The Fiance Fix

CHAPTER FOUR

WHAT was Nick doing here? was Joey’s first panicked thought as she sat down abruptly in the chair the waiter held back for her. The chair, while not having its back towards Nick, was sideways on, meaning she could glance across at him if she wanted to.

And Nick could glance up from the papers he appeared to be studying, and see her, too!

Nick looked different tonight, the casual working shirts and denims replaced with a cream shirt and formal trousers. In fact, Joey decided after a brief glance at him from beneath lowered lashes, Nick no longer looked like the approachable workman she had known.

What was he doing, dining at this hotel? And alone, by the look of it; Nick was already on to the main course of his meal, with no sign of a second place ever having been set at the table.

She had assumed that Nick, being part of the construction company working on the new supermarket, would be staying somewhere locally. But she certainly hadn’t thought of it being this particular hotel! They must pay building workers higher rates than she had imagined!

‘Miss Delaney? Or may I call you Joey now?’

She turned sharply back to David Banning, blinking rapidly as she tried to gather her scattered thoughts together; seeing Nick in this unexpected way had totally unnerved her! ‘Of course,’ she ceded distractedly, frowning across at her dining companion.

David Banning looked at her quizzically. ‘The menu, Joey,’ he prompted. The waiter standing at her side was waiting to hand it to her.

‘Oh. Thank you.’ She gave the young waiter a brief smile as she took the menu into her shaking hands.

Shaking because of Nick’s presence here, she easily acknowledged as she stared sightlessly at the menu open in front of her. Goodness knows, this meeting with Daniel’s brother was going to be difficult enough, without the sword of Damocles hanging over her as she waited for Nick to see her here—with the man who was supposedly her ‘date’ for the evening!

What would Nick do when he finally spotted her—if he spotted her!—seated across the dining-room with the other man? Would he just get up at the end of his own meal and leave the dining-room, too annoyed to speak to her? Or would he come over and say hello?

Until she had told Nick of her prearranged date for this evening she would have said the latter, but his cool reaction to the fact that she was going out with another man made her hope he would do the former. She really didn’t feel up to dealing with Nick this evening as well as David Banning!

‘Is there something wrong, Joey?’

She looked up to find David Banning looking at her once again with those narrowed blue eyes. As if she were a particularly nasty bug he was studying under a microscope!

Joey closed the menu with a snap. ‘You arrived out of the blue last night, informed me that Daniel is dead, and then claimed that the two of us need to talk—of course there’s something wrong!’ she bit out caustically.

‘Touché,’ he acknowledged drily, slowly closing his own menu to give her his full attention. ‘How did you and Daniel meet?’

She stiffened at this frontal attack; the ‘niceties’ definitely were over! ‘At university,’ she supplied, as abruptly.

Blond brows rose in surprise. ‘At Oxford?’

Joey’s mouth twisted derisively. ‘Awful, isn’t it? The class of person they let in there nowadays if they think they will fit in and they have the right qualifications!’

‘Obviously,’ David Banning drawled cuttingly. ‘Did you know who Daniel was when you met him?’

Joey drew in a sharp breath; obviously this was going to be a ‘gloves off’ evening. Well, two could play at that game! ‘He introduced himself as Daniel Banning,’ she returned scathingly. ‘I saw no reason to think he might be lying.’

David Banning’s face darkened ominously. ‘I—’ he broke off abruptly as the waiter arrived with the bottle of wine he had ordered, clearly displeased at the interruption even as he tasted the white wine.

Joey breathed an inward sigh of relief at the same interruption. This was turning out worse than she had even imagined it would. Obviously David Banning believed she had been nothing but a gold-digger seven years ago!

Cold, arrogant, pompous…

‘What would you like to eat, Joey?’ he prompted impatiently, the hovering waiter now obviously waiting to take their order.

Get a grip, Joey, she firmly instructed herself as she gave her order for the soup, followed by Dover sole and a salad; she didn’t particularly care what she ate, doubted she was going to taste any of it anyway—the bile rising in her throat at David Banning’s condescending scorn would make that impossible!

Well, she refused to be cowed by his attitude. She was thirty years old, for goodness’ sake, owned and ran her own business, had been a mother for six years…

But then, that was this man’s problem, wasn’t it—because she was mother to his brother Daniel’s child…?

‘Could we just get one thing straight before we go any further with this conversation?’ she told David Banning coldly once they were alone again. ‘I made no claim on Daniel while he was alive,’ she continued at David Banning’s reserved nod of acquiescence. ‘And I have no intention—’

‘I wouldn’t call a five-hundred-pound cheque every month, paid into a bank account in your name, making “no claim”,’ he cut in raspingly.

The colour flooded and then drained from Joey’s face, leaving her eyes large and accusing. ‘I haven’t touched a penny of that money,’ she told him from between stiff lips. ‘The account you’re speaking of is in trust for Lily.’

David Banning raised rueful brows. ‘Indeed?’

‘Indeed,’ she snapped furiously, eyes flashing deeply green.

It had been Daniel’s one acknowledgement of the child he had left behind in England when he returned to America at the end of his time at Oxford.

