Slave to Love

He made no reply to that one, but she saw his shoulders give a rueful shrug. ‘See you later,’ he said, then he was gone, leaving her to sink weakly into the nearest chair, feeling as though she had just run and won a marathon.

But he cared, she reminded herself staunchly. Three days—three whole days he had tried to put aside for her! And, even if Lulu’s call had effectively ruined all of that, new hope began to flare like fire in her breast. Mac’s family came first with him—perhaps they would always come first—but there was room in his heart for her too; she was sure of it now. And she was suddenly determined not to give up a single inch of that space without a damned good fight!

CHAPTER SEVEN

BY FIVE o’clock that same morning they were at the airport, waiting in the departure lounge for their flight to be called. The moment they’d checked in Mac had gone off to call the hospital to find out how Delia was.

Sitting waiting with their flight bags, Roberta watched him come striding back to her, the dark frown on his face filling her with a small sense of alarm.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked him sharply.

‘I don’t know,’ he grunted, throwing himself down in the chair beside her. ‘She’s still in Theatre. For a straightforward appendix operation it seems to be taking an awful long time...’

‘What time did they take her into Theatre?’ Roberta asked concernedly.

He glanced at his watch. ‘Almost four hours ago now.’ He frowned again. ‘I hope the bloody plane doesn’t take off late!’ he snapped, on a surge of anxious impatience.

Roberta reached out to touch his arm. ‘She’ll be all right,’ she tried to assure him. ‘Delia is fit and healthy. Whatever is complicating things she’ll come through it all just fine.’

‘It isn’t Delia I’m worrying about,’ he muttered, and got up, moving away on restless legs, leaving her to draw her own conclusions from that.

Lulu. He had to mean Lulu. Did that girl have any idea how lucky she was having a father like Mac? she wondered wistfully.

Arriving at Heathrow right in the middle of the commuter rush, Roberta blessed her own foresight in thinking of having a car laid on, ready and waiting to whip them into London. By then they were both tired; neither had slept. It had been gone two o’clock when Lulu’s call had come through to Mac, and by the time they had packed and made arrangements to travel it had been almost time to leave for the airport to catch the first shuttle to London. Since leaving Zurich hardly a word had been exchanged between them. Mac had sunk deep into himself, waiting out the journey with a necessary patience, but the dark expression on his face had said that his concerned thoughts were with his daughter and his ex-wife and, wisely, Roberta had not tried to intrude.

It was mid-morning before they walked through the doors of the plush private hospital where Delia had been admitted. After a short conversation with the girl on Reception, who was unable—or unwilling—to tell them anything, they were directed towards the lifts and the floor that Delia’s room was situated on.

It was evident as soon as the lift doors opened on to Lulu’s strained white face that the poor child was almost frantic with worry.

She saw Roberta first, and for a moment something murderous snapped into the younger girl’s eyes, then, as they s

tepped out of the lift, she was throwing herself into Mac’s arms.

Mac caught her to him, his arms closing securely around this daughter who meant all the world to him. ‘Oh, Daddy!’ she cried. ‘It’s awful! Nobody will tell me anything, and she’s been gone hours and hours!’

‘Shush,’ he murmured soothingly. ‘Give me five minutes and I’ll find out just what’s been going on,’ he assured her. ‘Now, is there a waiting-room or something, where you can wait while I—’

‘I’m coming with you!’ Lulu insisted tearfully. ‘I want to see their faces when they try fobbing you off the same way they’ve been doing to me!’

Despite the gravity of the situation, Roberta couldn’t help smiling at that. Like his daughter, she was well aware of Mac’s intimidating force when he met with resistance in any way. Glancing at her over the top of Lulu’s dark head, Mac saw the smile, and mocked it ruefully, taking a moment out himself to acknowledge the humour in the remark.

‘Will you wait?’ he then asked her huskily.

Roberta nodded. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said. ‘Just go and find out how Delia is.’

He nodded gratefully, then turned his attention back to Lulu, drawing the young girl beneath the crook of his shoulder and guiding her away.

Roberta watched them go, wishing she could be there with them, offering them both her support.

But she was quick to realise that there was a fine but definite line between support and intrusion. And one, she acknowledged as she went in search of the waiting-room, that she was going to have to learn to tread very carefully if Mac’s family was ever going to accept her position in his life.

Not that treading that kind of line was anything new to her, she reminded herself grimly. Her whole life had been a series of fine lines drawn between herself and those people she cared about but who had other things in their lives which took precedence over her needs.

Like her parents, for instance, who were only approachable as parents while between assignments. Then there was Aunt Sadie, who lived the obsessive life of a painter and, whenever she had found herself saddled with her young niece during school holidays, had managed to come up with just about anything to keep that child out of her hair so that her routine was not disturbed more than it needed to be. Aunt Sadie lived in a cottage quite close to Lake Windermere, which was perhaps fortunate for the middle-aged spinster, who didn’t have much experience with children, because she had solved the problem by filling Roberta’s time with just about any lakeland activity she could find for her! Sailing, skiing, windsurfing— Wryly Roberta counted them off in her head. Outward-bound courses, rock-climbing, fell-walking—by the time she was eighteen, she’d become quite proficient in all of them! she recalled, with a smile that showed it hadn’t all been horrible.

But it had been a different matter when she had been dumped on her two bachelor uncles, who had never taken their noses out of their stuffy books long enough to notice the lonely child that they’d been left in charge of. Experts on just about any classical subject you would like to mention, they lived for their fusty old books, and had expected her to be very quiet when around, so as not to disturb them. Those times had been perhaps some of the most miserable in her life, she remembered, recalling one particularly frightening day when she had taken ill with a rather nasty bout of tonsillitis that had knocked her completely flat. They hadn’t known what to do with her! So they’d had her packed off to a private hospital where she’d stayed until it was time to go back to school.

She never went to them again after that. They said she broke their concentration. So, if Sadie wouldn’t have her, she had stayed at school during the vacation breaks.