A Night of Scandal

by Sarah Morgan

  Shocked into silence, as far out of her depth as the helpless child in the water, Katie felt a desperate need to ease his anguish in whatever way she could. She moved her hand towards his and then withdrew it, afraid of doing anything that might be a catalyst for his withdrawal. ‘Do you want to tell me why?’

  His laugh was harsh. ‘Do you want to hear it?’

  ‘Yes.’ She held her breath, feeling the fragility of the moment and afraid to damage it with clumsy words. ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Are you sure? You and I don’t live in the same world. You live in Katie-land.’

  ‘Stop saying that.’

  ‘Why? It’s true.’ It was the low, warning growl of a wounded animal. ‘You believe that people are basically good and that happy endings come to those who wait. You believe in love.’ He spoke the word with cynical emphasis that said everything there was to be said about his own belief system.

  This time she did take his hand and held tightly, refusing to let him pull away. ‘We’re talking about you, not me. Tell me why you hate the water.’

  The silence stretched for so long she started to think that he was never going to talk.

  And then he spoke. ‘There was a lake—’ his voice was hoarse ‘—in the grounds of our house. I grew up in this huge, soulless stately home. Wolfe Manor. A privileged upbringing, or so everyone always told me. It was big. Big enough to play hide and seek and never get found, which was useful because hiding was part of how I lived.’

  ‘Who were you hiding from, Nathaniel?’

  He stared into the darkness, his eyes focused on nothing. ‘The lake was huge. No matter how blue the sky, the water was always dark. Just below the surface you could see the weeds, floating like tentacles ready to grab an ankle. None of us knew how deep it was, but we did know that one of our ancestors had drowned there.’

  Katie shivered, although whether it was the words or the tone, she didn’t know. ‘It sounds like a pretty menacing place.’

  ‘When we were very young we used to believe that a monster lurked in the middle.’

  Without thinking, she lifted her hand and smoothed her fingers over his face. Her fingertips registered the roughness of stubble and the perfect symmetry of his jaw. Those smouldering good looks belonged to the man. There was no trace of the boy in his face, but it was surprisingly easy to imagine how he might have been back then, a child, standing by that lake, fascinated and horrified in equal measure, terrified of the monster.

  ‘What happened?’ She asked the question in the absolute certainty that something had. ‘Nathaniel?’

  His blue eyes fixed on hers with a fierce intensity, revealing indecision and a deeply inbred reluctance to share with anyone.

  After a moment he stood abruptly and paced to the front of the terrace. His hands curled over the railing, his knuckles white with the force of his grip.

  ‘It was late evening. Dark. I’d been doing something I shouldn’t—as usual. Messing about. My father picked me up and threw me in that lake.’ His voice shook with repressed emotion. ‘I don’t know whether it was the look on his face just before he hurled me in or the words he spoke, but the shock froze all my reactions. I didn’t even struggle. When I hit the water I thought, This is it, I’m going to drown. I remember wondering how long it would take and whether it was going to hurt. I remember struggling below the surface, trying to get my legs free of the weeds, watching his back as he walked away, thinking, He’ll come back and save me in a minute. He didn’t.’ He kept his back to her, his voice strangely flat as he recounted an incident so sickening that for once Katie found herself without words as she struggled to absorb the full implications of that driven confession.

  ‘No.’ Her voice trembled with uncertainty. She thought about her own father, of the games they’d played where he’d tumbled her upside down and tossed her in the air. ‘It must have been a joke that went wrong. He must have been playing a game.’

  ‘He wasn’t playing. Afterwards I tried to rationalise it to myself. I’d been messing around instead of raking the leaves. I’d had it coming to me. I was so young I didn’t really understand.’ He recited the options in a flat tone. ‘I thought it was me. My fault. I thought if I did the right thing, he’d love me. It isn’t easy for a child to absorb the fact that isn’t ever going to happen.’

  He’d wanted his daddy’s approval, the way all little boys did.

  He’d wanted love. Wasn’t that the minimum any child should expect from a parent?

