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‘Oh, I promise,’ Seb replied earnestly, and Dan looked at him, nodded once and passed him the mouse so that he could concentrate on holding his beaker of milk with both hands.
It had been a very long time since Seb had seen such a decrepit piece of equipment with the processing speed of a small slug. In fact his mobile phone had better connections.
Just as Ella was bringing the pan of eggs towards the table, Seb pushed back his chair. ‘Back in a moment, please start without me.’
In fact it took him a good few minutes to jog up to his room, slip back to the kitchen with his laptop and forward the email to himself so that Dan could read the message on the laptop instead of the TV screen.
‘Here you are, Dan.’
‘Where’s the clicky mouse? ‘
‘Inside. You press on here instead. And that little box sticking out of the side means that I can connect to the Internet wherever I go in the world.’
Dan’s eyes widened in delight. And he yelled out loud and clapped his hands together as a brightly coloured photo of a woman smiled back at him with a dramatic backdrop of ice and mountains.
‘Look, Mum—it’s Aunty Nicole.’
Ella took a second to spoon the creamy scrambled eggs onto ham and toasted sourdough bread on Seb’s breakfast plate, then lifted the hot pan away from Dan’s head and peered over his shoulder.
‘It certainly is. Look at that lovely hat she is wearing! Thank you, Seb. That was very thoughtful. Please. Feel free to read the message. It’s not private.’
Dan nodded several times as he chewed and mumbled his thanks through a full mouth.
Seb smiled back. ‘You are most welcome.’ And then his smile faded. ‘She’s not due back in Paris until Monday evening, and then plans to fly south late Tuesday.’
He sat back and pursed his lips. ‘Well, that’s a shame. I was hoping to see Nicole but I have to fly home late Monday.’
Seb glanced up at Ella. ‘My apologies, Mrs Martinez, but in that case there is no reason to stay here any longer. I’ll drive back to Montpellier later this morning.’
Dan’s eyes widened in astonishment. ‘You have to leave? Already?’
Ella kissed the top of Dan’s head, her hands on his shoulders, but the smile had faded from her mouth. ‘Don’t you remember what Aunty Nicole said? This is Seb’s work. He lives in Australia and that is a long way from here. Now. Time to check on Milou and get ready for school. Okay?’
Dan nodded furiously while sliding off his chair, a pancake clutched in one hand, but stopped to pat Seb on the arm.
‘Can I send you a mailey message on the
‘puter? Please? Can I?’
‘Sure,’ Seb replied, between mouthfuls, and then shot a glance towards Ella. ‘If it’s okay with your mum.’
Ella looked from Seb to Dan, then grinned. ‘Maybe later.’
Ella sat down opposite Seb as soon as Dan had skipped up the staircase and exhaled loudly before she poured two cups of fragrant coffee.
‘I am so sorry about that,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Dan seems to love anything to do with computers and technology. I have no idea where he gets that from.’
Then she looked up at him with a faint smile. ‘I am sorry that you have to leave so soon. I know Nicole will be very disappointed to have missed you. She was so looking forward to having you here.’
Seb took a long sip of the delicious coffee, and savoured the aroma and flavour with a satisfied sigh.
‘As am I, but I do have a question. You are clearly an excellent cook, Ella, but you are also a busy mum. I’m surprised that Nicole asked you to organise her birthday party. That’s a lot of work for one person.’
Seb reached into a pocket and pulled out his personal organiser. ‘If it helps, I could make amends for my absence by arranging for an events management company to take care of the party. I would be happy to do it.’
Ella replied with several quick shakes of the head.
‘Thank you, but no, Seb. Nicole didn’t ask me to organise her birthday. I volunteered. I asked her to give me the chance to do it.’
Just as Ella was about to tell him the long list of reasons there was a sharp knock on the kitchen door and a small dark-haired older woman with bow knees sauntered in, nodded at Seb, deposited a basket of what looked like apricots on the kitchen floor, then kissed Ella on each cheek before heading back to the breakfast table.
