Payment in Love.

By Penny Jordan.

Heather dreaded seeing Kyle Bennett again Six years ago, her stupid, childish jealousy had driven him away from the only home he had ever known. But for her father's sake, now she must ask for his help. "What are you asking me for, Heather?" he demanded. "You want money from me... a cash payment for the years you had to put up with me in your home?" There seemed to be no way to convince Kyle that she regretted what she had done. No way to make him believe that money was not her only driving force...

1988.

CHAPTER ONE.

THE sitting room was strewn with pieces of dissected fir tree, and the reel of scarlet tartan ribbon the cat had unrolled made bright pools of colour against the dark background of the carpet. Heather noticed these details as she walked into the room, just as she saw how the flickering flames from the apple logs in the fireplace threw cheerful shadows to lighten the dreariness of the darkening winter's afternoon. She couldn't help noticing them-that was how she had been brought up, to observe and then store what she had seen for use later on-but today she noticed them absently, without her normal enthusiasm.

She had just finished speaking to her mother, and what she had heard had not rea.s.sured her. It was hard to believe that it was less than two days since her father had been rushed into hospital.

Neither she nor her mother had known there was anything wrong. Gordon Burns was a lean, tanned man in his late fifties, with a boundless energy for life that nothing seemed to quench.

Even now, when his shock of once dark hair had turned iron-grey, Heather still had difficulty in accepting the fact that he was growing older. She frowned and nibbled tensely at her bottom lip. They had always been such a closely knit family.

Many of her contemporaries found it odd that she should not only be quite content working for her parents, but that she should also voluntarily choose to live at home. At twenty-three, she supposed she was rather unusual, but she had never felt any desire to share their so-called independence.

The phone rang sharply and she hurried to answer it, her heart racing. It could be her mother again from the hospital. They had agreed she would ring only when there was anything to report. So far, her father's condition was stable, although there was talk of the necessity of an operation to bypa.s.s some of the damaged arteries, and avert the danger of further heart attacks.

Only last night the specialist had cautioned them about the seriousness of her father's condition. Such an operation would have to be carried out privately, Heather knew, and again she gnawed distractedly on her bottom lip. A tall, slender girl, she took after her father more than her pet.i.te blond-haired mother; she had his colouring and his dark red hair, but in temperament she was like neither of her parents. A throwback to the MacDonald clan, with its reputation for fierce pride and intense emotions, so her father often teased her, and it was true. As a child and a teenager, the intensity of her own bewildering emotions had often left her disturbed and defensive. Now, as an adult, she had learned, if not to control them, then at least to understand them.

She picked up the receiver, her mouth dry with apprehension, but it was only Mrs Anstey, the mainstay of their small village population and the uncrowned head of the local Women's Inst.i.tute.

'Heather, my dear, I'm sorry to bother you at a time like this, but how are you doing with the decorations?'

Many years ago, Heather's father had worked in London's top store as a departmental manager, and it was while he was there that he had conceived the idea of starting up his own business to make and supply to small shops the kind of window-dressing and design service normally only available to stores large and profitable enough to afford an in-house window-dressing team.

In retrospect, even Gordon Burns had been surprised by the success of his small venture. Within two years of starting up in business, his wife had joined the company, and then, once she left art school, Heather had been co-opted on to the team.

Normally, she loved her work. There was something immensely satisfying about being given a relatively small budget and then asked to create the impossible.

Over the years her father had been approached several times with offers to buy him out, but he had insisted that he liked his business the way it was, small and modestly successful.

If her father had one fault, it was that he was too soft-hearted; too generous, Heather acknowledged wryly; and the Christmas party for the old folk's home was a prime example of his generosity.

When Maureen Anstey had approached him about decorating the church hall for the party, he had immediately thrown himself into the preparations with vigour and enthusiasm, and Heather knew from past experience that, when it came to submitting his invoice, the sum quoted would have very little bearing on the actual cost of time and materials.

They had always had a comfortable life-style, but she knew that her parents had no savings, nothing to finance something as expensive as the open-heart surgery it now seemed her father was going to need.

