Losing Aunt Claire at the vulnerable age of nineteen had been like losing the linchpin that had held her unnatural life together. It had also preceded her spectacular fall from grace—a fall which had left her with two options only. Either she crawled away to hide in shame or she lifted her chin and outfaced everything that her critics had to throw at her. She had chosen the latter. And, with Todd’s support, countless surprise offers had flooded in to Lissa, her agent, for the kind of work which must have made her aunt turn in her grave.
It was only as César’s hand reached out to cover her own that she realised she was sitting there pressing damp pebbles between two tense palms as if she were trying to grind them into dust.
She looked down at that hand—big and dark, and seeming to promise so many things that she had learned not to trust. A hand that now knew her more intimately than any hand. The hand that had drawn from her a woman she hadn’t known existed inside her.
The hand of contempt, now the hand of consolation.
She pushed it away.
There was a moment’s silence, in which they both stared bleakly out to sea. Then, on a soft sigh that revealed an until now banked-down frustration, he requested brusquely, ‘At least tell me what Hanson is to you.’
‘Todd?’ She turned a glance on him, seeing for the first time how his shattered illusions had scored deep grooves of strain into his lean, dark face. He was not so calm and composed, nor was he finished with guilt and remorse, she added as his eyes caught hers and held, the sombre glow of regret dulling the usual incisive greenness. ‘Well, he’s not my lover, that’s for sure,’ she drawled with mocking irreverence, watched him wince, then turned her face away again to stare back out to sea.
‘He’s my half-brother,’ she announced.
Well aware that she had just delivered the biggest shock she could have done she selected one of the tiny pebbles in her hand and threw it into the ocean.
‘We share the same father,’ she extended, launching another pebble. ‘Though I didn’t find out about him until my aunt died.’ She paused, then added, tight-lipped and flatly, ‘Only she wasn’t my aunt. She was my mother.’
Another stone was launched into the clear blue water while she gave those few pertinent facts a chance to settle in the stunned air now surrounding them. Then she quietly began relating a story that she had never told anyone in her life before—though why she suddenly chose to tell this man was beyond her ability to understand.
‘Not once during the eighteen years I lived with her did she ever let me know that interesting little fact,’ she told him. ‘I had to wait until she was dead to discover our true relationship—via letters sent from Todd’s father to her, laying out ground rules for the lump sum he settled on us both which involved hear holding her silence about his name. Why she decided to include herself in that silence I don’t know.’ And will never know now, she added bleakly to herself. ‘But discovering that far from being the orphan I’d always believed myself to be I’d had not only a mother but a father as well sent me a little crazy for a time.’
‘You were hurt,’ he defended her gently.
‘And the rest,’ she said, and huffed out a sound of scorn. Hurt, angry, bitter, betrayed.
She hunched her body over her knees, a fresh handful of pebbles clenched in her fist.
‘I stormed into Giles Hanson’s office and began shrieking at him like a maniac,’ she went on after a moment. ‘I accused him of just about everything I could accuse him of, then set about telling him what I thought of him as a man.’
The word ‘man’ emerged with enough contempt to make any man wince. César winced.
‘I had just got to the part where I was telling him how I was going to reveal to the world how he and my mother had treated me when Todd came into the room.’
She turned to look at him then, her gaze skimming over his set, sober face. ‘Your eyes are the same colour as Susie’s,’ she remarked—quite out of context. ‘I should have made that connection a lot earlier than I did. And I’m surprised now that I didn’t.’
He glanced at her frowningly, not really understan
ding what she was getting at. ‘We have nothing else in common,’ he said, almost as if he was defending himself against a suspected insult. ‘The eyes are the only legacy.’
‘You think so?’ Her expression was curious and damning at the same time. But she didn’t elaborate, returning to the original subject instead. ‘I took one look at Todd and saw myself,’ she said. ‘The hair, the eyes…We are so similar, in fact, that I am amazed that no one else has ever made the connection.
‘Still—’ she shrugged ‘—I didn’t give a hoot about what he looked like then as I slammed into him as well as his father. He was shocked.’ She grimaced, remembering that look of pained horror on Todd’s face as clearly as if he were standing in front of her right now. ‘Shocked enough for me to realise through my rage that he, like myself, knew nothing about his father’s past indiscretion.
‘But it was he who calmed me down, he who shut his father up when he began spitting all kinds of threats back at me about what would happen if I did open my mouth. And it was Todd who led me out of there, took me to his apartment, let me pour out the whole dirty story all over again, then set about convincing me that I would do no one any good by making it all public, but could actually do a lot of harm.’
Her mouth tightened, eyes glinting at some bitter memory of then that could still hurt her now. ‘His mother really does suffer from a chronic heart problem,’ she said huskily. ‘And finding out about me would surely have killed her because she so foolishly believed that she had a marriage made in heaven.’ Her cynicism was so tight and bitter that even Annie wanted to wince when she heard it in her tone.
‘Todd didn’t care what the scandal could do to his father. But he did care about his mother. So did I, funnily enough,’ she admitted. ‘Having known what it felt like to be betrayed by just about everyone who should love you, I had no wish to put a sick woman through the same kind of hell. So—’ another of those expressive shrugs ‘—I found myself shut out in the cold again.’
‘Hanson shut you out also?’ César said in surprise.
‘I shut him out actually,’ she amended. ‘He had his loyalties, which did not include me or my feelings, so as far as I was concerned right then he could go to hell with the rest of them. I told you I’d gone a little crazy,’ she reminded him. ‘Anger, hurt, bitterness—you name it—’ she grimaced ‘—he got the lot since his father had delegated responsibility to his son.’
‘You say “his” father,’ César remarked. ‘But he was your father also.’
‘Not so you’d notice,’ she said. ‘Not so you’d ever notice,’ she then added tightly. ‘He died last year never having so much as mentioned my name. Ironic really,’ she tagged on ruefully, ‘that he should precede his ailing wife to the grave after all he had been prepared to do to me to protect a slowly dying woman from more pain.