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‘Pleath, Daddy,’ the little redhead added. ‘Pleeeeeath.’
Patrick smiled down at his daughter. Ruby tended to be on the quiet side and it was unusual for her to make such a fast friend so it eased his conscience over the move. He looked at Miranda and shrugged. ‘I’m okay with it if you are.’
Miranda felt cornered. She was absolutely, one hundred per cent not okay with it. But she’d have to choose her words carefully in front of little ears. Somehow ‘I’d rather stick a red-hot poker in my eye than have a low-down cheating skunk in my house’ didn’t seem appropriate with their audience.
‘Pleeeeeath,’ Ruby begged, looking up at Miranda. Her two front teeth were missing, something that no doubt exacerbated the lisp.
‘It would give us a good chance to talk,’ Patrick murmured close to her ear.
‘Pleeeeeease, Mummy.’
Miranda took in all three, each in their own way desperate for something from her, and knew when she was defeated. ‘Okay,’ she acquiesced. ‘But only for a short visit. I’ve got a bit of a headache and tomorrow will be another long day.’
‘Yaaaay!’ Two little girls squealed and jumped up and down, hugging each other, strands of blonde and red hair intertwining.
‘Yay,’ said Patrick.
But his voice was lower, edgier, sexier and slid into places he’d already been and shouldn’t have.
Miranda shivered.
Twenty minutes later the knock on her front door heralded Patrick and Ruby’s arrival and Miranda felt the squall inside intensify. The two tablets she’d taken for her headache had started to work but the thump returned with a vengeance as Lola squealed and raced to answer the door.
Miranda looked around her small two-bedroom residence feeling suddenly inadequate. She’d been living above her grandmother’s garage since before Lola’s birth and although she’d made it into a nice cosy home, it wasn’t where she wanted to spend the rest of her life.
Patrick probably lived in a mansion. On the river. With a city view. What would he make of this?
Lola and Ruby ran past her into Lola’s bedroom in a blur of blonde and red and left her alone with Patrick standing in the doorway in his business shirt and trousers looking tired and sexy and rumpled, just like he had that night six months ago. Her heart fluttered madly.
‘Hi.’ He smiled.
Miranda wanted to smile at him too. Say hi back as she walked straight into his arms and gave in to the passion that still burned deep inside despite her animosity. He looked so at home in her doorway it was scary.
She took a breath. ‘Come in,’ she said. It felt stiff and awkward but that was too bad. ‘Would you like a coffee?’
‘Sure.’
Patrick pushed off the doorframe. She looked tired and wary and he couldn’t blame her but her jeans clung and her T-shirt stretched nicely across breasts he’d dreamed about a little too much, and he was right back there in that hotel room with her.
He followed her across the lounge into the open-plan kitchen, leaning his butt against a bench as she busied herself. ‘You’ve cut your hair,’ he said.
Miranda, hyper-aware of him standing behind her, absently touched her nape where her pixie cut now feathered. ‘Yes,’ she said, her hands shaking as she poured hot water into mugs.
She supposed he had some fancy Italian coffee machine that made double-shot decaf lattes. All she had was instant and an electric jug.
‘Mummy, can we have cupcakes now?’
Miranda turned, pleased for the interruption. She nodded at her daughter and Patrick’s, looking all Shirley Temple and little orphan Annie. ‘It’s all set. Help yourselves.’ Lola clapped excitedly. ‘But remember, it’s polite to serve your guest first.’
Lola nodded. ‘Come on, Ruby—Mummy and I made a tea party!’
‘Come on, Daddy,’ Ruby said, tugging on his hand as Lola pulled her towards the table.
He shrugged at Miranda. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s fine. Go and join them. I’ll bring your coffee.’
Miranda wrapped her hands around a mug and thanked the universe for the breathing space. She’d felt his gaze on her neck like a caress and could almost feel his lips brushing there too.
She pulled herself together and fixed the coffees, lecturing herself about the inappropriateness of her thoughts. By the time she walked on spaghetti legs to the exquisitely set table she felt more in control.
‘Thanks,’ Patrick said, as she put his mug down.
It looked out of place amidst the fancy-looking china that Lola had insisted they use for the impromptu tea party. Her grandmother had bought it for Lola a couple of years ago and though it had been inexpensive, it looked fit for a queen.
‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised. ‘It’s all a bit girly.’
Patrick smiled and shook his head. ‘I like a tea party as much as the next man,’ he declared, and the girls laughed hysterically as he stuck out his pinky and sipped his coffee.
‘Your daddy is funny,’ Lola said around a mouthful of cake.
Miranda agreed.
