by Penny Jordan
‘How did you get in?’
She saw the open french windows and grimaced wryly. It was her fault. She had left the french windows open.
A little to her surprise, she saw his mouth thin angrily as he too looked at the open doors.
‘Anyone could have walked in here,’ he told her tersely.
Her eyes widened a little as she caught the note of reproval in his voice.
‘Anyone could,’ she agreed drily. ‘But you did. Why? What are you doing here, Joss?’
Her brief surge of shock-born defiance left her as he responded derisively, ‘I think you already know the answer to that question. I’ve come to talk to you about your daughter…our daughter…’
He stressed the possessive pronoun, watching her with eyes that seemed to see right inside her soul. Hard, bitter eyes, that seemed to blame and accuse; but who was he to accuse her? Why should he feel bitter?
He had caught her off guard, and as she struggled to reassemble her defences she licked her over-dry lips, tension seeping into her muscles and paralysing them.
‘What do you mean?’ she challenged, knowing as she spoke that she had hesitated for far too long.
He gave her a derisive look.
‘You know exactly what I mean, Kate.’
She moved restlessly in her chair. It was hard and uncomfortable, making her feel even more physically vulnerable. She longed for the soft comfort of one of the easy chairs by the fire where she could at least relax her compressed muscles, but he was standing right in front of her, making it impossible for her to move without brushing past him.
‘That was some shock, seeing you so unexpectedly like that last week—and then to discover, almost by accident, that—’ He broke off abruptly. ‘My cousin, John’s mother, invited me to have dinner with them last Sunday. We had a most illuminating conversation.’
The grey eyes bored into her, making her heart pound with fear. She wanted to drag her gaze away, to break the hypnotic concentration of his eyes and the anger she could sense he was only just able to control.
‘Sophy is my child.’ He said it flatly, refusing to allow her the opportunity to deny it.
She moistened her dry lips again, wanting to tell him that he was wrong, but her throat muscles refused to respond to her need and she could only stare wildly and betrayingly at him, while the colour came and went under her skin.
Her exhausted brain couldn’t cope with the hostility emanating from him. Last weekend she had dreaded this very confrontation…dreaded the denouement which would have ruined Sophy’s wedding day, and when it had not come she had reassured herself that acknowledging Sophy as his child was the very last thing Joss was likely to do.
Safe and reassured, she had started to let go of her fear, and in doing so had rendered herself vulnerable.
Her whole body ached with shock and fear.
‘I can’t see the point in dragging up the past now,’ she challenged him bitterly.
He stared at her for a moment as though he had never seen her before, his eyes merciless, his mouth a hard line of contempt. She focused on it despairingly and then, whether because of her fear or her exhaustion, she did not know which, she suffered the shockingly hallucinatory sensation of suddenly slipping back in time, so that when she looked at his mouth she remembered how it had felt moving against her own…how she had felt…almost sick with excitement and desire, wanting him so much…loving him so much…
‘The point is that I have already missed out on the first twenty years of my daughter’s life,’ Joss told her gratingly, destroying the fragile spell of the past and jolting her into the present, ‘and I do not intend to miss out on the next twenty. You had no right to do what you did, Kate,’ he told her savagely. ‘All right, so you discovered that you no longer wanted me…that there was no place for me in your life, but… What’s wrong?’ he asked her roughly, seeing the way the colour drained from her face, leaving it pinched and white with shock, her eyes enormous in its delicacy, their soft depths betraying her disbelief and pain.
It was a look that no one could have manufactured, painful and haunting enough to make him stop in his tracks to focus on her and study her.
‘What’s wrong, Kate?’ he repeated less savagely.
She had started to tremble violently, her reaction so intense that he reacted instinctively to it, reaching out to clasp her wrists firmly in warm fingers as though in comfort, while he registered the frantic race of her pulse.
She made an inarticulate sound of pain in her throat and tried to stand up…to escape. What was he trying to do to her? Why was he trying to pretend, to lie, to hurt her more than she had already been hurt?
