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She read the letter again, felt the tug at her heartstrings. Lucy. The child could be her niece...
No. She refused to believe it Or was she afraid to believe it? Afraid to believe that her sister could be that heartless? No. It had to be some little girl in a world of hurt latching onto a woman who had made caring for the planet her personal crusade. A little girl hoping that a woman with so much compassion would have some love left over to spare for her.
Fitz turned from the cooker. Lucy was drawing a picture, working at the kitchen table, her arm curled protectively about the paper. ‘Will you be long, sweetheart? Tea’s nearly ready.’
She tucked her pencils and the picture carefully away in her school bag then looked up, her bright blue eyes unusually shadowed, like someone with a secret.
And she did have a secret. How long had she known? When had she found her birth certificate, the photograph of Brooke Lawrence, all the things he had kept locked away at the back of his desk, at the back of his life?
He had been going to tell her. One day. He had fooled himself into believing that he would know when it was the right moment to sit her down and explain about her mother, tell her what had happened. But what time was ever right to tell a child that her mother hadn’t wanted her?
‘I’m done,’ she said with a quick smile. ‘Shall I lay the table?’
God, when she smiled she looked so like Brooke. He hadn’t anticipated that. The chestnut hair and blue eyes had fooled him into thinking that there was nothing of Brooke to see in the child. But that enchanting smile...
‘Please,’ he said quickly and looked away, making a performance of stirring the sauce. Why did it still get to him? Brooke Lawrence might have had a smile like an angel but that was as far as it went. Somewhere, deep inside him he’d always known that, even when he’d been pursuing her with a single-mindedness that had been nine parts testosterone to one part common sense.
How on earth was he to tell this child, this little girl that he loved so much that he sometimes thought his heart might break just looking at her, how was he to tell her that her mother had never wanted her, had handed her over to him and walked away without a backward glance the day after she was born?
He had never believed she would do it. He had always believed that once her baby was lying in her arms she would love her.
No. He could never tell Lucy how it had been. But Claire Graham was right—he would have to tell her something, as much of the truth as she could manage. When she was old enough she could confront Brooke herself, ask her why. Ask her how she could do that. Maybe she would be able to tell him, because he had never understood.
He should tell her now, before she fabricated a dozen fantasies about how it might be. He stared into the saucepan as if the contents might provide him with inspiration. Nothing. ‘Lucy—’
‘What are we having?’ She hooked a long, thin arm about his waist as he stood at the cooking range and, standing on tiptoe, peered into the saucepan.
‘Spaghetti carbonara.’
‘Oh, yummy. Can I have a Coke with it?’
He glanced down at her and his courage failed him. ‘If I can have a beer.’
‘Yeuch. Beer’s disgusting.’
‘Oh? And how do you know what beer tastes like?’ She giggled and his heart did its usual somersault. ‘Go on, then, get the drinks while I dish up.’
Later, he tried again. ‘Lucy, Miss Graham asked me to visit her today.’
A brief startled glanced then a casual, ‘Oh?’ Then, ‘Can I turn on the television?’ She was avoiding asking him why her head teacher had wanted to see him.
‘Leave it a minute.’
‘It’s something I want to see,’ she protested, unusually sulky. This was worse, far worse than he had ever imagined. Or maybe he had just refused to imagine this moment.
‘She told me...’ he began, then cleared his throat. ‘She told me...’ He stared at the top of her head as she suddenly became totally engrossed in her trainers. ‘She told me about sports day,’ he said, finally. ‘Did you forget, or didn’t you want me to come?’
She flung her head up. ‘No! You mustn’t! You mustn’t come!’
‘Why?’ Her reaction startled him but he tried not to show it, tried to hide his concern beneath a grin. ‘Are you going to come last in everything?’
For a moment he saw her struggle with a lie, with the temptation to tell him that she was going to be terrible. But maybe she realised he didn’t give a hoot where she came in the fifty metres, or whether she fell over her feet in the high jump, that he would come because he loved to see her having fun. ‘No. But if you come it will spoil—’ She stopped.
‘Spoil what, sweetheart?’
‘I...I...’ She reddened, swallowed. ‘I’ve done something that’s going to make you really angry. Daddy.’