And sexy and manly and one hundred per cent at home in an environment that was suffocating in oestrogen. Which only ramped up his own masculinity. He looked so incredibly male amidst the frippery of a girly afternoon tea with the china and the delicate pink cupcakes, she wanted to drag him to her bedroom, rip his shirt open and rediscover every inch of his maleness.
Play a little doctor and nurse.
They made stilted conversation with their daughters for ten minutes before Lola announced they were going to watch some TV.
And then there were two.
Miranda stood and started gathering dishes. When Patrick placed a stilling hand on her arm she ignored it, continuing her task with manic speed.
‘Miranda,’ he said quietly, refusing to remove his hand, refusing to be ignored. ‘I need to explain.’
Miranda shook her head. ‘No,’ she said as she pushed crumbs from one plate onto another. ‘No, you don’t. Let’s just pretend it never happened and move on, okay? I won’t mention it, you won’t mention it…’ she stacked plates one on top of the other and picked them up, turning to leave ‘… and it’ll be fine.’
Patrick applied a little more pressure on her forearm and he felt the weight of her gaze as it moved to his hand, his gold wedding band a reminder of their predicament. ‘Miranda, we have to work together,’ he said gently. ‘I do need to explain. Sit. Please.’
Miranda would rather have enrolled in a medical trial that involved daily root-canal treatment but deep down she knew he was right. They did have to clear the air, for their professional life if nothing else. Or one of them was going to have to leave.
And she was guessing it would have to be the most expendable.
Which would be her.
She sat.
CHAPTER THREE
PATRICK HAD FORMULATED a spiel in his head on the drive to Miranda’s. But it didn’t seem adequate enough now as she sat stiffly, staring transfixed at the table as if the debris littering the lacy cloth was diamond chips instead of cake crumbs.
Whatever else he said, he knew he had to start with an apology. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t one hundred per cent honest with you at the bar that night.’
Miranda didn’t take her eyes off the table. ‘Well, it’s complicated, right?’
Patrick sighed. ‘It is. It really is.’
Miranda glanced up at the resigned exasperation in his tone. Like he’d known she was going to judge him and there was nothing he could do about it. Except there was.
He could stop sleeping with women other than his wife!
‘And because I was just some … bar pick-up…’ even saying the words made her feel sullied ‘… I wasn’t owed the truth?’
He rubbed his hand along his jaw and Miranda could tell he was choosing his words carefully. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘And no.’
Miranda felt her blood pressure skyrocket. Obviously he wasn’t choosing his words carefully enough. ‘I see,’ she said, looking back at the table again.
Patrick groaned inwardly at the barriers she was building at a rate of knots. So different from the Miranda of six months ago who, although reserved, had been receptive and aware of their vibe.
A vibe that had roared to life again this morning.
Right at this moment she was so shut down he wondered if she’d ever speak to him again. He was trying to be honest but his situation wasn’t typical. ‘It’s not something I talk about much. To anyone. Certainly not…’
Miranda tossed her head and glared at him. ‘Women you pick up in bars?’
‘It wasn’t like that, Miranda.’
‘Of course not,’ she said derisively. ‘So what is it like?’ she demanded, her voice quiet but loaded with don’t-screw-with-me attitude. ‘Is she frigid? A shrew? Sexually unavailable? Or maybe she just can’t love you the way you need?’
Patrick blinked at the rapid-fire choices she’d given him. Her lip had curled at each option, her voice full of derision. If he had to take a guess he’d say Miranda had more than a passing acquaintance with infidelity.
He took a breath. It was understandable that she was angry. He had to accept that.
‘My wife … Kate … Katie … went missing when Ruby was six weeks old. I haven’t seen her since.’
Miranda had prepared herself for the usual platitudes. Even for the not so usual. But nothing had prepared her for this. She frowned as she tried to wrap her head around what he’d said. ‘Missing?’
Patrick nodded. ‘I came home from work one evening to an empty house and a screaming baby.’
Miranda let go of the plates with a clatter and without even thinking about her actions reached out to touch his hand. Her anger and disappointment dissolved. What a truly awful thing to happen. ‘I’m so … sorry. I didn’t realize …’
Patrick shrugged. Her touch felt good and the empathy in her smoky green gaze reached right inside him and squeezed. He’d thought he was over the rawness of that time, a time when his entire life had been turned upside down, but talking to Miranda about it was surprisingly difficult. The worry and the fear and the anger were mixing again in a potent tangible force.
‘It’s fine. Not really bar-conversation material though…’
Miranda nodded. ‘Yes, of course, you’re right.’