Ella’s friend was wearing blue dungarees and old boots set off with a jaunty wool scarf. She leant against the sink and slurped down the coffee as Ella dived into the box.
‘Oh, these are fantastic!’ Ella squealed in perfect French with enough of the local accent that Seb could not help but be impressed. Unless you had been born and raised in this area, most people did not notice the subtle differences between the dialects in the different towns of the Languedoc. But Ella seemed to have picked it up perfectly.
Then she looked up and remembered that Seb had no clue as to who their visitor was.
‘Oh, sorry. Introductions. Yvette. Do you remember the Castellano family who used to live here? This is Sebastien Castellano visiting from Sydney.’
‘Of course I remember,’ Yvette replied and nodded once. ‘You’re Helene’s son. Used to play football with my boys after school when we had the farm.’ She scanned his business clothing for a few seconds before adding, ‘I heard that you’ve done well for yourself.’ Then she slurped down what was left of the coffee, grabbed another pancake and waved one hand in the air with a friendly goodbye and was gone before Seb had a chance to reply.
‘What was that all about?’ Seb asked in a dazed voice.
‘Actually that was quite a speech for Yvette,’ Ella replied. ‘The forecast is for a mistral storm over the weekend and I need to bring in the cherries today or risk losing them.’
She stopped rummaging around inside the basket and glanced back towards the kitchen door before whispering in English, ‘Yvette is a wonderful babysitter and totally brilliant with the garden, but I am a bit worried that she’ll try to help me out from the top of a wobbly ladder in the orchard, so, would you mind doing me a huge favour?’
Ella licked her lips a couple of times. ‘Could you keep Yvette talking and away from ladders until I get back from the school run? I don’t want any accidents, but I promise that I won’t be long and you can get on your way the minute I get back.’
Then she gave him a lopsided grin. ‘I was forgetting! This is your chance to catch up with all of the gossip. Won’t that be the best fun?’
CHAPTER FIVE
BEING interrogated by Yvette for almost an hour about every detail of where he had been, what he had studied, what he had done and where he had travelled in the past eighteen years had not been what Seb called fun.
And she had made him work. By the time Ella wheeled her bicycle around the corner of the house, he had emptied three wheelbarrows of plant clippings, heard potted histories of most of his old schoolmates and made rash promises to welcome assorted members of Yvette’s extended family to Sydney.
So he was more than happy to hand over the reins to Ella, who vanished into the kitchen with Yvette the minute she got back, leaving him trapped outside on the patio.
At last! It was finally time to get packed and on his way back to the business world he understood.
So he had to find a way into the house that did not involve going through the kitchen. The fastest way would be to sneak in through the sitting room and what had been his mother’s salon.
Sebastien glanced through the open patio windows of the long wide room and stopped dead in his tracks—his feet frozen to the floor.
Hanging above the heavy stone mantelpiece of the original fireplace was a photograph he had never seen in his life. Of his mother.
Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes, startling him with their intensity, after the shock of seeing her picture, life size, smiling back at him.
Hardly believing his eyes, he clenched his toes hard inside his made-to-measure shoes and breathed out slowly through his nose before taking a step across the threshold onto the marble tiles.
Only the fireplace was familiar in this strange mix of a room that had originally been two rooms—the formal parlour and the salon. The dividing wall was gone and the long sitting-room windows had been replaced by wide glass doors that opened out into the garden and allowed light to flood into what had been a rather dark space.
That light seemed focused like a spotlight on his mother’s image. She must have been in her twenties when the photograph was taken and the photographer had captured her in a moment when every aspect of her beauty and grace were at their height.
She looked stunning. More like a film actress or professional fashion model than the woman who had kissed him goodnight and made his favourite chocolate cake every Friday—just because she felt like it.
How had he forgotten how very beautiful she had been?
