The Bridesmaid's Secret

by Fiona Harper

  The sight drew no pity from him. He wouldn’t allow it. Instead he looked away.

  Marry her? Have a Happy Ever After with her? Right at this moment it was the last thing he wanted to do. In fact if he never saw her again he’d be ecstatic. But that wasn’t an option. She was his sole link to his daughter. A daughter he could still hardly believe existed.

  He spoke without looking at Jackie. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Kate,’ she said blandly.

  Kate. Very English. Probably not what he would have chosen, given the chance. But he hadn’t been given the chance—that was the point. He wanted to shout, to punch, to…do something to rid himself of this horrible assault of feelings. Normally he could bat negative things away, dissolve them with a joke or distract himself—usually with something female and pretty—but this just wouldn’t go away and he didn’t know how to handle it.

  Facts. Stick to facts.

  ‘Kate,’ he echoed. ‘Short for Katharine?’

  She didn’t answer. He let out a rough sigh. How could she still be playing games with him after what she’d revealed? How did she have the gall to make him work for the answers?

  Because she’s Jackie. She sets tests. You have to prove yourself to her over and over and even then she’ll never believe you.

  He swivelled round and looked her in the eyes, knowing that the lava inside was bubbling hard, even though he was desperately trying to keep a lid on it. Instead he let its heat radiate in his stare, let it insist upon an answer.

  She swallowed. ‘I suppose so. I’m not sure.’

  Was a straight yes or no so hard to come by? Suddenly, it was all too much for him. He couldn’t do this now. He needed time to think, to breathe. One more of her cryptic answers and he was going to lose it completely.

  ‘Fine. If that’s the way you want to play it, I’ll go.’

  She looked shocked at that. He didn’t care why.

  ‘But don’t think you’ve heard the end of this,’ he added. ‘You owe me more. And you can start paying tomorrow with answers. Facts. Details. Call them what you want, but I will have them.’

  Jackie got over her surprise and pushed herself away from the wall of her grotto with her hands so she was standing straight. She fixed him with that flesh-melting stare he remembered so well. He refused to acknowledge the ripple of heat that passed over him in response.

  ‘Don’t you dare act all high and mighty about this, Signor Puccini! You and I both know you weren’t ready for fidelity and commitment back then.’

  That lid he’d been trying to keep tightly on? It popped.

  But he was aware Lizzie and Jack might well still be within earshot and he didn’t have the luxury of using the volume he would have liked to. He did the next best thing and dropped his voice to a rasping whisper.

  ‘You have no right to judge me. No right at all. You don’t know what I would have done, how I might have reacted. Who do you think you are?’

  Jackie marched out of the grotto and for a moment he thought she was going to leave him standing there, all his anger unspent, but she got halfway up the garden and then turned back and strode towards him.

  Of course. She always had to have the last word. Well, let her. It still wouldn’t make what she’d done right.

  ‘Who do I think I am? I’ll tell you who I think I am!’ Her face twisted into something resembling a smile. ‘I’m the poor, pathetic girl who waited at the farmhouse all afternoon for you, scared out of her wits, feeling alone and overwhelmed.’

  She wasn’t making any sense.

  ‘You know I didn’t get your letter,’ he said. ‘You can’t blame that on me.’

  She took her time before she answered, her eyes narrowing, faint glimmer of victory glittering there. ‘I saw you, Romano, that afternoon.’

  Saw him? What was she talking about? He’d thought the whole point had been that he hadn’t turned up.

  ‘When I finally gave up waiting, I walked back up the track towards the main road, and that was when I saw you.’ She waited for him to guess the significance of her statement, but all he could do was shrug. ‘I saw you drive past on your Vespa with…her. With Francesca Gambardi!’

  Ah.

  He’d forgotten about that.

  So that was the afternoon he’d finally given in to Francesca’s pestering, had agreed to take her out on his bella moto, as she’d called it, because he’d hoped her presence would make him forget the crater Jackie had left behind when he’d finally got the message she’d wanted nothing more to do with him.

  It hadn’t been one of his finest moments. Or one of his best ideas.

  And it hadn’t worked. Francesca hadn’t been enough of a distraction. Every time she’d looked at him, every time she’d brushed up against him, he’d only been plagued by the feeling that everything had been all wrong, that it should have been Jackie with her arms around his waist as they whipped through the countryside, that it should have been Jackie sidling up to him as they’d stopped to look at a pretty view. In the end, he’d taken Francesca home without so much as a kiss. A first for him in those days.

  Jackie was way off base, thinking he’d had something going with Francesca, but he remembered how insecure, how jealous she’d been of the other girl, and he knew how it must have looked to her. But if she’d only asked, only would have deigned to talk to him, she would have known the truth. He’d acted foolishly, yes, but she hadn’t behaved with any more maturity.

  ‘And that was why you didn’t bother telling me you were carrying my child? Because you saw me with another girl on the back of my Vespa? Jackie, that’s a pathetic excuse.’

  The smug look evaporated and she looked as if she’d been slapped across the face with the truth of his statement. Her jaw tensed. It didn’t take her long to regroup and counter-attack.

