He looked up, saw her, and smiled. Her eyes connected with his and for a long moment the noises surrounding them—the clatter of cutlery, the murmur of conversation—faded away. The shimmering thread of awareness drawing her to him seemed almost tangible until, flustered, she gave a shaky smile back and headed to the table. What was happening here?
The admiration in his eyes as he rose to greet her assured her that the pink dress had been a good choice. She’d teamed it with a lacy knit vintage cardigan in a paler shade of pink embellished with silver beading and wore her favourite silver stilettos.
‘You look lovely,’ he said. ‘One of your own creations?’
‘But of course,’ she said, preening just a little.
She took her seat opposite him, settling her full skirts around her. They ordered first drinks and then their meals. There wasn’t any of the awkwardness of a first date. She marvelled at how she slipped into conversation with him as easily as she had at the park.
‘Where’s Daisy?’ he asked, pretending to look around for a dog.
‘Did you expect me to bring her?’
‘It would have been nice to see her again,’ he said with an obvious sincerity that pleased her. Craig had pretended to like dogs until he’d felt more certain of her. Then he’d let slip that he would never allow her to have a dog after they were married. Allow her! That might have been the moment her feelings for him had started to turn.
‘She’s safely asleep at my apartment, all tired out from her run in the park and then a visit to my workroom, where the staff all make a fuss of her.’
‘You take your dog to work with you?’
‘The advantage of being the boss. Of course, we have to keep her away from the expensive fabrics and laces we have in the workroom. Other foster dogs I’ve had haven’t been as easy as this little one. She’s happy to be crated if need be.’
‘Do you usually work weekends?’
She leaned across the table towards him. ‘I work any day I need to. Weekends suit some clients better. I like to do the final fitting for a bride whenever I can rather than leave it to one of my staff.’
‘So I’m having drinks with a perfectionist?’
‘Some say workaholic.’ She laughed. ‘I don’t mind which label you use. There’s a lot of hope and dreams invested in a wedding dress and I want that dress to look as perfect as it possibly can on my bride so she feels confident and comfortable.’
‘There are a lot of dollars invested in your gowns too.’
‘We use only the finest fabrics and trims; they don’t come cheap.’ She paused. ‘How do you know how much my gowns cost?’ She put up her hand in a halt sign. ‘Wait. I get it. You looked me up online.’
‘Of course.’ He paused for a beat. ‘Didn’t you do a search on me?’
‘Er...yes. Seems you own half the digital world. You were remarkably modest about your achievements.’ She wouldn’t say anything about the eligible bachelor lists that seemed to haunt his internet presence.
‘So were you. Bridal wear designer to the stars. You don’t get more famous than Roxee.’
‘I know.’ She grinned. ‘I was positively star-struck when she got in touch. But she’s a lovely, warm person and was wonderful to deal with. Her fabulous wedding and her commendations of my label have been brilliant for me. Business went ballistic. I’ve had to take on more staff and be prepared to fly more often to the US for personal fittings for her celebrity friends.’
Eloise waited for him to ask for inside gossip on the mega star—as so many people had since the wedding—and was relieved when he didn’t. She would have thought less of him.
‘It seems the designer became famous too.’
‘Not really. It’s second-hand fame, isn’t it? I don’t like being in the spotlight. I’m a backroom girl. I find interviews excruciating.’
‘I don’t care for the spotlight either, except when it serves my purposes,’ he said shortly. ‘My personal life is my own business.’ She was glad she hadn’t mentioned the eligible bachelor thing.
The waiter came with their starters—organic Sydney rock oysters for him and a salad of seared, cured trout for her.
‘How did you get to be a wedding dress designer to the stars?’ he asked when she had finished her salad.
‘I’ll ignore that label, if you don’t mind,’ she said, with a smile. ‘I’m just as happy working with a girl from the suburbs who’s saved up for one of my dresses, and gets to be a star for a day at her wedding.’
‘Seriously,’ he said, putting down his tiny oyster fork. ‘When you were a little girl, did you say “I’m going to grow up and design wedding gowns for international superstars”?’
‘Actually, I said I was going to grow up to be a mermaid.’
He laughed. ‘Cute.’
‘I don’t know why, as I’m not a particularly keen swimmer. I think it was the idea of having a glorious tail, glistening with multicoloured scales. Which, when you think of it, is not so different from a bride’s glorious long train trailing after her as she glides her way up the aisle, picking up the light from the beautiful beading and crystals stitched onto it.’
‘You’re obviously highly creative,’ he said, a smile twitching around the corner of his mouth. ‘And imaginative.’
‘Even as a little girl I loved colour and texture and fabrics. Most of all I loved clothes. My grandmother—my Australian grandmother, that is—was no fashionista but she taught me basic sewing and I stitched garments for my dolls as soon as I could use scissors and needles and thread. The same grandmother gave me a sewing machine for my eleventh birthday and I started making my own clothes. I was a puzzle to my mother. She’s a scientist with, as she herself says, no real interest in fashion. She lets me choose her clothes for her now, which is fun.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘So you don’t take after your parents.’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t, and maybe I do. I’m the creative one in a family of intellectuals and scientists. But I’m adopted, so that’s no great surprise.’