  Katie felt the numbness spread through her body. She’d never felt so inadequate, not even when her father had died and the whole ghastly mess he’d left had come to light. She wanted to say exactly the right thing but how could you say anything right about something so wrong?

  Nathaniel turned his head to look at her. His eyes were hard and his mouth slanted into a cynical smile. ‘Poor Katie. Now I’ve destroyed your essential belief that all human beings are good and that life always ends in a happy ever after.’

  She roused herself. ‘I don’t think that. I don’t think that all human beings are good, but …’ She drew breath, struggling to imagine how it must feel to have a father that brutal. ‘What about your mother?’

  ‘Ah, my mother …’ His expression altered. ‘Well, the one thing you need to know about my mother was that she was in love with my father. She only ever wanted one thing and that was for him to love her back. He didn’t, of course. My father didn’t love anyone.’ His tone was derisive and contemptuous, layered with bitterness and years of pain and rejection. ‘He was the wrong guy for someone as sensitive and fragile as my mother. It was like placing Venetian glass under a sledgehammer. He shattered her. She … left.’

  Katie winced at the image he drew. ‘So you were left alone with your father?’ The man he’d described was a monster.

  ‘Not on my own. Some aristocratic English families collect Renaissance art or Louis XV furniture. My father collected women. And those women had children. Children my father was never interested in.’

  ‘He didn’t want children?’

  ‘My father was interested only in himself.’

  Katie stood and the swing creaked. Her feet silent on the deck, she took two steps and placed her hands on his shoulders. Her fingers encountered knots of tension under hard solid muscle. ‘Who rescued you from the lake that day? How did you survive?’

  ‘My half-brother Jacob. He was nine years older than me and it wasn’t the first time he’d fished me out of the lake.’ Something flickered in his eyes. ‘His role in the family was to clear up my father’s mess. He hauled me choking out of the water, pumped the water out of my lungs and kept me out of the monster’s way until he’d drunk enough to forget I even existed.’

  ‘Nathaniel—’

  ‘It’s all right. You don’t have to try and find the right thing to say. In this case, there really isn’t anything. Even someone with your sweet, sunny nature can’t put a positive spin on a father like mine, although for years I tried to do just that.’

  ‘Is he still alive?’

  ‘No. He died when I was nine years old.’ His voice was savage. ‘You think you’ve heard the worst? Ask me how my father died, Katie. Ask me that question.’

  The air around them felt thick and heavy. ‘How did he die?’

  ‘We were all home from boarding school for the holidays. My sister had taken advantage of his absence to sneak out of the house to a party in the village. She wasn’t even fourteen, but she was already stunning and that night she decided to flaunt it. Lipstick, miniskirt—’ He broke off, his face several shades paler than normal. ‘It would have been fine, except that he came back early.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘He’d seen her flirting in the village and when he arrived home he took a whip to her.’

  Katie flinched, her imagination making it all too easy to imagine the cruel bite of the whip. ‘He beat her?’

  ‘His intention was to make sure no boy would ever look at her again, but he
was drunk and out of control and he beat her so brutally that he would have killed her if Jacob hadn’t stopped him. And the whole time I stood there shaking and yelling, “Stop it! Stop it!”’ He stared down at his shaking hands. ‘That night I learned how it felt to be helpless. Powerless.’

  Katie’s face was soaked with tears. ‘Nathaniel, you were a child. What could you possibly have done?’

  ‘We should have fought him. But we shouted at him, Sebastian and I,’ Nathaniel said hoarsely. ‘And just when I thought it was all over, that he was going to kill her with us watching, Jacob walked through the door.’

  ‘He stopped him?’

  ‘He killed him.’ Nathaniel turned his head to look at her. His eyes were empty. Tired. ‘It was an accident—he was so drunk that he fell and his head cracked against the stairs and then …’ His brow furrowed. ‘There was so much blood. My father’s blood, Annabelle’s blood, her beautiful face a torn mess. Jacob was frozen with shock. And my father was dead.’

  Annabelle?

  Annabelle was his sister?

