by Natalie Fox
He smiled knowingly. ‘Shall I finish that one for you as well?’ he teased.
Karis shrugged in defeat.
‘Before pleasure,’ he said meaningfully, somehow adding an enormous weight to the word.
Karis managed to get to the kitchen without succumbing to a denial because a denial would sound so very naive at this moment.
He didn’t follow. She heard him laugh, though, and then the sound of him taking the verandah steps two at a time and then silence because sand under your feet was soundless. He’d be on his way to the plantation house to make his peace with Simone because he had nothing better to do. He’d agree to the beastly fishing trip Fiesta was organising on the yacht—one of those trips that took several days, with much quaffing of champagne and not a lot of serious fishing going on. And he would meet the Haslems and do what he had to do with Simone by his side…
And she would mind Daniel being away with Simone, Karis reluctantly admitted to herself. And swimming with him alone, a break from the children, would have been a pleasure she wasn’t too happy to admit to either. In fact there were a lot of things she wasn’t too eager to admit about her feelings for Daniel Kennedy, none of them making much sense. He was out of bounds and she knew it and just wished he’d remember it from time to time.
‘Saffron made up a teething brew for Tara and it’s worked wonders,’ Karis told Daniel later.
Supper had passed and not without event. Josh had pushed a dish of pasta off the edge of the table, an action which Karis hadn’t been sure wasn’t an accident Daniel had been adamant it was deliberate and had marched Josh off down the verandah to his bedroom, his son’s feet hardly touching the ground. Ten minutes later Karis had crept down the wooden verandah, tiptoeing for silence, and heard Daniel reading him a story.
Now Daniel was sitting across from her at the cane table outside and staring out at the last remnants of a fiery and speedy sunset, lost in a world only he knew. He hadn’t said a word since coming back from his son’s bedroom.
‘Coffee?’ Karis murmured, and leaned forward to pour it.
‘What was that?’ he asked distantly.
‘Coffee.’
‘No, before. You said something about a brew for Tara.’
He was trying to make conversation and Karis recognised it and understood. He looked tired, as if Josh was wearing him ragged, which he was of course. She told him about the brew Saffron had made up for Tara and then immediately switched the conversation to Josh.
‘He’s testing you,’ she began, pushing a cup of coffee towards him. ‘Seeing how far he can push you. He wants your reaction. He wants you to discipline him; that proves that you love him because if you let him get away with it it means you don’t really care. Don’t be upset by it. See it as positive progress, not a retrograde step.’
Daniel stared at her in astonishment. ‘How come you know so much and I don’t?’
‘You do,’ she insisted. ‘You do the right things but you don’t really know why. Parenting is instinctive. It’s why some are good at it and some aren’t. Women are generally better at it than men because they are programmed that way. I’m sure a million feminists would be onto me like a ton of bricks if they heard that but you can’t change the truth. Women are made that way.’ She smiled at him encouragingly. ‘You are doing very well and Josh is respecting you.’
‘I don’t want his respect. I want what he gives to you—his love.’
‘You can’t have one without the other.’ She laughed.
There was a silence, as if Daniel was considering what she had said.
‘Aiden was a fool,’ he said unexpectedly.
Karis raised a brow in surprise.
‘If you had been my wife I wouldn’t have treated you so shabbily.’ He looked past her, gone again, into that world of his where the past lurked, no doubt.
Karis was silent with him for a few minutes, pondering those words. They had been spoken with sincerity, as if he really would have cherished her as his wife. But he was simply musing, being kind to her—and grateful too. He’d have some weighty job on his hands trying to make it right with Josh on his own.
She took courage from his confidence in her and asked what she had wanted to know from the first time she had met his son. Now, of course, she was curious for another reason. She wanted to know more about him because she was getting to know Daniel Kennedy the man and not just the father. And it was time he opened up to her anyway. They were living together after all.
‘What happened to Josh’s mother?’
