Jessica Steele – The Bachelor's Bargain (страница 3)

She was more likely to have to look after them than they look after her. ‘I live with my family,’ she replied, and again made to get out of the car, when he stopped her.

He took out his wallet and extracted a business card. ‘If you change your mind about the money—give me a ring.’

She took the card from him, but, knowing she wouldn’t be phoning him, she didn’t so much as look at it. ‘Goodbye,’ she said. His car was purring away before she was halfway up the garden path.

Ignoring the general clutter of family life when she went in, Merren picked up a note from the kitchen table. ‘Gone to supermarket,’ she read. Heartily glad that she had the chance to make herself more presentable before her brother and his family arrived home, Merren had a quick shower and changed into a cotton frock. The weather was sunny—she wished she felt the same.

She mourned the loss of her mother’s ring—it had been so difficult to part with, and she felt quite dreadful that she had. Despite all her trials and tribulations her mother had always hung on to the ring, and had kept it safe for Merren, telling her that one day it would be hers.

And what had Merren done? Not only had she sold it but she’d lost the money she had received for it. Merren just didn’t know how she was going to face her brother and confess what had happened.

Knowing she should go downstairs and try to restore some order into the chaos of school bags, odd plimsolls, socks and a half-eaten sandwich she’d seen lying about, for once Merren squashed down her tidy soul and instead got out her writing pad. It was an age since she had last written to her father, and, much though she disliked asking him for money, she just didn’t know what else she could do. And he was family.

Having penned a very difficult letter—which had started along the lines of ‘as you know, Robert and his family have, in straitened circumstances, come to live with me here in your house’—she had gone on to tell him of his lovely grandchildren, which she thought might interest him, and ended with the crunch line, which had been the most difficult of all to pen—if he could see his way clear to send something to help pay off some outstanding bills. She signed her letter ‘With love, Merren’, and went downstairs to tidy the cluttered sitting room and kitchen.

Most probably they had all eaten dinner, but in case they hadn’t she began to peel a large panful of potatoes. If they had eaten, the potatoes would do for tomorrow. Now what was she going to tell Robert?

Merren knew she could only tell him the truth, but she was feeling all stewed up inside about having to confess when she heard her car on the drive.

She looked up as first her two nieces charged in. ‘Hello, Aunty Merren.’ They raced each other to the bathroom, followed by her depressed-looking sister-in-law, who was carrying a grizzling seven-month-old Samuel. Robert, laden with shopping, followed on behind.

‘Shall I have the baby?’ Merren asked, drying her hands and, while wanting to have what she had to tell her brother said and done with, found she also wanted to delay that dreadful moment when the expectant look on his face would die.

‘He needs changing,’ Carol answered, finding a smile, and disappeared to leave her alone with Robert.

‘How did your job interview go?’ Merren asked. Oh, how could she tell him?

‘I didn’t get it,’ he said glumly, and, dropping the shopping down on the kitchen table, ‘How about you—did you get it?’

He meant the money, she knew. ‘N-no, actually, I…’

‘Merren!’ he exclaimed hoarsely. ‘You couldn’t sell Mother’s ring? Oh Lord, this is the end!’ He collapsed on to a kitchen chair, his head in his hands, his despair total. ‘That’s it—I’ll go to prison, Carol will divorce me, I…’

‘Robert!’ Merren cried. Prison! This was the first she’d heard of the mention of prison! ‘You’re just being dramatic.’

‘You don’t know the half of it!’

‘You’ve been in trouble before? Financial trouble?’

‘You try bringing up a family—and maintaining a wife with expensive tastes,’ he said bitterly.

As she looked at him, Merren saw for the first time that her big, dependable brother didn’t seem so big and dependable after all. For the first time she noticed a certain weakness around his mouth. But that didn’t make her love him less. He had their father’s mouth. In fact he suddenly seemed a lot more like her father than her warm, generous-hearted mother.

‘You have a lovely wife and a lovely family,’ Merren reminded him, not liking at all that he seemed to be taking a snipe at his wife.

‘And I’ll have the not so lovely bailiffs hammering on the door if those outstanding bills aren’t settled by Monday,’ he retorted sullenly. ‘Are you sure you haven’t got that money, Merren? You promised you’d sell that ring; you know you did.’