Her sparkling hazel-green and amber eyes shone out from the flat surface behind the glass, as bright as her perfect smile that could light up any room in seconds. Even now this simple colour photograph dominated the room.
She was wearing a pale pink dress with the slight shimmer of silk in the ruffles on the collar, and a single string of pearls he knew that his father still kept in a wooden box in his bedroom that Seb was not supposed to know about.
On one shoulder was a corsage of white and pale pink rosebuds chosen to match the exact same shade as her dress and she had raised her left hand towards it. She was wearing a ring with a large heart-shaped diamond-cut pink stone on the fourth finger—but it was not a ring he recognised.
Intrigued and fascinated by the maelstrom of emotions whirling around inside him, Seb moved closer to the fireplace until he was within touching distance of what was obviously an amateur photograph.
One thing was clear. She was looking straight into the lens of the camera and at the person taking the photograph with a look in her eyes that was absolutely unmistakable. It was the look of love. Because if Helene Castellano had a flaw, this was it.
She was incapable of hiding her true feelings—about anything.
She might have told him that the garden frog he had presented her with when he was seven was the best she had ever seen, but he had only had to look at her face to know the truth. And she had released the poor frog back into the river by morning.
He had loved her so very much. When she was taken ill, he had felt so powerless to do anything to help her that her last weeks were a whirlwind of kind words and fierce anger and frustration, which he took out on everyone and everything around him.
In life she had taught him about respect and hard work. Her death had taught him what it felt like to love someone so much and then have that love snatched away from you.
Her heart had been an open book.
His heart was locked tight closed and was going to stay that way. Other men might be foolish enough to risk falling in love and start a family. Not for him.
The blood pounded in the veins in his neck.
The photograph could have been taken by Luc Castellano, the man he had called his father for the first thirty years of his life. But it could equally have been a friend or relative at the same party. He simply could not know! And yet this photograph had been deliberately left behind when they emigrated!
Possibilities raced through his mind in tune with the blood pounding in his heart. What if his birth parents had been in the same room when this photograph was taken?
This photograph could be the clue he had not even acknowledged that he had been looking for. The first step to finding the answers to so many questions he had buried deep inside about his parentage.
Questions which now burned to be answered.
He had been a fool.
The growing feeling of unease and anxiety that had sat on his shoulders ever since he found out that his dad could not be his natural father suddenly made sense.
It had nothing to do with the business deal, and everything to do with understanding who he truly was, and the decisions his parents had taken to give him a safe family life.
Instead of feeling elation and exhilaration that he was within sight of the greatest business deal of his life, standing at that moment in front of his mother’s portrait, all he could feel was a hollow emptiness that needed to be filled.
The Helene Castellano Foundation meant everything to him going forward and he refused to let that work suffer because he was preoccupied with his heritage and his past. He had to put that behind him.
He had come here to ease his mind before starting work on the greatest adventure of his life. Nicole was not around. So he would have to do the job himself.
It was time to face the facts and get the answers he needed.
There was a rustle of movement behind Seb and he swung around, his mouth hard with emotion and resentful at the intrusion. Ella bustled happily through the patio doors, her arms wrapped around a china bowl packed with a stunning arrangement of fresh early sunflowers and green foliage, which she carefully lowered onto the low coffee table in front of the sofas, turning the bowl from side to side to give the best viewpoint.
Only when she was satisfied did she stand back, nod once, and then march over to the dressoir sideboard and start rummaging around in a long bottom drawer.
‘Thank you for staying and looking after Yvette. Do you like the portrait? I found your mum’s photograph in a box in the attic. Nicole’s designer had some modern abstract above the fireplace but it was totally wrong. Doesn’t she look wonderful? ‘
Her words had emerged with such a gush and a rush that Seb had to take a second to form an answer.
‘Yes, she does,’ he replied, turning back to face the portrait so that Ella could not see his face as he composed himself. ‘I’ve never actually seen that picture before. I don’t have many family photographs so it’s quite a surprise.’