He was almost afraid to ask, but he had to know, so he pulled her towards him, picked her up and settled her against his chest. ‘Let me decide about that. I don’t suppose it’s as bad as you think.’
The words were a long time coming and when they did come they were mumbled into his chest. ‘I—wrote—to—my...’ His heart seemed to stop beating during an endless pause.
‘Who did you write to, sweetheart?’ he prompted, when be could no longer bear it.
‘My mother. I wrote to my mother and asked her to come to sports day.’ And then the words tumbled out, unstoppable. ‘I asked her to come because they said I was lying, they wouldn’t believe me, but it’s true, isn’t it?’ She sat back and looked up at him, every cell in her body appealing to him to tell her it was so. ‘Brooke Lawrence is my mother.’
His throat was tight, a lump the size of a tennis ball blocking the words. But he had to say them. ‘Yes, Lucy. Your mother is Brooke Lawrence.’
If he’d expected anything, it would have been reproach that he hadn’t told her before. Her triumphant, ‘Yes!’ was like a knife to his heart. ‘And she’ll come to sports day and everyone will know—’ She slid from his lap and twirled giddily across the living room floor.
‘Look out!’ His warning came too late as she swept a small china spaniel from the top of the television. It hit the carpet and bounced and would have been safe but before she could stop herself Lucy trod on it and there was an ominous crunching noise.
Fitz caught her by the arms as she catapulted back towards him, holding her still, his arms about her in a protective vice, a safe place he had made for her, a place where nothing could hurt her...or so he had thought.
He eased away and bent to pick up the china dog. ‘Just a little chip here,’ he said, rubbing his thumb over the dog’s nose. Then, ‘And we can stick his ear back on.’ He picked up the ear and it crumbled in his fingers. It was a sensation that was rapidly becoming familiar.
When he finally looked up, dared to face her, Lucy was standing exactly where he had left her. He had never seen her so still.
‘I took the key to your desk from your dressing table,’ she said. ‘We were doing a project about family history and Josie brought in her birth certificate. It had her mother’s name on it and I realised...’ She stopped. ‘I’m sorry, Daddy.’
Oh, no. He was the one who was sorry. She should never have been reduced to taking keys, hunting in drawers to find out what she should always have known. ‘You saw the photographs, the custody papers?’ She frowned, not understanding the word, but of course she had found them. How else would she have known where to write?
‘She will come, won’t she, Daddy?’ She looked so desperate, so needy. How long had she been feeling this way? Why hadn’t he noticed? ‘I told her you wouldn’t be there, that she wouldn’t have to meet you.’
‘Did you?’ He almost smiled at her bluntness. Almost. ‘In that case I’m sure she will. If she can. But she might be abroad, making one of her films.’ Please, God... ‘Had you thought of that?’
Lucy’s face fell momentarily, then immediately brightened. ‘No, she can’t be. I saw her on television last week.’
Yes. He’d seen her too, trailing a new series that was starting next month. But they were clips from the series and meant nothing. Except of course that a new series meant a book tie-in, the endless round of the chat shows, breakfast television, the whole publicity circuit.
He would have to find out, because Fitz, despite a cast-iron certainty that Brooke wouldn’t want to come within a country mile of her daughter, found himself making a silent promise to the child that if it was humanly possible, even if he had to hog-tie the woman and bring her in the boot of his Range Rover, she would put in an appearance at sports day.
CHAPTER TWO
SHE couldn’t put it off any longer. Bron bit into her toast, putting it off. She would have to call Lucy’s father and tell him about the letter.
The idea was sufficient to dull her appetite and she abandoned the toast. If only she hadn’t opened the letter. If only she could forget she’d ever seen it. It hadn’t been meant for her, after all. If it hadn’t been for the coincidence of their initials, if her mother’s first gift to her father hadn’t been a hand tooled leather bound edition of the complete works of Rupert Brooke and if he hadn’t responded with an equally beautiful copy of Wuthering Heights, she would never have opened it...
