by Nora Roberts
“Sam, there’s no need.”
“There’s every need. Let’s go home.”
10
It was after one a.m. when they arrived at Johanna’s house, but she went straight to the phone. With a pen in one hand, she began to flip through her address book. “It shouldn’t take long for me to set this up,” she told Sam, “but you don’t have to wait up.”
“I’ll wait.” There were things that had to be said, and he wanted them said before she had a chance to build the barricades again. Though she looked steady, perhaps too steady, he was coming to understand her. Still, he left her alone as she began to dial.
There was little enough she could do. She was certain her father would tolerate only the slightest interference from her, but he would want his people informed. Johanna fed information to his publicist, then hashed out a simple, straightforward press release.
While she was calming her father’s assistant and making sure that the daily business of Patterson Productions would run as smoothly as possible, Sam handed her a mug. Grateful, Johanna sipped, expecting coffee. Instead she tasted the soothing herbal tea she’d bought on impulse and brewed occasionally after a particularly long day.
“I’ll be able to tell you more tomorrow, Whitfield. No, whatever can’t be handled by you or another member of the staff will have to be canceled. That would appear to be your problem, wouldn’t it?”
Across the room, Sam had no choice but to smile at her tone. As producers went, he’d never heard better.
“Where’s Loman? Well, call him back.” She made a quick notation on a pad. “Yes, that’s right, but I’m sure he’ll be giving you instructions himself in a couple of days. You’ll have to check with the doctor on that, but I don’t think you’ll be able to discuss that or anything else with Carl for at least forty-eight hours.” Her voice changed, went frigid. “That’s not really the issue here, Whitfield. You’ll have to consider Carl unavailable until further notice. No, I won’t take the responsibility, you will. That’s what you’re paid for.”
She hung up, incensed by the man’s insensitivity. “Idiot,” she muttered as she picked up her tea again. “His main concern is that Carl insisted on supervising the editing of Fields of Fire, and the heart attack is going to put the project behind schedule.”
“Are you finished?”
Still frowning, she skimmed down her notes. “I don’t think there’s any more I can do.”
“Come and sit down.” He waited until she’d joined him on the sofa, then poured more tea into her cup from the pot he’d brewed. Sensing tension even before he touched her, Sam began to massage her shoulders. “It’s hard, only being able to wait.”
“Yes.”
“You handle yourself well, Johanna.”
She sipped tea and stared straight ahead. “I had a good teacher.”
“Tell me about your father.”
“I told you everything the doctor told me.”
“I don’t mean that.” She was tensing up again, even as he massaged the muscles. “Tell me about him, about you and him.”
“There’s really nothing to tell. We’ve never been particularly close.”
“Because of your mother?”
She went stiff at that. “What does my mother have to do with it?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.” He’d been shooting in the dark, but he wasn’t surprised that he’d hit the target. “Johanna, you don’t have to be a gossip buff to know that your parents divorced when you were, what—four?”
“I’d just turned five.” It still hurt. No matter how often she told herself it was foolish, even unhealthy, the child’s pain and confusion leaked into the woman. “That’s history, Sam.”
He didn’t think so. Instinct told him it was as much a part of the present as he was. “She went back to England,” he prompted. “And your father retained custody of you.”
“He didn’t have much choice.” The bitterness leaked out. She made a conscientious and difficult effort to bury it again. “It really isn’t relevant.”
“I’m not Whitfield, Johanna,” he murmured. “Humor me.”
She was silent for so long he decided to try another tactic. Then she sighed and began. “My mother went back to England to try to pick up the stage career she felt she’d sacrificed when she’d married. I didn’t have a place there.”
“You must have missed her.”
“I got over it.”
He didn’t think so. “I don’t suppose divorce is ever easy on a kid, but it’s got to be worse when one of the parents ends up several thousand miles away.”
“It was better that way, for everyone. They always fought terribly. Neither of them were happy with their marriage or . . .” She trailed off before she could say what was in her mind. Me. Neither of them wanted me. “With the situation,” she finished.
“You’d have been pretty young to have known that.” He’d begun to get a picture of five-year-old Johanna, dealing with the inexplicable ups and downs of a rocky marriage.
“You don’t have to be very old to recognize turmoil. In any case, my mother explained it to me. She sent me a telegram from the airport.” Her tea had gone cold, but she sipped automatically.
A telegram’s just like a letter, the pretty young maid had told Johanna. If the maid hadn’t been new, the telegram would have been handed over to Carl and disposed of. But the maid had been avid to know the contents, and more than willing to help Johanna struggle over the words.
My darling girl. I’m devastated to leave you like this, but I have no choice. My situation, my life, has become desperate. Believe me, I have tried, but I’ve come to understand that divorce, and a complete separation from what was, is the only way I can survive. I despise myself for leaving you in your father’s hands, but for now mine are too frail to hold on to you. One day you’ll understand and forgive. Love. Mother.