Ella shoved the drawer closed and pushed herself back onto her feet with a satisfied sigh. ‘Here is the original print. These were all in the same box in the attic.’
Seb stared at the brown card wallet that Ella was holding out towards him and steadied himself to accept it from her, only they both stepped forwards at the same time and for a fraction of a second their fingers slid into contact, a gentle stroke of skin against sensitive skin.
Instantly a burst of hot energy ran through Seb’s hand, then arm and body, like a small electric shock. It was so unexpected and surprising that he half coughed out loud, breaking the heavy weight of silence. The awkwardness of the moment made him look up from the folder into Ella’s blue, blue eyes. And found that she was staring back at him. Wide eyed. Startled.
In a blink she sucked in a breath, waved her arms to the air above her head and squeaked. ‘More in the attic. I’ll go and, er, try and find them for you.’
Before Seb could reply Ella fled away into the corridor, her sandals making a light pattering on the wooden staircase.
Clearly he had not been the only one to feel the connection.
Mentally shaking himself for being so obvious in front of a widowed single mother, Seb sighed heavily.
More photographs? He didn’t even know that these photographs existed, and here they were. For strangers to see.
He flicked open the folder, and quickly sorted through the jumble of mostly black and white prints he found inside.
Some of the faces were so familiar to him they were like friends he vaguely remembered but could not name. His grandmother and his parents were in many of them, but in others strangers smiled back from locations and events from a very different world he knew nothing about—a world called the past.
Then he found it. A small colour print with his mother smiling out. Her beauty and life force captured in two dimensions for all time. Only as he picked it up he saw that there was writing on the back.
His heart skipped a beat as he read the faded words in French. ‘Engagement Party. 26 May. Andre’s house.’
That was all. No indication of who had been celebrating their engagement. Or who André was. A friend? A relative?
Perhaps André was one of the young people in the bundle of photographs he had just glanced at? Someone who had known his mother as a young woman and who could tell him who his birth parents had been and what had happened to them.
He had so many questions. And way, way, too few answers.
Seb dropped the folder of photographs onto the sofa and started pacing up and down the room between the fireplace and the garden.
He had known the old house would have mixed memories for him, but this was something new. Something he could not have expected.
Hot resentment flashed through him and his fingers clenched into his palms. His dad had left these precious photographs of his mother and his heritage behind in his rush to abandon everything and leave for a tiny apartment in Sydney.
Seb stopped pacing and picked up the colour print. How could he do it? How could he have left these pictures behind for strangers like Ella Martinez to sort through? Maybe even throw out or burn in the fire? He could easily have made room for these few precious pieces of paper.
Back in Sydney he had three photographs of his mother. Three worn, faded and torn prints, the surface coating worn away by the rubbing of his fingers over the years. His dad had one single wedding photo in a silver frame in his bedroom, which Seb used to sneak in and look at. He never got tired of grinning back at the pretty dark-haired girl in a long white dress and carrying a huge bouquet of flowers that trailed almost to the ground, standing next to his dad in his best banker’s smart suit, as they both smiled for the camera.
Four photographs. And yet here in this house he had already seen more photographs than he ever knew existed.
It was almost as if his dad had deliberately kept these photos from him. Was he trying to hide something? Trying to protect him?
Not any more.
Change of plan.
He was here now. He had the means and the opportunity and he could spare a few hours of personal time. In a few days he would be back to Australia. This could be the only chance he might have.
The more he thought about it, the more decisive he became.
He had used his tenacity and determination to take his business to the top. Now it was time to apply that same energy and drive to do some digging into his own past.
Decision made.
He had a new mission. He was going to find any and every scrap of evidence of his family’s past. Even if it meant turning this house upside down to find them.
Starting with the attic.
Because whatever he found from now on, he had every intention of claiming for himself. This was personal and had nothing whatsoever to do with Nicole or her housekeeper. Nothing at all.
