‘Your father?’ She blinked at him in surprise.
He nodded. ‘He died a few months back.’
‘You never said—’
‘Well, I’m saying now. There was no reason to tell you before,’ he said. ‘And before you look at me with that reproachful gaze—I didn’t go to his funeral because I hated him and he hated me.’ He paused for a moment, long enough to get his breathing under control but he could do nothing about the painful clench of his heart. ‘They found a letter from my mother among his belongings. A letter addressed to me, which I never received, even though it was written a long time ago, just before she died. But it seemed she didn’t have the sense or the wherewithal to give it to her own lawyer. She entrusted it to her husband, which was a dumb thing to do because he kept it all this time and I only got to hear about it after his death.’
Her face creased with concentration as if she was trying to piece together a puzzle of facts. ‘So is New York where you were born?’
He shook his head, his laugh bitter as, unwittingly, she asked the most pertinent question of all. ‘It’s where I grew up. I don’t know where I was born because last week I discovered that my mother and father weren’t my real parents.’
‘You mean...’ she frowned again ‘...that they kept that fact hidden from you?’
‘Yes, they did. Though there’s a more accurate way of putting it. They lied to me, Tara. All through my life they lied.’ He saw her wince. ‘Because they couldn’t bear to tell me the truth.’
‘And was the truth so very awful?’ she whispered.
‘Judge for yourself.’ There was silence for a moment before he shrugged, but his shoulders still felt as if they were carrying a heavy weight. ‘The woman I called my mother was in her forties when she married a man who was decades younger. She was a hugely wealthy heiress and he was a poor, good-looking boy from Argentina—who happened to have a pretty big gambling habit. Her Alabama family cut her off when she married Diego and the two of them moved to Manhattan. In her letter she explained that he wanted a child but her age meant she was unable to give him one.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘So she did what she’d spent her whole life doing. She tried to solve a problem by buying her way out of it. That’s when she bought me.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘My mother bought me, Tara. But when the deal was done she discovered that having me around wasn’t the quick solution to her troubles she thought I would be. She’d bought me, but she didn’t want me and neither did Diego. Suddenly I was in the way and a child isn’t as easy to dispose of as one of the fancy sports cars my father loved to drive.’
And Tara stared at him dumbly, in horror and in shock.
CHAPTER NINE
‘YOUR MOTHER BOUGHT YOU?’ Tara demanded, eventually getting her voice back. ‘She actually paid money for you?’
‘She did.’ His jaw tightened. ‘I guess the illegal trade in selling babies has always gone on and back then it was pretty unregulated. She found someone who was willing to part with their infant child—for the right price, of course.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ she breathed.
But Lucas seemed to barely hear her. It was as if having bottled it up—that he could do nothing to now stop the words spilling bitterly from his mouth.
‘A child’s memory only kicks in fragmentally,’ he continued harshly. ‘But I gradually became aware of the fact that he seemed to resent me from the get-go and then to hate me—only I could never understand why. It couldn’t have helped that he obviously felt trapped in a marriage to a woman he clearly didn’t love—only he loved her fortune too much to ever walk away.’ But that hadn’t lessened the tension, had it? His mother sobbing and kneeling on the floor in front of her younger husband, begging him not to leave her. And Diego gloating like a boastful schoolboy about the lipstick she’d found on his collar. Lucas snapped out of his painful reverie to find Tara staring at him, her eyes like two amber jewels in her pale face.
‘What...happened?’ she whispered.
He shrugged. ‘They sent me away to boarding school in Europe to get me out of the way. And when I came home for the holidays...’ he paused and maybe admitting this was the hardest part of all, harder even than the sharp blows to his kidneys ‘...he used to beat me up,’ he finished, on a rush.
‘But, surely he couldn’t get away with something like that?’
‘Oh, he was very careful. And clever, too. He only used to mark me where it wouldn’t show.’ He heard her sharp intake of breath and she opened her lips as if to say something, but he carried on—wanting to excise the dark poison which had lived inside him for so long. ‘The summer I realised I could hurt him back was the last summer I ever came here and that’s when I broke all ties with them.’
‘But what about your mother?’ she breathed. ‘Do you think she was aware that Diego was cruel to you?’
He gave a cynical laugh as he gazed at her with weary eyes. ‘Do you really think it’s possible for a woman not to know when a child is being beaten within the home, even in a house as big and cold and dysfunctional as ours?’
‘Oh, Lucas.’ Her bottom lip had grown pinker from where she’d been worrying it with her teeth and he saw the genuine consternation on her face. ‘That’s terrible. I can’t—’
‘I didn’t tell you because I wanted your sympathy, Tara.’ Ruthlessly, he cut across her faltered words. ‘I told you because you asked and because you of all people now have a right to know. Maybe now you can understand why I started a new life for myself and left the old one far behind. When my mother died my father was such a gambler it wasn’t long before there was no money left to pay for my schooling in Switzerland, so at sixteen I got myself a job as a bellhop in a fancy Swiss hotel—’
‘So that bit was true,’ she interrupted wonderingly before offering an explanation to the frowning question in his eyes. ‘There were rumours swirling around Dublin that you’d been a bellhop but I couldn’t ever imagine you doing a job like that.’
For the first time, he smiled—and the rare flash of humour on his troubled face made Tara’s heart turn over with an emotion she didn’t dare analyse.
‘You’d be surprised at what a comprehensive education it was,’ he said. ‘I watched and learned from all the customers who’d made money and a couple of them gave me advice on how to make it big. When I got to Ireland I changed my name and that changed everything. I worked hard and saved even harder and I had a little luck sprinkled over me on the way.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Though maybe I deserved a little luck by then.’
But Tara didn’t seem interested in the details about how he’d made his fortune. Instead she was frowning with intensity, as she did when she was trying to work something out, often a new recipe.
‘I guess you did.’ She hesitated. ‘But going back to the letter.’