  ‘But I thought you’d read my letter, remember? I thought you knew I was pregnant, that I was waiting for you to discuss our future. And when you rode past the farmhouse—our special place—with that girl pressing herself up against you…well, it sent a message loud and clear.’

  Okay, things might not be as black and white as he’d thought.

  It was all so complicated, so hard to keep track of who knew what and when. Jackie had always been hot-headed and quick to judge and while he didn’t like her reaction to the situation he could understand it, understand it was the only way she could have acted in that moment. What he didn’t understand was why that one, unlucky coincidence, when he’d driven past with Francesca, had decided everything, had defined both their futures.

  ‘But you didn’t think to ask me? To find out for sure? Maybe not right then, when you were still angry, but what about the next month or the one after that? What about when the baby was born, or when you registered her? On her first birthday? On any of her birthdays? Hasn’t she asked questions? Doesn’t she want to know?’

  Jackie just stared at him.

  Maybe his daughter took after her mother. Maybe Jackie had brought her up to be as hard and self-obsessed as she was. Unfortunately he could imagine it all too easily. The elegant flat in one of the classier parts of London, the two of them being very sophisticated together, eating out, going to fashion shows. What he couldn’t imagine was them laughing, making daisy chains or having fun.

  He sighed. Jackie had always been such hard work, had always kept him on his toes. What would it be like if he had two such women to placate? It would leave him breathless.

  He’d drifted off, almost forgotten Jackie was there. Her voice pulled him out of his daydream…nightmare…whatever.

  ‘I did think of you when she was born, in the days following…’ She paused, made a strange hiccupping noise. ‘And don’t think that every birthday wasn’t torture, because it was. But by then it was too late. It had already been done. And I wouldn’t have turned back time if I could have done. It would have been selfish and wrong.’

  His first reaction was to stoke his anger—she was talking in riddles again—but
the weighty sorrow that had settled on her, making her shoulders droop, diluted his rage with curiosity.

  ‘What do you mean “it was too late”?’

  Jackie looked up, puzzled. ‘She’d gone to her new family—the people who adopted her.’

  The words didn’t sink in at first. He heard the sounds, even knew what they represented, but, somehow, they still didn’t make sense. He walked away from her, back towards the grotto and stuck his hand—shirtsleeves and all—into one of the chilly black pools, just because he needed something physical, something to shock his body and brain into reacting.

  It worked all right. Suddenly his brain was alive with responses. Unfortunately, the temperature of the water had done nothing to cool his temper. He flicked the water off with his hands and dried them on the back of his beautifully crafted, mortgage-worthy suit.

  ‘You’re telling me that, rather than raise our daughter yourself, rather than telling me—her father—of her existence, that you gave her away to strangers? Like she was something disposable?’

  He marched up to her, grabbed her by the shoulders.

  ‘Is that what it was like, Jackie? She didn’t fit into your nice, ordered plans for your life, so you just put her out of sight…out of mind?’

  Jackie’s jaw moved, but no sound came out. She had gone white. And then she wrenched herself free and stumbled out of the garden on her high heels, gaining speed with every step.

  For a man who lived his life in the shallows, Romano experienced the unfamiliar feeling of knowing he’d gone too deep, said too much, and he didn’t know how to deal with that. There wasn’t a quip, a smart remark, that could save the situation. He was in open water and land was nowhere in sight.

  Jackie had disappeared along the path and into the small patch of woodland that hid the sunken garden from the island’s shore.

  The path. The one that led down to the beach.

  Oh, hell.

  He sprinted after her, even though he couldn’t rationalise why stopping her from bumping into Jack and Lizzie was so important. In his mind she deserved all she got. He told himself he was speeding after her to stop her putting a huge dampener on the wedding and ignored the pity that twinged in him every time he thought of how much she would hate anyone—especially her adored older sister—to see her in such a mess.

  It didn’t take long to catch her up, only twenty steps away from where the trees parted and she would have a full view of the shingle beach.

  ‘Jackie!’ It wasn’t quite a shout, wasn’t quite a whisper, but a strange combination of the two.

  She faltered but didn’t alter her course. He was closer now and put a restraining hand on her arm, spoke in a low voice. ‘Not that way.’

  All of her back muscles tensed and he just knew she was getting ready to let rip, but then they heard a rumble of low laughter from the direction of the water’s edge and she jolted in surprise.

  ‘This way,’ he said, as quietly as possible, and led her through the trees in the opposite direction, heading for the narrow tip of the island, away from the house, where they would be less likely to be disturbed by wandering wedding guests. They reached a clearing with a soft grassy bank and she just seemed to lose the ability to keep her joints locked. Her knees folded under her and she sat down on the grass with a thud.

  ‘It wasn’t like that at all,’ she said, enunciating each word carefully. ‘You don’t know…’

  It took Romano a couple of seconds to realise she was continuing the conversation she’d walked out on as if no time had passed. And that wasn’t the only strange thing that had happened. He no longer wanted to erupt. He didn’t know why. Maybe he’d experienced so many strong emotions in the last half-hour that he’d just run out, had none left. He sat down beside her.