The facts may not have changed—she had still slept with a married man. But he was right, it was complicated. And totally understandable not to have confided in her, a stranger, that night in the bar.
Or at any stage really. How did a person work that into a one-night stand—’Oh, by the way, I’m married but it’s okay because she’s been missing for five years’?
Perhaps he wasn’t such a skunk after all.
She became aware that she was still touching him and withdrew her hand. It felt right to proffer some small gesture of comfort but there was a lot more that needed to be said.
‘So … what happened? Is she, Katie … is she…?’
Patrick watched her face as she obviously tried to approach the question with delicacy. ‘Dead?’ he asked.
Miranda baulked at his blunt delivery and the bleakness in his eyes. Was this what made him look so tired all the time? Did he lie awake every night wondering where she was? Worrying? Grieving for his wife?
‘Well … yes.’ It had been the question foremost in her mind but she’d hoped to put it more delicately. Along with the hundreds of other questions that crowded inside her waiting to be asked.
‘No. She’s out there somewhere.’ Patrick raked his fingers through his hair. It was hard to admit—his wife, Ruby’s mother, was choosing to stay away.
That’s probably what hurt most.
Miranda caught a glimpse of the pain and suffering he must have gone through reflected in the agitated rake of his fingers. She could see it was hard for him and she put her hand out again, touching his forearm.
‘You don’t have to talk about this.’
Patrick looked down at her hand and placed his over the top then smiled at her. ‘Yes, I do. Because if I’d slept with you that night and never seen you again, it would have been fine. But here we are. So I need you to know.’
Miranda nodded and withdrew her hand. It felt too intimate and as much as her empathy meter was blinking off the scale, there were still a lot of reasons why getting too close to Patrick was a bad idea.
If anything, he was even more off limits. Getting involved with a man who was hung up on another woman was just plain dumb.
She only needed to look to her mother for a perfect example of that.
‘Okay. So what happened?’ she asked.
‘There was an extensive search for her. It was all over the news …’
Miranda thought back and did vaguely recall something now about a missing mother that she’d obviously absorbed subliminally in her new-mother fog with a colicky baby who rarely slept and while studying for her grade-twelve exams.
‘Weren’t you … implicated in that?’
Patrick grimaced. ‘Initially, yes. Despite the fact I’d been at work all day for twelve hours with dozens of witnesses.’
Miranda supposed she should have been concerned about that startling piece of information but there was nothing about Patrick that raised her highly developed run-away-fast instincts.
She searched her brain for more titbits for a moment then gave up. ‘I don’t remember what happened after that … Lols was brand new and my life officially sank into a black hole for quite a few months.’
‘There was a media storm and some pretty harrowing questioning by the police and then after two weeks Katie contacted her mother. Left a message on her mother’s machine. Said she was okay but she didn’t want to be a mother any more. Had never wanted it. That she was going away and wasn’t coming back.’
Miranda felt the pressure of something hard and hot wedging under her diaphragm. She couldn’t begin to imagine the state she would need to have been in to abandon Lola. To never see her again. She shook her head in bewilderment. ‘Was there…? Were you having problems? Do you think she was suffering from post-natal depression?’
Patrick liked how easy it was to talk to Miranda. Just like in the bar that night. Most people were emotional and animated or listened with ghoulish delight but, once again, Miranda was reserved and thoughtful.
‘She was only twenty-one when we met. She was in her last year of nursing and doing her prac at the same Sydney hospital where I was an intern. She was this bright, sparkly butterfly. The life and soul of the party, and I was hopelessly smitten. But it was all a façade. She was actually desperately insecure and anxious and she … had some problems with substance abuse. After a few months I began to suspect she was a little bipolar and our relationship had become quite rocky.’
‘And then she fell pregnant,’ Miranda supplied. She understood only too well what a life-changing event that was.
Patrick nodded, feeling again the highs and lows of that time. The dread, the fear, the excitement.
‘She was great at first. On a high, I guess. Happy to clean up her act and get married and excited about being a mother. But by the time Ruby was due she was quite down, very flat. I finally managed to convince her to see her GP, who wanted her to go on some antidepressants but she was adamant she wouldn’t take anything while she was pregnant.
‘And then in the weeks after the birth she got worse. I tried to get her to see somebody but she refused. When I came home that evening to find she wasn’t there, a part of me wasn’t surprised. But I never thought she’d just disappear … just go … for good …’
Miranda leaned forward a little in her chair. He was twisting his wedding ring round and round his finger with his thumb, the low strain of emotion in his voice giving her goose-bumps.
‘Do you think she had a bit of a … breakdown that day?’
