by Tasha Taylor
“You want to be careful with those hips squirming against me, Leah. Our daughter’s only next door,” Nathan warned, stilling the woman in his arms.
“Is she awake?”
“She wasn’t earlier,” his breath was warm against her neck as he traced a line to her collarbone.
Leah’s hips flexed instinctively against him, stirring the beginnings of a familiar need inside. As Nathan’s lips reached the hollow at the base of her throat, she arched her back, with a soft moan, pressing her breasts into his hard chest.
“Mum, I’ve got the papers!” a sing-song voice called from downstairs, followed by the thump of six year old feet pounding up the stairs.
“The papers?” Nathan asked.
“We always read them in bed together on a Saturday, she likes the cartoons,” Leah grimaced and Nathan flipped her off him, on to her back and pulled the duvet up with a second to spare.
Pippa burst into the room, all of a flurry, and then stopped, her mouth a perfectly round O.
“Morning, Pip,” Nathan smiled at his daughter. “Got to work on those door knocking skills,” he whispered.
Pippa was still standing, staring. A frown worked its way across her face.
“What’s up, sweetheart?” Nathan sat up and patted the bed. “Come here, then, and show me the cartoons.”
Leah could see her daughter was trying to work something out, and then the conversation in the car a few days before dropped into her mind.
“But mummies and daddies sleep in the same bed!”
“Only if they are married.”
“Did you get married without me?” Pippa asked, looking from her mother to her father and back again.
“What?” Nathan exclaimed.
“I’ll explain later,” Leah mumbled, scooting out of bed to give Pippa a cuddle. “No, we didn’t get married without you, sweetie. Daddy and I were just waiting for you to bring the papers up. What’s in the news today?”
The little girl contemplated her mum and then carefully unfolding the paper, held it at arms’ length and showed them the front page.
“We’re famous, Mum.” Pippa’s smiling face round the edge of the tabloid publication would have been a picture if both her parents weren’t looking aghast at the headline and accompanying photos.
‘THE ROCK STAR’S SECRET GIRLS – Nathan Llewellyn plays happy families with secret love child’
Chapter Ten
The pounding on the front door broke the profound silence in the bedroom, causing Leah to jump.
“I’ll get it. It might be Nana. I want to show her I’m famous!” Pippa was out of the door before Leah could react.
It was Nathan’s forceful “No, Pippa,” that stopped her in her tracks.
Nathan got out of bed and pulled on his jeans and top almost instantly it seemed to Leah, who was still trying to process what was happening. How could a photo of the three of them be on the front page of a national newspaper? How had that happened?
“Pippa, go to your room.”
“But Nana!”
“It’s not Nana, love,” Leah spoke to Pippa, but looked straight at Nathan, who was peering round the edge of the window frame. “Go to your room.”
“But…”
“Go to your room!” Leah and Nathan spoke together, their eyes meeting over the head of their daughter, who stomped out the room, slamming her bedroom door in a huff.
Nathan looked away first as his phone buzzed on the bedside table.
“Nathan.”
“Not now. I’ve got to take this call.” He put the phone to his ear and pressed answer. “Justin, they’ve found me…”
Leah wasn’t party to the rest of the conversation as Nathan left the room, talking to his manager in hushed tones.
The knocking on the front door continued, punctuated by the chime of the doorbell and then Leah’s house phone and mobile rang in unison. She could hear the call of voices through her letterbox.
“Nathan! Nathan! We know you’re in there. Come out and give us your side of the story. How long have you known you were a dad? Nathan! Nathan!”
The mobile phone buzzed as text after text was sent to Leah’s phone. Knock. Buzz. Ring. Knock. Buzz. Ring.