She had been the one to find him, slumped over his desk in his study, and the shock of that discovery was still with her, adding a new vulnerability to her shadowed eyes and full mouth.

Having a.s.sured Maureen Anstey that the decorations would be completed in time, she returned to the sitting-room. For once, the sight of it failed to soothe her. The sitting-room was her favourite room in the small rectory her parents had bought when they first moved down to Durminster. All the downstairs rooms had open fires, and this room, with its collection of comfortably old furniture and its general air of being very much a family room, had an immediate ambience of warmth.

The cat miaowed plaintively, reminding her that it was tea time. She would have to take Meg out for a walk before it got too dark.

The old collie thumped her tail on the kitchen floor as Heather walked in. Meg had been a thirteenth birthday present to her. A shiver suddenly touched her skin, as memories she would rather not have had slid, betraying, to the surface of her mind. How clearly she could picture that birthday morning. Her parents' faces, happy and expectant, the excited yaps of the small puppy; it should have been the most perfect of memories, but it was marred by another face, sharp and haunting still, after all these years.

As she had reached out to take hold of the puppy, her mother had said warmly, 'Of course, you must share Meg with Kyle, Heather.'

And instantly she had dropped the little pup back into her box. Even now, down the years, she could still hear the truculent bitterness in her childish voice as she'd said bitterly, 'I don't want her, then. You can give her to him, because I'm not sharing her.'

Even now, the memory had the power to make her suffer a wild see-saw of emotions, some of them so complex and still so only partially understood by herself that she could scarcely bear their oppressiveness.

She had been jealous, of course. Bitterly and immensely jealous, and the remnant of that jealousy and what it had led her to do still haunted her.

One of her closest friends at art school had accused her of being motivated by guilt when Heather had explained to her why she felt she must go home and work with her parents, and she had been partially right. Deep in her heart, she knew that nothing she could ever do could wipe out what she had once done; there was no going back and, even though her actions had been those of an immature child, their repercussions still echoed through all their lives.

She had been seven when her parents first mooted the idea of fostering a teenage boy. She had hated the idea right from the start, resentful of their need to introduce someone else into their small family circle, but she might have grown to accept the idea if she had not happened to overhear someone commenting that they suspected that her mother had never really got over the loss of the baby boy she had been carrying before Heather's own birth.

Until that moment, she had never known that she might have had an elder brother, and with that knowledge had come the first seeds of doubt about the strength of her parents' love for her.

While they talked about their fortunate circ.u.mstances and the value of sharing them with someone less fortunate, she had grown more and more bitterly resentful of the as yet unknown male intruder who was apparently more important to her parents' lives then she was herself.

And her resentment and fear had grown, so much so that, well before the social worker had brought Kyle to see them, she had already hated him.

She had steadfastly refused to go with her parents on their visits to the children's home, bitterly resentful of their determination to carry out their plans in the face of her own strongly voiced and expressed disapproval.

She knew now that her disapproval had only increased her father's determination, and that he had been disturbed by her displays of temper and jealousy, for her own sake. At the time, she had simply seen, in their calm continuation with their plans, a total lack of regard for her and her feelings, which had increased her fear that she wasn't loved or wanted and that this stranger would supplant her in her parents' lives.

They had known none of this, simply seeing in her resentment and anger an only child's lack of vision and narrowed upbringing. Both of them had been only children themselves, and were far more aware of the pitfalls that could lurk ahead than Heather herself, but she had not known of any of this.

The seeds of resentment and hatred had been sown, and when Kyle had finally arrived she'd been determined to hate him.

And hate him she had. It hadn't been hard. For one thing, he was obviously bigger and more powerful than she was, a whole six years older, and thirteen to her seven; for another, he was a whole lot cleverer as well, talking with her parents on a level that totally excluded her.

Now, of course, she could see that Kyle had felt just as insecure as she had herself, that the fact that he had totally ignored her had sprung from feelings very close to those she was herself experiencing, and not a desire to cut her out of her parents' love.

