by Liz Fielding
‘Please, please, please!’ she begged.
Jacqui turned to him, planning to add her own appeal, but just in time saw the tiny tucks at the corners of his mouth that betrayed him.
He’d actually made Maisie plead for clothes that she’d normally die rather than wear, she realized, and she wasn’t sure whether she was mad at him, or overwhelmed with admiration for such a slick piece of psychological string-pulling.
Maybe he thought she was going to say something, because he put out a warning hand to stop her.
‘OK, if that’s what you want, I’ll ring the head teacher and ask her if she’ll take you. But be very sure it’s what you want. Once you start, you can’t change your mind.’
‘I won’t, I won’t!’
Harry glanced at her then and Jacqui realised that the I-don’t-want-to-know disguise had slipped again. His smile—a combination of tenderness, solicitude and a pleased-with-himself look that was totally endearing—lit up his face and, without even thinking about it, she put her hand on his arm, stretched up on her toes and kissed his cheek.
For a moment there was an illusion of time stopping. There was no sound, no movement, not even from Maisie. It was as if a single heartbeat of time was being stretched to infinity as his smile faded into something immeasurably deeper.
It was a moment of pure magic; as if she could suddenly see right through the protective shell with which he armoured himself against the world, and for a moment she felt pure joy. And then she shivered as, at the heart of him, she confronted the hollow, black centre of true pain.
It was so negative a force that she lost her balance, as if blown back by the shock of it, but even as she wobbled off her toes he caught her, held her steady, one strong arm around her waist.
The smile had completely disappeared now and his voice was soft, barely audible as he said, ‘You take terrible risks, Jacqui Moore.’
She swallowed, well aware of the risks she was running with her fragile heart, and said, ‘Nothing worth having,’ she said, ‘is without risk.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘But once you’ve taken the risk, you have to live with the consequences.’
CHAPTER TEN
HARRY knew he was playing with fire. Despite his surly manner, his strenuous efforts to keep his distance, she hadn’t been discouraged, but had continued to reach out to him, had finally touched him. Not just physically, but in the dark and shuttered place where no one had been in the last five years.
Not even him.
Each time he saw her, spoke to her, spent time with her, she got a little closer, sneaking beneath his guard, involving him—and not just with Maisie. She might not have an umbrella like Mary Poppins, but there was something magical about her.
Why wasn’t she afraid of him?
Everyone else seemed to get the ‘keep out’ message, but she persistently ignored it. And now she’d kissed him and he had his arm around her—again—and the only thing on his mind was kissing her back.
Really kissing her.
He should have let her fall back into the bath. Better still, flung himself into it. The water wasn’t cold, but it would have served to douse the heat that flooded his veins whenever he was within touching distance of her.
She was wrecking all the effort he’d put into getting his life back on an even keel. The hard work he’d put into blocking out all emotion so that he could get back out in the field. Do his job.
She was seriously bad for his peace of mind and he should put a stop to this right now, but heaven help him she was lovely and the goodness and warmth that emanated from her called to him like the hearth on a cold winter night.
As he continued to hold her, torn between head and heart, her lids fluttered down and with eyes closed, soft lips slightly parted, she gave a little sigh. And he knew that no power on earth could save him.
Jacqui felt the fleeting brush of Harry’s lips against her own. Scarcely a kiss in any true sense, just enough to prove his point and demonstrate the danger she was in. Too late. Brief though it was, it had the power to stir her body, lifting it from languor as the first rays of spring sunshine opened the primrose, and her heart leapt with a recklessness that was terminal.
And, looking up into the burnished heat of his eyes, she understood that, while Harry Talbot had been guarding his heart against all-comers, she had given hers away.
‘Excuse me! If you’re going to be doing gross stuff like kissing—’
‘No!’ Jacqui recovered first, turning abruptly, and, grabbing a towel from the rail, swept it around Maisie and lifted her out of the water and began to rub her dry. ‘I lost my balance, that’s all, and Uncle Harry caught me.’