Her cramped muscles refused to respond to her need to get away from him, and as she tried to pull herself free and push past him her legs simply refused to support her. She fell heavily against him, with an impotent cry of frustrated panic.
The too familiar scent of him was all around her, and as she struggled to escape from it she felt his arms locking round her. The silk shirt he was wearing felt nothing like the T-shirts and rough woollen shirts he had worn before, but the body beneath it was the same, hard and warm, its scent and shape dangerously evocative of the past. The harder Kate tried to escape from the miasma of emotions pouring through her, the more impossible escape became. Confused, exhausted, unable to understand why he was accusing her of leaving him, she felt him say her name tautly, and then, when she made no response, swing her up into his arms and carry her over to the chairs by the fire. He placed her in one of them, and then stood over her, asking tersely, ‘Have you any brandy in the house?’
She shook her head, closing her eyes. ‘I don’t want any.’
‘No, what you want is a damned good meal,’ he told her raggedly. ‘Honestly, Kate, there’s nothing of you.’
That got through to her. She stiffened in the chair and glared at him.
‘I might not measure up to the Junoesque proportions of your secretary, Joss, but that doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with me.’
‘I wasn’t trying to imply that there was,’ he told her drily. ‘Kate, you’re suffering from shock and—’
‘Yes, I am,’ she agreed fiercely, interrupting him, ‘and is it any wonder? You come here trying to claim my daughter,’ she emphasised the ‘my’ and saw him wince as though the assertion hurt him in some way. ‘You start telling me some idiotic lies about me not wanting you, when we both know that it was the other way round. You were the one who left without a word, without anything other than that message your landlady gave me…’
He had been frowning, but now suddenly he was tensely alert.
‘What message?’ he rapped out sharply.
Kate stared at him, and then her mouth curled in soft bitterness.
‘Can’t you even remember what you said?’ she asked wryly. ‘Well, I can, Joss.’ In a low, pained voice, she added almost under her breath, ‘Sometimes I think every word is engraved in blood on my heart.’
She wasn’t looking at him, so she didn’t see the way his face changed colour, the bones beneath the skin suddenly sharp and angular.
‘What message?’ he repeated grimly.
She focused briefly on him, and then looked away again, repeating emotionlessly from memory.
‘“Tell her that it’s over…and that there’s no point in her trying to get in touch with me. I don’t want to see her again…” She also told me about your wife and child,’ Kate added in an anguished voice looking into the hearth. It was empty now. In winter a warm fire burned in it, and she shivered, suddenly feeling cold. The central heating was off, and although it had been a warm day her skin was suddenly all gooseflesh and she was shivering.
‘That’s not possible.’ Joss sat down abruptly, and Kate, who had caught the fierce note of pain in his voice, looked across at him.
All at once he looked gaunt…no longer the young man she remembered, but an adult male with life’s experiences written on his face, his eyes shado
wed with bitterness and pain.
‘I’m not lying to you, Joss,’ she told him quietly. ‘I loved you. I believed you loved me. I had no idea that you were married—’
‘I wasn’t,’ he told her roughly, stunning her into shocked immobility. He shook his head slowly as though he was trying to clear his thoughts. ‘I need to think this through. I was called home urgently because my father was ill. He’d had a heart attack. It was in the middle of the night. I’d no way of telling you…I left you a note, giving you my address and telephone number, begging you to get in touch with me as soon as you could. It was the only thing I could do. I had no idea of your aunt’s surname, you’d never mentioned it, and my landlady didn’t know it either. I knew you lived in the Yorkshire Dales, but we’d never really discussed our respective backgrounds in any depth. When you didn’t get in touch with me, I phoned my ex-landlady. She said you’d told her that you didn’t intend getting in touch…that it had just been a holiday fling…’
Kate stared at him. There was no mistaking the sincerity in his voice.