She also knew now that love was something that wasn't necessarily apportioned; and that it was something that grew rather than diminished when it was shared with others. Yes, she knew all these things now. Now, when it was too late.

She frowned and reached for her hooded duffel coat. It was cold outside. Snow threatened; she could smell it in the air.

Meg barked excitedly as she opened the door. At the back of the rectory garden was a stile and a footpath that led through the fields. It had been a clear, bright day, and as she climbed over the stile the fields lay spread out against a winter skyline, the sky that deep, dense dark blue that only occurred on very cold and clear winter evenings.

The full moon illuminated the scene brilliantly, and her breath hung on the air in steamy puffb.a.l.l.s of vapour. The sharpness of Meg's yaps was intensified by the crystal clearness of the air, and far away a farm dog heard it and set up a bark in response.

From the copse Heather heard the unearthly cry of a dog fox, and Meg p.r.i.c.ked up her ears. Some instincts never died, Heather acknowledged, shaking her head at the collie as she crouched, belly down, on the crisp frosted field.

It was just the right sort of evening for a brisk walk, the sort of evening she would normally have thoroughly enjoyed. She knew that her parents sometimes worried about her solitary state; her mother was constantly urging her to join in the village's extremely varied social gatherings, but so far she had not experienced any desire to find a mate and settle down, and she knew herself well enough to accept that a string of casual relationships was not for her.

She was frightened of committing herself in a male-to-female relationship, she knew that. Her experiences of the intensity and depth of her capability for emotion had affected her in the same way a small child reacts to an accidental burn when faced with the threat of a real fire: she shied away, apprehensive and alarmed, remembering past pain.

The relationship between her parents, its stability and longevity, had spoiled her; she could not adopt the careless manner of her contemporaries towards the commitment of marriage, and she doubled that she would ever find a man who could and would commit himself to her with the whole-heartedness she knew that she would crave if she ever allowed herself to fall in love.

That being the case, she was better off not allowing herself to do so. The heady sixties with its laissez-faire att.i.tude towards casual s.e.x had gone, and in its place was a new awareness, a new carefulness about the use and abuse of the human body. One was no longer considered odd if one did not agree to go to bed with a man on a first date, and Heather preferred things that way.

She did date occasionally-boys, now adult, whom she'd known from school, men she met through her work-but so far there had been no one special in her life; no lover.

Frost crunched underfoot as she took the familiar path. Meg darted off to investigate a long empty rabbit burrow. This route was well known to both of them, and yet she always found something new about it, Heather acknowledged, her heavy thoughts dismissed momentarily as her artist's eye was caught by the black and silver tracery of bare branches illuminated by the moon.

The weather men were predicting snow for Christmas. Maureen Anstey had commented wryly that the village children were delighted. Not so pleased were those members of the community whose jobs meant driving daily to Bath and Bristol. This part of the country was notorious for its heavy winter snowfalls, and the opening of the M4 had suddenly made it far more accessible to London-based businessmen looking for a country environment for their wives and families. A small influx of newcomers during the summer months had added to the population, but Heather wondered how many of them realised what they would have to face during the winter months.

Their coal-house was already stacked with fuel, the logs her father had cut only two weekends ago drying out; gas had been bought in ready for their annual power-cuts. She remembered how astonished Kyle had been by the depth of their snowfalls. He had come from London, where snow never lay for very long on the busy streets. Just momentarily she had felt superior to him but, as always, he had quickly turned the tables on her.

She shivered and called to Meg.

She knew why Kyle Bennett was in her thoughts so much, of course; she had known from the first moment the specialist had told them that her father was going to need surgery and she had seen the fear and exhaustion on her mother's face.

Things had not been going well for them businesswise recently. Too many shops were closing; too many small businesses going to the wall. It hadn't helped, seeing all those huge signs plastered all over Bristol for Bennett Enterprises. Who would ever have thought that the scruffy-at-heel boy her parents had taken in would turn out to be such a successful businessman?

He was a millionaire several times over now, and with a life-style to match his wealth, if the popular Press was to be believed. And, knowing him as she did, Heather did believe it.