Maisie gave her a do-you-think-I’m-a-total-idiot look, then turned to Harry and, without any expression at all said, ‘He’s not my uncle. He’s my daddy.’
Her mind had clearly been doing its subconscious thing with the ‘uncle’ title and it had just slipped out while her mind was still away somewhere in dreamland…dreaming.
And had totally backfired.
Harry froze. What on earth had Sally been telling the child? What fanciful fairy stories had she been weaving in her head?
And guilt speared through him, as real a pain as anything he’d suffered, taking his breath as it drove into his heart. He’d surrendered this child of his heart to a woman who treated her as little more than an accessory. He’d walked away without a fight, giving up all right to her love, her respect. What could he say now that wouldn’t make things worse than they already were?
Something. He had to say something and quickly because Jacqui’s silver-grey eyes were asking the obvious question and demanding nothing less than the truth.
‘Jacqui…’ he began. Faltered.
Her expression changed from confused query to hard certainty and she said, ‘Excuse me, Harry. It’s late and I need to get Maisie into bed if we’re going shopping tomorrow.’ And she picked the child up in her arms and swept past him.
A few minutes ago he’d been mentally bemoaning the fact that this woman had breached the defensive wall he’d built against all emotional ties and was busy dismantling it brick by brick.
Now she had withdrawn and it was like the sun going in.
He tried to say something, but it was too late. She’d gone. And so had Maisie.
For a moment he was tempted to go after them, demand a fair hearing. But what was fair? He’d done what he’d done and there was no way to change that.
Maybe it was better this way. He should just go and have the shower he’d been planning and stay out of everyone’s way for their sakes, as well as his. Return to what passed for normality in his life.
But he was drawn to the murmur of voices from the tower bedroom, as he’d been drawn earlier to their laughter. The soft reassurance of Jacqui’s voice as she put the child to bed. Maisie’s desperate, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to say it. He won’t make me leave, will he? I can still go to school—’
He tapped, pushed open the door. Felt his heart turn over at the sight of Maisie tucked up in her ‘princess’ bed, his throat seize and tighten. But they were looking at him, waiting for him to speak.
‘Come and see me before you go shopping tomorrow, Jacqui,’ he said, forcing the words past the lump in his throat. ‘You’ll need money.’
He sensed Jacqui looking at him, knew she was searching for some clue as to what he was thinking. He hoped, when she’d worked it out, she’d let him know, because he’d abandoned the script he’d written for himself and was floundering about in the dark, looking for some spark of light to show him the way.
‘I’d feel happier if you came, too,’ she said. ‘I’m hopeless at finding my way around strange cities.’
And there it was. His light in the darkness…
‘Of course,’ he said, and, doing his best to ignore the straight-to-the-heart appeal, added, ‘Do you know what she’ll need?’
‘I’ll make a list.’ He nodded, turned to leave. ‘
Harry…’ He waited. ‘I left some supper for you. In the fridge.’ And the light flared into something brighter, something warmer.
Harry felt as if he’d been waiting hours before Jacqui found him, manoeuvring a tray around the library door.
‘I’ve made coffee.’
‘You didn’t have to do that,’ he said, taking it from her, putting it on the sofa table. Or maybe she did. The tray, coffee, were nothing but props, he realised, something to occupy her so that she could avoid looking directly at him. It was only now, when she wasn’t doing it, that he understood just how direct her gaze was.
Little wonder she could see right through him. Dismiss the mask for what it was.
Having just seen himself clearly for the first time in what seemed like years, he didn’t blame her for not wanting to look at him now.
She poured coffee into two cups, handing him his black and unsugared without asking, then took the armchair on the far side of the fireplace and waited for him to join her. Sit down and face the music.