She’d drink her coffee first. She reached for her mug, sent the jar of marmalade flying, flinched as it hit the quarry-tiled floor and smashed. She spent the next few minutes carefully picking out the glass, cleaning up the sticky mess. It had to be done, she told herself, but she knew she was simply prevaricating. Putting off the moment.
The important thing was that she had opened the letter; whatever the truth, Lucy Fitzpatrick was a child who needed help and maybe she was the only person in the world who knew that
She’d spent the long wakeful hours of the night—still unable to get used to the silence, the fact that no one needed her—telling herself that getting involved in other people’s domestic problems was simply asking for trouble. Telling herself was one thing, however, convincing herself something else.
At first light she’d given up the struggle for sleep and taken herself into the cool, early-morning garden and tried to forget about Lucy in a furious blitz on the weeds that seemed to leap out of the ground in full flower at this time of year. She had her own problems. Like what was she going to do with the rest of her life?
She had no job skills: all she knew was caring for her mother. The thought had led her back to Lucy, to wonder who was caring for her. A housekeeper or nanny, perhaps? Or did she go home to an empty house after school while her father worked?
Eventually hunger had kicked in, reminding her that she had had no breakfast and she straightened, easing her back, dead-heading the roses as she walked slowly back towards the empty house, she finally acknowledged that nothing was going to drive Lucy from her mind. The need to do something was at war with common sense and common sense didn’t stand a chance. She could not possibly ignore the letter.
But that decided, what was she going to do about it?
She had taken the envelope from her pocket, smearing it with green that had adhered to her fingers from her weeding. She had wiped her hands on her shorts before she’d taken out the letter. Lucy hadn’t put a telephone number. Well, she wouldn’t. From the comment about not having to meet her father, Bron guessed that Lucy was hoping to keep the whole thing a secret from him.
She had unhooked the telephone, dialled 192. ‘Directory Enquiries. What name please?’
‘Fitzpatrick. I don’t have an initial. Bramhill Bay, in Sussex.’
‘One moment, please.’ Then, ‘Would that be Fitzpatrick Studios?’
Fitzpatrick Studios? What kind of studios? Film studios? ‘That could be it,’ she said, her heart sinking. That could very well be it She’d all but managed to convince herself that Lucy had chosen Brooke because she was well known, admired. Saving the rain-forest was such a big issue these days, but if her father was a filmmaker the coincidence was just too much... She stopped herself.
What kind of film studios would be in some tiny village in Sussex? A place called The Old Rectory was far more likely to be an artist’s studio, or a pottery, or both. She could just imagine a picturesque tithe barn housing some artists colony... ‘The address is The Old Rectory,’ she said quickly.
There was a click and then she heard the recording, ‘The number that you require is...’ Bronte wrote it down, double-checked it and then hung up. She stared at the number. Well, it seemed to say, you’ve got me, now what are you going to do with me?
The child’s father needed to know what was going on, she rationalised as she made coffee, dumped the bread in the toaster. She couldn’t just ignore it. If Lucy was so desperate for love that she needed Brooke as a fantasy mother... And if she wasn’t fantasising?
It made no difference. She would have to ring. But after breakfast. No one could be expected to deal with something like this on an empty stomach.
Bronte stared at her empty mug, the abandoned toast. Now. Do it now. Delaying was not going to make it any easier. And it might be all right. Lucy might do this once a week, or whenever her mother refused to be blackmailed into more sweets, later TV, a day off school, and she’d get a resigned apology from an embarrassed parent. Maybe. Why didn’t she believe that?
Whatever she believed, she could no longer put off making the call. She picked up the telephone, dialled the number. It rang once. It rang twice. Three times. There was no one there. Relief surged through her and she had the receiver halfway back to the cradle when she heard it being picked up. She couldn’t just hang up...she just hated it when people did that...
‘James Fitzpatrick.’ James Fitzpatrick had a voice like melted chocolate. Dark, expensive chocolate. It rippled through her midriff like a warm wave of pleasure and left her gasping. ‘I can’t come to the telephone right now but if you leave a message I’ll get back to you.’ There was a click and the long bleep of an answering machine. She was still holding the receiver when there was a long, insistent ring on the doorbell.
