by Valerie Parv
“She’s four and a half,” she said, obliging him. “She starts school in a few months. I don’t know how I’ll get through the days without her.”
“You and your husband never had children of your own?”
“It…didn’t work out for us. We had a few problems,” she added with difficulty. Even now it was hard to talk about her marriage, which had started so well until Andrew’s true character emerged. “Genie has more than made up. She’s an adorable child, full of mischief like most children her age, but so loving that I can’t stay annoyed with her for long.”
James folded his arms across his broad chest. “Does that mean you spoil her?”
She flashed him a wry smile before returning her attention to the road. “Is it possible to spoil a four-year-old? She doesn’t get everything her own way, but when it comes to loving her, I don’t believe you can go overboard, do you?”
His weight shifted on the seat bedside her, attracting her attention. In profile, his features were half in shadow. “Unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to find out.”
Horrified with herself, she fell silent. What was she thinking of, going on and on about the joys of parenthood when it only reminded him of his loss? He had started the conversation, she told herself, but she could have framed her answers with a little more sensitivity. With relief she sighted their turnoff. “We’re almost there.”
If he sensed her relief, he gave no indication. Nor did he take more than a cursory interest in his first sight of the mansion as the electronically operated gates swung open to admit them. Was he acting disinterested as a prelude to some hard bargaining? He had seemed far more animated when discussing their children than he did as they got out of the car and approached the house, their footsteps crunching on the freshly raked gravel driveway.
Apart from a caretaker who lived in a cottage on the grounds, the property was unoccupied. Her sense of unease returned. She put it down to the silence settling around them as soon as she switched off the engine. “Would you like to see the house or the grounds first?” she asked, unaccountably hoping he would choose to explore the garden.
“The house,” he decided. “There are six bedroom suites, I understand.”
Her unsettled feeling was probably due to the discussion about his missing daughter, she thought. Knowing how she would feel under the same circumstances was bound to affect her. She was thankful to be able to switch the conversation to the virtues of the mansion.
He responded in kind, asking shrewd questions about the house, its history and the land surrounding it. By the time she had shown him everything, over an hour had gone by. Apart from his questions, his demeanor gave her no clues as to whether or not she had a sale.
Somehow she also found herself talking more about her own life, she noticed. His questioning was so subtle that it wasn’t until the inspection was almost over that she realized they’d talked more about her than about the house.
“If you want to see the house again, I’ll be happy to arrange a second inspection,” she told him as they walked back to her car.
“There’s no need. I’ll take it.”
She could hardly believe her ears. A million-dollar property and he would take it, just like that? The commission from this one sale alone would take care of most of Genie’s needs for some time to come.
“You will?” she said, professionalism failing slightly as elation gripped her. “That’s great. I had a feeling it was right for you when you explained your company’s requirements.”
He nodded briskly. “The company will want to make some changes. Add a few more modern conveniences and more secure car parking, of course.”
“I’m authorized to discuss offers,” she assured him, mentally calculating the cost of the improvements he’d outlined. No doubt he would expect the final selling price to reflect them.
He named a figure only slightly below the asking price, which she had privately decided was above market value anyway. Evidently James agreed with her because his offer was exactly the one she would have made in his shoes. She was sure her clients would accept his offer without further negotiation.
At her car she swung around to face him. “I’ll call the vendors on the way back to my place. I’m sure your offer will be acceptable, so we can go to my office and get the preliminary paperwork under way this afternoon if you like.”
He braced an arm against the roof of her car, meeting her gaze with disturbing directness. A woman could drown in those blue pools, she thought. She had the uncanny sensation that he knew everything there was to know about her—every secret, every dark place. And found it intriguing.
She shook her head slightly to clear it. More fantasies, Zoe? What was the matter with her today? It must be the thrill of making such an important sale. She refused to believe her state of mind could be blamed on James’s effect on her.
His slightly lopsided smile warmed her. “Do you have the offer document with you?”
She nodded and drew it out of her portfolio. He barely glanced at the fine print before writing in the price they’d discussed and scrawling his signature at the bottom. It was as firm and bold as everything else about him, she noticed.
“There, you have my offer in writing,” he confirmed. “Everything else will be handled by my deputy, Brian Dengate, at my head office.”
A faint sense of disappointment rippled through her. So he wasn’t to be involved in the purchase beyond today’s inspection. She dismissed the thought with surprising difficulty. “In that case, it’s been a pleasure doing business with you, James.” She slid into the driver’s seat and he got in beside her. “I’ll have you back at your car in fifteen minutes.”
“There’s no hurry,” he said, catching her unawares. “I still have some matters to discuss with you.”
Unaccountably her spirits lifted. He probably wanted to question her about the local zoning laws and heritage listing requirements, but it didn’t seem to matter. She only knew she was happy to continue the conversation.
They had reached her house before she realized he hadn’t asked any of his questions, talking instead about inconsequential matters. “Would you like to come in for coffee?” she offered and found herself holding her breath as she waited for his answer.
