The Fatherhood Affair

‘Damien, I’m very attracted to you...’

He made a sound of deep exasperation. ‘Is this the overture before I get the “Can we be good friends?” speech?’

She flushed. ‘I can’t afford another mistake like the one I made with Brett.’

‘Can’t you trust your instincts, Natalie?’ he burst out, his eyes blazing with the need she had fed so recklessly.

‘My instincts led me into marrying Brett,’ she cried, more in protest at what Damien stirred than with any logic in her argument. ‘I need some distance to get everything in proportion.’

‘You had everything in proper proportion when you couldn’t remember anything.’ His hands lifted in a gesture of urgent appeal. ‘Stop listening to your mind. Go with what you feel. Come to me.’

‘I can’t. Not yet. Please...’ She stepped back, fighting the strong tug on her heart. ‘I’m asking you to wait, Damien.

’

‘Wait!’ His face twisted with feeling. He fought to control it but it throbbed through his voice. ‘How long, Natalie? How long am I to wait this time? Until you have another car accident? Another lifetime?’

‘Until I believe what you tell me.’

It silenced him. He arched his head back as though she had hit him with an uppercut to the jaw. Then slowly he turned to look out over the mist. ‘Will-o-the-wisp,’ he muttered. ‘You’ll bracket me with Brett until the day you die.’

That could be true. Natalie had no answer to it. She’d had a rotten husband, and for all she knew, Damien had been aiding and abetting Brett in his infidelities, perhaps encouraging him to do what he’d done, wanting her to find out, wanting her to turn to him, wanting to win out in the end. Or was that a twisted reaction from the miserable life she had led?

Who else knew Damien intimately? Who could tell her what he was really like to live with?

The answer came immediately.

His wife. His ex-wife. Lyn. It should be easy enough to find a Lyn Chandler who worked on a woman’s magazine.

‘Give me a month. I need that to get my bearings, Damien. I promise I’ll give you a definite answer then.’

He turned to her with a gaze that seared her soul. ‘What if you’ve conceived our child today, Natalie? Will I be told?’

Her stomach contracted. ‘It won’t happen. I’m sure it won’t.’

‘But if it does?’ he insisted.

‘You’ll be told,’ she heard herself say. The consequence of throwing caution to the wind was that she could end up with a child whose father she did not wish to marry or live with. ‘You’ll definitely be told,’ she repeated, but her lips trembled.

She turned and headed up the path, trepidation for the future in every step. It was vitally important that she remember everything, vitally important to question Damien’s ex-wife. She had to know what kind of husband Damien had been, and why the only thing he and his wife had shared in the end was a divorce.

CHAPTER TEN

NATALIE spent five days at Fairmont. It was a fine, impersonal place for her to rest, eat well, exercise in the heated indoor pool, and take long leisurely walks. The room service was excellent, the amenities first class. She didn’t seek company and no one pressed company upon her.

She tried very hard to marshall all the facts she knew and make some consistent order of them. Bits and pieces of her four years of marriage to Brett came back to her, and she tried to take a more objective view of her husband, and why he was the way he was.

He had taken her home to that house in Narrabeen. It had already been furnished by a ‘first-class’ interior decorator, and Brett was intensely proud of it. No way would he countenance any change.

He had been generous with money, encouraging her to buy ‘first-class’ clothes and whatever added dignity and status to their lives. She was the woman in his home, his wife, the artist, the mother of his child...all images that reflected well on him.

It was important to Brett to be perceived as a man who had the best of everything.

Damien was right about Brett’s not relating to her, or any woman, as a person. She had never connected that aspect of Brett’s character to his background as Damien had. She had viewed their upbringings as something they had in common, both of them only children, cared for by a single parent.

Yet hadn’t not having known a father influenced her to stay with Brett despite her personal unhappiness? She hadn’t wanted Ryan to be without a father, and Brett had been very good with Ryan. Perhaps as his father was to him.

If attitudes and values came from family background, then what of Damien’s? Surely, with his happily married parents and an ample number of brothers and sisters, he should be a well-rounded person, confident of holding his own anywhere and in any company. That was the way he came across. Perhaps Brett had seen Damien as the man who had everything, someone to pit himself against to be at the top.