Ella tried to wind her way through the jumble of unwanted furniture and assorted objects that had accumulated in the attic. And fought a sudden urge to kick them out of the way. Hard.
Stamping her foot, she squeezed her eyes tight shut, dropped her head back and counted to ten. Backwards. The furniture was bashed enough without her adding to the knocks and scrapes.
They said that bad things came in threes. Well, her Friday was certainly turning out to be a lot more challenging than she had expected. First was the news about the mistral. A summer storm was the last thing this garden needed a few days before a garden party. And it could last for days!
As for the second? It was obvious to her now that Sebastien Castellano never had any intention of staying around long enough to attend Nicole’s birthday party. And that was just cruel.
How could he do that? How could he promise to be here then change his mind?
She simply did not understand that at all. He had travelled halfway around the world for a business trip, only to take off again without seeing Nicole!
How could he be so selfish? Surely he could put Nicole’s needs in front of his own for once? And what was so urgent back in Sydney that he could not stay for a few more days?
And then there was the killer. The thick letter stuffed into her trouser pocket that had been waiting for her when she got back from the school run.
The very sight of the Spanish stamps made her heart sink into her deck shoes.
To a six-year-old, Barcelona might just as well have been next to India and not just a few hours’ drive away. Not that Christobal’s parents came to see them very often. They hated staying at Sandrine’s clean but simple hotel and made repeated comparisons with their luxury villa complete with indoor heated swimming pool and every possible item of the latest technology.
They truly could not tolerate the fact that their grandson was being brought up in a tiny French village while their daughter-in-law worked as a housekeeper for a wealthy woman.
She did not even drive any more.
7Christmas had been a nightmare. As soon as Dan had gone to bed they had bombarded her with their elaborate plans for his education—all the time making her feel like a completely selfish mother by not providing personal tutors and modern computer games and the like so that Dan would not feel left out at the expensive private schools he would soon be attending.
Yeah. Boarding schools. Right. Like she was going to let that happen! Except of course by selfishly keeping Dan here with her she was ruining his chance of a good education and a career. Guilt. Guilt. Guilt.
Ella groaned, then shrugged and sat down on the curved cover of an old trunk and opened the letter under the light beaming in through the dirty glass-covered skylight in the attic roof.
Then hot tears burned the corners of her eyes, blurring her vision.
Two return train tickets to Barcelona. First class. For Monday next week! Two days. She only had two days before she had to hand her baby boy over to his grandparents.
Oh, no. Of course she had known that they wanted to see Dan during his summer school holidays, but the first week! The Martinez family took their holiday in August, not July! And Dan had been so looking forward to Nicole’s party. If she used these tickets, she would be forced to leave him there on his own while she scurried back here to work every hour she could to create this very special birthday party for Nicole.
So what if she had been putting on a brave face in front of Sebastien Castellano? He didn’t have to know that she was secretly panicking. Swan on the water did not come close.
No. She would simply reschedule the dates and… Ella scan-read the letter that came with the tickets. His grandparents had already booked more tickets for a whole programme of special trips and wonderful treats for Dan, which she knew that he would adore.
The energy and the fight drained out of her.
She couldn’t reschedule the trip without throwing all of those plans away.
They were Christobal’s parents! Of course they wanted to see Dan and give him a wonderful time. Dan was all they had left of their son. Chris would have wanted this. Of course, Chris would also have liked them to welcome her as well. But that was a lot more difficult.
Her fingers clenched around the paper. What choice did she have? They knew that she did not have the money to give Dan the things they could. Playing the piano at Sandrine’s at the weekends was not going to be enough to even buy a new computer. She was lucky to have Sandrine’s old machine so that she could keep in touch with her own parents and they were in no position to help her financially.
In their eyes she had made a total mess of her life. A wandering musician without a stable home. She had no investments or resources to provide her son with the type of education that his father had enjoyed. She had never even been to university!