He shrugged. ‘I think so, yes. Gwen, our neighbour at the time, said she’d seen Katie leave the house clutching her handbag and looking in a bit of a daze. Katie didn’t apparently even acknowledge Gwen when she asked how things were going with the baby.’
Miranda was no mental-health expert but that didn’t sound good to her. ‘But she rang her mother and you were off the hook, right?’
He snorted. ‘Not immediately. The police, quite rightly, I suppose, were suspicious about the authenticity of the message, so they ran forensic tests comparing it to the welcome message on our answering machine and eventually they cleared me of any suspicion.’
‘So … she’s never turned up?’
Patrick shook his head. ‘No. The police dropped the investigation once they were satisfied she was alive. I’ve hired several private investigators but it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t want to be found.’
Miranda’s mind crowded with questions, each more urgent than the next. ‘Aren’t you worried that she may have come to some harm in the intervening years?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But there’s occasional activity on her bank account and every once in a while she rings a great-aunt of hers, tells her she’s okay and then hangs up.’
Miranda couldn’t even begin to comprehend what he must have gone through in the years since Ruby had been born. The wondering. The not knowing. Not to mention having to be mother and father and juggle job and family responsibilities and finances and a hundred other things.
Just like her.
‘I can’t begin to imagine what you’ve been through,’ she murmured. ‘It must have been so hard. To have coped with all that as well as trying to be a father.’
The empathy in her gaze was real and washed over him, oozing into all the cracks that had opened up again as he’d talked about Katie’s desertion. ‘To be honest, it nearly broke me.’
He paused. It was the first time he’d admitted that out loud. He’d spent a lot of years presenting a tough front but it seemed okay to admit the truth to her. To finally admit it to himself even.
‘I didn’t cope that well for a while. I kind of just … survived. If it hadn’t been for Katie’s mother helping out I think I might have gone under.’
Miranda nodded. She was glad Patrick had had someone to lean on. How would she have survived without her grandmother’s love and support?
‘What does Ruby know about it?’ she asked. It was the thing as a mother she found most difficult to comprehend—how could Katie have deserted her baby?
Patrick dragged himself back from the helplessness of that time, pleased that he now had time and distance and perspective.
He shrugged. ‘I’ve just tried to be honest. Ruby, like Katie, does tend to be a bit on the anxious side so we don’t make a big deal out of it. She knows she has a mummy who loves her but is too sick to look after her properly so Daddy does it instead.’
Miranda pursed her lips. ‘Ooh. That’s good.’
He grimaced. ‘Well, it seems to appease her. For now. What do you tell Lola about her father?’
‘Honestly? Lola is far too egocentric to care. She asked once when she was two why she didn’t have a daddy and I told her that some kids didn’t have daddies, which seemed to satisfy her perfectly. As long as there’s Pinky, Bud and cupcakes in the world, she’s happy.’
Patrick laughed at Miranda’s candid answer. It was nice to meet a mother who had her daughter’s measure. He’d met many a rabid mother since having a child of his own and it was nice for once to talk to someone who wasn’t blind to everything.
‘So where is he? Lola’s father?’
Miranda shrugged. ‘On a beach somewhere, I guess.’
‘You’ve lost contact?’
‘We never really had contact. I grew up near a really great surf beach and he was there for a few weeks, camping with a bunch of friends, on a big trip around Australia. I was seventeen and … a little on the rebellious side …’
‘Seventeen?’ Horrified, Patrick did the maths in his head. But no matter how many times he did the simple sum he kept getting the same answer. ‘Dear God that makes you …’
‘Twenty-two.’
‘Oh, God.’ Patrick buried his head in his hands. He’d slept with a woman ten years his junior? How was it possible that Miranda was just a year older than Katie had been when they’d first hooked up? She was so much more mature in a multitude of ways.
‘Is that bad?’
He looked up. ‘Very, very bad. I figured you were the other end of twenty.’
‘Gee, thanks.’
‘Sorry.’ He grimaced. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
Miranda laughed at his obvious discomfort. ‘It’s fine. I was a teen mother—it tends to mature you pretty quickly.’
Patrick groaned again. A part of him had been thinking that maybe they could pick up where they’d left off. ‘I’m going to hell.’
Miranda leaned in close to him and whispered, ‘It’s okay. I wasn’t a virgin.’
He winced. ‘That is so not funny.’
‘Oh, come on.’ She grinned. ‘It is. Just a little.’
Patrick did not return the grin. After Katie, he’d made a personal vow to never get involved with anyone who could still see twenty in their rear-view mirror.
Seriously? How could she only be twenty-two!
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