by Orla Bailey
My eyes don’t waver. “I trust you, Jack.”
He draws my hand from his mouth, confused. “What?”
“I trust you.” I’m struggling to come to this decision but I know it’s the right one. The only one I can make. Without it, I might as well leave now; accept that we are finally finished and I know I will never be able to willingly do that.
“I don’t want –”
“– My trust?” I stare in disbelief. “You want that from me, above everything. You said so.”
“Not this way.”
Why not? “I don’t get you.” I pull my hand from his. “I said I trust you. I want to trust you.”
“Not like this.”
I’m not the only one staring.
“My God! You’re feeling guilty.” He doesn’t think he deserves my trust. How bad can this be? Perhaps he and Amanda are not over at all. Perhaps they are only just beginning and Singapore confirmed it. This weekend is our goodbye, not theirs. The kiss-off. Amanda is trusting Jack to say goodbye forever. To me.
A sob escapes my throat.
Jack says nothing. Grasping my wrist, he turns and marches me away. Tracking down a course official, he demands a private room. It’s located instantly, we’re lead to it and left alone.
He wastes no time. “It’s time you knew anyway.”
My heartbeat quivers, dips, but continues on its numb beat. I’m not ready to hear those final words.
I fear the knowledge of Amanda as mother of Jack’s child more than anything else in the world. Their child is the one thing that will bind him to her for all time. One thing she will always hold above me. And I cannot deny it – that’s the way it should be. He should be with his child. His family. It is right they are together and I cannot come between them. I understand what it is like for a child to lose their parents. It is not in me to wish that lonely desolation on Jack’s child. Nor Amanda’s. No wonder she fought me off with everything at her disposal. She was fighting for her child and I have been the one to unknowingly threaten them.
I struggle to restrain hopeless tears. I am damaged. Destroyed. Defeated by the hand of fate. The eternal knot of karmic destiny.
“Don’t cry. I didn’t want you hurt by any of this.”
His words break me wide open and I weep. I can’t even speak.
Jack understands. He sits me down and hunkers down in front of me, holding my shaking hands firmly between his. “I never meant for you to learn about it this way.”
I swallow past the lump in my throat. “Did you mean for me to learn it at all?” Another wedge of secrecy driven between us. A splinter in my heart.
“I would have told you but it isn’t important to us. To you and me.”
“How can you say that?”
“It changes nothing.”
“That is no longer your decision to make.”
“I won’t let it change anything between us.” For the first time he sounds less sure of me.
“Did you hope I would never find out that you had fathered Amanda’s child? Your child.”
“There is no child.” His voice holds no uncertainty.
I’m confused “Your mother said –”
“I know what she said. What you thought she said. Now I want you to listen to the facts.” He whips the folded handkerchief from his top pocket and wipes the tears from my face.
“I deserve that much at least.” I fix all my hopes on Jack’s insistence there is no child and ignore the devastation any other truth would bring me.
“You do.” He takes a deep breath. “I admitted Amanda and I were engaged once. We…” – it is so obvious he hesitates over how he will phrase the damning words – “…had only a brief personal association.”
“You made love to her.”
“No. Not love.”
“You wanted sex with her, then,” I state mulishly. “She fired your rockets.” Let’s call it what it is.
He pauses only briefly, thinking better of reprimanding me for being unladylike. “Yes.” He continues. “I was simply – I’m sorry, kitten – pursuing casual sex with her but it soon became clear she wanted something more exclusive.” He races on to countermand my stunned expression. “Something I was unwilling to give her. I only considered Amanda in the first place because she seemed so totally committed to her career to the exclusion of all else.” Jack pauses to gauge my reaction to his confession.
I can see how he might have made this mistake with Amanda Devereaux. She is nothing if not single-minded. But he fails to take account of his greater personal inducements that a woman like Amanda would switch allegiance for. “And she’s beautiful.” I wait for him to acknowledge the attraction and he does when he glances briefly at the floor.
He recovers well. “I socialised with that type of woman precisely because they wanted what I wanted: a simple physical connection and nothing more.” Again he measures the effect his admission is having on me.
“No strings attached.” Is that all he wanted from me in the beginning too? “I saw the photographs in the newspapers, Jack.” I cried myself to sleep night after night over them.
“I’m so sorry, kitten.”
I know he is but I don’t feel like absolving him so easily, even though I know I mean more to him than they ever could. “Go on.” I wanted this truth and now I must deal with it.
“I thought Amanda understood how things were between us.” He sighs. “It was a complete misjudgement on my part and I accept all the blame. I ended our personal involvement quickly but it seemed easier, less unkind under the circumstances, if we remained friends.”
“You cared for her?”
“Not the way I should have done when I allowed myself to become intimately involved. I’m personally ashamed of that, let alone not wanting to admit it to you. I don’t want you, above anyone, to think badly of me.”
“Can’t you see I need to know everything?”
“Yes. I’m sorry. I created a problem.”
