A muscle jerked at the edge of Jake’s hard-set mouth, his scrutiny impassive. Grant grimaced. ‘Maybe I flatter myself, but there’s a distinct resemblance. It’s always amazed me that nobody has ever noticed it.’
‘It’s true.’ Her tongue finally unglued from the roof of her mouth. ‘He is my father.’
‘And I’m going public tomorrow,’ Grant added. ‘We can get acquainted some other time when you’ve had the time to face the depressing prospect of our all being one family. Ciao, children. You can battle for the rest of the night if you like, but I’m for my bed.’
He strolled out of the door under Jake’s dazed stare. His dark head spun back, dark eyes flaming over her. ‘You’re his daughter? How the hell is that possible?’
She swallowed hard. ‘My mother was working as a hotel receptionist when she met him. He wasn’t famous then. He was with a repertory company that was touring the north. He persuaded her to return to London with him,’ she explained against a background of absolute silence that was uniquely discouraging. ‘He was offered a part in a television series in New York. He left her in London. He promised he would send her the money to join him. But he didn’t.’
‘Tell me something that’s a surprise.’ Jake snatched up the bottle of brandy and poured a measure into the glass she hadn’t touched. He raised it almost clumsily to his lips and threw it back. His clenched profile sent further arrows of alarm stabbing into her.
‘He’s always insisted that he did write to her, but I don’t think he did. When my mother decided to go home, she was pregnant, and she must have been desperate to decide to do that,’ Kitty shared tautly. ‘She went into labour before she arrived. She was dead by the time my grandparents reached the hospital. Grant wrote to them months afterwards asking if they’d had any news of her. They ignored the letter, but they kept it. The name and address of his solicitor was in it.’ She hesitated, torn by his silence. ‘I should have told you…I know I should have!’
‘You do look like him,’ Jake grated, swinging back to her. He loosed his breath in a hiss of anger. ‘Do you know what I’ve gone through for eight years? And all this time…hell!’ He thrust raking fingers through his wind-tousled hair. ‘I’m talking off the top of my head. Put it down to shock. I have never wanted to hit anyone so badly, and the notion didn’t leave me even when he said who he was. When I walked in here and found him…’ He shook his head violently. ‘But I was still going to take you home!’
‘Were you?’ she whispered.
‘I missed you by hours in London. I don’t think your father’s housekeeper likes him very much.’ A rueful quirk fleeted his lips. ‘She invited me into the house, told me where you were and offered me the use of the phone. I received the distinct impression that she was hoping he was about to have his nose put out of joint.’ The gleam of amused recollection evaporated and black lashes screened his gaze. ‘Only I wasn’t at all sure that I would have enough of a hold on you to do that.’
The pain roughly accentuating the stark admission tortured her. She twisted at the ribbon ties of her frothy peignoir. He took several restive steps away from her before he turned back. ‘When I found you gone, I was shattered,’ he muttered raggedly. ‘Considering the way I behaved, you probably wonder why, but I didn’t intend to drive you away. I wanted you to make a decision to put Maxwell and everything to do with him out of our lives, and if that meant shaming you into it, I was perfectly prepared to do it.’
Her eyes shimmered. ‘I can understand that, but I think it’s time that I told you what really happened to me…I mean, why I ended up with Grant,’ she outlined shakily. ‘My grandparents wrote to his solicitor and they sent me to him. He didn’t get much choice about taking responsibility for me. You see, I never ran away. They told me to go and they told me not to come back…’
Jake’s appraisal was intense, stark. ‘Why?’ he breathed. ‘Why did they do that?’
Her eyes were pools of pain in her pale face. ‘I lied to you, Jake. Don’t you understand? I lied to you when I said I wasn’t p…pregnant.’
Absolute silence greeted her confession. ‘I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know where to turn!’ she sobbed. ‘I pretended it wasn’t happening to me, and then of course I wasn’t well and I couldn’t hide it any longer.’