In the circumstances, Joey had been tempted to tell him where he could put his money, but then common sense had kicked in; the money was nothing to do with her, was for Lily’s future. Joey hadn’t felt she was in a position to make that particular decision for Lily. And so she had reluctantly agreed to have the money paid into an account for Lily’s future. A fact David Banning was now twisting around to his own mercenary way of looking at things…

‘I can show you the account book, if you would like to see it,’ she continued harshly. ‘You will find every penny Daniel ever sent—plus interest—is still in there!’ It was Lily’s money, the very least that Daniel could do for the daughter he had abandoned.

A grudging look of respect briefly crossed David Banning’s arrogant features—only to be quickly replaced by his own brand of scathing mockery. ‘That won’t be necessary,’ he drawled.

Because, Joey knew, the money Daniel had given towards Lily’s future was nothing but chicken-feed to the Banning family! They were an all-powerful, all-rich banking family in New York, and had been for generations. Whereas the Delaneys had emigrated to England from Ireland only eight years ago, had worked, and worked hard, for everything they had ever had.

‘I must say,’ David Banning drawled lightly as he picked up his spoon to begin eating the soup that had just been delivered to their table, ‘that you aren’t at all what I was expecting of the woman who mothered Daniel’s child.’ He gave her a speculative glance.

‘Oh?’ Joey guardedly returned that gaze.

‘Hmm.’ David Banning nodded slowly. ‘It came as something of a shock to me when I went through Daniel’s things after his death and found the paperwork for the standing order of five hundred pounds to be paid to one Miss J. Delaney every month over the last six years or so—’

‘The account is only in my name because Lily was a baby when the payments began,’ she cut in sharply. ‘If you would let me show you the account details you will see it states quite clearly that it is in trust for Lily—’

‘I’ve already told you I don’t want to see the account details.’ David Banning dismissed the suggestion with a bored wave of one elegant hand. ‘But, as you can probably imagine, at the time of discovery any number of explanations for those cash payments flashed through my mind.’

‘I’m sure they did,’ Joey acknowledged disdainfully, easily able to imagine what some of those explanations might have been. ‘How did you discover the truth?’ She frowned.

That question had been bothering her since David Banning arrived outside her home the previous evening. She had known Daniel when they lived at Oxford, but she and Lily now lived hundreds of miles away from there. Deliberately so. Obviously Lily’s money was now paid into a local branch of the bank, but that still didn’t explain how this man had found out who Lily—and she!—actually were.

Blue eyes met hers unblinkingly. ‘Amongst Daniel’s belongings I also found some letters. Love letters. From “Josey”. At least, I thought it was Josey,’ he corrected drily. ‘You really should learn to write in a neater hand, Joey,’ he drawled pointedly.

Her mouth twisted in the paleness of her face. ‘I’ll try to bear your advice in mind,’ she dismissed. ‘OK, so you found…the letters. That still doesn’t tell me how you learnt of Lily’s existence. Or, indeed, exactly who she is.’ She looked steadily at David Banning.

He shrugged those broad shoulders beneath his tailored jacket. ‘I hired a private detective—’

‘You did what?’ Joey gasped incredulously, what little colour there was in her face immediately draining away, huge green eyes dominating the whiteness of her face now.

Just the thought of some faceless, nameless third party digging into the details of her life—without her even being aware of it—gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

‘How dare you?’ she continued angrily, shaking with indignation.

David Banning shrugged again. ‘In view of the fact that I live in America—’

‘And your time is precious!’ Joey put in scathingly.

‘—it was the easiest, and most efficient way of finding out exactly what I wanted to know,’ he continued as if she hadn’t interrupted.

‘It was an infringement of my privacy, is what it was!’ Joey corrected furiously.

‘Perhaps,’ he allowed drily. ‘I—’

‘There’s no “perhaps” about it.’ Her voice shook with anger, her hands tightly clenched into fists beneath the table.

‘I do wish you would calm down, Joey,’ David Banning told her in a bored voice.

‘I’ll just bet you do.’ She glared across the table at him, her thoughts racing. Exactly what had this damned private detective found out about her? ‘But I have to tell you that I deeply resent having some seedy private detective sifting through the contents of my life—’

‘You watch too much television, Joey,’ he put in disparagingly. ‘The man was quite respectable, I can assure you.’

For respectable Joey instantly read discreet. It really wouldn’t do to have the sort of information David Banning had uncovered made public knowledge. How would the Banning family ever be able to lift their heads in New York society again if Lily’s existence as Daniel’s illegitimate child became public knowledge?

David Banning’s gaze was steely now. ‘All the man actually turned up was that you run a hairdressing salon. That your private life is non-existent. Obviously he found out your home address,’ he revealed mockingly. ‘And that you share that home with your six-year-old daughter Lily. In view of those cash payments Daniel paid for the last six years or so,’ he continued with distaste, ‘it didn’t need an Einstein to work out that Lily was the reason for those payments—that she had to be Daniel’s daughter.’

‘Lily is my daughter,’ Joey corrected harshly. ‘Daniel’s so-called payments were just to ease his damned conscience.’

She wished now that she had let her pride win in that situation. Then she would never have been presented with this other—more threatening?—situation.

‘What exactly is it that you want, Mr Banning?’ she asked guardedly, green gaze hard on the arrogant features across the table.

This man might look like Daniel, but she had quickly learnt that the similarity was only skin-deep. David Banning was hard and shrewd, things Daniel had never been, and Joey also guessed that he could be completely ruthless if the situation necessitated it.

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