Ruthless Passion Read online

  He had been in love several times, but always his love was tinged with fear that he might somehow harm or hurt those he had loved.

  While he was at Heidelberg there had been a girl, a fellow student. He had loved her deeply and had ached to tell her so, but his fear had made him hold back. She had accused him of simply using her, of not wanting to give a real commitment.

  Just before his death his father had been urging him to marry, telling him that it was his duty.

  Because he had discovered that Wilhelm and therefore Wilhelm’s sons were not of his fathering.

  * * *

  The baroness was buried with due pomp and solemnity four days after her death.

  The Schloss felt empty without her. For one family to own such a place was surely an anachronism, Leo reflected. It had been built to house a feudal lord and all his dependants, not a modern nuclear family.

  He was not surprised to discover that this unentailed estate had been left to him, and neither, thankfully, was Wilhelm.

  ‘You’re welcome to it,’ he had told Leo before he returned to Hamburg.

  Leo stayed on for another few days. There was nothing really for him to do; his grandmother’s papers were meticulously in order; her preparations for her death made with the care and precision which had hallmarked her whole life. Noblesse oblige.

  Leo knew he was delaying his return to Hamburg. In two days’ time he was due to attend a conference in Edinburgh. He had decided to combine the trip with a visit to Cheshire to see Alan Carey’s daughter. He knew that unless he did see her, unless he did everything he could, searched as hard as he could for whatever evidence might exist about his father’s past, he would always wonder if he had not actually deliberately tried to avoid learning the truth.

  His enquiries in Germany had revealed nothing that he did not already know. If his father had ever been in any way connected with the SS he had successfully ensured that no one else would ever know. Even the tentative enquiries he made through a tortuously circuitous route in Israel had produced nothing to show that they had any awareness of what his father might have been or might have done.

  But those newspaper cuttings could not be ignored; he could not now forget he had seen them.

  He had been unwilling to delve too deeply into Alan Carey’s past; in his position there was only so much he could do without exciting other people’s interest and curiosity, which was why he would have to see Davina James personally.

  The tentative enquiries he had made had revealed more about Davina than her father. She was popular and well liked, a quiet, calm woman who had apparently stoically borne the infidelities of her husband and the burden of nursing her father.

  Now, it seemed, she had taken on another burden: that of an almost bankrupt company.

  She appeared to be used to carrying burdens, but did he have the right to inflict yet another on her? And yet if he didn’t see her … didn’t at least try to uncover some evidence …

  What more evidence did he need? Didn’t he already know the truth in his heart … hadn’t it already made him soul-sick enough without his adding to that sickness?

  There was no going back, no altering what had happened. But Leo knew that he wouldn’t be able to rest until he had seen Davina James.

  If Alan Carey had confided in anyone he was far more likely to have done so to his son-in-law rather than his daughter, Leo acknowledged wearily. They had been two of a kind, those two, both of them now dead … like his father … thank God.

  * * *

  In Hamburg he went straight from the airfield to his own home. He had bought the small town house in the old part of the city over ten years ago, but it had never truly seemed to him to be a real home.

  The woman who came in daily to clean for him had kept it aired and polished in his absence. There were fresh flowers on the table in the hallway, and the soft glow from the buttermilk-yellow walls should have felt welcoming to him as he stepped inside.

  Was it the house that was at fault or was it him? he wondered. He tried to think when he had last shared the intimacy of waking up in a bed disturbed by a night’s lovemaking … when he had last opened his eyes to look into the sleeping face of his lover, when he had last ached so much for her body that he had cried out in ecstasy just to feel her naked warmth in bed beside him.

  His last relationship had finished quietly and discreetly just after his mother’s death. He and Elle had been lovers for just over two years. She was slightly older than he was, a tall, elegant natural blonde whom he had met at a dinner party. Her husband, a government official almost twenty years her senior, apparently turned a blind eye to her affairs provided they were conducted with discretion and tact.

  She had been the one to instigate their relationship. She had called round to see him on some pretext or other, subtly making her real purpose clear, but carefully allowing him the opportunity to ignore her sexual invitation if he chose. He had almost done so, but she was intelligent as well as attractive, and his desire for her had overruled caution.

  There was no question of her wanting to end her marriage or to leave her husband, she told Leo frankly. Hans suited her as a husband.

  ‘I know that, no matter how wonderful and exciting the sex between us is now, Leo, there will ultimately come a time when that excitement no longer exists. Marriage is not about sexual desire, or even about love. At least, not for me. Hans understands me. Our marriage works and I intend to ensure that it goes on working, but in the meantime there is no reason why you and I should not enjoy one another … provided we are discreet.’

  Which was exactly what they had done. Until just after his mother’s death, when Elle had announced quietly and casually, as though she were discussing nothing more personal than the weather, that she thought it was time for them to part. ‘We are becoming staid … almost middle-aged,’ she had told him, wrinkling her nose. ‘It is time for us both to move on to new partners.’