He had always liked the very best life had to offer, she remembered sourly. She only had to think of the succession of pouting would-be model girls he had brought home to show off to her parents. Glossy, expensive creatures who had made her feel clumsy and ugly, and she had seen in his eyes that he had known and enjoyed her discomfort. It had always been like that between them. From the very first moment, they had recognised in each other a mortal enemy. She had never imagined then that she would be the one to vanquish him.

She shivered, and not from the cold, remembering the price that had had to be paid for her victory. And she had not been the one to pay it. She swallowed hard against the lump of pain buried deep in her throat. Her parents never mentioned him, never referred to the events of that dreadful night, the night of her seventeenth birthday. They had never reproached or condemned, but she knew how they must feel. In demonstrating the strength of their love for her, they had also shown her a mirror-image of her own selfishness, an image reinforced by the counselling she had received while in hospital. She shuddered again, not wanting to recall those dark days and that stupid emotional teenage threat made out of jealousy and anger, without thought for its consequences.

Even now, the memory of how easily it could all have gone dreadfully wrong haunted her. She had been criminally stupid, selfishly determined to vanquish Kyle once and for all, to ruin his triumphant homecoming from Oxford, and to make her parents choose between them.

And she had succeeded, but at what price?

Never would she forget the reproach and fear in her father's eyes when she'd woken up in her hospital room.

The indignity of having her stomach pumped out by the hospital staff had left her sore and exhausted, her brain not mentally capable of reasoning properly. Her first croaked words had been, "Where's Kyle?"

And they had had the compa.s.sion and the love not to tell her then that he had gone.

It had all been so silly, her resentment of the fact that he'd chosen to return home on the very day of her birthday, and thus, in her eyes, taken the limelight from her. She had refused to get changed for the special birthday dinner her parents had organised at a local hotel, and instead had stayed upstairs in her room sulking, sure that her father at least would come up and coax her to go down.

But it had been Kyle who had come up to see her. A Kyle older and far more mature than she'd remembered from his last visit, almost twelve months ago. During his last year at Oxford he had worked during his holidays and so they had not seen him, and she had managed to persuade herself that he was gone from their lives forever, even though he wrote and telephoned regularly every week.

He had been curt and derisive with her, sparing her nothing, making her see herself as a spoiled, petulant child, determined to make everyone dance to her bidding. She had hated him even more for that, because she had seen in his coolly deliberate criticism the seeds of the truth, and that had hurt.

She had reacted wildly, close to the point of tears at what she considered her parents' betrayal of her in choosing to let him come up and torment her, why they should have sent him packing and spent the evening coaxing her out of her black mood.

'If you have the slightest bit of feeling for your parents, you'll get dressed and come downstairs right now,' Kyle had told her, getting off her bed. 'It's time you grew up, Heather, and stopped trying to use emotional blackmail to get what you want. OK, so you and I are always going to be poles apart, but for your parents' sake we should at least try to appear to get on.'

She had hated him for his calm, reasoned argument, for the realisation that he was showing more concern for her parents than she was herself; and all the nebulous and real fears she had experienced in the years since he had become an adopted member of her family had exploded inside her.

She'd refused to get dressed, and in the end her parents and Kyle had gone out without her.

Nearly demented with rage and jealousy that this should happen on her birthday, she had flown to the medicine cabinet and extracted a full bottle of aspirin.

She hadn't really wanted to die, just to punish those who should have loved her more than they did Kyle... much more.

If it hadn't been for the fact that Kyle had persuaded her parents to return home half-way through the meal, she would not be here today.

She'd been unconscious when they'd found her hysterical note. She had been rushed to hospital, and brought round by the unsympathetic and very angry hospital staff, who quite rightly felt that their time was far too valuable to be spent on one silly, jealous teenager, when there were so many other people in greater need of it .

She had said many bitter and angry things in her letter: accusing her parents of wishing she had been a boy, accusing Kyle of trying to steal their love away from her, and finally saying that, since she wasn't wanted or loved, she might as well end her life.