I could almost forgive him for that admission alone. “So I’m not the only one who messes up?”
“Far from it. I’ve tried so hard to keep this situation from escalating that many times I forgot I was trying to change my domineering ways. For you.”
“But you must have wanted Amanda. Felt desire for her.” It’s his turn to wince at my phrasing. Am I hoping the raw hurt of his admission will scrub away the deeper pain I’m feeling? Anything must be better than Jack having any real emotional intimacy with her. Fathering her child. “Be honest.”
“Yes.” His eyes cut away from mine again. “You could put it like that.”
I wait, stubbornly silent, until he looks at me again.
“I think there must have been a little more to it than that,” I insist. “Affection? I know you. You have a sense of honour.”
“I’m just a man.”
“I know Amanda too. I think she wanted you very badly.” Still does. “If she set out to get you, she’d do anything in her power to make it happen.”
He looks thoughtful. “Perhaps. That doesn’t excuse my part in the affair.”
“No,” I agree. “It doesn’t.” Especially when I wanted to be with him so badly, long before Amanda came on the scene, yet he so easily denied me.
“I ended things quickly because I only ever wanted you. All the time I spent away from you was empty. I filled it with work and drunken, careless affairs. Amanda was a thoughtless need. A distraction. All any of them ever were, were distractions.”
“All?” I stare wide-eyed. Am I ready to hear him confess to how many women he indulged his misery in?
His lips wrench themselves into a twist. “Sorry. I’m not handling this very well. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I know you had a life between us.” I did too, if you can call it that. “What happened? I don’t imagine Amanda liked being given the brush-off.”
“She took my refusal to continue the affair rather badly. I tried to be kind; persuade her to move on, gently. She tried to
persuade me to change my mind. Repeatedly.”
“I can imagine.”
He looks rueful. “It was a holy mess but I want you to know I didn’t budge.” Sincerity shines from his eyes into mine. “I never went there again. I was done with her.”
“And this child your mother spoke of?” I say it almost reluctantly. It surely wasn’t a figment of her imagination.
Much as it hurts, I accept Jack and Amanda have been lovers. I’m living with the fact that she still wants him to be hers rather than mine. But I believe him when he says it is over.
However, his mother spoke of their child. It isn’t impossible. Despite Jack’s denial, the idea of a child connecting them continues to eat away at me.
“I made sure our paths didn’t cross too much after I told her we were through. I didn’t want to rub her nose in the fact that I didn’t intend to pursue a relationship with her.”
I stroke his cheek. My Jack is too decent to be that deliberately cruel to any woman.
“But a number of weeks after we were last together she told me she was pregnant with my child.” His face insists it’s not a memory he cares to remember.
“She lied to you.” I see the truth in an instant.
Jack’s love for me shines from his eyes. “I suspected that possibility right from the start. Even drunk, I was always careful to use protection. I asked her to provide evidence.”
“She’s devious enough. How did she persuade you to discount it as a lie?”
I swear I see his adoration for my defence of him. “She produced a positive pregnancy test.”
“And you saw her use it?”
“Of course not. I asked for more definite confirmation. The fact is I didn’t want it to be true. That would have ruined every plan I ever had for us to be together. You and me.” He stops and takes a few moments. I like to think it’s because he’s realising how close he came to losing me. “She brought me an ultrasound scan and a doctor’s report with her name all over it. I had no choice but to accept them. If she was carrying my child, I was responsible. I did the only thing I could do.”
“You agreed to marry her.” It wasn’t love. It was never love for Amanda. My heart lifts. “Oh, Jack.”
“I wanted it kept quiet. I had to tell my family though, obviously.”
“Did they meet with her?”
“My parents came to London to discuss the situation. I couldn’t bring myself to take her to my family home. They didn’t exactly take to her. They wanted us both to wait until after the baby was born before we made it official.”
“Did they suspect she might not be telling the truth?”
“I think maybe they did. I was too wrapped up in the knowledge that once I married Amanda for the child’s sake any future I’d planned with you was over for good. And it was all my fault.”
“What happened?”
“I insisted on confidentiality in return for my agreement to marry Amanda for the sake of the child. Later, Eimear and Aiden stayed with me on their way through to Dubai. That visit changed everything.”
I understand instantly. “Eimear’s a nurse.”
“Amanda was supposed to be quite well into her pregnancy by then. Eimear insisted there was no way she could be.”
“Didn’t you notice?”
“I know it seems impossible but I made business an excuse. I worked around the clock. Travelled. I kept my distance from Amanda most of the time. She had my word and that was all she was getting of me. I provided for her financially but I insisted we continue to live separately until after we were married. The truth is I couldn’t bear to look at her or be around her. She represented all my crushed hopes and dreams.”
I can’t even begin to imagine the awful scene that took place. “Tell me.”
“Eimear confronted her after dinner one night and Amanda broke down.”
“She told you the truth? That she’d lied?”