  He had missed her, but not as much as he had expected, and when he had seen her several months later with the man who he suspected had supplanted him he felt no jealousy, only a wry envy of her ability to skim so lightly over the surface of life.

  Physically, as a lover, she had been exquisitely skilled, but a part of him had always known that it was not enough and had hungered for more than the mere physical coupling of their two bodies, no matter how sexually pleasurable their lovemaking was.

  Wryly he admitted that for him mere sex was not enough and that he would have found it more erotic, more arousing to have been needed and loved rather than merely sexually desired.

  A case of role reversal? It had certainly opened his eyes and made him see himself in a new perspective to know that he, the man, needed more emotional input into their relationship than Elle, the woman, who needed him only to satisfy her sexual hunger.

  He went upstairs, stripping off his clothes in his bathroom and got into the shower.

  It still shook him to know that Wilhelm was not Heinrich’s child; they had been so alike, so much more so than he and Heinrich, and yet he was Heinrich’s son.

  Perhaps after all he had been wrong to fear that he might have inherited his father’s genes, his viciousness and cruelty, and that, while these traits were dormant in him, he might somehow pass them on to his own children.

  Having seen the effects of his father’s personality, he had come to believe that it was as potentially destructive to pass on to one’s children flawed personality traits as it was to conceive a child one knew would inherit a physical disorder.

  Now couples carrying the genes of hereditary physical diseases received counselling and screening. Would there ever come a time when those carrying known character disorders might receive the same benefits, or would that be carrying man’s interference with nature too far?

  Once he had not thought so, but now, realising that Wilhelm’s mirroring of Heinrich’s vices might have come simply from living with him, rather than from a flaw carried in the blood, he began to w
onder if he had not made too harsh a judgement; a judgement based on fear rather than reality.

  He turned off the shower and stepped out on to the floor, reaching for a towel. His body was powerfully muscled, his torso rough with soft thick body hair. He exercised when he could, swimming in the pool at the private health club of which he was a member. In the winter he skied, and occasionally, when he had time, he played squash, although he was beginning to think of himself as too old for the sport.

  Elle had once told him teasingly that he had the body of a Greek god and a profile from a Roman coin. She had laughed at his embarrassment, dragging her nails delicately along the inside of his thigh so that the fine hairs were set on edge and his flesh broke out in a rash of goose-flesh as his muscles quivered under the strain of trying to control his reaction to her. She had laughed again then, pouting a little as she glanced downwards at his body. They had already made love, but her deliberately tormenting touch was making it difficult for him to stop himself from having an erection.

  When Elle played games she liked to win, and he wasn’t entirely surprised when she bent her head and took him in her mouth, skilfully playing with him until his self-control broke and his penis swelled to hard rigidity.

  She had enjoyed being the one who controlled their relationship. Sometimes Leo wondered if she was deliberately trying to push him to the point where he physically dominated her, but that was something he had promised himself he would never do to any woman. Down that road lay the dangerous path of violence and abuse taken by his father and brother, and he was never ever going to follow them. If he ached sometimes to stop Elle’s deliberate torment by rolling her over on to her back and taking her angrily and quickly, he told himself that the brief satisfaction of giving in to that need would very quickly be outweighed by the self-contempt that would follow.

  Elle had been an aggressive lover, often leaving his flesh marked with bruises and bites, his back and arms lacerated with raw scratches inflicted by her long nails. To Elle violence seemed to be an integral part of sex—perhaps, in a way, it was—but if so it was a violence he had never felt he dared allow himself to experience.

  Instead he had learned to turn Elle’s own need against her, to skilfully arouse her to the point where she would cling demandingly to him, begging him for his penetration of her body, often with words, pleas that used the language of the gutter. The first time she screamed during orgasm he thought he must have hurt her.

  He grimaced as he rubbed himself dry now. No doubt she had thought him very naïve.

  Well, their affair was over now, and since they had parted he had met no one for whom he had felt any real kind of desire. He was a sensual rather than a sexual man, he had decided. The mere act of penetration on its own was not sufficient to motivate him. When he thought of making love to a woman he thought of touching her slowly, of running his hands over her skin, of caressing her with his mouth, feeling that first sensitive quiver beneath her flesh that meant he was arousing her, feeling her body tense in his arms as she moved closer to him when he kissed her, feeling her tremble against him when she trusted him enough to let him see her need. The scent of her skin, her hair, the warmth of her body, its pliancy and softness, the way she smiled, talked or simply looked—all these were just as erotic and arousing to him as the thought of his body moving within hers as she opened herself to him and shared with him the mystery of her womanhood.

  Two days later, when he boarded the Lufthansa flight for Britain, Leo’s spirits were weighed down by the knowledge of what lay ahead of him. He closed his eyes, not wanting to think about what might happen if he proved that his father had not come by the original chemical equations as innocently as he had claimed.