Every time she told people she was adopted she forced her voice to sound calm and even, as if it were no big deal. And maybe it wouldn’t seem a big deal if she’d been told she was adopted from the get-go. But she would never forget the shock of discovering the hidden truth of her birth. The justification of that nagging feeling that she somehow didn’t fit, the creative in the family of pragmatic academics. She had the same colouring as her father, so no one had ever doubted she was their birth child. But that shock, that feeling of betrayal and mistrust, was burned deep into her psyche.
‘I don’t know anything about my birth family except my birth mother worked in a department store, so maybe she was into fashion too,’ she said.
Both she and her adoptive parents had tried to find out more, but with no luck. After a while, she’d asked them to stop the search. It seemed painful and pointless, especially when she had decided to forgive her parents for their deception and embrace the family who had chosen her rather than abandoned her.
Sometimes, when she sent one of her foster dogs off to their new home with a sense of satisfaction he or she would now get the good life they deserved, she wondered about the social worker who had placed her with the Evans family. Was that how it had felt for them, for the adoption agency, to place an unwanted little girl with a loving family who would care for her as if she were their own?
Always, she forced those thoughts to the back of her mind. To know she’d been unwanted was too hurtful. No one on either side of her birth parents’ families had claimed her after her birth mother’s death. Sometimes she rationalised that her adoptive maternal grandmother had made up for all those others who hadn’t wanted her, but their rejection still stung deep down. No matter how exceptionally fortunate she had been with her adoptive parents.
‘What about your birth father?’
�
�Father unknown,’ she said making light of it by forming quote marks with her fingers. She wasn’t telling him anything that she hadn’t spoken about in interviews in the past.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Don’t be. I couldn’t imagine a better father than my real—that is, my adoptive—father was to me. Or my amazing mother, who did her very best to nurture and encourage the cuckoo she had brought into her nest.’ Not that her mother had ever called her a cuckoo—that was Eloise’s own term, devised to explain her role in the Evans family. ‘She tells me it was an adventure to see how I would turn out. According to her, it was like seeing a flower bud unfurl, blossoming into possibilities that my pragmatic parents had never imagined.’
That was the truth. Except some of that had been recognised in retrospect. After she’d come to terms with the truth of her adoption, after she had struggled with her identity. After she had vowed to be the best daughter she could be to the people who had rescued her.
Josh raised his eyebrows. ‘And you don’t think your mother is creative? That’s quite an analogy.’
‘She’s rather proud of her story, I think. But I never tire of hearing it. It’s only as an adult that I truly appreciated how generous she was. She says I must have got my creativity from my first mother, the woman to whom she was so grateful. She couldn’t have children of her own.’
One of the worst times in the six months of rebellion and trauma that had followed the discovery of the adoption document, had been when her mother had cried as she’d explained how much she loved her, what a gift she’d been to a mother who could not conceive a child of her own.
‘Your parents sound great.’ There was an edge to Josh’s voice Eloise couldn’t place.
She nodded. ‘I was fortunate. I was cherished and loved and encouraged to follow my own interests in art and design. I won a dress-designing competition in a teen magazine when my dad was still alive. He said he couldn’t have been more proud of me than if I’d been awarded a doctorate.’
‘Sounds like the perfect childhood,’ he said. ‘If such a thing exists.’
She toyed with her linen napkin. ‘Do I sound ungrateful if I say it was nearly perfect? There was always something missing.’ She acknowledged her adoption to wonderful parents, but this was something she didn’t often talk about. It had nothing to do with her adoption, and everything to do with her personal wishes. But there was no harm in it. His calm, accepting manner made it easy to open up.
‘What was that?’ he said.
‘A sister. I longed for a sister. Not a brother, although I liked boys. I used to beg my mother to give me a sister. I was so sure of the sister I wanted, I drew a picture of her when I was about seven. My mother laughed when I handed her my sketch; she said I’d drawn an image of myself. She’s still got it.’
Josh made a strangled sound that might have been a cough, suppressed laughter, or some kind of choking attack. Silently, she passed his water glass towards him. ‘That’s amusing,’ he said finally, after he’d drunk some water. ‘That you’d drawn a self-portrait, I mean.’ She got the feeling he didn’t find it amusing at all, but she couldn’t imagine why.
The waiter brought their main courses. Eloise welcomed the interruption. She felt she’d talked far too much about herself without finding out anything much about him. He was dangerously easy to confide in.
Once she had tasted her favourite dish at the restaurant, a pan-fried chicken breast finished with truffle oil, and asked Josh how his steak was, she put down her knife and fork. Time to redress the balance.
‘Do you have a sister or brother?’ she asked. ‘Or both?’
He paused for a beat too long before he spoke. ‘How deeply did you burrow into the search engine when you looked me up?’
