‘Excuse me, that is exactly the point!’ Tabby argued fiercely, recalling the terrible feeling of humiliation she had experienced that day and stiffening in sick remembrance. ‘I was ready, willing and eager to tell you about Jake. I think you need to remember what a louse you were to me that day—’
‘I did and I said nothing—’
‘And nothing was precisely what you deserved and got for treating me like the dirt beneath your feet!’ Tabby hurled furiously. ‘I practically begged you to speak to me in private in spite of the fact that your awful snobby relatives and friends were all lined up with you and shooting me looks of loathing as if I, rather than my father, had been the cause of that ghastly accident!’
Christien was rigid and pale with rage. ‘Ciel! That day I was too busy grieving for my father to concern myself with the behaviour of other people—’
‘You didn’t give a damn! I was eighteen and I was alone in a foreign country and I was grieving too.’ Tabby was shaking, raw with pain and the need to justify her own actions and defend herself. ‘But you talk now and you behaved then as if you had cornered the grief market. You lost a father. Well, at least you were able to look back on your memories of him with respect and affection. I was denied even that because my dad got drunk and destroyed a lot of other lives as well as his own!’
Christien spread two lean hands in a movement of angry rebuttal. ‘I did not even notice how others were behaving. If you think that grief was all that lay behind my distance with you that day—’
‘Don’t you shout at me!’ Tabby interrupted wrathfully.
Hauling in a furious breath, Christien then froze in bewilderment at the strange noise he could hear emanating down from the floor above. Tabby was quicker to recognise and react to her son’s frightened howl and she raced for the stairs in automatic maternal pilot. She found Jake sitting bolt upright in bed, tears running down his pale, scared face.
‘The car…the car ran me over!’ her son sobbed, letting her work out for herself what had caused the nightmare that had wakened him from his sleep.
Tabby tugged his small, trembling body into her arms. ‘It was just a dream, Jake…just a dream. The car didn’t run you over. You’re safe. You’re all right. You got a fright but you weren’t hurt,’ she told him with a note of soothing and determined cheer in her quiet intonation.
But the consequence that she had feared from the minute she ran to her son’s bedside was already happening. Although Jake had stopped crying as soon as she’d put her arms round him, he was now struggling for breath and wheezing. Worse, because he was not yet fully awake and still recovering from the effects of his nightmare, he was all the more distressed by his physical difficulties.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHRISTIEN was paralysed to the spot by shock as he watched Jake fight to get air into his skinny little chest. As Christien had not even a nodding acquaintance with what fear felt like, his fear on his son’s behalf hit him as hard as a bullet from a gun. He watched Tabby grab up what looked like an inhaler and tend to the little boy. His little boy.
‘What’s the matter with him…what can I do?’ Christien demanded, sick to the stomach with the force of his concern.
‘You don’t need to do anything. Jake’s fine.’ Tabby’s squeaky tone was a leaden but obvious attempt to conceal her anxiety sooner than increase the risk of Jake getting more upset. ‘It’s just a little asthma attack and the medication in the bronchodilator will help put it under control.’
Unimpressed and constitutionally incapable of standing around doing nothing and feeling helpless, Christien stepped out onto the landing, dug out his mobile phone and hastily called a doctor.
Even as his son’s breathing difficulties subsided Christien discovered that he could not take his attention from Jake. In appearance the little boy was unmistakably a Laroche. His black curls ran down into a peak at the hairline just as Christien’s did. His eyes were just like his paternal grandmother’s—dark, liquid and very expressive. His olive skin was in direct contrast to Tabby’s fair colouring and the pure lines of his bone structure were already hinting at the strong features that could be seen in the family paintings. However, in apparent defiance of those genes from a tall, well-built family, Jake looked shockingly small and slight to Christien, who had had very little to do with young children. But then illness had probably stunted his son’s growth, Christien reflected sadly.
Tabby’s tension was beginning to drain away when Christien sat down on the other side of Jake’s bed as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Jake stared at the tall, dark male in his city suit with huge surprised eyes.
Tabby was annoyed that Christien was pushing in just when she had got her son calmed down. ‘Jake…this is—’
Christien closed a hand over Jake’s tiny one and breathed shakily, ‘I am your papa…your father, Christien Laroche—’
‘Christien!’ Tabby hissed in a piercing whisper, shaken by the ill-considered immediacy of that startling announcement. ‘If you upset him, it could cause another—’
‘Daddy…?’
Jake was studying Christien with big, wondering eyes.
‘Daddy…Papa. You can call me w
hatever you like.’ Satisfied to have introduced himself and claimed his rightful place in his son’s life, Christien smoothed a thumb over the little fingers curling within his. He smiled. Jake began to smile too.
‘Do you like football?’ Jake piped up hopefully.
‘Never miss a match,’ Christien lied without hesitation.
Feeling excluded for the first time since her son had been born, Tabby watched in a daze as Jake and Christien proceeded to demonstrate that the gap between three years and twenty-nine years was not so great as any mere female disinterested in sport might have supposed. But then Christien was bright enough and smooth enough to sell sand in a desert. A bell sounded and she jerked in surprise, only then appreciating that the cottage now possessed a doorbell.
‘That will probably be the doctor.’ Christien vaulted upright.
‘You called out a doctor?’ Tabby questioned in some annoyance.