‘I did sell it,’ she confessed, but before she could tell him how the money had been stolen from her, his face was lit by a tremendous look of relief.

‘You little terror!’ he exclaimed, his face all huge smiles suddenly. ‘You’ve been winding me up, Merren Shepherd! How much did you get for it?’

‘T-two thousand, but…’

‘Two thousand. Great!’ He beamed. ‘You were robbed, of course,’ he said of the jeweller, Merren winced at the accuracy of the remark. ‘But two thousand, as you know, will settle the blighters. Oh, Merren, it feels as if a ton of weight has been lifted off my shoulders. For a while there, you wicked imp, I felt quite suicidal.’ Oh, heavens. Merren quailed at the enormity of what he had just confessed. ‘Where is it?’ he asked.

Good question. She felt tears prick the backs of her eyes. She turned away from him, knowing that, suicidal or not, she was going to have to douse that look of tremendous relief. ‘I w-was…’ she began, and half turned. It was a mistake to look at him. She loved him; he was her family. ‘I’m—er—getting it tomorrow,’ she heard herself state.

And Robert opined, ‘Honestly, you’d think a jeweller of all people would have two thousand in cash on the premises, wouldn’t you?’

‘You would,’ she agreed, and found she was taking up Robert’s notion that she was going to have to go back to the jeweller’s tomorrow because they normally paid via cheque and didn’t deal much in cash. ‘It’s a security thing apparently.’

The conversation came to an end then, when Queenie and Kitty raced down the stairs and into the kitchen chorusing, ‘I’m starving.’

Robert looked at Merren, who would normally have seen to their appetites, but she was reeling under the enormity of what she had done—and what she was panickingly realising she was going to have to do now.

‘I’ve a letter I need to post,’ she excused, and, finding a stamp in the bureau, went upstairs to collect the letter she had written to her father.

She stayed in her room some minutes, contemplating her options while the words ‘prison’, ‘suicide’, ‘divorce’, ‘family break-up’ whirled around in her head. She couldn’t allow any of that to happen. So what options were there?

She’d post her letter to her father, though since he hadn’t even bothered to reply to Robert’s letter, she saw little hope that any plea from her would fare any better.

As if trying to avoid thinking of the man whose parting words had been, ‘If you change your mind about the money—give me a ring,’ she dwelt on the eldest member of their family, Uncle Amos.

Amos Yardley lived a ten-minute drive away, was her mother’s brother, and Merren thought the world of him. He had been more of a father to her than her own, even before her parents had separated.

Dear Uncle Amos. ‘Are you all right for money?’ he’d asked when her mother had died. Merren had determined he would never know how the funeral had nearly cleaned her out; only the best had done for her mother.

‘Absolutely!’ she’d assured him. His two up and two down cottage was collapsing about his ears—he was poorer than they were.

It was partly because she hadn’t wanted him to worry, when she knew he could do nothing to help, that she hadn’t told him the true reason Robert and his family had moved in with her. She had let Uncle Amos believe it was because it was so quiet and empty with her mother gone that she had asked Robert to move back to the family home.

But Uncle Amos, who was an inventor and often quite vague about matters outside his work, had given her a shrewd kind of look, as if suspecting she was doing a little inventing herself. To her mind, though, hers was a necessary invention. For, while Uncle Amos’s inventions earned him nothing—he seemed to subsist by writing articles for clever magazines and barely scraped a living for himself—so Merren knew she would not be approaching him to help Robert out.

Which left her with the one option she was trying to avoid. She flicked her glance to the dressing table where, without so much as bothering to read it, she had dropped the man Jarad’s card. A sick feeling entered her stomach. She didn’t want to do it; she didn’t.

Merren went over to the dressing table and picked up the card, and read it, and, oh, grief! She worked for an electronics company herself—only a tiny one by comparison, but large enough for her to be familiar with the name Roxford Waring, one of the biggest and most highly respected multinationals in the electronics field. The man Jarad had given her his personal business card, which also listed his home number. Oh, heaven’s above, Jarad Montgomery was a director of Roxford Waring! Was she really contemplating contacting one of their board members with a view to borrowing some money from him?