She remembered it still, word for word, though at the time all she had understood was that her mother was leaving her because she wasn’t happy.
Sam was staring at her, amazed that she could be so matter-of-fact. “She sent you a telegram?”
“Yes. I wasn’t old enough to fully understand, but I caught the drift. She was miserably unhappy and desperate to find a way out.”
Bitch. The word rose up in his throat, hotly, and he had to swallow it. He couldn’t imagine anyone being so self-absorbed and selfish as to say goodbye to her only child by telegram. He tried to remember that Johanna had told him how her mother had taken her to feed the ducks, but he couldn’t equate the two acts with the same woman.
“It must have been rough on you.” He put his arm around her, as if he could find a way to protect her from what had already happened.
“Children are resilient.” She rose, knowing that if he offered comfort she would break. She hadn’t broken in over twenty years. “She did what she had to do, but I don’t think she was ever happy. She died about ten years ago.”
Suicide. He swore at himself for not remembering it before. Glenna Howard, Johanna’s unhappy mother, had never quite achieved the sparkling comeback she’d sought. Disappointment had been eased by pills and alcohol until she’d taken a deliberate overdose of both.
“I’m sorry, Johanna. Losing her twice. It must have been hell for you.”
“I never knew her that well.” She reached for her tea again, for something to keep her hands busy. “And it was a long time ago.”
He went to her, though she turned away. Patient but determined, he drew her back. “I don’t think things like that ever stop hurting. Don’t back off from me, Johanna.”
“There’s no use dredging all this up.”
“I think there is.” He took her shoulders, firmly enough to let her know he wasn’t easing off. “I’ve wondered all along why you held off. I thought at first it was because you’d had a bad experience with another man. But it goes back farther than that, and deeper.”
She looked at him then, her face set but her eyes despe
rate. She’d said too much, more than she’d ever said before. In saying it, the memories became all too clear. “I’m not my mother.”
“No.” He lifted a hand to brush at her hair. “No, you’re not. And you’re not your father either.”
“I don’t even know if he is my father.”
The moment it was said, she went white. The hands she had fisted unballed and went limp. Not once in all of her life had she said it out loud. The knowledge had been there, locked tight but never completely silent. Now she heard her words echo back to her and was afraid, terribly afraid, she’d be ill.
“Johanna, what are you talking about?”
His voice was calm and quiet, but it shot like a bullet through her shock. “Nothing, nothing. I’m upset. I’m tired. Tomorrow’s going to be a difficult day, Sam. I need to sleep.”
“We both know you’re too wired to sleep.” He could feel the violent shudders begin as he held her there. “And you will be until you get the rest of it out. Tell me about your father, Johanna. About Carl.”
“Will you leave me alone?” There were tears in her voice that only frightened her more. She could feel the walls cracking, the foundation giving way, but didn’t have the strength to shore it up again. “For God’s sake, can’t you see I’ve had all I can manage? I don’t want to talk about my mother. I don’t want to talk about him. He could be dying.” The tears spilled out, and she knew she’d lost. “He could be dying, and I should feel something. But I don’t. I don’t even know who he is. I don’t know who I am.”
She fought him, pushing away as he gathered her to him, swearing at him as he held her there. Then she collapsed in a storm of weeping.
He didn’t offer comforting words. He hadn’t a clue which ones to choose. Instead, he lifted her into his arms. With her sobs muffled against his throat, he sat down, cradling her to him. Sam stroked her hair and let her purge herself. He hadn’t known it was possible to hold that many tears inside.
She felt ill. Her throat and eyes burned, her stomach heaved. Even when the tears were over, the raw, sick feeling remained. Her strength had been sapped, as if someone had pulled a plug and let it drain away. She didn’t object when Sam shifted her, nor when he rose. He was going away. It was something she accepted even as her own battered heart suffered another crack.
Then he was sitting beside her again, placing a snifter in her hands. “It might help some,” he murmured. “Take it slow.”
If there’d been any left, more tears would have fallen. She nodded, took a sip of brandy and let it coat the raw wounds.
“I was always in awe of him,” Johanna began without looking up. “I don’t know even now if I loved him as a child, but he was always the largest and most important figure in my life. After my mother left—” she paused to sip again “—after my mother left I was terrified that he’d leave, too, or send me away. I didn’t understand then how important it was to him to keep his private affairs private. The public could accept and be entertained by his romances and marriages, but if he’d shipped off his only child without a blink, they’d have taken a different view. No one forgot that he’d been married to Glenna Howard and that she’d had his child. No one except him.”
How could she explain how lost she had been? How confusing it had been to see her father entertain other women as though her mother had never existed.
“When he married again it was horrible. There was a big, splashy wedding, lots of photographers, microphones, strangers. They dressed me up and told me to smile. I hated it—the stares and innuendos about my mother. The whispers about her. He could ignore it. He’d always had that kind of presence, but all I could think was that my mother was being replaced with someone I didn’t even know. And I had to smile.”