Fitz had found it impossible to talk to Lucy about her mother. The other way round would not be so difficult, he assured himself, yet when he pulled up outside the steeply gabled house with a large garden overgrown with blowsy midsummer roses, he still wasn’t certain that he was doing the right thing.
It might be wiser to let sleeping dogs lie. Brooke knew where to find him but in nearly nine years had never once bothered to call him, enquire after her daughter, show the slightest interest in her health or happiness.
Well, that was the deal he’d agreed to.
Until the moment when he’d finally realised that Brooke had meant it when she’d said she would have her baby adopted, Fitz had never given much thought to what that would involve. He had never thought of himself as a man wanting a child of his own, but the unseen, unknown life that had been so carelessly created had, with the threat of rejection, become so real to him, so precious that he had been overtaken with the longing to protect her. And with her lying, hours old, in his arms, he’d known he could never bear to let her go.
He would have promised Brooke anything at that moment and he had never once doubted that he’d had the better of the deal. He’d supported her through her pregnancy, looked after her, certain that once the baby was in her arms she would love her. Then after Lucy was born, when Brooke had calmly announced that she was going to give her baby away, she’d seen his reaction and she’d made her bargain with him.
What had been so galling, so unforgivable, had been her amusement...her callous assurance that within weeks he would see it her way and hand the child over to some anonymous couple and be glad to do it. The truth was she really hadn’t cared what he’d done with her baby as long as she hadn’t been the one kept awake at night, hadn’t been the one changing nappies. She hadn’t had time for such mundane nonsense, she’d been going to make something of her life and in return for her baby he’d been going to help her do that. Well, he had to admit that she hadn’t wasted her opportunity.
Maybe somewhere, hidden in the untrodden byways of his mind, he had nursed a secret hope that one day she would realise what she was missing, would come back. Eight years should have been long enough for him to come to terms with the truth, but perhaps Lucy was not the only one with a penchant for fantasy.
Maybe that was why he had found it so hard to tell Lucy the truth; maybe he hadn’t wanted to believe that any mother could be so callous. Well, he could no longer fool himself. Lucy had taken the matter out of his hands, chosen the moment.
But now he was here, parked outside a house which until this moment had simply been an address on the document which gave him sole custody of Lucy, it occurred to Fitz that he was almost certainly on a wildgoose chase.
This had been Brooke’s family home. It was highly unlikely that she had lived here since university, but it was the only address he had. She’d long since left the television natural history unit where he’d got her that first job, easily finding a backer to start her own film company, but no one there would give him an address, advising him to write in and his letter would be passed on. There wasn’t time for that. And his contacts in the business who could have told him what he needed to know would have been just too damned interested.
He watched the postman making his way down the street, dropping letters through the boxes. The man reached The Lodge, turned in at the gate, but he had more than letters—he had something that needed signing for, or wouldn’t fit the box, because he rang the bell. Who would answer? Her mother, a middle-aged version of Brooke? Her father...
‘Brooke...’ Her name escaped him on a breath. It was the last thing on earth he had expected. But she was there, she had opened the door, was talking with the postman, giving the man one of those blazing smiles as she pushed back her hair in an achingly familiar gesture before taking the pen he offered and signing for a letter. Before he knew what he was doing he was out of the Range Rover and across the street. The postman saw him coming, held the gate for him, but halfway up the path he stopped.
Suppose she refused to speak to him, this spectre coming back from the past to haunt her, determined to remind her of something she had chosen to forget? Suppose she shut the door on him? Refused even to discuss Lucy? She had every right to. He had promised he would never contact her, never betray her secret. But then he had never expected to have to keep that promise. And Lucy’s happiness was more important than any promise.
He stepped off the path, followed the lawn around to the back of the house.
Bron put the registered letter from her mother’s insurance company on the kitchen table unopened. Her mother was dead and nothing would change that, but Lucy was alive and needing help now. She picked up the telephone again, pressed redial. She would leave a message, ask James Fitzpatrick to call her. It rang once, twice. A shadow passed the kitchen window, someone coming round to the back of the house, no doubt Mrs Marsh checking up on her, making sure she was coping...
‘Come along,’ she muttered impatiently. And then the voice again. Except it wasn’t the answering machine.