  Digesting that fact, Katie stood still, hopelessly inadequate in the face of so much pain. ‘I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’ He turned and locked his hand in the front of her shirt and hauled her against him, his eyes the deep, menacing colour of a sea in a storm. ‘I wasn’t sorry, Katie. I stood there thinking, Now it will stop. But I wasn’t sorry.’ His voice was thickened with a vile mess of emotion, from guilt to bitter anger. ‘So now you know. Now you know who I really am. Your world and my world don’t even overlap.’ He released her so suddenly she staggered. The intensity of emotion pulsed from him like a living force and suddenly she realised just how much he kept locked inside, hidden away from the world.

  ‘Do you feel guilty for not being sorry? Is that what’s wrong? You were just a child, Nathaniel.’ She slid her arms around his waist but he stood rigid and unresponsive.

  ‘He was my father, and I hated him. That makes me the monster.’

  ‘It makes you human.’ Her throat thickened by tears, Katie rubbed her hands over the tense muscles of his back and then slid her arms around the strong column of his neck. ‘You’re not a monster, Nathaniel. You were a little boy who wanted, and deserved, to be loved by his father.’

  ‘At the time I assumed it was shock.’ It was as if he was talking to himself. ‘I assumed I’d wake up one day and feel sorry that it had happened. I’m still waiting to feel sorry.’

  She pressed her lips to his chest, as if her touch could heal his agony. ‘You have no reason to feel guilty.’

  ‘I didn’t protect my sister.’

  ‘You were a child!’

  His beautiful mouth twisted into a cynical smile. ‘We weren’t allowed to be children.’

  They stood for a moment in silence and then she lifted her head. ‘What happened to Jacob?’

  ‘There were expensive lawyers in sharp suits. They sorted it.’

  So few words to describe such a hideous trauma.

  ‘But that didn’t make it go away, did it? You all had to live with that. Who took care of you?’

  ‘To begin with, Jacob. Then one day he just took off.’ In the dim light, his eyes shone a deep, glittering blue. ‘That was the day I really thought Annabelle might die. I guess she saw him as the one stable person in our very unstable family. She loved him so much.’ He gave a crooked smile. ‘Big mistake. If you don’t care, you can’t get hurt. Annabelle cared, and she got herself badly hurt.’

  And not just Annabelle.

  If you don’t care, you can’t get hurt.

  That was why he avoided relationships. Not because he didn’t believe in love, but because he was afraid of love. He associated love with carnage, both emotional and physical.

  ‘You must have felt so lost and vulnerable, losing your father and then Jacob.’ Katie hesitated. ‘When you walked off the stage that night, you kept saying, “I have to warn Annabelle.” What were you warning her about, Nathaniel? What really happened on opening night?’

  ‘Jacob was in the audience.’

  ‘And you haven’t seen him for a while?’

  There was a long silence. ‘I last saw Jacob twenty years ago.’

  ‘Twenty years!’ Katie couldn’t hide her shock. ‘You haven’t seen him since he walked out?’

  ‘We’re not what you’d call a close family. As reunions went, this one wasn’t exactly successful.’

  Katie found it difficult to absorb. ‘No wonder you reacted the way you did—no wonder you walked out.’

  ‘I kept thinking about Annabelle. How his sudden reappearance would affect her. I just wanted to warn her he was back.’

  So he hadn’t been involved in some complex love triangle. When he’d said, ‘He’s here,’ he’d been referring to his half-brother Jacob. And Annabelle was his sister.

  When he’d walked off the stage, he’d been intent on protecting the sister he believed he’d failed all those years ago.

  Her heart ached for the lonely little boy, hurt and abandoned by those who should have loved him.

  The soft sound of the sea licked at the air and the smell of tropical flowers tinged the night with sweetness.

  The stark contrast between the idyllic surroundings and his brutal, loveless childhood was acute.

  His mother had left. His father had beaten him.

  He had little or no contact with his family. No wonder he was hard and cynical when she talked about family. She winced, remembering all the things she’d said. Katie-land. She’d been insensitive. If she’d known …

  ‘Have you spoken to Annabelle?’

  ‘We exchanged a text.’

  ‘A text? That’s it? No conversation?’

