‘My father met a girl—a young woman. She’d recently moved to the area with her family. Your father and Tom had gone abroad for the summer—they had comfortably well-off parents, unlike my paternal grandparents, who were fisher-folk. My father’s parents couldn’t afford to send him to France and Italy to see the sights. He was expected to work on the fishing boat once he was home from university. They’d had to sacrifice much to allow him to go in the first place.’
He looked away from her, staring through the windscreen. His profile might have been sculpted in granite. The clear forehead, the chiselled straight nose, the firm mouth and strong square jaw. He really was a very good-looking man, Marianne thought vaguely, but disturbing. Infinitely disturbing.
‘The two of them fell in
love, my father and this young woman. He was besotted by her. He couldn’t believe such a beautiful young girl had fallen so madly for him. They had a wonderful summer together. She would wait each evening for him to return from fishing so they could be together. They had barbecues for two on the beach with the fish he’d caught, walks through the countryside, evenings sitting in the gardens of village pubs, things like that. She had golden-blond hair and the bluest of eyes, my father said. In that respect—the eyes—you are not like your mother.’
She had been expecting it, realisation dawning slowly as he had talked, but it was still a shock. Licking her lips, she said, ‘Your father fell in love with my mother?’
‘Not just fell in love with her—he always loved her. He still does. And my mother knew. She knew there was a girl in England he was trying to forget—a girl who had broken his heart and left only a small piece for anyone else. But my mother loved him enough to take what was left and make it work. They had a good marriage on the whole, even though she knew she was second-best.’
The bitterness in his voice broke through for a moment and Marianne watched as he took a deep breath, gritting his teeth. When he next spoke his voice was steady again, unemotional. ‘Your father and Tom came back from their travels one week before the university term began. By the end of it your mother had switched her affections from the son of a poor fisherman to a man who had wealth and power in his family, the son of a successful businessman who owned a big fine house which would one day become his.’
Marianne’s throat constricted. She cleared it, then said tightly, ‘If you are insinuating my mother married my father for his wealth and property, you are wrong. They loved each other.’
He ignored this. ‘The three of them—my father, yours and Tom—had one year left at university. On the eve of my father’s graduation his father and brother were drowned in a storm and the fishing boat lost. My grandmother went to live with her widowed sister some miles inland. At the same time your father and mother got engaged. There was now nothing to hold my father here. A mixed blessing in the circumstances. Certainly I don’t think he could have stood seeing your parents settling into married bliss.’
She stared at him, colour burning in her cheeks and her hands clenched in her lap. How dared he say these things about her mother? How dared he? ‘I don’t know what went on all those years ago, Mr Steed, and neither do you, as it happens. You only have your father’s side of things. But I do know my mother and she would never have done what you’ve suggested. If she cared for your father as you say I’m sure she was in turmoil when my father came on the scene and she realised what she felt for him was the sort of love that lasts a lifetime. Because that’s what they had.’
‘How nice and how fortunate it was the wealthy son of a businessman and not the poor fisherman who made her heart beat faster.’
He was doing it again—saying her mother had married for money. ‘You’re disgusting, do you know that?’
‘Why? Because I’m telling you the truth?’
Marianne called him a name—one that made his eyes widen. ‘It’s not the truth, just your distorted version of it. I can’t help it if your father is a bitter old man who has poisoned your mind as well as his.’
‘Don’t talk about my father like that.’
Marianne reared up at the hypocrisy, her voice flying up the scale. ‘Your father? Your father! I’ll say what I like after your insinuations about my mother. She was a wonderful woman, the best, and never in a million years would she have married my father simply because he was going to inherit a business and a big house. She wasn’t like that.’
Her fury strangely seemed to calm him. His voice lower than it had been a moment ago and without the growl to it, he said, ‘Calm yourself, woman. You’re overreacting.’
Marianne didn’t think about what she did next; it was pure instinct. The sound of the slap echoed in the close confines of the car and immediately the handprint of her fingers were etched in red on his tanned face. She stared at him in the silence that had fallen, inwardly horrified at what she’d done but determined not to let him see it. She had never struck another person in her life.
Seconds ticked by. ‘Feel better?’ he drawled coldly.
She raised her chin. If she had tried to answer him she would have burst into tears and that was not an option.
‘I can see we are going to have to agree to disagree about certain elements in the past.’ He raised a hand to his face, flexing his jaw from side to side, one eyebrow raised. ‘That taken as read, at least we now have all the cards on the table, so to speak.’
Marianne gathered herself together with some effort. Cards on the table? Hardly. If Rafe Steed and his father bore such an immense grudge about the past, then why the proposal regarding Seacrest? It didn’t add up. Her voice as chilly as his had been, she said, ‘Why are you and your father buying my home, Mr Steed?’
He made a show of relaxing back in his seat but Marianne was sure it was just that—a show. He was as tense as she was inwardly, she knew it.
His blue eyes narrowed against the sunlight streaming in through the window, he said quietly, ‘I’ve told you why the offer has been made. My father and I are in the hotel business and have converted several suitable properties in the States. I think it would be healthy for him to have a project here rather than having to concentrate on his illness away from family and friends. He liked the idea of obtaining the house when I put the idea to him.’
‘Because you both feel you’re getting one over on my father?’ she asked baldly, deliberately not mincing her words. ‘Acquiring Seacrest would mean you’d secured the main thing which had persuaded my mother to marry my father, the way you see it, surely? Isn’t that so?’
He surveyed her indolently for a moment or two. ‘What a suspicious little mind you have, Miss Carr.’
‘What a nasty little mind you have, Mr Steed.’
‘I understand from Tom and Gillian that you are very like your mother.’ It wasn’t laudatory. ‘In looks, personality—everything.’
‘I hope so.’ Her head was high and her eyes steady.
‘She must have given the same appearance of fragility while being as—’ he paused, obviously changing his mind about the next word before he continued ‘—strong as an ox beneath that delicate exterior.’