Silence. But Karis wasn’t put off. Because of her own revelations about her past, and his sympathetic understanding, she persisted, understanding his reserve.
‘Were you divorced?’ she asked at last though she suspected not. Sometimes he was so far away in the mists of his past that she thought he should have come to terms with a divorce by now if that had been the case. But by suggesting divorce it would eliminate one reason and lead to the real reason for his and Josh’s sadness.
He gave her his attention then, his eyes dark and unreadable but a small smile curved rather cynically at the corners of his mouth.
He shook his head. ‘You don’t want to know,’ he breathed drily.
‘I do or I wouldn’t have asked,’ she insisted softly. ‘You owe me a confidence anyway and I wouldn’t like you to leave with Josh as much of a mystery as you were when you arrived.’
‘Sometimes mysteries are best left as mysteries.’
‘Oh, very profound,’ Karis teased, trying to lighten the atmosphere, which was getting a bit heavy.
‘Would it matter if you never knew?’
It was a serious question and Karis treated it accordingly. ‘Yes—yes, it would,’ she admitted truthfully. ‘I care about Josh and what is going to happen to him. You’re going to take him away and it would help me to know why Josh has been so unhappy in his life. I could let him go understanding him better.’
‘You might be so shocked it will put you off me.’
He smiled then, a real one.
‘Are you really worried about what I think of you?’ she said gently, quite surprised that her opinion of him was a consideration to him.
He didn’t respond verbally, but his eyes hinted that possibly her opinion did matter. That was only her interpretation of the look, though, she thought, not necessarily the truth. ‘I doubt you could shock me,’ she added to fill the silence. ‘My own past wasn’t exactly without shocking incidents.’
‘I could top your tale of woe any day,’ he said ruefully.
He held her eyes for a very long time, a time in which Karis began to wish she had never asked. The candles on the wall flickered, somehow ominously, and Karis felt her skin prickle with a suggestion of dread. This was nothing to do with divorce.
‘She…she’s dead, isn’t she?’ she whispered at last.
Silence again. A silence of confirmation and Karis’s own bruised heart went out to him. So, his wife had died and he was still in love with her and this was why he had rejected Josh—because he couldn’t face life without her and Josh was ever a reminder…
‘I’m sorry, truly sorry,’ she murmured with sincerity.
And then, in the following silence, she let her imagination run riot. He must have loved her so deeply, almost to the point of obsession, because he obviously hadn’t coped with her death. Karis felt a deep envy drag inside her for the wonderful marriage they must have had. Aiden hadn’t really loved her to the depth she had hoped for in their brief marriage. He wouldn’t have left her, pregnant and alone, while he went sailing the Med if he had. Yes, she envied Daniel’s deceased wife; she envied the love he still had for her. He couldn’t love Simone in the same way and yet he was willing to marry her to give Josh a stable family life at last. It was all a terrible tragedy but that obsessional love for his wife had damaged his son. Didn’t Daniel realise that?
Karis leaned forward across the table. ‘Daniel, please don’t think I’m speaking out of turn,�
� she said softly. ‘I understand how you must feel, how much you must still miss her, but…but think of Josh. I mean, that poor little boy needed you after his mother died. I know grief can cripple you but how could you have let that little boy go?’
‘Do you think I would have allowed that to happen if I could have avoided it?’ he said abruptly.
Karis shook her head. ‘Of course not, but you were hurting and sometimes…sometimes love can twist your thinking and make you do and say things that should have had more consideration. You were mourning the death of your wife and—’
His hand came across the table-top and grasped at her wrist. ‘Love didn’t twist my thinking after she died,’ he told her roughly. ‘There, I’ve shocked you. Do you want to hear more?’
Dazed, Karis stared at him. So often he had hinted that he knew nothing about love, but he must have loved his wife, surely?
‘Yes. Yes, I do want to hear more,’ she said faintly.
‘You don’t sound very sure.’
‘I…I want to understand, like…like you wanted to understand about me.’