Leah slid off the bed onto the floor, helpless against the cacophony. The paper was open on the floor, with more pictures. The three of them at the zoo. Nathan pressed against her as he followed her into the nightclub. Nathan and Pippa at the games arcade. Nathan bringing Pippa out of school. Leah’s vision blurred as she scanned the story. They knew who her mother and sister were, that her dad had died, that she’d left home on her 16th birthday and shacked up with wannabe musician Llewellyn some two years later. There were quotes from people who claimed to have known her growing up. There was a whole paragraph from Jennifer, the woman who claimed to be broken hearted by the news that Nathan had a secret love child he’d never told her about.
Leah heard a door open and looked up from the story, hoping it was Nathan come to take her back in his arms, making her safe, not alone, but it was Pippa.
“Mum, there are men outside calling our names. I looked out the window and they started shouting at me.” Her lower lip wobbled. “I don’t want to be famous, Mummy. I don’t like being shouted at.”
Leah watched as fat tear rolled down Pippa’s cheek.
“Come here, sweetie, Mummy will keep you safe,” her voice catching in her throat and Leah reached up to pull her down into her lap, wrapping her arms tight around her baby girl, the living, breathing bundle of hope that she and Nathan had created together.
As her daughter sobbed in her arms, Leah saw Nathan standing in the doorway, watching them. The banging and shouting continued.
“Justin’s sending a helicopter.”
Leah returned her attention to Pippa, kissing her head.
“If I go, the press should leave too.”
“You think?” Nathan couldn’t miss the sarcasm dripping from her words. “You and I both know that’s not going to happen.”
“Come on. You have to know this was inevitable.”
Leah turned sad eyes to him. Didn’t he know she loved him still? Hadn’t she shown him when they lay together last night? Hadn’t they made a beautiful child together? Was it enough?
For a long minute, their gazes held and Nathan shook his head.
“I’m going…”
“Yes, go.” Leah jumped in, with a wry smile. “It is your turn, after all.”
Nathan’s phone rang again and he took the call. He listened to the person on the other end of the phone before responding.
“No, just me.”
Leah closed her eyes, holding her daughter as tight as she could, only opening them again when she heard the front door going and a furor erupting outside. She listened as the noise followed Nathan out to the road, drowned only by the noise of a helicopter landing in the field opposite.
It was happening again. She was all by herself. The press were baying for blood outside of the house and she was alone. Her father gone. The father of her child as good as gone. What was she going to do this time? This time around, she had all but invited trouble into her life, the second she let Nathan put his expensively shoed foot in the door.
More fool me, Nathan. Stupid of me to hope it would be different this time round, different for my daughter than it was for me.
***
Pippa was sound asleep in the back of the car. Her head lolling against the caterpillar shaped neck support cushion from the last motorway service station they’d stopped at. That had been two hours before and Leah knew she should have stopped at the travel hotel for the night, for both their sakes, but she didn’t want anyone to recognize her. God, how up herself did that sound? It was just all so tiring. Everybody in her space, asking about Nathan. Nathan wasn’t answering his phone and Pippa got so low every time she tried it and there was no answer, Leah just stopped ringing. After just two days of it, the furor showed no signs of waning, so she did what she normally di
d when things got tough and ran. Except this time, she wasn’t running away.
Pulling the car to a halt, Leah turned off the lights and the engine and sat for a moment, waiting for a pap to jump out of the bushes, but none did. She quietly got out of the car, reaching into the back of the car to unbuckle her daughter. Pippa was out for the count, the caterpillar pillow still round her neck, as Leah gently extracted her, carrying her to the wrought iron gate.
Hoisting the little girl more comfortably onto her hip, Leah took a deep breath to try to steady her racing heart, before putting a shaky finger on the intercom. It buzzed. Leah waited for the sky to fall, but it stayed resolutely up above.
“Hello?” A female voice crackled over the speaker.
Leah waited for the world to end, but it didn’t. “Mum?”
The intercom buzzed once more and the gates began to open inwards. The security light came on in the driveway and Leah walked towards the house. Before she was halfway there, the door opened and the woman who answered the intercom walked towards them, looked into the weary faces of her daughter and granddaughter and opened her arms wide.