‘Brooke...’ he said and as she spun around, saw the shadowed figure in the doorway, she knew exactly who he was.
‘James Fitzpatrick,’ she said. And as if to confirm it his voice repeated the name in her ear.
For a moment he didn’t move, stayed in the open doorway with the sun streaming in around him. ‘That’s a little formal under the circumstances, Brooke. I still answer to Fitz.’
‘Fitz,’ she repeated dully, while the cogs in her brain freewheeled, trying to catch up with what was happening. Apparently taking this as an invitation, he stepped into the room, into the light. Oh, God, the voice was perfect, the man was perfect. More than perfect, he was beautiful. Tall, broad-shouldered, lean as a whippet beneath a white linen shirt that draped loosely about his torso, beneath old faded denims that stretched tight across narrow masculine hips, clinging to his thighs as though moulded to them. His hair was black, a dishevelled mass of thick dark curls that flowed over his shirt collar, his mouth was sinfully sensuous, his eyes the colour of ripe blueberries. No man had the right to be that good-looking, that sexy, that... ‘I—I was just trying to call you,’ she said.
‘Then that answers my question. You did get Lucy’s letter.’
Bron tore her gaze away from this apparition of manly perfection long enough to glance at the crumpled, slightly grubby envelope lying on the kitchen table. Unfortunately she tried to replace the telephone receiver at the same time. She missed. It swung down and hit the wall, jerking the telephone from its bracket. The whole lot landed on the floor with a crash.
James Fitzpatrick crossed the room, bent to retrieve the instrument. ‘It’s cracked,’ he said, straightening beside her.
‘It was already cracked.’ A bit like her voice.
‘I see.’ He checked the dialling tone, replaced it on the wall before turning to her, his forehead creased in a thoughtful frown. ‘I’ve often wondered where Lucy gets that from.’
Lucy was clumsy? ‘You made me jump,’ she said defensively. ‘Why did you come to the back door?’
‘I thought it might be a good idea to take you by surprise—’ he’d certainly done that ‘—before you had time to put the chain up.’
Close up to him, Bron was finding it difficult to breathe. This was Lucy’s father? Brooke had walked away from this man to film monkeys and spiders and frogs and any number of unspeakable creatures in mosquito infested swamps? If anyone had ever doubted her dedication... His words suddenly got through to her. ‘Why would I do that?’
‘I made a promise. The fact that I’m here must tell you that I’m about to break it.’
What promise? His right hand was against the wall, trapping her in the corner, but it made no difference, her legs weren’t planning on taking her anywhere. She swallowed. ‘Because of Lucy? How is she—?’
‘You’ve had nearly nine years to ask that question,’ he said, cutting off her concern, refusing to acknowledge it.
‘I didn’t mean—’ She hadn’t meant it in that meaningless, ‘How are you?’, kind of way. She meant, What kind of child is she? What are her dreams? Is she happy? But his left hand, the fingers loosely curled, was rubbing mesmerisingly against her cheek, stealing her wits. ‘You don’t have to pretend you care, Brooke, not for me. Save that for your daughter.’
Brooke?
Brooke was looking at him as if she had been knocked sideways and it gave him a small charge of satisfaction to know that he wasn’t the only one struggling for breath. But surely she must have expected him? If she had reached the point where she was going to call she must have realised that he was going to come looking for her. No doubt she had been trying to stop him. As if anything could.
It was odd—he’d seen her on television dozens of times during the years and he’d felt nothing. He’d been so certain that she was incapable of doing this to him again yet it was as if the years had never happened, as if Lucy had never happened and she was still twenty years old and looking up at him from a bench on her university campus.
Her skin was still peachy soft beneath his fingers, a little pink from the recent heatwave but surprisingly unlined by the months, years spent in tropical sunlight. He had expected her harder, tougher, despite the girlish sweetness with which she managed to charm her audience, had long ago charmed him. She was older and yet disconcertingly still the same; looking at him with the same misty, melting grey eyes, still with that look of surprised innocence that she had done so well, that had so captivated him. She still smiled with that made-for-pleasure mouth that had never needed lipstick and, heaven help him, his blood was still hot for her and the heat was straining against the tightness of his jeans.