  ‘So tell me what it was like.’

  He knew his request didn’t sound exactly friendly, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances.

  She kicked off her shoes and sank her bare feet into the grass. Even the shade of her toenails complemented her outfit. So Jackie…

  She hugged her legs, drew them up until she was almost in a little ball, and rested her cheek on her knees. Her face was turned in his direction, but her eyes were glazed and unfocused.

  ‘I wanted to believe you’d come,’ she said in a voice that reminded him of a little girl’s. ‘I wanted to believe that it would all turn out right, but I truly didn’t think it was ever going to happen.’

  Another nail in the coffin. Another confirmation from her that he was a loser. He ought to get angry again, but there was something in her voice, her face, that totally arrested him.

  Honesty. Pure and unguarded.

  It was such a rare commodity where Jackie was concerned that he decided not to do anything to scare it away. He needed answers and she was the only one who could provide them.

  ‘Mamma was so cross when I told her I was pregnant that I thought she was going to break something.’

  One corner of his mouth lifted. Yes, he could well imagine the scene. It wouldn’t have been pretty.

  ‘She insisted that adoption was the only way. How could I argue with her? I couldn’t do it on my own.’

  ‘What about your father?’

  She snorted. ‘He might be a blue-sky-thinking entrepreneur, but he’s smart enough to do what Mamma tells him to do.’ She blinked, looked across at him as she lifted her lashes again. ‘I don’t think he knew what to do with me. He’s good with big ideas and balance sheets, but not so great with the people stuff. I think he wanted the problem to just go away. It was as much as he could manage just to let me go and live with him until the baby was born.’

  Romano didn’t say anything. He’d always thought of Jackie as being just like him—a child of a wealthy family, secure in the knowledge of her place in the world. He’d even envied her the sisters and the multitude of cousins compared to his one-parent, no-cousin family. His father hadn’t been perfect, but he’d always shown him love, and that had made Romano too sure, too cocky, when he’d been young, but he realised that Jackie had never had that.

  One loving parent—however unique he might be—had to be better than two clueless ones. His father would never have forced him to do what Jackie’s parents had made her do. Yes, her mother had been the driving force, but her father had to take responsibility too. He’d let her down by omitting to stand up for her, to fight for her, to do anything he could to make her happy. That was what fathers were supposed to do.

  That was what he was supposed to do now.

  Jackie lifted her head from her knees. ‘Once I was too big to keep it a secret any more, Mamma packed me off to London to live with Dad, and you know what?’ She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and took a long gulp of air.

  ‘What?’ he said softly. No longer was he trying just to keep her talking, aiming to get dates and times and details from her. He really wanted to know.

  ‘When I went to live with him, he never even mentioned my pregnancy, even though I was swelling up in front of his face. He just…ignored it. It was so weird.’ She shook her head. ‘And when I came home from the hospital without…on my own…the only emotion he showed was relief.’

  She hugged her knees even tighter and rested her chin on top of them. He could see her jaw clenching and unclenching, as if there were unsaid words, words she’d wanted to say to her father for years, but never had.

  She’d been so young. And so alone.

  He didn’t have a heart of stone. He would have been a monster if he couldn’t have imagined how awful it must have been for her. And she’d only told him bare details.

  There wasn’t anything he could say to change that, to make it better. For a long time they sat in silence.

  ‘What was it like?’ he finally said. ‘The day she was born?’

  Jackie frowned. ‘It rained.’

  He didn’t push for more, sensing that the answer he wanted was coming, he just needed to give her room. The sun had started t
o set while they’d been in the clearing and, through the trees, the sky was turning bright turquoise at the horizon, and the ripples on the lake glinted soft gold. The temperature must have dropped a little, because Jackie shivered.

  Not a monster, he reminded himself, and pulled his jacket off and draped it around her shoulders. The sleeves hung uselessly by her sides.

  When she spoke again, she went on to describe a long, complicated labour that had ended in a distressed baby and an emergency Caesarean section. All the half-formed ideas of cute newborns sliding easily into the world were blown right out of the water. Real birth, it seemed, was every bit as traumatic as real life. And she’d done it all on her own, her father away on a business trip and her mother still in Italy keeping up at the façade, lest anyone suspect their family’s disgrace.

  ‘What was she like? Kate?’

  Jackie’s face softened in a way he hadn’t thought possible. ‘She was perfect. So tiny. With a shock of dark hair just like yours and a temper just like mine.’

  He wanted to smile but he felt strangely breathless.

  A single tear ran down her cheek. ‘She’s amazing, Romano. Just so…amazing.’

  He sat up a little straighter. ‘You’ve met her?’

  She nodded. ‘She started looking for me a few months ago and we’ve been meeting up, trying to establish a bond.’ She pulled a face. ‘It’s not been going very well.’

  Well, if she had Jackie’s temper, that was hardly surprising.

  He watched Jackie as she stared out into the gathering dusk, not sure he’d ever seen her like this before, with all the armour plating stripped away.