“Mum,” Leah managed, her eyes welling with tears, her voice wobbly, “I got a little lost.”
***
Leah stood at the bedroom door, watching her daughter sleep. Pippa was tucked up in Leah’s own childhood bed. It had years since she had been at home, but it seemed just a heartbeat ago since she had cried herself to sleep night after night, the loss of her father so hard to take, and the lack of support and contact she so desperately needed from her mother made the loss complete.
Tonight was the first night that Pippa hadn’t needed somebody to stay with her. Leah wondered if that was through exhaustion, they’d made a long journey to come home.
Home. After years of having her own safe place, her own world, that she should still call home felt strange, and yet natural. She’d spent nearly 16 happy years in the family home, with a loving mum and dad and a big sister, all of whom loved her unconditionally. At least that’s what she thought. Whilst she’d been closer to her dad, her mum was outgoing, funny and a joy to be around. After Luke died, Leah turned naturally to her mum for comfort, but Katherine had shut down, closed herself off from everyone, the pair of them together but so, so apart in the sea of pain that surrounded them.
“She looks just like you did at that age.”
Leah looked over her shoulder at her mother’s whispered words.
“She enjoyed looking at the photos, Mum. I’d forgotten half of them. I’ve only got one of all of us together and that’s tucked away in the loft somewhere.”
Something like a sob escaped Katherine’s lips and Leah watched in concern as her mother’s eyes filled with tears.
“Mum? What’s wrong?” Leah turned and touched Katherine’s arm. “What did I say?”
“Oh, ignore me. I’m just being an over-sentimental old woman.” Katherine sniffed and forced a smile.
“You’re not old, Mum. And I don’t think anyone could accuse you of being over-sentimental!” The words were out of Leah’s mouth before she was aware of what she was saying and the look of hurt on Katherine’s face brought her too her senses. “Mum, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”
As Leah’s voice trailed off, she knew that deep down; she did mean what she said. Her most recent memories of her mother were not ones of warmth and affection. They were associated with courting the press, telling her story to anyone who would listen, not of quiet time with her 15-year-old daughter, reassuring a girl whose world had all but ended and who didn’t know what to do with all the pain, all the emotion.
“Let me show you something,” Katherine took Leah’s hand and lead her downstairs to the study that she had shared with her husband.
Leah had fond memories of this room. Whenever she was allowed, Leah loved to curl up in the battered old armchair in the corner of the room and watch her parents at work. Luke would be trawling through long lists of numbers, working the stock exchange and Katherine would be tapping away on her computer, plotting the next chapter of whichever novel she was working on at the time. They would catch each other’s eye every now and then, look at each other for a while, Katherine smiling a smile only for Luke and he’d wink at her or blow her a kiss. They were always giving each other little touches, a squeeze here, a hug there. To Leah as a child, it was just how her parents were together. To teenage Leah, it was embarrassing. She could remember rolling her eyes and tutting when Luke pulled his wife to him for a kiss. She remembered how her mother had laughed at her.
“You wait, Leah. One day, you’ll do the same when you find someone you love.”
Leah thought about the last few weeks with Nathan back in her life. Were there moments where they had shared a look like that, a touch where words were not necessary? The wink he gave her outside of the club, the day he’d driven her back to work; the brush of his fingers on her hip in the gift shop, whilst Pippa browsed the soft toys. Hell, just being close to him made her feel… whole.
As Katherine switched the light on, Leah saw immediately that her father’s side of the office was unchanged from the day she’d left home. Her father was organized and methodical, neat and tidy and that was how he liked to work. Her mother was sloppy and slapdash, bits of paper with hand written notes everywhere. When an idea came to Katherine she would just grab whatever writing implement was at hand and wrote on any flat surface. The time she’d written all over Rebekah’s Hollywood vanity mirror with her best Mac eyeliner pencil because she was cleaning and an idea just came to her in a flash. Rebekah had been apoplectic, Katherine unapologetic and Luke accepting.
