by Nora Roberts
“Let Johnno take Emma into the kitchen, Jane. We’ll talk.” Brian took a careful step toward her. “We’ll find a way to do what’s best for everyone.”
“I only want you to come back.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” Braced, he watched her grip relax. “We’ll talk.” He signaled Johnno with a slight nod of the head. “We’ll talk it all through. Why don’t we sit down?”
Reluctantly, Johnno pried the girl from her mother. A fastidious man, he wrinkled his nose a little at the grime she’d accumulated under the sink, but carried her into the kitchen. When she continued to cry, he sat down with Emma on his lap and patted her head.
“Come on now, cutie, give over. Johnno won’t let anything bad happen to you.” He jiggled her, trying to think what his mother might have done. “Want a biscuit?”
Damp-eyed, hiccuping, she nodded.
He jiggled some more. Under the tears and dirt, he decided she was a taking little thing. And a McAvoy, he admitted with a sigh. A McAvoy through and through. “Got any we can pinch?”
She smiled then, and pointed to a high cupboard.
Thirty minutes later, they were finishing up the plate of biscuits and the sweet tea he’d brewed. Brian watched them from the kitchen doorway as Johnno made faces so that Emma giggled. When the chips were down, Brian thought, you could always depend on Johnno.
Going in, Brian ran a hand down his daughter’s hair. “Emma, would you like to ride in my car?”
She licked crumbs from her lips. “With Johnno?”
“Yeah, with Johnno.”
“I’m a hit.” Johnno popped the last biscuit into his mouth.
“I’d like you to stay with me, Emma, in my new house.”
“Bri—”
He cut Johnno off, lifting a hand palm up. “It’s a nice house, and you could have your own room.”
“I have to?”
“I’m your da, Emma, and I’d like you to live with me. You could try it, and if you’re not happy, we’ll think of something else.”
Emma studied him, her full bottom lip pushed out in a pout. She was used to his face, but it was different somehow from the pictures. She didn’t know or care why. His voice made her feel good, safe.
“Is my mam coming?”
“No.”
Her eyes filled, but she picked up her battered black dog and hugged it close. “Is Charlie?”
“Sure.” Brian held out his arms, and lifted her.
“Hope you know what you’re doing, son.”
Brian sent him a look over Emma’s head. “So do I.”
Chapter Two
Emma had her first look at the big stone house from the front seat of the silver Jag. She was sorry that Johnno, with his funny beard, was gone, but the man from the pictures let her push buttons on the dash. He wasn’t smiling anymore, but he didn’t scold. He smelled nice. The car smelled nice. She pushed Charlie’s nose into the seat and babbled to herself.
The house looked enormous to her with its arching windows and curvy turrets. It was stone, weathered gray, and all the windows were made up of diamond shapes. The lawn around it was thick and green, and there was a scent of flowers. She grinned, bouncing with excitement.
“Castle.”
He smiled now. “Yeah, I thought so, too. When I was little I wanted to live in a house like this. My da—your grandda—used to work in the garden here.” When he wasn’t passed out drunk, Brian added to himself.
“Is he here?”
“No, he’s in Ireland.” In a little cottage Brian had bought with money Pete had advanced him a year before. He stopped the car at the front entrance, realizing he would have to make some calls before the story hit the papers. “You’ll meet him someday, and your aunts and uncles, your cousins.” He gathered her up, amazed and baffled at how easily she cuddled against him. “You have a family now, Emma.”
When he walked inside, still carrying her, he heard Bev’s light, quick voice.
“I think the blue, the plain blue. I can’t live with all these flowers growing on the walls. And those beastly hangings have to go. It’s like a cave in here. I want white, white and blue.”
He turned into the parlor doorway and saw her sitting on the floor, dozens of sample books and swatches around her. Part of the wallpaper had already been stripped, part of the replastering was finished. Bev preferred tackling a single job from a dozen angles.