He nodded, his face impassive. She couldn’t tell whether he was as drawn to her as she was to him, but at least he hadn’t refused. Her step was light as she led the way inside.
Her home was modest but well-cared-for. Not what he would be accustomed to, she thought as they stepped over toys in the hallway to reach the living room. She’d decorated it herself with cream wallpaper, a handwoven Mexican rug and a few inventive touches such as a pottery jar holding giant paper sunflowers.
James settled himself on the sofa while she fetched coffee and homemade walnut cake. But he refused the cake and his coffee sat untouched at his elbow as he leaned toward her. “I have something to tell you, Zoe.”
He looked so serious that alarm shrilled through her. “If you’re worried about the heritage listing—”
“This isn’t about the property.” He forestalled her. “It’s about Genevieve.”
For a moment the name confused her, then the truth dawned. “You mean Genie. What about her?”
James reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a sheaf of documents. “There’s no easy way to tell you this, but there’s absolutely no doubt. The child you know as Genie is my daughter, Genevieve. All the proof you need is in these reports.”
Chapter Two
Zoe felt as if she had stepped off a sandbank into deep water, which was rapidly closing over her head. Her skin turned icy and every breath became a huge effort. This was how it felt to drown, she thought, as if seeing her own reaction from a distance.
“She’s what?”
“She’s the daughter who was taken from me eighteen months ago. Her real name is Genevieve Matilda Langford.”
The drowning sensation went on and on, but there was also the sense of seein
g herself from above as Zoe dispassionately noted every detail of her pose which miraculously hadn’t altered.
She sat frozen with one slim leg crossed over the other in a calm precision which now seemed to mock her other self, watching from above. She had actually thought that James wanted to prolong their meeting for other than business reasons. The truth chilled her beyond belief. All his interest in her marriage and her child had been designed to draw her out, to confirm what he must already have known. Like a panther toying with its prey, he had been waiting for the right moment to deliver his devastating news.
With an agonizing rush she inhabited her body again, feeling every nuance of the pain squeezing her heart relentlessly. Her bones felt liquid and she knew she couldn’t have stood up to save her life.
She was aware of James’s tension as if they were connected by invisible wires. The denials she held back in her throat vibrated along the connection like the ghostly echo of a million callers down a telephone line. He watched her silently, apparently waiting for her to say something. But her mind was gripped by so much pain and confusion that speech seemed beyond her.
He had come to claim Genie. The realization burned through her tortured mind, erasing all other coherent thoughts. Her beautiful, beloved daughter belonged to him.
It couldn’t be true. It was all some terrible nightmare from which she would awaken at any moment. She would feel Genie’s insistent tug on her hair and she would pry her eyes open to protest that it was too early to get up. “But the sun’s awake, Mummy,” Genie would insist. Laughing, Zoe would swing her legs over the edge of the bed and catch the child’s squirming body to her for a good-morning hug.
“Zoe? Are you all right?”
It wasn’t Genie’s voice but James’s vibrant baritone, which banished the vision and replaced it with a harsh reality that refused to be denied. Without knowing it, Zoe had squeezed her eyes shut. She opened them now, knowing that the full extent of her pain would be visible to James who was reaching out to her.
She shrugged away his offered hand. “I’m all right. I just…this is…I don’t know what to say.”
He looked down at his long-fingered hands then back to her again, his cerulean gaze mirroring her torment. “There’s nothing to say. You’ve done a wonderful job of taking care of her.”
She recoiled from the decisive edge in his voice. Done, past tense. She found her voice with an effort. “You make it sound as if it’s over.”
His head jerked up. “You know it is, Zoe. You were only able to foster her while her family couldn’t be traced. Now she has family. I’m her father and she belongs with me.”
“But Ruth told me…” Zoe clamped her jaw shut on the accusations welling up inside her. Ruth had managed to convince her that Genie’s father was an unfeeling brute who didn’t care about his wife and daughter.
James gave a resigned sigh. “Whatever she told you about me is probably as much a fabrication as the identity she used.”
Confusion coiled through Zoe. Throughout the house inspection she’d begun to feel compassion toward him. Yet Ruth had described him as hard and uncaring, too preoccupied with business affairs to have much time for his family. Which was the real James Langford? she wondered.
His public image was of a stop-at-nothing entrepreneur who had built a global communications business from nothing. The Aussie Bulldozer, Time magazine had called him. Now Zoe was standing in the bulldozer’s path, and he would go over her if she forced him to. But he would not be stopped, that much she knew with a numbing certainty.
She clutched at another straw. “You said your wife took your daughter to another country.” Perhaps this was some ghastly case of mistaken identity.
He nodded. “She did—Australia. My company was setting up a satellite communications network in the Middle East when we met. Ruth was handling security for the project. Neither of us planned on what happened, but it was a forbidding, lonely place for a foreigner. The political situation was delicate, and we couldn’t move outside our headquarters without an armed escort.” He gave a wry grimace. “In a situation like that, people turn to each other and form bonds more quickly than they might under normal conditions.”