Well, OK, he hadn’t expected to get away without some explanation. If she hadn’t found him, he wouldn’t have sought her out, but he would deny with his last breath that he was hiding from her; if that had been the case he’d have done a much better job of it. But he’d done with hiding from himself or anyone else.
But then again, maybe he was lying to himself about that, too.
‘You must be wondering—’
‘Yes, I am, but before you start, Harry, I think I should tell you that Maisie and I have had a bit of a chat about disconnecting telephones, telling the truth, that sort of thing. She owned up to hiding my cellphone and to emptying her bag and replacing the sensible clothes her mother had packed for her with her prettiest clothes. It seemed she wanted you to notice her.’
‘You can tell her that she succeeded.’
‘I suggest you tell her that yourself.’
Jacqui, he could see, was not amused, but then he hadn’t expected her to be. He was in deep trouble and not just on account of Maisie.
‘First thing,’ he promised.
‘So far, so good. It’s downhill from there. In fact she was extremely cross that I thought she might be getting a little carried away by the whole fairy-tale thing—’ she reached into her pocket and took out a folded sheet of paper ‘—which is why she gave me her birth certificate.’
‘Her birth certificate?’ Shocked, he said, ‘What on earth is she doing with that? It should be locked up.’
Out of harm’s way.
‘She said she found it “lying around”. I suspect the truth is that she searched for it, maybe took advantage of an open office safe.’ She smiled and he forgot to breathe. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m confident of Maisie’s ability to arrange a suitable distraction if she wanted something badly enough.’
‘She is a bit of a handful,’ he agreed. And discovered that, despite everything, he was smiling back.
‘And in case you were wondering why, I’d say she was trying to find out who she is.’
His smile was short-lived. ‘She knows who she is.’
‘You think so? If you were her, wouldn’t you have a few questions?’
‘She should have asked Sally.’ Then, realising how pointless an exercise that would have been—if anyone lived in a fantasy world it was his cousin—he said, ‘Her birth certificate won’t tell her anything.’
‘No?’ Jacqui opened the long, narrow document across her lap. ‘I’d say this little piece of paper tells us quite a lot. For instance, it’s not your average run-of-the-mill birth certificate. It’s not even an adoption certificate, but a consular birth certificate issued in Digali, a small sub-Saharan country that’s been in the throes of a civil war for years.’ She looked up, the firelight dancing in her eyes as she challenged him across the hearth. ‘You were working there?’
‘For an international medical charity, yes.’
‘Really?’ Her interest was immediate. Then, with a barely perceptible sigh, ‘How I envy you.’
‘You should have stayed on at university and qualified if you’d wanted to nurse in the field. Heaven knows, there’s need enough.’
‘I know, but life has a habit of getting in the way.’ She seemed to drift away for a moment and, although she was smiling, he thought it was the saddest thing he’d ever seen. Full of regret. Loss. And the walls around his heart that she’d been so determined to dismantle crumbled of their own accord.
‘Will you tell me?’ he asked. Because he wanted to know, needed to know what had happened to make her look so sad, before he could begin to think how to make it better.
She came back, looked at him for a moment and then said, ‘Maybe. Later.’
Depending on how frank he was with her? He had no intention of lying to her.
‘Is that a promise?’ he asked, leaning forward in his chair, holding his breath as he waited for her answer, and when, at last, she replied with a single nod he knew that it wasn’t an easy decision, that she’d thought hard before she’d decided to trust him.
Her expression, too, was deeply serious. And then something sparkled in her eyes as she said, ‘It’s a deal, Harry. You tell me your secrets and I’ll tell you mine.’
‘My secrets are there, on your lap, in a public document that anyone with the price of a copy from the Public Record Office can see.’
‘I’ll want to know more than the plain fact that you’re a liar, Harry Talbot.’
The words were harsh, her voice was not. Nor were her eyes. He didn’t answer and she said, ‘OK. Let’s see.’ She glanced at Maisie’s birth certificate and began to read.