She looked so small and sweet sitting amid the rubble. Her dark cap of hair was cut short and straight to angle down toward her chin. Big gold hoops glinted at her ears. Her eyes were exotic, both in shape and color. They were long-lidded with gold lights flecked in pale sea-green. She was still tanned from the weekend they had spent in the Bahamas. He knew exactly how her skin would feel, how it would smell.
She had a small triangular-shaped face, and a small angular body. No one looking at her sitting cross-legged in snug checked pants and a tidy white shirt would suspect she was two months pregnant.
Brian shifted his daughter in his arms and wondered how his pregnant lover would react.
“Bev.”
“Brian, I didn’t hear you.” She turned, half rising, then went still. “Oh.” Her color drained as she stared at the child in his arms. Recovering quickly, she stood and signaled to two decorators who were bickering over samples. “Brian and I want to discuss our choices a little more. I’ll call you by the end of the week.”
She hurried them out, making promises, flattering. When she closed the door on them, she took a deep breath, holding a hand over the baby growing inside her.
“This is Emma.”
Bev forced a smile. “Hello, Emma.”
“ ’Lo.” Suddenly shy, she buried her face in Brian’s neck.
“Emma, would you like to watch the telly for a while?” Brian gave her bottom a reassuring pat. When she only shrugged, he went on, desperately cheerful. “There’s a nice big one in this room over here. You and Charlie can sit on the sofa.”
“I have to pee,” she whispered.
“Oh, well …”
Bev blew her bangs out of her eyes. If she hadn’t felt so much like crying, she might have laughed. “I’ll take her.”
But Emma clung tighter to Brian’s neck. “I guess I’m elected.” He took her to the powder room across the hall, sent Bev a helpless look, then closed the door. “Do you, ah …” He trailed off when Emma pulled down her panties and sat.
“I don’t wet my pants,” she said matter-of-factly. “Mam says only stupid, nasty girls do.”
“You’re a big girl,” he said, stifling a fresh flow of rage. “Very pretty and very smart.”
Finished, she struggled back into her panties. “Can you watch the telly?”
“In a little while. I need to talk to Bev. She’s a very nice lady,” he added as he lifted her up to the sink. “She lives with me, too.”
Emma played with the running water a moment. “Does she hit?”
“No.” He pulled her into his arms, holding tight. “No one’s going to hit you again. I promise.”
Torn, he carried her out, past Bev, to a sitting room with a cushy sofa and a big console television. He switched it on, settled on a loud comedy show, and said, “I’ll be back soon.”
Emma watched him walk out, relieved when he left the door open.
“Maybe we’d better go in here.” Bev gestured to the parlor. Inside, she sat on the floor again and began poking at samples. “It seems Jane wasn’t lying.”
“No. She’s mine.”
“I can see that, Bri. She looks so much like you it’s scary.” She felt tears well up and hated herself.
“Oh Christ, Bev.”
“No, don’t,” she said when he started to slip an arm around her. “I need a minute. It’s a shock.”
“It was one for me, too.” He lit a cigarette, drew hard. “You know why I broke things off with Jane.”
“You said it felt like she could eat you alive.”
“She wasn’t stable,
Bev. Even when we were kids, she was never quite right.”
She couldn’t look at him, not yet. She reminded herself that it had been she who had pressured him into seeing Jane again, into finding out the truth about the child. Folding her hands in her lap, Bev stared into the dusty marble fireplace. “You’ve known her a long rime.”
“She was the first girl I ever slept with. I was barely thirteen.” He rubbed his hands over his eyes, wishing it wasn’t so easy to remember. “My father would get drunk, go on one of his famous rages before he passed out. I’d hide out in the cellar of the flat. One day Jane was there, like she was waiting. Before I knew it, she was on top of me.”
“You don’t have to go into all this, Bri.”
“I want you to know.” He took his time, drawing in smoke, letting it out. “We seemed a lot alike, Jane and I. Somebody was always fighting at her house, too. There was never enough money. Then when I started getting interested in music, I spent more time with that than her. She went crazy. She threatened me, threatened herself. I kept away from her.
