A Night of Scandal

‘He stopped him?’

‘He killed him.’ Nathaniel turned his head to look at her. His eyes were empty. Tired. ‘It was an accident—he was so drunk that he fell and his head cracked against the stairs and then …’ His brow furrowed. ‘There was so much blood. My father’s blood, Annabelle’s blood, her beautiful face a torn mess. Jacob was frozen with shock. And my father was dead.’

Annabelle?

Annabelle was his sister?

Digesting that fact, Katie stood still, hopelessly inadequate in the face of so much pain. ‘I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.’

‘I wasn’t.’ He turned and locked his hand in the front of her shirt and hauled her against him, his eyes the deep, menacing colour of a sea in a storm. ‘I wasn’t sorry, Katie. I stood there thinking, Now it will stop. But I wasn’t sorry.’ His voice was thickened with a vile mess of emotion, from guilt to bitter anger. ‘So now you know. Now you know who I really am. Your world and my world don’t even overlap.’ He released her so suddenly she staggered. The intensity of emotion pulsed from him like a living force and suddenly she realised just how much he kept locked inside, hidden away from the world.

‘Do you feel guilty for not being sorry? Is that what’s wrong? You were just a child, Nathaniel.’ She slid her arms around his waist but he stood rigid and unresponsive.

‘He was my father, and I hated him. That makes me the monster.’

‘It makes you human.’ Her throat thickened by tears, Katie rubbed her hands over the tense muscles of his back and then slid her arms around the strong column of his neck. ‘You’re not a monster, Nathaniel. You were a little boy who wanted, and deserved, to be loved by his father.’

‘At the time I assumed it was shock.’ It was as if he was talking to himself. ‘I assumed I’d wake up one day and feel sorry that it had happened. I’m still waiting to feel sorry.’

She pressed her lips to his chest, as if her touch could heal his agony. ‘You have no reason to feel guilty.’

‘I didn’t protect my sister.’

‘You were a child!’

His beautiful mouth twisted into a cynical smile. ‘We weren’t allowed to be children.’

They stood for a moment in silence and then she lifted her head. ‘What happened to Jacob?’

‘There were expensive lawyers in sharp suits. They sorted it.’

So few words to describe such a hideous trauma.

‘But that didn’t make it go away, did it? You all had to live with that. Who took care of you?’

‘To begin with, Jacob. Then one day he just took off.’ In the dim light, his eyes shone a deep, glittering blue. ‘That was the day I really thought Annabelle might die. I guess she saw him as the one stable person in our very unstable family. She loved him so much.’ He gave a crooked smile. ‘Big mistake. If you don’t care, you can’t get hurt. Annabelle cared, and she got herself badly hurt.’

And not just Annabelle.

If you don’t care, you can’t get hurt.

That was why he avoided relationships. Not because he didn’t believe in love, but because he was afraid of love. He associated love with carnage, both emotional and physical.

‘You must have felt so lost and vulnerable, losing your father and then Jacob.’ Katie hesitated. ‘When you walked off the stage that night, you kept saying, “I have to warn Annabelle.” What were you warning her about, Nathaniel? What really happened on opening night?’

‘Jacob was in the audience.’

‘And you haven’t seen him for a while?’

There was a long silence. ‘I last saw Jacob twenty years ago.’

‘Twenty years!’ Katie couldn’t hide her shock. ‘You haven’t seen him since he walked out?’

‘We’re not what you’d call a close family. As reunions went, this one wasn’t exactly successful.’

Katie found it difficult to absorb. ‘No wonder you reacted the way you did—no wonder you walked out.’

‘I kept thinking about Annabelle. How his sudden reappearance would affect her. I just wanted to warn her he was back.’