by Lynne Graham
Grant met her at Nice airport. A tall, slimly built man, who kept himself in the physical peak of condition, he had sun-streaked blond hair and the same cheekbones that lent such definition to his daughter’s face. Kitty experienced a split second of joyous recognition and then it all went wrong.
They were mobbed by his faithful fans and an aggressive contingent of paparazzi. As the suffocating crush of human bodies was held at bay by Grant’s security guards, Kitty was at screaming-point. She was painfully convinced that she had just received yet another polished paternal demonstration of how to manipulate the publicity machine to one’s own advantage.
With remarkable forbearance, her father neglected to comment on her bruised eyes, her pallor and her fined-down features. Unperturbed by her monosyllabic responses, he managed to have an entire conversation with himself in the rear of the limousine that ferried them to the villa where he was staying.
The palatial building, loaned to him by a close friend, was secreted behind high walls and electronic gates. In a vast tiled hall with a soaring ceiling and the acoustics of Westminster Cathedral, he took gross insensitivity to new heights.
‘You’ll want to freshen up before we go out to dinner,’ he told her in a rallying tone. ‘We’re eating out at La Chevre d’Or. A gastronomic experience par excellence.’
Under her despairing gaze, he kissed his fingertips French fashion. ‘And it will be a dinner you will never forget,’ an unfamiliar voice promised sweetly from the top of the stairs.
Grant whipped round, his charismatic smile evaporating with almost comical suddenness. ‘What are you doing here?’ he snapped.
A lush brunette, clad in ice-blue separates, was calmly descending the stairs, secure in the knowledge that she held the floor. Kitty recognised her instantly. Grant’s co-star, Yolanda Simons.
‘I made the booking at La Chevre D’Or,’ Yolanda announced, directing a killing smile at Kitty. ‘I should warn you that you will be sharing your table with a third party—namely me. I’m not prepared to be publicly ditched during the making of this film. Do stop scowling like that, Grant. You look like a cross little boy. You should understand that this is a matter of image. It is not personal.’
Kitty shot her flushed father a disgusted glance. ‘Tell her.’
‘Tell her what?’ He employed volume and voice pitch to intimidate.
Kitty was beyond intimidation. ‘Grant is my father, Miss Simons. I am his daughter. I am not a rival. And I do not have any plans to spoil your dinner engagement this evening. I shall be eating in.’
For the count of five seconds, Yolanda’s sultry mouth was wide. Kitty didn’t dare look at her father. She continued on up the stairs in the wake of her luggage.
‘Your daughter? Your daughter!’ Yolanda was shrieking in a rage. ‘And you let me think…’
Grant was receiving his just deserts. Kitty stifled a pang of conscience as she heard him trying to bluster loudly out of the confrontation. She had done something she should have done years ago. She had forced the issue, and now that the skeleton was out of the closet it would eventually rattle its bones in the outside world.
A maid arrived to do her unpacking. Dismissing her, Kitty continued to pace the floor. She expected her father to blaze explosively into her presence at any moment. When he failed to appear, she wondered if he was taking Yolanda out to dinner after all. She was well acquainted with her parent’s astonishing ability to charm the angriest females into purring complacency.
At eleven she abandoned her strained vigil and crawled into her elegant Empire bed to stare miserably up at the ceiling. As the turbulence of her emotions emerged from the stultifying fog of self-pity, doubts cast her into turmoil.
Jake had run over her like a truck. But hadn’t she connived at her own downfall? Candour would have resolved the conflict between them. What she was struggling to come to terms with now was that, even in the midst of that violent argument, she had made no real attempt to tell him the truth about Grant.
It had been so easy to tell Yolanda, but she had withheld it from the man she loved. Jealousy had twisted Jake’s view of her with disastrous consequences. She had kept quiet, stubbornly and stupidly using the most divisive and combustible emotion in existence as a subversive weapon. Jake had retaliated and she had bolted, something he had once suggested she did all too easily.
When those pictures of her with Grant hit the papers, their separation would be permanent. She fought a sensation that came very close to pure panic and an aching tide of longing for Jake could not be put to flight. She was remembering how supportive and kind he had been in spite of her insults when she had first arrived at Lower Ridge. And by the time she worked through to remembering how he had plunged into a burning house to save her life, she was crying her heart out so she didn’t hear the knock on the door.
‘I saw your light on…God,’ Grant groaned as she twisted away to wipe clumsily at her tear-swollen face. ‘This takes me back eight years to a phase I don’t want to live through with you again.’
Gulping she sat up and was nonplussed. He didn’t look furious. He didn’t walk in a very straight line either, which shook her. A devotee to the cult of the body beautiful, Grant usually stuck to mineral waters. He had a large brandy in his hands as he lowered himself down into an armchair by the bed. ‘I was planning to make a Press release about us when I finished the film,’ he informed her.