During the counselling she had received after her release from hospital, she had come to understand that it had not been Kyle she had hated so much as the threat she'd thought he represented; and that it was her own nature that was responsible for her feelings, rather than anything he had done.

She had been angry and resentful at these a.s.sertions, and then later, when she had come to understand the reality of them, very penitent. But by then it was too late. Kyle had disappeared, leaving only a note saying that in the circ.u.mstances, although he would always love and be grateful to them, he felt it would be as well if he didn't see her parents again.

His absence was never mentioned, but Heather knew how much her parents missed him. Her mother could have leaned on Kyle's strength, while her father could have turned to him for financial advice. If only...

But life wasn't a fairy story. It wasn't possible to simply close one's eyes and wish.

There was another way, though. Her mouth went dry at the very thought of it. It had been in her mind since her father had first been taken ill. She kept trying to dismiss it, to find another way out of her dilemma, but deep down inside she knew there was no other way.

Call it reparation for an old wrong, call it a test she had to face before being able to call herself fully adult, call it what you liked, it all boiled down to the same thing. She had to go and see Kyle; she had to ask for his help on her parents' behalf. She had to humble and abase herself before him; she had to have his help.

She was out for longer than she had intended, and when she got back the phone was ringing again. She raced to answer it, tensing as she heard her mother's familiar but anxious voice.

'It's all right, darling. There's not been any change. Your father is still holding his own, but Mr Frazer has confirmed that he will have to have an operation. There's one surgeon in particular who's highly skilled in this particular surgery, but he's very much in demand. He's in New York at the moment, apparently, but he's due back at the end of the week. I've told Mr Frazer that we can't possibly afford a private operation, but he's asked me to talk to Mr Edmondson anyway. If only your father hadn't had to let his medical insurance lapse...'

Heather clutched the receiver, echoing her mother's thoughts, but money had been so tight this last year. She wondered if her mother knew about the bank mortgage her father had taken out on the house so that he would have some capital to inject into the business. The bank was already pressing for its payment, and once they knew her father was ill...

She shivered inwardly. Added stress at this particular moment in time was the very last thing her parents needed. She couldn't forget that, when she'd found her father, he had been slumped across his desk where he had been studying a depressingly long list of outstanding debts.

'I'm going to stay here tonight. The hospital has found me a room for as long as I need one. How are you... are you coping?'

How like her mother to be concerned for her, Heather reflected. How on earth had she ever managed to convince herself that her parents didn't care? All right, so maybe they would both have loved another child, especially a boy. They had loved Kyle, she acknowledged that, but their love for him had never diminished their love for her, although she herself had been too jealous and angry to see that.

'I'm fine. I'm working on the decorations for the church hall. I'll have to go to our suppliers tomorrow, I've run out of some stuff I need,' she added on sudden impulse. 'I'll be out for most of the day, so don't worry if you can't reach me.'

'Well, just be careful if you're driving,' her mother warned her, accepting her lie at face value. 'They're forecasting heavy frost for tonight, with snowfalls in the morning.'

Heather felt guilty as she hung up. She hated lying, but she needed time for what she had in mind, and not just time to accomplish her self-imposed task, but time to psyche herself up into carrying it out.

CHAPTER TWO.

HEATHER slept badly, waking well before dawn and then lying in bed watching the darkness give way to light. An ominous faint pink flush tinged the sky, a threat of snow to come. Her sleep had been tormented by dreams that were made up of old memories and fears: Kyle's arrival, and the shock of his reality. He had been so much bigger than she had expected, and so very aggressive towards her. That aggression had been his only means of defence in an alien situation, she knew this now from her counselling. He had grown up in one of the toughest areas of London, deserted by his father and then left to the care of elderly grandparents when his mother had died at twenty-five from the results of an illegal abortion that went wrong. He had probably never known real kindness in his life before her parents came into it, she realised with hindsight. He was only one of several grandchildren cared for by his grandparents for one reason or another, and whereas the others had living parents he had not, and after his mother's death his grandparents had been more than happy to hand him over into state care.