He let go of her wrist and got up from the table, putting distance between them. He stood by the verandah rail, gripping it as he had gripped the rail of the yacht he’d arrived on. He seemed to have that same reluctance about him now, shoulders stiff and unyielding as if he didn’t want to be here. Of course he didn’t have to tell her anything but she had pushed him and perhaps he felt he owed it to her after all she had told him about her marriage to Aiden.
But if she was going to have to drag it out of him perhaps it was best left alone. She wanted to say that if he didn’t want to tell her she would respect his wishes but she didn’t get the chance.
‘Guilt twisted my thinking after her death,’ he admitted softly. ‘I might have been able to prevent it, you see. But I wasn’t there and I should have been. When you were telling me about what happened to your husband I knew just what you had been through. Every last aching, miserable, guilt-ridden emotion of it all.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Suzanne collapsed with a brain haemorrhage. If she had been hospitalised quickly enough she might have been saved. But I wasn’t with her, I just wasn’t there.’
Karis squeezed shut her eyes and her heart felt like lead with sorrow. So now she knew why he hadn’t been as open with her the night she had bared her soul. It might have tipped them both over the edge if he had twinned his tale of tragedy and sorrow with hers. You could only take so much and that would have been too much. So now she knew and it explained such a lot.
‘I was in Europe when it happened,’ he went on. ‘I was on yet another business trip, working, making money, for her, for Josh, or so I thought.’
Karis willed herself to get up and go to him. She wanted to be near him, to share it with him. She stood next to him, staring out to the same horizon he was looking at and hoping he would feel her silently reaching out to him.
‘What do you mean, so you thought?’ she asked tentatively, a small frown creasing her brow.
‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ he murmured, his voice thick with concern for her now.
Karis turned her face to his and gave him a reassuring smile. She saw in his eyes the pain from the past and the concern for her in the present. ‘I’m all right,’ she assured him. ‘I’ve been there, don’t forget.’ She sighed deeply. ‘I’m sorry, Daniel, desperately sorry for your wife and all of you. Please go on. Is…is it hard to talk about it?’ she pressed softly.
He smiled thinly. ‘It’s harder for the listener, deciding if I was guilty by default or not You must understand that well enough. You see, after it happened I questioned myself deeply. It’s inevitable you do after such a shocking tragedy. I should have been with her but I wasn’t, I was away, driving myself hard, travelling, away from home more than I was there. The dreadful truth was that I was escaping.’
He shook his dark head with regret. ‘It wasn’t an easy marriage. There was love at first, of course, or so I thought, but it seemed I could never please her or give her quite enough. Like you, I had ideals about love and marriage but they weren’t realised. I thought Josh coming along would make her see that there was more to life than an accumulation of all things material.’
‘Did it?’ Karis whispered.
‘She looked after him well enough—she would have lost face with her society friends if she hadn’t—but I don’t think her heart was ever in motherhood. She wanted a child but when Josh arrived he was more like an accessory to her lifestyle than a lifelong dedication. I adored the boy; right from the first moment I saw him I adored him, and that seemed to make matters worse for her. I sometimes thought she was jealous, perhaps feeling guilty that she couldn’t feel the way I felt about Josh and resenting me for it. No matter how hard I tried she couldn’t find contentment in her life and maybe that was my fault; maybe I failed her in some way.’
‘No, Daniel, not your fault. People are made the way they are and sometimes nothing can change them,’ Karis insisted. ‘Marriage is a minefield,’ she whispered beside him. ‘We take it on not realising that sometimes love isn’t enough.’
He turned to her then and leaned back against the wooden rail. His hand came up and pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear. ‘And there was I thinking you were some teenager down on your luck and probably doing all the wrong things for my son. I’ve heard more sense and wisdom from you than anyone else in my life.’