Insensitive, selfish idiots. Even as he thought it, he tightened his arms around her. “Wasn’t there anyone else . . . any family?”
“His parents had died years before. I remember hearing or being told somewhere along the line that he’d been raised by his grandmother. By that time she was gone, too. I’d never met her. I had what you’d call a governess, who would have literally died for my father. Women react that way to him,” she said wearily. “Nothing could have stopped it—my being in the wedding was important. Impressions, photo opportunities, that kind of thing. After it was over, I didn’t see him again for three months. He was spending a lot of time in Italy.”
“You stayed behind.”
“I was in school.” She pulled a hand through her hair, then clasped them in her lap. “It was perfectly legitimate for him to leave me behind with my tutors and instructors. In any case, his second wife had little tolerance for children. Few of his liaisons did.”
Because she could feel his sympathy reaching out to her, she shook her head. “I was happier here. I spent a lot of time with the Heddisons. They were wonderful to me.”
“I’m glad for that.” He drew her hand into his. “Go on.”
“It was after his second divorce, when he was involved with . . . it doesn’t matter who. Anyway, I was out of school and feeling sorry for myself. I went up to his room. I don’t even know why, except to be there, to see if I could solve the mystery of my father. I solved it.
“I’d always felt inadequate, awkward around him. There seemed to be something lacking in me that kept him from loving me the way that he should. He had this wonderful old desk in his room, one with all these fascinating cubbyholes and compartments. He was away again, so I didn’t have to worry about him catching me poking around. I found letters. Some of them were from his women, and I was old enough to be embarrassed, so I put them away again. Then I found one from my mother. An old one, one she’d written right after she’d gone back to England. Holding it was like seeing her again. Sometimes I hadn’t been able to bring the picture of her into my head, but the minute I had that letter, I saw her exactly as she’d been. God, she was beautiful, so fragile and haunted. I could even hear her voice, that trained, extraordinary voice. I’d loved her so much.”
He took the snifter from her and set it on the table. “You read the letter?”
“I wish to God I hadn’t.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, but it was now, as it had been then, too late to turn back. “I was so hungry for anything she’d touched, any part of her, that I didn’t even realize at first when I was reading. She must have been furious when she wrote it. It came across, the anger, the bitterness, the need to punish. I’d known, even as a child, that their marriage hadn’t been smooth. But until I’d read the letter I’d had no idea how much hate had been built up between them.”
“People say things they don’t mean, or at least things that shouldn’t be said under those kind of circumstances.”
“Well, she’s gone, has been gone, and there’s no way of knowing if she meant what she’d said. No way for me to know, no way for my father—for Carl to know.”
Her mouth was dry, but she no longer wanted the brandy. Johanna pressed her lips together and continued. “She brought up every hurt, every broken promise, every real or imagined infidelity. Then she brought out the big guns. Leaving me with him was the biggest payback she could think of. She was saddling him with a child who wasn’t even his own. Not that he could ever prove it, or that she would ever tell him who had fathered the child he’d given a name to. There was, of course, the possibility that the child was his, but . . . She wished him a lifetime of hell wondering. And because I read the letter, she gave me the same.”
Sam stared out the darkened window for a long time. The rage was so keen, so close to the surface, he was afraid to speak. She’d been a child, innocent, helpless. And no one had given a damn.
“Did you ever speak to him about it?”
“No, there was no reason to. He didn’t change toward me. I was well tended, well educated and allowed to pursue my own interests as long as I didn’t embarrass him.”
“They didn’t deserve you. Either of them.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said wearil
y. “I’m not a child anymore.” Nor had she been from the moment she’d read the letter.
“It matters to me.” He cupped her face in his hands. “You matter to me, Johanna.”
“I never meant to tell you, or anyone. But now that I have, you must understand why I can’t let what’s between us go too far.”
“No.”
“Sam—”
“What I understand is that you had a lousy childhood, and that things went on around you that no kid should ever be a part of. And I understand that there’re bound to be scars.”
“Scars?” She gave a quick, brittle laugh as she rose. “Don’t you see, my mother was ill. Oh, it was kept quiet, out of the press, but I managed to dig it up. She was in and out of sanitariums the last few years of her life. Manic depression, instability, alcohol addiction. And the drugs . . .” Johanna pressed her fingers to her eyes and struggled to get a grip on herself. “She didn’t raise me, and I can’t be sure who my father is, but she was my mother. I can’t forget that, or what I may have inherited from her.”
He rose slowly. His first instinct was to tread carefully, but then he realized it was the wrong one. She needed to be brought up short, and quickly. “It’s not like you to be melodramatic, Johanna.”
His words had exactly the effect he’d hoped for. Anger flashed into her eyes and whipped color back into her cheeks. “How dare you say that to me?”
“How dare you stand there and make up insufficient excuses why you can’t commit to me?”
“They’re not excuses, they’re facts.”
“I don’t give a damn who your mother was, or your father. I’m