‘I only had a quick look because I had to get to work. I figured if you really were a tech entrepreneur as you said, there would be something there on you beyond the usual social media. I didn’t expect to find thousands of pages.’
‘Did you read about the so-called scandal?’
‘Not that I recall.’
She would certainly have remembered something scandalous. She shifted in her seat. Was Josh what he appeared to be? Her instincts were finely honed when it came to her business. Not so reliable when it came to men. Somehow she wanted to believe the best of Josh, but was that just because she found him so attractive? No, Daisy had trusted him too. Another day a good-looking man had come close to them in the park and Daisy had whimpered her fear then flattened her ears and bared her teeth at him. Eloise had walked briskly away—the complete opposite of what had happened with Josh.
‘If I don’t tell you you’ll look it up as soon as you get home, won’t you?’ he said wryly.
‘I might do just that,’ she said lightly. ‘You can’t throw out the word scandal and not expect people to bite.’
‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘I guess I’ll have to follow through.’
She groaned. ‘Please stop dangling the bait. You’ve really got me intrigued now.’
Josh took a sip of his wine and settled back into his chair. His tension betrayed itself by his tight grip on the glass. What was the scandal he was about to reveal? Would it send her running from the restaurant?
‘Like you, I had what might seem to be an idyllic childhood. I was born into one of the best families in Boston. A mansion on Beacon Hill. An illustrious heritage stretching back generations. A predetermined place in society. A big brother six years older than me who I looked up to. A father, distant but caring in his own way in that I lacked for nothing. A loving mother. However, also like you, I sometimes felt like the cuckoo in the nest. My brother seemed to excel in everything expected of him to take the path into the family’s long-established legal firm. But I was a constant disappointment to my father. I’d rather have been on the sports field than in the library, although maths and computing came easily. I questioned rather than accepted the way things “had always been done”.’
‘Surely there’s room for a rebel in every family?’
Again that wry smile. ‘Rebel, perhaps. Interloper, definitely not.’
She frowned. ‘What do you mean by interloper?’
‘At the age of sixteen, a routine blood test proved I could not be my father’s son.’ Eloise gasped. ‘All hell exploded at home. My mother confessed to an affair. Both she and I were expelled from the family.’
Eloise stared at him. ‘I... I don’t know what to say. Except that it sounds more a tragedy than a scandal.’
‘You and I might say that; others didn’t, I can assure you.’
Aching with sympathy, she leaned closer over the table. She longed to put her hand over his but didn’t think it would be appropriate or welcome. ‘It must have been terrible for you.’ Just as traumatic as finding out she’d been adopted.
‘You could say that,’ he said with the understatement she was beginning to realise was part of him. ‘My father—the only father I had ever known and who I loved—wanted nothing to do with me. I was forbidden to use the family name, banned from the family home and disinherited. He never paid another cent of support.’ His words were underscored with bitterness.
Eloise’s meal sat abandoned. She could only concentrate on the man sitting opposite her. The downward pull of his mouth, his set jaw, betrayed he was still struggling to come to terms with an old hurt. ‘That seems unbelievably cruel.’
‘I’d always known he was a hard man. But not that hard. He was furious he’d been fooled into bringing up another man’s son. It appeared his relationship with me was collateral damage.’
‘I can see he would have been angry. After all, his wife had lied to him in a major way. But to take it out on an innocent kid seems appalling. Who was your biological father?’
Since she’d discovered she was adopted, this kind of terminology came easily to her.
‘My mo
ther’s tennis coach. She says she was in love, but that it was just a fling to him. He moved on. She wasn’t sure I was his until after I was born. Luckily for my mother, I looked like her and no one questioned my legitimacy. But she could see her lover in me. When she tried to contact him, it was to find he’d died in a mountaineering accident. His family never knew about me. My mother never revealed my birth father’s name—it was scandal enough that my father had disowned me. Even though she wasn’t happy with my father, she stayed.’
‘For your sake?’
‘And for my brother’s, she says. But she also liked the good life my father provided. She didn’t come from a wealthy family.’
Eloise frowned. ‘That sounds harsh.’
‘Even she admits it was true. Although she told me she felt so guilty about deceiving him, she strove to be the perfect wife to a difficult man she didn’t love to make up for her deception.’
‘No one else knew the facts of your birth?’
‘She hugged her secret to herself for sixteen years.’
‘Your mother must have been on tenterhooks the entire time that she’d be caught out.’ Had her parents even considered the possibility she would find out the truth about her adoption before they chose to tell her?
‘With good cause. Her husband’s reaction was swift and brutal. He’s had no further contact with me since the day he booted me out.’
She noticed she didn’t call his mother’s husband his father. The hurt must run deep and bitter. He wouldn’t trust easily either. ‘What about your brother? Surely he stood up for you? Not that you’d done anything wrong.’
Josh pulled down his mouth in a grimace. ‘He sided with my father. Why not when one day he’ll get the entirety rather than half of a massive inheritance? He had a personal grudge too. When the scandal erupted he reckoned it ruined his chances of going into politics.’
Harlequin Romance April 2021 Box Set Page 18