She smiled. ‘I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not’
‘It’s a compliment, I assure you.’ He turned back to face the darkness again, as if drawing from its power. ‘Suzanne died in our summer vacation house down on the Keys in Florida. She collapsed while getting ready for bed. The coroner said she had died at four in the morning. She had lain there all night. She wouldn’t have known anything about it but if help had been at hand she might have been saved. The cleaning woman found her the next morning and…and Josh, crouched in his bedroom, screaming for his mummy.’
‘Oh, no,’ Karis breathed in despair, squeezing her eyes shut at the thought of all the little boy had been through. Oh, it explained so much. ‘Oh, Daniel,’ she groaned helplessly, biting her lower lip and fighting for the right words, but only an ineffectual ‘How terrible’ came from her mouth. There were no words, nothing you could say to ease that sort of pain for someone.
‘He was sobbing in his bedroom, too young to understand what had happened, only that he couldn’t wake his mummy.’ Daniel sighed deeply. ‘That was the very worst thing for me—the torment of wondering what he had been through, if he had woken and found her, heard her cry out or something, actually been with her when she had breathed her last breath.’ His voice cracked and it was a while before he was composed enough to go on. ‘The shock of Suzanne’s death was bad enough, and then the terrible guilt that I should have been there, but my son…my darling son witnessing that night’ He shook his head. ‘It was and still is an unbearable thought for me. It tortures me because I can’t take that night away from him. He was there and I wasn’t and a small, helpless little boy shouldn’t have had to go through that shocking experience.
‘Josh was immediately taken into care while the authorities tried to contact me,’ Daniel went on. ‘I’d just flown from London to Germany and by the time I was tracked down and flew back he had retreated into himself. He was little more than a baby. Two, nearly three and going through all that trauma. It was heartbreaking.’
Karis couldn’t speak now for the grief that was tightening her own throat, and even if she could have what could she have said that wouldn’t sound crass and ineffectual? Now she understood why Josh was the way he was, so terribly insecure and afraid. Now she could understand Daniel more and her heart tore for them both.
‘Poor Suzanne and poor Josh,’ Daniel went on after a long, reflective pause. ‘Child psychologists had no effect. God only knows what was going on in his mind. I couldn’t get near him. He shrank away from me every time I tried to gather him into my
arms. I had to go through the formalities of the inquest and the funeral and it took for ever. In only a matter of months I lost so much business I was verging on ruin. All I could think of doing was getting Josh away from it all and trying to rebuild his life for him.’
‘How did Fiesta get involved?’ Karis asked at last, her voice barely a whisper. She lifted her head to look at him, her face pinched with grief for him. His face was gaunt, exhausted with the effort of reliving such a tragedy.
‘She’s a cousin of Suzanne’s, the only relative. We were both only children, our parents deceased, and there were no close friends, only Suzanne’s society friends, and God forbid I would put my son into their care. Fiesta came forward and offered to take Josh on. She said I would do better to get my life together before I lost everything and had nothing to offer for the boy’s future. I didn’t want to leave him but it seemed my presence made him worse, as if he too blamed me for the loss of his mother.
‘I brought him down here to the island and went back to the States. I sold the two homes we owned because I didn’t want to take Josh back to either of them. I wanted a new start for him. I built up the business again, security for Josh’s future if anything happened to me. I had to do that; I had to leave him and get my business back on track. For him, for his future.’
Karis noticed his hands were gripping the verandah rail so tightly they were white. She wanted to cover them with her own small hands, to show that she understood and was with him all the way. But she didn’t; she just stood next to him, waiting, because she knew there was more bottled up inside him.
‘All for Josh,’ he uttered at last, ‘and perhaps the time was wasted because no amount of monetary security can buy back the love of your own child.’
‘Josh does love you,’ Karis reassured him. ‘He just can’t admit it yet. I don’t know if you did the right thing,’ she sighed. ‘Only time will tell. If it’s any consolation, if I was a man I think I would have done the same thing. Josh’s trauma will pass because you love him so deeply.’