  ‘This is the Wolfe family.’ His tone mocking, he reached out and picked a brightly coloured hibiscus from the profusion of flowers that crowded the terrace. ‘If our background taught us one thing, it was how to survive alone. A text is a lot for Annabelle.’

  ‘But you love your sister.’ She said it as fact, not as a question. ‘And Jacob—’

  ‘When I saw him in the front row of the theatre I felt nothing but uncontrollable rage, but those feelings were all mixed up with seeing my father beating Annabelle that night.’ Nathaniel stared at the flower in his hands. ‘I left without speaking to him. And I still don’t want to speak to him. It’s in the past. I don’t want to go back there.’

  Instinctively she knew who was making those calls he ignored. ‘The two of you must talk.’

  ‘Talk.’ His tone mocking, he turned to her and slid the scarlet flower into her hair. ‘Katie’s answer to all life’s problems.’

  Katie blocked out the sensuous stroke of his hands in her hair. ‘If you’ve never talked about that night, then surely it’s time you did.’

  ‘Why?’ His eyes were bleak and empty. ‘We can’t change what happened. We can’t change who we’ve become. It isn’t possible.’

  ‘But it is possible to change the future. And the present. And the way you feel about the past. You didn’t let Annabelle down—you wanted to help her.’ She tried not to feel disappointed as his hands dropped to his sides. ‘I’m glad you told me.’

  ‘Why? Because now you have a juicy story to tell the press?’

  ‘You know I wouldn’t do that.’ She reminded herself that he was raw and hurting.

  ‘Go to bed, Katie. We should never have started this conversation.’ He turned away from her, his broad shoulders forming yet another barrier between himself and the world.

  Braced for rejection, she placed her hand on his back. The heat of his skin burned through his shirt and she frowned.

  ‘You’re burning up.’

  He turned, his eyes glittering dangerously—a cold, fierce blue loaded with warning. ‘I don’t want your sympathy. Go to bed.’

  ‘Why? So that you can wallow and feel bad in private? I’m not leaving you, Nathaniel. You’ve tried dealing with this on your own. Now try the other alterna
tive. I’m not walking away.’

  ‘Why? What is it that you want?’

  She stood, poised and breathless as a diver on the highest board about to plunge. ‘I want you.’ She’d never wanted anything so much. She wanted it more than she wanted to protect herself. Because of that, the words were remarkably easy to say. ‘I want you.’

  ‘I’ve been offering you that all week.’ He kept his hands by his sides. ‘You rejected it.’

  ‘You offered me Nathaniel Wolfe, the actor. I’m not interested in him. I want the man. I want to know it’s real.’

  ‘You don’t want the man and you can’t handle real.’

  Katie caught his arm before he could turn away again. ‘Don’t tell me what I want. Don’t tell me what I can handle.’

  ‘Real isn’t always pretty, Katie. Most people prefer their reality tempered with a little gloss. That’s why they go to the movies. They don’t want real.’

  ‘I do. I’m not afraid of that. I’m more afraid when you’re acting because then I can’t trust anything you say or do. Don’t hide from me, Nathaniel.’ Her fingers threaded through his and she felt his hesitation. And that hesitation punctured her confidence. Insecurity spread in widening ripples through her body. There was assertive and then there was pushy. He wasn’t just ‘a man,’ was he? He was Nathaniel

  Wolfe, A-list movie star and sex god. What if he didn’t really want her? What if the flirtation had just been his way of relieving boredom?

  When he still didn’t touch her, Katie took a step backwards, wishing she could vanish.

  The embarrassment was hideous.

  ‘Right.’ She conjured up brightness to cover the oceans of humiliation. ‘Well, obviously you can’t always have what you want, so I’ll just—’ The words were crushed under his mouth as he hauled her against him, his hands rough and his body hard.

  ‘Is this real enough for you?’ He spoke the words against her lips and his eyes blazed hot into hers. When she didn’t answer, he took her mouth, his kiss rough and demanding. His movements were jerky and unsynchronised and yet the desperation in his touch was more erotic than any of the smooth, choreo graphed movements of their previous encounters. The hands that dug into her hair shook slightly, and when he yanked at her dress he fumbled in his desperation to strip her naked.