  Times, opinions, morals were changing. The generation that had lauded his father’s success and shared his hunger for it had given way to one that was held far less in thrall to materialism, that questioned motives of profit-making far more deeply than the one that had gone before. Drug companies, once hailed as the saviours of the people, were now often viewed with suspicion, accused of putting profits before people, of experimenting on and exploiting humanity.

  There was no corporation on earth, even one as powerful as Hessler Chemie, that could not be destroyed by the same people for whom it had been created. If people turned their backs on their drugs … boycotted them, as could very well be done … How short a time ago was it that the fur trade would have laughed in the face of anyone who might have claimed that the views of a few animal activists could destroy them? Now they were becoming as extinct a species as the animals they had once hunted down for their pelts.

  Look at the way public opinion had turned against smoking and was now turning against alcohol. It was never wise to assume that one was in an unassailable position, and, whatever his own views might be on some of the methods his father had employed to increase the power of the corporation, it was his duty, his responsibility to ensure that Hessler’s survived, for the sake of all those whose lives it supported.

  If at the same time he could introduce a different approach to research and development, an awareness of the benefits of kinder, milder drugs, then he would certainly do so, but his prime duty now was not to ease his own conscience but to ensure that the corporation’s reputation was safe, that it could not be damaged or tarnished by anything his father might once have done.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘NOW remember,’ Christie told Cathy mock seriously as she hugged her, ‘no letting Uncle Saul stay up too late watching television.’

  Cathy giggled, hugging her back.

  She was so dearly precious to her, this child she had borne in such anger and bitterness, Christie acknowledged as she smoothed Cathy’s soft hair back off her forehead.

  Over Cathy’s head she looked at Saul. He was lost in thought, staring out across the airport concourse. Much as she loved him, she had always been aware of how very different they were, not just in temperament but in their whole outlook on life.

  As she grew up she had been constantly both infuriated by and resentful of the way his male superiority armoured him from all her small gibes and made him impervious to the self-doubts that tormented her.

  As adults they had taken completely different paths in life, but she had never forgotten or ceased to be grateful for the way he had supported her when Cathy was conceived.

  Now, abruptly, she was aware of a change within him, an unfamiliar introspection and withdrawal. She wanted to reach out and touch him, to ask him what was wrong, but she knew instinctively that he would rebuff her. Their father had been a man who was afraid of emotions because they made him feel vulnerable. He had taught Saul that emotions were something a man should always contain and control. Sadly she wondered if Saul was beginning to realise that their father might not always have been right. Sadly, because she knew how much Saul had idolised him and that to bring him down from his pedestal would be to destroy the strongest motivating force in her brother’s life.

  Their father had been a subject they had never been able to discuss calmly or logically, Christie acknowledged as she gave Saul and Cathy a final hug before turning to board her flight for Scotland.

  When she was a teenager, adoring Saul and yet at the same time resenting him, sometimes even hating him, her feelings had confused and upset her, causing her to wonder if she was in some way abnormal. She already knew that her father was not really interested in her. Her mother, quiet, calm, apparently content with the confines of her marriage and her life, was not the role model her churning, fierce youthful ideals and beliefs wanted. She loved her mother dearly, but at the same time, watching her, seeing the way she always seemed to be smoothing her husband’s path through life, soothing his irritations, boosting his ego, she had known that she could never settle for such a subservient role.

  She had yearned, ached sometimes to ask her mother if she really truly was satisfied with a relationship, a life, that allowed her only to fulfil someone else’s expectations of her and
never her own; but somehow she had never felt able to do so. Perhaps because she had been afraid to hear the answer?

  Her mother was a loving, gentle woman, the kind of woman to whom others constantly brought their problems. As an adult Christie had learned how highly respected and loved her mother had been, how much her judgement and wisdom had been appreciated by those around her, and quite clearly she had seen that, of the two of them, it was her mother whom others valued the most, but during her lifetime her mother had always taken care to ensure that she never in even the smallest way outshone her husband.

  How much effort and suppression of her own needs must that have taken? How much self-restraint? How much love? She could never love anyone like that. She was too selfish, and she would certainly never denigrate herself, her own ideals, her own ambitions simply to pacify a man who was either too petty or too immature to recognise and accept her right to be an individual and to strive to succeed.

  Her father had never wanted her to become a doctor. Surely nursing was far more suitable work for a woman, he had asked, frowning at her. Heatedly she had started to argue with him, angry when her mother quickly hustled her out of the room.

  ‘Why won’t he listen to me?’ she had demanded tearfully, alone in the kitchen with her mother. ‘Don’t I have as much right to use my brains as Saul?’

  ‘Your father is a little old-fashioned about these things,’ her mother had soothed. ‘Just give him some time to get used to the idea, Christie. You know how he hates things being thrust on him.’

  ‘You mean how he hates anything that wasn’t his own idea,’ Christie had challenged, her eyes stormy, her body tight with tension. ‘Just because I’m a girl he expects me to do as I’m told and not to have any ideas of my own. Well, I’m not like that.’

  ‘No,’ her mother had agreed.