“Then not long after the guys and I got together, when we were struggling so hard to get a break, she showed up again. We were playing in dives, barely making enough for food. I guess it was because she was someone I knew, someone who knew me. Mostly it was because I was an asshole.”
Bev sniffled, gave a watery laugh. “You’re still an asshole.”
“Yeah. We got back together, almost a year. Toward the end she was outrageous, trying to start trouble between me and the others. She’d break up rehearsals, make scenes. She even came to the club and went after one of the girls in the audience. Afterward, she’d cry and beg me to forgive her. It got to the point where it stopped being easier to say, sure, fine, forget it. She said she’d kill herself when I broke it off with her. We’d just hooked up with Pete and had a series of gigs in France and Germany. He was working on the first record deal. We got out of London, and I put her out of my mind. I didn’t know she was pregnant, Bev. I hadn’t even thought of her in over three years. If I could go back—” He broke off, thinking of the child in the next room with her crooked tooth and little dimple. “I don’t know what I’d do.”
Bev drew up her knees and leaned over them. She was a young, practical woman from a stable family. It was still difficult for her to understand poverty and pain, though those were the very things in Brian’s background that had drawn her to him.
“I guess it’s more to the point what you’re going to do now.”
“I’ve already done it.” He stubbed out the cigarette in a nineteenth-century porcelain bowl. Bev didn’t bother to mention it.
“What have you done, Bri?”
“I’ve taken Emma. She’s mine. She’s going to live with me.”
“I see.” She took a cigarette. She’d cut, out drinking and her dabbling with drugs since her pregnancy, but tobacco was a harder habit to break. “You didn’t think we should talk it over? The last I heard we were going to be married in a few days.”
“Are going to be.” He took her by the shoulders then, shaking her, afraid that she, like so many others, would turn away from him. “Goddammit, Bev, I wanted to talk to you. I couldn’t.” He released her to spring up and kick at the sample books. “I walked into that filthy, stinking flat intending to do no more than threaten Jane if she didn’t stop harassing us. She was exactly the same, screaming one minute, pleading the next. She said Emma was in the bedroom, but she wasn’t there. She was hiding.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Jesus, Bev, I found the kid hiding under the sink like a frightened animal.”
“Oh God.” Bev dropped her head on her knees.
“Jane was going to beat her—she was going to beat that tiny little girl because she was frightened. When I saw her … Bev, look at me. Please. When I saw her, I saw myself. Can you understand?”
“I want to.” She shook her head, still fighting tears. “No, I don’t. I want things to be the way they were when you left this morning.”
“Do you think I should have walked out on her?”
“No. Yes.” She pressed her fisted hands on each side of her head. “I don’t know. We should have talked. We could have arranged some sum of settlement.”
He knelt beside her to take her hands. “I was going to leave, drive around a little and think before I came home to talk to you. Jane said she’d kill herself.”
“Oh, Bri.”
“I might have handled that. I think I was furious enough to egg her on. But then, she said she’d kill Emma, too.”
Bev pressed a hand against her stomach, over the child that was growing inside her, a child that was already beautifully real to her. “No. Oh no, she couldn’t have meant it.”
“She did.” He tightened his grip on her hands. “Whether she would have followed through, I don’t know. But at that moment, she meant it. I couldn’t leave Emma there, Bev. I couldn’t have left a stranger’s child there.”
“No.” She took her hands from his to lift them to his face. Her Brian, she thought. Her sweet, caring Brian. “You couldn’t have. How did you get her away from Jane?”
“She agreed,” Brian said shortly. “Pete’s having documents drawn up so it will all be legal.”
“Bri.” Her hands firmed on his cheeks. She was in love, but she wasn’t blind. “How?”
“I wrote her a check for a hundred thousand pounds. In the agreement she’ll get twenty-five thousand a year every year until Emma reaches twenty-one.”
Bev let her hands drop away. “Christ, Brian. You bought that baby?”