He captured her clenched hands and dragged her into his arms. ‘Oh, dear God, why can’t we turn the clock back?’ he demanded unsteadily, muttering her name, smoothing her hair until his lean, hard strength calmed her and she clung to him. ‘Why were you still protecting me, Kitty? You lied to me and I should have known you were lying. You were just a kid and you had to face that alone…’ His roughened voice petered out as he crushed her against him.
‘I never wanted anything as much as I wanted that baby,’ she confessed in a surge of emotion. ‘When I had the miscarriage, I wouldn’t even believe the doctor when he said that it would have happened anyway. It made me so bitter.’
‘I know…I know,’ he whispered jerkily. ‘You were expecting my child and I should have been there for you. I’ll never forgive myself for that night.’
‘But it wasn’t your fault…it wasn’t your fault,’ she protested.
He drew in a long, shuddering breath. ‘I was going to marry you as soon as I finished my training. I couldn’t wait to get you out of that awful house. I had it all mapped out. I never once accepted that anything could go wrong. Naturally you were to be a virgin bride. I never once saw a future that didn’t include you.’
‘Don’t,’ she begged. ‘I saw your mother. I know why, why you treated me like that.’
‘It all came apart overnight,’ he relived rawly. ‘She killed it. Do you know why I believed her? Because we were so close. I didn’t go to my father because I was afraid of what I might do. I couldn’t believe that she would tell a lie like that about my father, not the way she felt about him. I didn’t know how to keep myself away from you. That was the worst part of the nightmare and that’s why I married Liz. With her around I thought I could still see you in the guise of a friend…’
She shivered, pierced by the savage bitterness powering those final words.
‘Naturally the marriage was a disaster. You’d disappeared and I was half out of my mind with worry. When I found out the truth about you, I went off the deep end.’ He was winding a shining strand of silver hair tightly round his fingers. ‘If I’d lost you through something I’d done, I could have lived with it. But I couldn’t live with it as it happened. I felt cheated. I never lied to Liz. I never pretended to love her, but she deserved a better deal than she got,’ he completed grimly.
Kitty cleared her throat uncertainly. ‘We were very young. It mightn’t have worked for us either.’
‘We had enough love to make it work,’ he contradicted. ‘I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love you. When you came back, I did gen
uinely intend to try and be a friend. Only I wasn’t capable of that. I saw you again and that was it. Even though I couldn’t get near you, even though I was eaten alive with jealousy, I could have laid my heart at your feet on the first day…’
‘Why didn’t you tell me what your mother had done?’ she prompted frustratedly
His firm mouth compressed. ‘At the beginning I thought I’d be making an ass of myself. You didn’t want to know. And then that day at the Grange, I remembered how I’d felt that night and I’d have told you then.’
‘I cut you off. I was scared,’ she admitted.
‘That makes two of us,’ he confessed wryly. ‘But when I got you to the church, I didn’t believe that anything could ever come between us again.’
‘And I let Grant come between us. I think I believed that, as long as you thought someone else might want me, you’d want me more. I was so terrified of losing you,’ she confided half under her breath.
‘Kitty.’ It was an aching reproof. ‘You never lost me. Never once in all these years. I didn’t have any right to be jealous, but just the thought of you with another man turns me into a vicious bastard. I’ll get over it. I’m not asking any questions.’
Her heart was in her damp eyes. ‘There’s never been another man, Jake. I’ve always loved you and I always will.’
He took her mouth in a passionately hungry assault, his hand roving to the ties on her filmy covering, jerking them loose to explore beneath. Her fingers tugged his shirt out of his jeans, her breath sobbing in her throat as she made contact with his warm, sensuous flesh.
With an inarticulate sound of frustration, he lifted his head. ‘If you don’t stop doing that, I won’t be able to control myself long enough to explain why I lost my head over the Grange.’
‘Stop doing what?’
He intercepted the hand roaming over the silk-smooth skin just below his waistband. ‘You can take up exactly where you left off in a few minutes,’ he promised unsteadily. ‘Last winter on my thirtieth birthday I came into my grandmother’s money. My father was a big disappointment to her, and before she died she cut him out of her will and made me her beneficiary. I was only a child and, since she had no idea how I would turn out, she ensured that I couldn’t touch a penny before I was thirty.’