He looks at me incredulously. “She told me she’d lost our baby. Said she hadn’t known how to break the dreadful news. She cried.”
“And you believed her?”
“To be honest all I felt was relief. I no longer had to go through with a sham marriage to a woman I didn’t love. One I hardly cared about. All I could think about was you. I had been granted a God-given reprieve. A chance to make things right with you. I was entirely selfish. That was the night I came round to see you and broke your door down to get to you.”
“Were you planning on telling me everything then?”
“Yes.”
“Instead you found me drunk.” Wasted. Incoherent. Damaged. How could he have burdened me with any of that?
“I realised we needed time.”
Time I used to push him further away.
“Do you believe Amanda was never pregnant at all?” I know what I think.
“I do now. After everything that’s happened to you, I think she’s capable of anything.”
“Her best chance to keep you had slipped through her fingers but she wanted you so badly, when I came back into your life she was prepared to do whatever it took,” I agree. “I was so upset when she told me you’d taken her with you to Singapore.”
“I saw it as an opportunity to make the situation very clear, as well as keep her where I could see her: as far away from you as possible.”
“Make what situation clear?”
“That I was going to be with you. That I wanted to be with you above all things. That whatever happened in the past between her and I, there was no hope whatsoever of any future between us. I told her she would never have me. Never.”
“That must be when she phoned me. She tried to make me leave you because she could see you were never going to leave me.”
“Can you forgive me, Tabitha? I’ve made you so unhappy. I want to spend the rest of my life making up for that.”
“Just love me, Jack, the way I love you.”
He pushes to his feet and hauls me into a close embrace. I feel a ragged sigh of utter relief wash through his body into mine.
“It makes me so happy to hear you say that, my darling girl. I was scared you would never forgive me for what I did with Amanda when I should have waited for you.”
“Don’t forget all those other women!” I’m laughing and crying at the same time and probably trying to degrade Amanda’s importance in his past.
“What other women?” he quips. “I couldn’t love you any more than I do right this minute.” He sweeps my hat off and his lips worship mine, tenderly, reverently until a natural shift occurs and the fires of our recent denial begin to consume us. His lips devour mine.
I push against his chest. “Jack?”
“Mmm.” He rocks me against him and I feel his heart thundering in his chest, filling mine.
“Can we go and tell your mother we’re alright. She’ll be worried.”
“Dear, sweet girl. We can do anything you want as long as we’re together.” He holds me a little in front of him. “Don’t ever leave me, Tabitha.”
“I promise.”
“I’ll hold you to that promise.” His gaze burns through me.
I try to dispel his dark shadow with a cheeky smile. “I’ll sign a contract if you like.”
He looks at me with bemusement. “Now there’s a happy thought.”
I narrow my eyes. I could almost swear he’s keeping secrets still. “Is there something you wish to tell me, Jack Keogh?”
“That’s my line.”
“What’s yours is mine,” I counter, pressing him. “Well?”
He won’t budge. “Tell you later.” He leans in and whispers, even though there’s only the two of us in the room. “In bed. Come on. Let’s go back to the family and put their hearts at ease.”
Now all I can think about is sharing a bed with Jack. It seems like it’s been forever. We walk back hand in hand. He squeezes mine every time someone tries to engage him in conversation. Infinitely polite but assertive, Jack won’t be diverted from fulfilling my wishes.
<
br /> There must be some rapid communication system operating throughout the Keogh clan because by the time we re-enter the marquee every member of his family has assembled from the four corners of the racecourse.
Jack and I step up to them as they wait expectantly. The women get it immediately. I see them relax and smile as they read our body language.
“I’m sorry I blurted out what was none of my business,” Fionnoula speaks out.
I nudge Jack.
“Everything to do with me is your business, mother, just as it’s Tabitha’s.”
“So you’re okay about everything?” Eimear asks.
Jack and I glance at each other.
“Best to have things out in the open.” We’ve both been guilty of keeping things too close to our chest. There’s nothing about Jack or his past, I can’t handle any more and he’s revealed a strength and faith in me, I never knew existed.
Diarmuid pulls his eyes from the mammoth projector screen back to us. “We’d better get out in the open if we don’t want to miss the start of this year’s Derby.”
“It’s the reason we’re here, after all,” I reply, laughing at his impatience to be back in the thick of the real action of the day.
I watch with quizzical interest as Jack and his mother exchange brief glances. He shrugs when he notices me staring and we follow everyone pouring outside.
The tense excitement of the crowd mounts as the horses collect at the starting gates. I try to spot Camelot so Jack lends me his binoculars again. He points my horse out to me with one arm wrapped around my waist, his fingers resting lightly at my hip. The anticipation mounts as they come under starter’s orders and they’re off. I bounce in Jack’s arms, yelling out my horse’s name. He joins in until I glance back over my shoulder at him and laugh.
The runners are moving fast, sods of turf flying from their hooves as they rumble by.
“The going’s pretty heavy. They’ll labour before the end.”
