able
to bridge the chasms between them?

A daughter… Strange that when she had not
thought of herself in the context of motherhood for so long, when she
had not allowed to think of herself in that context since losing Scott,
she should think of it now, no matter how obliquely.

She had told herself that she was more than ready for her
confrontation with Daniel, that the physical reality of him held no
traumas or fears for her, that once over the shock of seeing him walk
into the hall that night she was finally free of the past…
but as he walked into her mother's study she knew that it wasn't true.

Why, when she was a relatively tall woman herself, did the
sheer physical presence of him make her feel so breathless and nervous?
He was tall, but not overly so, broad without the almost ape-like torso
of so many large men, which she personally found repellent rather than
attractive.

As he came towards her she looked for signs of grey in the
thick darkness of his hair, and, finding none, wondered idly if he had
it tinted before dismissing the notion as totally implausible. Daniel
simply wasn't that kind of man.

Even now, with his hair expensively cut and shaped, his
nails well-manicured and buffed, his hands and wrists were still sinewy
and brown as though he still spent long hours physically working
alongside his men. She remembered how much Scott had admired him for
that, cataloguing his virtues for her, when she had sneered at her
beloved's new friend, claiming that she didn't like him.

Scott… What was he doing now? Did he ever think
about her? She knew that he was married… Someone, she didn't
know who, since the magazine had arrived anonymously, had taken the
trouble to send her a copy of an Australian magazine describing his
marriage to the daughter of a successful entrepreneur as the 'Wedding
of the Year'.

That had been six years ago, and certainly he had looked
happy enough. The letters she had sent to him in the first frantic
throes of her grief had all been re-turned to her unopened. Her
telephone calls remained unanswered. Only once had she heard from
Scott's father, a brief note telling her that Scott was recovering and
that he didn't want to hear from her again.

The years between Scott's accident and his marriage were
ones she preferred not to remember now. Years in which she had drunk
deep of the rich, heady wine of life, and had sometimes found that such
drinking had brought her a miserable sickness of the soul which refused
to go away.

Sex had been the panacea she had used, or tried to use, to
blot out the past—until the morning she had woken up and
realised that she would far rather be sleeping alone than with the man
beside her… that sex, like any other crutch, worked only as
long as you allowed yourself to believe that it would, and that in the
end it was far better to face up to the harsh realities of life and the
pain they brought without any crutches at all; that sex on its own,
while physically pleasurable, was emotionally barren, and, ultimately,
that it was something she did as an act of destruction against herself,
masking that fact in the illusion that she was doing it simply for its
physical pleasure.

It had taken many solitary hours of painful self-analysis
for her to realise this, to realise that what she was doing was
punishing herself, hurting herself, destroying herself.

That had been over six years ago, and yet still the gossip
columns accredited her with an ever-changing list of lovers, while in
fact… while in fact there had been none for two years, and
even before that… even before that there had been far less
than the world seemed to assume.

But those men that there had been had wanted her, some of
them almost to the point of insanity… Unlike this man, she
reflected, watching as Daniel came towards her.

He hadn't really changed; only matured, grown harder,
shrewder. The assessing grey eyes were still the same, seeing far more
than one wanted them to see, the handshake just as determinedly firm,
the mouth still disconcertingly passionate, even when it was smiling
with the cool, watchful smile he was giving her.

'Daniel… It was good of you to come at such
short notice.'

She smiled back at him, the distant, professional smile
she used to warn off those clients who dared to presume that she was
available as a woman as well as a professional muralist.

'As I recall, you didn't give me much option.'

His voice had changed, deepened, steadied, become more
measured… perhaps like the man himself?

He was looking, Sage noticed, at her mother's desk.

'Good piece,' he commented, eyeing it thoughtfully.

'I believe so, although I'm afraid I'm not very
knowledgeable about antiques. My mother picked it up at a sale in
Ireland. She was fortunate enough to have the wisdom to pick up quite a
lot of old stuff that way in the fifties when no one wanted to be seen
dead with anything over six months old, and a lot of old houses were
being pulled down.'

Daniel smiled to himself at the way she described what
were no doubt priceless antiques as a lot of old stuff. He had
initially been slightly taken aback when he was shown into this room
and discovered Sage standing there, dressed like the very toughest type
of American female executive, or, at least, her own very feminised and
unique version of that.

He wondered obliquely if she had chosen the silk shirt
deliberately because of the way it emphasised her breasts, and then
dismissed the idea as unfair.

As well as he had known her—and he had
considered he had known her well in the old days, despite that final
debacle—he could never have accused her of being deliberately
sexually provocative. She had never had any need.

He wondered if it was true, as he had heard recently on
the grapevine, that she had become virtually celibate. Quite a
turn-around after the wild years of changing her lovers almost as
frequently as she changed her clothes, if it was true, but then she had
always had that rather unexpected core of inner purity about her.