‘She lied to both of us!’ she said shocked. ‘But why…why would she do a thing like that?’
To her amazement she saw a dull surge of colour crawl up under his skin.
‘I think I may know the answer,’ he told her grimly, not looking at her. ‘Grace regularly boarded students working for the National Trust, as I was, and I soon discovered that she’d got a bit of a reputation for offering more than mere board and lodging. It was understandable in a way, I suppose. She was a divorced woman in her early thirties, and I don’t suppose the village offered her much in the way of male company.
‘The first time she came on to me I was a bit taken aback. I’d heard about her reputation but I hadn’t really believed it—and then when she appeared in my bedroom one night in the early hours…’ He shrugged. ‘Well, let’s just say it was apparent that she was making herself available. In those days I’m afraid I was inclined to be a lot more gauche than I hope I am now. I’d just met you…and perhaps I wasn’t as tactful about refusing her as I might have been.’
Kate stared at him, mature enough now to read into his remarks all that he wasn’t saying.
‘And you think she might have deliberately lied to both of us out of revenge?’ she asked him quietly.
He shrugged tiredly. ‘At least it’s an explanation. We’ll probably never know the truth, but I promise you I did leave that letter for you…’
She knew he was speaking the truth.
‘And I wasn’t married.’
‘Your father,’ Kate asked distractedly, not daring to allow herself to think about what he was saying. ‘Did he…?’
‘He died,’ he told her emotionlessly. ‘And I was virtually thrown into taking charge of the company. It was months before I was able to take enough time to go down to Cornwall to try to trace you. My ex-landlady swore she knew nothing about you, and by the time I made it back to the village your aunt had sold her cottage and moved.’
‘Yes. She went back to London. The bad summer had convinced her that country living wasn’t for her,’ Kate sighed.
‘You knew my name,’ Joss told her quietly. ‘Why didn’t you register it on Sophy’s birth certificate?’
He had seen that!
She looked at him and said tiredly, ‘I thought you were a married man, who already owed responsibility to one child. We…that is, my parents and I had decided that although one day Sophy would have to know the truth about her birth, it would be unfair to your wife and child to risk destroying their…their peace of mind by claiming paternity…’
‘And in all these years, Sophy has never once asked for my name so that she could find me?’
There was so much pain in his voice that Kate felt the colour rise in her face, as though she was in some way guilty.
‘No,’ she said shortly, avoiding looking at him. ‘She felt, as we…that is, my parents and I, felt…that she didn’t want…’
‘Anything to do with me,’ he finished bitterly for her.
‘I had to protect her,’ Kate defended herself. ‘You had already rejected me…broken your marriage vows and…’
‘What marriage vows?’ he derided savagely. ‘I loved you, Kate…’
The words hung on the stifling air of the small room, causing an aching, yearning sensation to twist through her. She stifled it ruthlessly. She was not sixteen any more. That knowledge steadied her.
‘And I loved you,’ she responded calmly, ‘but at barely sixteen…’
‘Sixteen?’ She froze as he interrupted her sharply. ‘You told me you were nineteen… You were sixteen! Oh, dear heaven! You were a child—a baby…’
There was such a wealth of self-disgust and horror in his voice that Kate reacted instinctively and compassionately, saying quickly, ‘You didn’t know. That wasn’t your fault. I might have been young, Joss, but I wasn’t a child. I was woman enough to conceive your child,’ she pointed out drily, unaware of the undercurrent of triumph that softened her voice and made him look at her sharply.
‘So you admit that she is my child,’ he said tiredly. ‘I just couldn’t believe it when, under the influence of a few glasses of wine at dinner, Mary started to tell me about how you’d conceived Sophy and then been left high and dry by some rat of a man who was already married.’ His mouth twisted. ‘I didn’t realise then that you’d actually believed that I was married. I thought you’d simply invented that fiction to cover your own rejection of me.’ He looked remorsefully at her and said bleakly, ‘You must have gone through hell…’
She had, but not in the way he thought. Her hell had been caused by the fact that she loved him, not by having his child.