‘Were you?’
Meeting drenched violet eyes, he sighed, ‘Well, I was thinking about it. I don’t know why I let the charade go on for so long. No, that’s a lie. It amused me.’
Unaccustomed to her father in a morose mood, she forced a smile. ‘Did you soothe Yolanda?’
‘She didn’t need to be soothed. She went out of here laughing like a drain,’ he related humourlessly. ‘I spent the evening dreaming up a Press release about my long-lost daughter. I hope you’re not looking for recognisable facts. There aren’t any. I let your mother down badly. I am fifty-two years old tomorrow and you are the only person in my life whom I have ever really cared about. Some track record that, isn’t it?’
‘Fifty-two?’ she couldn’t help parroting.
He winced. ‘Fifty-two.’ He rolled his brandy round the glass slowly. ‘I thought I was being tactful earlier, but now I’ll be blunt. Tell me about him. I hate the bastard, but who needs an open mind at a wake?’
She swallowed chokily. ‘I don’t want to bore you.’
‘Take my mind off my birthday,’ he invited gloomily.
She started at the beginning and then leap-frogged back and forth. He phoned down for a bottle of brandy and another glass. She glossed so fast over the wedding, he almost missed out on it. When she mentioned the fire, he looked at her in horror and loosed a pungent remark about it being very kind of her to have kept him informed. When silence finally fell, her father was surveying her more cheerfully and she was in tears again. ‘At least he’s not after your money.’
Aghast, she stared at him. ‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’
‘It springs to mind that Romeo and Juliet hit on the perfect solution, but don’t take that as a serious piece of advice,’ he quipped. ‘Why the blazes didn’t you admit that I was your father? You really put him through the wringer. And in my name too. Now I’ve got him on my conscience as well. That is all I required to make my cup truly overflow.’
The internal phone buzzed. Grant stretched out a long arm to answer it. His frown of impatience slowly faded to be replaced by an expression of growing amusement. Involved in diving for another issue, Kitty didn’t follow one word in five of her father’s fast and fluent French.
‘Do something with your face,’ he said abruptly. ‘You’ve turned blotchy.’
Hurt, she wriggled off the bed and vanished into the en-suite bathroom. Cool water eased her hot, stretched skin. She tugged a comb through her tossed hair and returned to the bedroom.
‘Assuming that he takes the stairs at a normal pace, your husband is goi
ng to walk through that door in about three minutes,’ Grant imparted.
‘P…pardon?’ she stammered.
‘He pinned the security guard on the gate to the wall and forced him to use the phone.’ Her father’s eyes gleamed with rich appreciation. ‘It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that Jake has come to snatch you from your den of iniquity and wipe the floor with me. I wouldn’t miss this for the world.’
‘Jake’s here?’ In consternation, Kitty leapt back off the bed.
No knock gave forewarning of Jake’s precipitate entry. He came through the door and froze in his tracks, night-dark eyes whipping from Kitty’s stilled figure to the man standing on the other side of the room. Her eyes clung to his lithe, taut physique in close-fitting jeans and a leather blouson jacket. Her mouth ran dry and a wave of weakness swept her.
What Grant read in Jake’s unshielded eyes more than satisfied him. ‘Before you get the wrong idea—’ he began.
‘She belongs with me and I’m taking her home,’ Jake interposed harshly. ‘But before I leave, I intend to—’
‘I’m Kitty’s father,’ Grant cut in.
A muscle jerked at the edge of Jake’s hard-set mouth, his scrutiny impassive. Grant grimaced. ‘Maybe I flatter myself, but there’s a distinct resemblance. It’s always amazed me that nobody has ever noticed it.’
‘It’s true.’ Her tongue finally unglued from the roof of her mouth. ‘He is my father.’
‘And I’m going public tomorrow,’ Grant added. ‘We can get acquainted some other time when you’ve had the time to face the depressing prospect of our all being one family. Ciao, children. You can battle for the rest of the night if you like, but I’m for my bed.’
He strolled out of the door under Jake’s dazed stare. His dark head spun back, dark eyes flaming over her. ‘You’re his daughter? How the hell is that possible?’
She swallowed hard. ‘My mother was working as a hotel receptionist when she met him. He wasn’t famous then. He was with a repertory company that was touring the north. He persuaded her to return to London with him,’ she explained against a background of absolute silence that was uniquely discouraging. ‘He was offered a part in a television series in New York. He left her in London. He promised he would send her the money to join him. But he didn’t.’
‘Tell me something that’s a surprise.’ Jake snatched up the bottle of brandy and poured a measure into the glass she hadn’t touched. He raised it almost clumsily to his lips and threw it back. His clenched profile sent further arrows of alarm stabbing into her.