Her throat felt gravelly. “You were married in the Middle East?”
“We hadn’t planned to until Ruth became pregnant.” He frowned at Zoe’s sharply indrawn breath. “Don’t look so scandalized. We took precautions, but Ruth suffered a bout of food poisoning and her contraception failed. Ruth wasn’t really the marrying kind, and I doubt if she would have said yes if not for her pregnancy.”
From her short acquaintance with his wife, Zoe suspected he was right. Ruth had given the impression that she enjoyed flaunting her power over men, but hated being pinned down for long. As a mother, she took little interest in the childish milestones Zoe had dutifully reported to her each day.
In many ways Ruth had reminded Zoe of a butterfly, moving restlessly from flower to flower, hating to be impeded in her travels. She hadn’t struck Zoe as a woman for whom marriage and motherhood were natural choices.
James watched the expressions moving over her face. “I see you know what she was like.”
“I only knew her for a short time when she moved into an apartment across the road,” Zoe explained, her voice deepened by the ache in her throat. “She called herself Ruth Sullivan and said she was working as a courier in the city. Sometimes she left Genie with me overnight, so I was accustomed to having her sleep here. But when Ruth didn’t return to collect her for two days, I went to her address to see if she was ill. There was no answer and her neighbors hadn’t seen her in days, so I contacted the police.”
“Who traced her movements and discovered she’d been killed in that sailing accident,” James supplied. His tone said he was still adjusting to the discovery. In the midst of her own desolation, Zoe felt an unexpected wave of compassion for him.
“According to the police, she was involved with a pretty reckless crowd who encouraged her to try all sorts of dangerous sports,” Zoe added.
His sigh of resignation hissed between them. “Knowing Ruth, she wouldn’t have needed much encouragement. She enjoyed living on the edge. It made her feel alive. Working in the Middle East suited her need for adventure. I should have known better than to expect her to settle into domesticity with me.”
“What happened between you?” Through her hurt, Zoe felt compelled to ask the question, to know everything about Genie’s brief life before she came to Zoe. Until now she’d only had Ruth’s account to go by.
A shadow crossed his chiseled features. “When we found out she was pregnant, I suggested returning to Australia so the baby could be born here.” He lapsed into a long, nerve-stretching silence before continuing. “For a while, things seemed to work out, but Ruth became restless. I had to return to the Middle East to complete our contract. Ruth wanted to come with me, but Genevieve was not yet two. I tried to cut my trip as short as I could. I was only supposed to be gone for a month.”
His deep voice cracked. The pain caused by his memories enfolded Zoe as if it was her own—which in a way, it was. But for these events triggered half a world away, she would not now be facing the worst moment of her life.
“She couldn’t wait a month?” she managed to ask, saying the unsayable for him. How could any woman, the mother of his child, not wait a lifetime for the man she loved, if that was what was required?
“In the end…circumstances…intervened. It was much longer than a month before I was able to return,” he rasped. “By the time I got back she was gone, taking my daughter with her.”
A distant part of her mind noticed that he made no attempt to explain what circumstances had kept him away. Was it the pressure of business? Or, heaven forbid, another woman? Neither were excusable when he had a wife and baby waiting for him at home.
Whatever had happened was none of her business except as it concerned Genie, she told herself. He was probably only telling her the story at all to help her
understand how Genie came to be in Zoe’s care. The crazy part was she did understand. In his shoes she would have done everything in her power to find her child, just as James had. But the mother in her railed against it with every breath in her body. How in the name of all that was right and true could she face giving Genie up?
“I know this must be hard for you,” James conceded. Distantly she registered that he felt badly about what he was doing. Yet she also sensed that nothing she said or did, no amount of tears or pleading, would change his course any more than one rock can alter the eventual course of a mighty river.
“Hard?” she echoed, her eyes blurring as she lifted them to him. “This goes way beyond hard, all the way to impossible. I doubt if you have the slightest idea how hard this is, Mr. Langford.”
It registered that familiarity had gone, along with any sense of the attraction she had begun to feel toward him.
He gestured toward the documents lying between them on the coffee table. “Are you sure I don’t know how this feels? If you come back to my office, I can show you files stacked higher than that table with reports and false leads, rumors and red herrings, as well as hard intelligence gathered inch by painstaking inch since the day Genevieve was taken away from me.” His jaw hardened. “So don’t tell me I can’t understand how it feels.”
The difference was that he had had longer to adjust to the situation, if that helped any. Somehow she doubted it. And if he got his way, she would have to live without Genie a lot longer than James had. She forced herself to ask, “What do you intend to do now?”
He paced to the window, parting the curtain to survey the suburban vista beyond before swinging back to face her. Compassion softened the lines etched around his features, but his eyes shone with purpose. “I intend to get to know my child, be a father to her again. We’ve been kept apart quite long enough.”
Her mind refused to deal with any of this. Even acknowledging that she had heard him would lead to discussing ways and means. Suddenly she understood how bereaved people could prattle on about trivial matters, anything to avoid facing the reality of their loss.