‘Father: Henry Charles Talbot. Occupation: Surgeon. Mother: Rose Ngei. Occupation: none. Baby’s name: Margaret Rose. Place of birth—’
She made a small dismissive gesture with one hand and said, ‘How did you do it, Harry?’ Then, ‘Why did you do it?’
‘Because I wasn’t prepared to let Maisie become just another statistic of war.’
‘There must have been dozens of babies. Hundreds—’
‘Thousands,’ he said. ‘It’s always the innocent that suffer most.’
‘So why her?’
He shook his head, for a moment unwilling to relive the horror. He wanted to get up, walk out of the room, lose himself in the hills, but that was what he’d been doing for years. Running away, burying himself in work. The fact that he’d finally run himself to a standstill, burned out, proved that it wasn’t the answer. And changing locations hadn’t made one jot of difference.
But he’d kept it buried for too long to be able to easily find the words. Instead he knelt before the fire, stirred the ashes with a poker, tossed on a couple of logs, watching while they smouldered, caught, burst into flame. Delaying the moment for as long as possible.
She didn’t press him. Remained perfectly silent while he organised his thoughts, and eventually there was nothing left to do but begin.
‘Her mother was a refugee fleeing from the fighting,’ he said. ‘I never knew her name—I made that up.’ He glanced at her to make sure she understood and she reached out, touched his shoulder to show that she did. ‘I don’t even know where she came from, only that she had the misfortune to blunder into a minefield. She was brought into a field hospital we’d set up. She and her baby were all but dead when I got to her. All I could do was deliver Maisie with an emergency section.’
Jacqui said nothing, just covered her mouth with her hand to smother words that she knew were meaningless; understanding the horror of the picture he’d sketched without any need for him to fill in the hideous details.
‘Maisie was small, weak, but as I lifted her scrawny little body from what was left of her mother and wiped her clean, she gave a cry of such…triumph. It was as if she was saying, “I’ve made it! I’m alive!” And she gripped my finger as if she’d never let it go. In that awful place it seemed like a miracle, Jacqui.’
‘It was. You’d saved her.’
‘But for w
hat? The reality of the situation was that she wouldn’t last one day in a refugee camp without a mother to care for her.’
‘But she did survive.’
‘I made her a promise that she wouldn’t become just another nameless casualty of a pointless war.’
‘You saved her,’ she whispered again. ‘How did you do that?’
‘I kept her with me. She slept beside me, travelled next to me. I fed her, cared for her and on occasion I operated with her slung in a carrier on my back.’
He must have shuddered as he thought about how close he’d come to losing her because without seeming to move Jacqui was suddenly on her knees beside him, taking his hand between hers, holding it for a moment, before putting her arm around his neck and drawing him close, cradling him against her breast.
‘Tell me,’ she whispered fiercely against his neck. ‘Tell me what happened to you.’
Her warmth, her scent, seemed to seep into his bones, restoring something inside him that he’d done his best to kill. It hurt, but in the way a wound did when it was healing.
‘Every moment of it is so clear,’ he said.
The heat of the late afternoon. The dust. The flies. The warm weight of Maisie slung across his back…
‘The clinic had just finished and I was walking back to my quarters in the compound,’ he began. ‘Maisie woke, began to grizzle and I stopped, took her out of the sling, had her in my arms. The last thing I remember is her little face lighting up in this great big smile…’ He shook his head. ‘Then the world blew apart as a shell landed somewhere behind us and I was thrown forward by the blast.’
‘Maisie? She was unhurt?’
‘When the bombardment stopped they found me in the shelter, hunched over her, protecting her. I must have crawled there, although I don’t remember how I got there—’
‘You saved her again.’
‘A moment earlier…’
‘Sssh,’ she said, on her knees beside him. ‘You saved her.’ Then, as she stroked his back as if to comfort him, she said, ‘Oh!’ as she made the connection. ‘That’s what happened to your back…’