What a difference now. Leah could see evidence of a filing system, a pin board with notes pinned to it, along with various pictures and cut-outs from magazines. There were still piles of books everywhere, but they were at least neatly stacked. There was a framed photo of the four of them, taken just a few months before Luke died, on a day out to a theme park. It was a copy of the only photo that Leah had taken with her, the one that was stashed away in the loft.
Was this change what Katherine wanted to show her? What did it mean? Leah looked at her mother for clarification.
Katherine smiled. “No, love, that’s not what I wanted you to see, although it does make my life easier when I can find notes I made a month ago! Sit down.”
Leah sat at her father’s desk as Katherine reached for a leather bound album from the bookshelf, opening it at the first page. There were newspaper clippings about the death of her father.
“No, Mum, I don’t want to see. I don’t want to remember.” Leah turned her head.
“These are my memories. My way of coping without your dad was to keep him alive in the media. If I talked about him, to everyone, I’d always have him with me. That’s why I started this memory book. I didn’t grieve for your dad until much later and it was only when I read about him, our life together, that I began to grieve.” Katherine turned the pages of the album. “When I saw the headlines on Saturday about you, Pippa and Nathan, I felt for you, I really did. You were such a shy little girl, not like Rebekah. I knew it would hurt you, reading everything they had written, but in a way, I’m so happy they did write it.”
Katherine knelt down at the side of the chair, taking her daughter’s hand.
“I found out where you were, I found out what you did. I found out I had a granddaughter.” Katherine paused, her voice breaking. “I could see with my own eyes that you were alive.”
“Mum, I…”
“Hush now. Let me finish. Nathan rang me on Saturday to let me know what had happened. He wanted me to go to Newcastle, to go to you. I said no.”
Katherine wiped the tears from Leah’s face as they fell. “I said no, darling, not because I didn’t want to help you, to hold you. I wanted to, so very much, but I didn’t want to add to everything that was going on. I can still remember the look on your face when Rebekah and I turned up at your 18th birthday.”
“It wasn’
t you, Mum, it was…” Leah turned in the chair, her words earnest.
“It was me, in part. If I had given the press the slip on your birthday, things would have been so much different. We might have been able to rebuild our relationship and whether you and Nathan would have made it or not, you might have come home to me rather than running away to wherever you’ve been for the last seven years. But you’ve got to understand, I courted the press for many years, both for my sake and Rebekah’s and it was hard when we were out in a public place.”
“I understand the need for publicity, Mum, that’s what I do for a living, but it got even worse after Dad died. They were permanently outside and you were constantly giving interviews. I needed you, then, Mum. I was only 15. I need you now.” Leah’s eyes were full of tears.
“Are you sure it’s me you need?” Katherine stroked her daughter’s hair. “I’m not sure I can give you what you need. When we lost your dad, I lost my other half. We’d been married for 25 years, Luke was my best friend. I’d never been alone before.”
“You had me.”
“I know, then you left me too and I had to start again. You have done the alone bit, Leah.” Katherine pressed her lips to her daughter’s forehead. “Do you still want to be alone, when you don’t have to?”
Leah watched her mum go, leaving her with the memories of her past and pondering about the future.
***
Katherine was enjoying getting to know her granddaughter, they were currently in the kitchen making cookies. Leah, familiar with Pippa’s culinary skills, decided she was better off out of it and took a walk around the village where she grew up.
After stopping to buy some flowers from the store, she made her way to the church to pay her father’s grave a visit. Entering the church yard, Leah waited for the barrage of emotion to hit. The day of the funeral was one of the worst days of her life, not least from having to say her final goodbye to Luke, but also because of the hordes of press. But nothing came, only a sense of calm.
Looking round, she tried to picture exactly the funeral, the way she’d remembered it for years, but she could only see what was real. The churchyard was tiny and even with just the close family and friends who Katherine had invited to the service, it had been a squeeze. How had the hordes of press managed to fit in? Leah thought she remembered flash bulbs popping in her face, people calling out.