He remembered how she had once rounded on Scott when he
had idly suggested trying some of the hallucinatory drugs so
fashionable among some of the undergraduate set… How she had
heatedly and graphically described to him the potential hazards of such
a course. He personally hadn't done drugs in those days, and had never
felt the need to since, but it had struck him quite forcibly at the
time that she could potentially become a woman of strong character and
resolve… that once her mind was set to a course no amount of
peer pressure or any other kind of pressure was likely to change it.
And if she had become celibate, well, she had certainly been running
well ahead of the field.

'You said there was something you wanted to discuss with
me,' Daniel reminded her as Sage waved him into a chair. 'Something too
urgent to wait.'

'Yes. I've asked Jenny to bring us some tea, although if
you'd prefer coffee…'

In the old days he had always drunk coffee, only coffee,
and now, listening to her dulcet offer, looking into her guarded green
eyes, he smiled an equally crocodile smile and shook his head.

'Tea's fine. Like everyone else, I've probably become
over-diet-conscious these days. I found that the threat of suffering a
bout of caffeine poisoning effectively had me switching to tea.'

As Sage turned her back on him he heard her drawling
mockingly, 'My God, how the mighty are fallen with a vengeance. Is this
really the hard man of the Welsh hills, afraid to drink a cup of coffee
in case it over-excites his adrenalin flow?'

Daniel refused to rise to the bait, simply saying with
false gentleness, 'Oh, I think we're all far more health-conscious
these days, don't you?'

If she picked up the underlying taunt, it didn't show. The
colour which had once come so swiftly and betrayingly to her pale skin
had somehow become controlled over the years, only the faintest glimmer
of something that could have either been anger or amusement glinting
momentarily in the green eyes as she turned back to him.

'I expect you know that as far as the committee is
concerned I've had to step into my mother's shoes at rather short
notice,' she told him, completely changing the subject. 'Initially I
didn't have much opportunity to do any research—'

'No? Which reminds me, how is your mother?'

He hid his smile as her dark eyebrows rose in aloof
surprise.

'Holding her own,' Sage told him dismissively, her tone
implying that he had no right, no right at all to dare to assume such
familiarity with her family. Once, even after knowing that he was
Robert's son and not John Ryan's, the snub would have angered him,
brushing too roughly over very sensitive areas of his psyche, but now
he had both the maturity and the wit to smile inwardly at it.

His placid amusement niggled at Sage; for a moment she
forgot that he was her adversary and dangerous and reacted to his
infuriating male arrogance in much the same way she might have reacted
once to David, challenging him angrily, 'I didn't realise you knew my
mother.'

The moment the words were said she regretted them; of
course he didn't know her mother, and in underlining that fact she was
behaving not as the woman of sophistication and assurance she wanted
him to see but as the child they both knew she had once been.

However, to her astonishment, instead of acknowledging the
truth of her remark he said, 'Well, I can't claim to know her. I
suspect very few people can do that—on the one occasion we
did meet she struck me as a very complex lady indeed.'

Sage felt her mouth start to drop open. Before she could
close it she saw that Daniel was looking at her and smiling.

'Catching flies, Sage?' he teased her.

Angrily she snapped her lips together.

'I met your mother when news of the motorway first became
public. She attended the initial open meeting— I was there as
well.'.

What he didn't tell her was that her mother had
deliberately sought him out, not because of his role as chairman of the
company which would be constructing their section of the motorway, but
because she had recognised his name, recognised it and remembered it as
belonging, as she explained to him, to the young man who had telephoned
several times asking for news as to Sage's health and well-being in
those long dark months after Sage had lost Scott.

They had had a long talk together, he and Sage's mother,
and afterwards he felt he had come closer to understanding much about
Sage that had puzzled him before.

Angry with herself, Sage turned away from him. Why on
earth hadn't she thought of that, that he might have met her mother in
her capacity as chairperson of the local committee? Why was she
allowing her thoughts to drift back into the past, and on to a personal
level, the kind of personal level which meant she was digging pits for
her own unwary feet?

'Yes… I'm afraid I'd forgotten what an
important person you are these days,' she responded tartly. 'Chairman
of a public company… and managing director of a small
subsidiary one.'

'Mm…' Daniel agreed, not sure where her
conversation was leading, but convinced suddenly that she was about to
get to the crux of why she had insisted on this meeting.

'You don't deny, then, that you are the managing director
of Hever Homes?' Sage pressed.

Daniel stared at her and then shrugged his shoulders. 'Is
there any reason why I should?'

'I don't know,' Sage told him smoothly… as
smooth as a snake before it strikes, Daniel reflected, watching her,
fascinated by the way her moods were reflected in the green depths of
her eyes. Here was a woman who, no matter how hard she tried, would
never be able to totally disguise her feelings… at least not
with those who knew her.

Sharply and uncomfortably it struck him that he knew her
far too intimately and in far too much detail for someone who had
supposedly put all thought of her out of his life fifteen years ago. He
also wondered why on earth it was, when he knew damn well that she had
had countless numbers of lovers, that she should have such an air of
fragility and vulnerability. He hadn't missed the way, when he had
first walked into the room, she had backed off from him. Not in the way
of someone arrogantly infuriated that another should dare to infiltrate
their personal space, but like someone threatened and made nervous by
the close proximity of another human being of the opposite sex.