‘Not really,’ she denied quietly. ‘My parents were marvellous after they got over the initial shock. They supported me all through the pregnancy and loved Sophy to death.’
She saw the shadow darkening his eyes and offered tentatively, ‘She had a very happy childhood, Joss…surrounded by love. In fact, when I felt really low, I used to try to cheer myself up by comparing Sophy’s lot with your other child’s, reminding myself that although Sophy might not have a father, she did have the love of three adults who cherished and adored her, while your legitimate child had a father who didn’t care enough for it or for its mother to stay faithful to her…’
His face was dark with emotions that threatened the barrier of his self-control as he said tersely, ‘No wonder she’s never tried to get in touch with me. She must really hate my guts.’ He moved his head slightly, swallowing past the rigid muscles of his throat, and Kate’s heart leapt sharply as she caught the faint glitter of tears between his dark lashes.
When he bowed his head defensively, she moved instinctively, reaching out to touch the downbent dark head so like their daughter’s, her touch compassionate and tender until she realised what she was doing and who he was, and snatched back her hand as though the crisp darkness of the hair beneath her fingers had actually scorched her.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said heavily, apparently oblivious to her brief, betraying gesture. ‘It’s just that it’s all been such a shock… All week I’ve been thinking about this meeting, imagining what I was going to say to you, but the reality is so different from what I’d imagined.’
‘Yes,’ Kate agreed bleakly.
‘Look,’ he said heavily, ‘I think we both need time to come to terms with what we’ve learned tonight. I’m staying in the village. I’ll go back there now. Can I call and see you again tomorrow? There are things we need to discuss.’
What things? she wanted to ask, but in her heart she knew…and had known from the moment she opened her eyes and heard him say that possessive ‘our daughter’.
It wasn’t she who had brought him up here. It was Sophy. Sophy—who would have to be told that she had lied to her about Joss not wanting her. Not deliberately, it was true, but she had lied none the less, and in doing so had denied her daughter a loving relationship with her father.
She was quite sure that Joss had no intention of withdrawing from Sophy’s life now. Why should he? But what would Sophy think of her once she knew the truth? Would she hate her, resent her…turn away from her?
Joss got up tiredly and headed for the door. She followed him automatically, and then stopped abruptly as a thought struck her.
‘Joss.’ He turned to look at her, his face shadowed in the darkness of the room.
‘Your wife…’ she said uncertainly. All right, so he hadn’t been married when they met, but he most certainly must be now! ‘Does she know about…about Sophy?’
He was silent for a moment and then he said tiredly, ‘I don’t have a wife, Kate. I was married, briefly, but we separated after less than twelve months. We’re divorced now. She didn’t want a family and I did. Ironic, isn’t it?’
He opened the door and walked through it. She followed him, unlocking the back door for him and watching him.
He hesitated on the step for a moment, and then said softly, ‘I’m sorry if tonight…upset you!’
Upset her? Tension tingled down her spine.
‘It shocked me,’ she admitted. ‘And saddened me, of course…but what happened between us is all in the past now, and if I was upset it was because of the way Sophy has been cheated of her father…not for any personal reasons.’
Her chin tilted as she stared at him, defying him to contradict her, to claim that she still loved him. And it wasn’t until he had driven off into the darkness that she asked herself just why it had been so important to her that she make it plain that she no longer felt anything for him, when he had never once implied that the existence of her long-ago love mattered to him one way or the other.
It was Sophy who had brought him to her door. Sophy who was important to him. Not her.
* * *
Of course, it was impossible for her to sleep. She lay there in bed, reliving every word he had said, trying to come to terms with the enormity of the wrong that had been done to them by a jealous, bitter woman and wondering why she did not feel more pain, more anger…wondering why she could not feel anything other than a cold, aching fear that somehow he would come between her and Sophy.