“You can’t buy what’s already yours.” He bit off the words because it made him feel dirty. “I gave Jane enough to be sure she would stay away from Emma, from us.” He laid a hand on her stomach. “From ours. Listen to me. There’s going to be press, some of it will be ugly. I’m asking you to stick with me, ride it out. And to give Emma a chance.”
“Where would I go?”
“Bev—”
She shook her head. She would stick with him, but she needed a little time yet. “I’ve been reading a lot of books lately. I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t leave a toddler alone for this long.”
“Right. I’ll go take a look.”
“We’ll take a look.”
She was still on the sofa, her arms curled tight around Charlie. The blare of the television didn’t disturb her as she slept. There were tears drying on her cheeks. Seeing them, Bev’s heart broke a little.
“I guess we’d better get the decorators busy on a bedroom upstairs.”
Emma lay in the bed between fresh soft sheets and kept her eyes tightly closed. She knew if she opened them, it would be dark. There were things that hid in the dark.
She kept a hammerlock on Charlie’s neck and listened. Sometimes the things made swishing noises.
She couldn’t hear them now, but she knew they were waiting. Waiting for her to open her eyes. A whimper escaped and she bit her lip. Mam always got mad if she cried at night. Mam would come in and shake her hard, tell her she was stupid and a baby. The things would slink under the bed or into the corners while her mam was there.
Emma buried her face in Charlie’s familiar, stale-smelling fur.
She remembered that she was in a different place. The place where the man from the pictures lived. Some of the fear vanished in curiosity. He said she could call him Da. That was a funny name. Keeping her eyes closed, she tried it, murmuring it into the dark like a chant.
They had eaten fish and chips in the kitchen with the dark-haired lady. There had been music. It seemed music played in the house all the time. Whenever the Da man spoke, it sounded like music.
The lady had seemed unhappy even when she had smiled. Emma wondered if the lady was going to wait until they were alone before she hit.
He’d given her a bath. Emma remembered that he’d had a funny look on his face, but his hands hadn’t pinched and he hadn’t gotten much soap in her eyes. He asked about her bruises, and she had told
him what her mam had warned her to say if anyone asked. She was clumsy. She fell down.
Emma had seen the angry look come into his eyes, but he hadn’t smacked her.
He’d given her a shirt to wear, and she had giggled because it had come all the way to her toes.
The lady had come with him when he had put her in bed. She’d sat on the edge and smiled when he had told a story about castles and princesses.
But they had been gone when she’d awakened. They’d been gone and the room was dark. She was afraid. Afraid the things would get her, snap their big teeth, eat her. She was afraid her mam would come and slap her because she wasn’t home in her own bed.
What was that? She was sure she had heard a whispering noise in the corner. Breathing through her teeth, she opened one eye. The shadows shifted, towering, reaching. Muffling her sobs against Charlie, Emma tried to make herself smaller, so small she couldn’t be seen, couldn’t be eaten by all the ugly, squishy things that hid in the dark. Her mam had sent them because she’d gone with the man in the pictures.
The terror built so that she was shuddering, sweating. It burst out of her in one high wail as she scrambled out of bed and stumbled into the hallway. Something crashed.
She lay sprawled, clutching the dog and waiting for the worst.
Lights came on. They made her blink. The old fear dissolved in a new one as she heard voices. Emma scooted back against the wall and sat frozen, staring at the shards of china from the vase she’d broken.
They would beat her. Send her away. Shut her up in a dark room to be eaten.
“Emma?” Still dazed with sleep, floating a bit on the joint he’d smoked before he and Bev had made love, Brian walked toward her. She curled into herself, bracing for the blow. “Are you all right?”
“They broke it,” she told him, hoping to save herself.
“They?”
“The dark things. Mam sent them to get me.”
“Oh, Emma.” He dropped his cheek to the top of her head.
“Brian, what—” Still belting her robe, Bev rushed out. She saw what was left of her Dresden vase, gave a little sigh, then crossed to them, avoiding the shards. “Is she hurt?”