‘He’s always insisted that he did write to her, but I don’t think he did. When my mother decided to go home, she was pregnant, and she must have been desperate to decide to do that,’ Kitty shared tautly. ‘She went into labour before she arrived. She was dead by the time my grandparents reached the hospital. Grant wrote to them months afterwards asking if they’d had any news of her. They ignored the letter, but they kept it. The name and address of his solicitor was in it.’ She hesitated, torn by his silence. ‘I should have told you…I know I should have!’
‘You do look like him,’ Jake grated, swinging back to her. He loosed his breath in a hiss of anger. ‘Do you know what I’ve gone through for eight years? And all this time…hell!’ He thrust raking fingers through his wind-tousled hair. ‘I’m talking off the top of my head. Put it down to shock. I have never wanted to hit anyone so badly, and the notion didn’t leave me even when he said who he was. When I walked in here and found him…’ He shook his head violently. ‘But I was still going to take you home!’
‘Were you?’ she whispered.
‘I missed you by hours in London. I don’t think your father’s housekeeper likes him very much.’ A rueful quirk fleeted his lips. ‘She invited me into the house, told me where you were and offered me the use of the phone. I received the distinct impression that she was hoping he was about to have his nose put out of joint.’ The gleam of amused recollection evaporated and black lashes screened his gaze. ‘Only I wasn’t at all sure that I would have enough of a hold on you to do that.’
The pain roughly accentuating the stark admission tortured her. She twisted at the ribbon ties of her frothy peignoir. He took several restive steps away from her before he turned back. ‘When I found you gone, I was shattered,’ he muttered raggedly. ‘Considering the way I behaved, you probably wonder why, but I didn’t intend to drive you away. I wanted you to make a decision to put Maxwell and everything to do with him out of our lives, and if that meant shaming you into it, I was perfectly prepared to do it.’
Her eyes shimmered. ‘I can understand that, but I think it’s time that I told you what really happened to me…I mean, why I ended up with Grant,’ she outlined shakily. ‘My grandparents wrote to his solicitor and they sent me to him. He didn’t get much choice about taking responsibility for me. You see, I never ran away. They told me to go and they told me not to come back…’
Jake’s appraisal was intense, stark. ‘Why?’ he breathed. ‘Why did they do that?’
Her eyes were pools of pain in her pale face. ‘I lied to you, Jake. Don’t you understand? I lied to you when I said I wasn’t p…pregnant.’
Absolute silence greeted her confession. ‘I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know where to turn!’ she sobbed. ‘I pretended it wasn’t happening to me, and then of course I wasn’t well and I couldn’t hide it any longer.’
He captured her clenched hands and dragged her into his arms. ‘Oh, dear God, why can’t we turn the clock back?’ he demanded unsteadily, muttering her name, smoothing her hair until his lean, hard strength calmed her and she clung to him. ‘Why were you still protecting me, Kitty? You lied to me and I should have known you were lying. You were just a kid and you had to face that alone…’ His roughened voice petered out as he crushed her against him.
‘I never wanted anything as much as I wanted that baby,’ she confessed in a surge of emotion. ‘When I had the miscarriage, I wouldn’t even believe the doctor when he said that it would have happened anyway. It made me so bitter.’
‘I know…I know,’ he whispered jerkily. ‘You were expecting my child and I should have been there for you. I’ll never forgive myself for that night.’
‘But it wasn’t your fault…it wasn’t your fault,’ she protested.
He drew in a long, shuddering breath. ‘I was going to marry you as soon as I finished my training. I couldn’t wait to get you out of that awful house. I had it all mapped out. I never once accepted that anything could go wrong. Naturally you were to be a virgin bride. I never once saw a future that didn’t include you.’
‘Don’t,’ she begged. ‘I saw your mother. I know why, why you treated me like that.’
‘It all came apart overnight,’ he relived rawly. ‘She killed it. Do you know why I believed her? Because we were so close. I didn’t go to my father because I was afraid of what I might do. I couldn’t believe that she would tell a lie like that about my father, not the way she felt about him. I didn’t know how to keep myself away from you. That was the worst part of the nightmare and that’s why I married Liz. With her around I thought I could still see you in the guise of a friend…’
She shivered, pierced by the savage bitterness powering those final words.
‘Naturally the marriage was a disaster. You’d disappeared and I was half out of my mind with worry. When I found out the truth about you, I went off the deep end.’ He was winding a shining strand of silver hair tightly round his fingers. ‘If I’d lost you through something I’d done, I could have lived with it. But I couldn’t live with it as it happened. I felt cheated. I never lied to Liz. I never pretended to love her, but she deserved a better deal than she got,’ he completed grimly.
Kitty cleared her throat uncertainly. ‘We were very young. It mightn’t have worked for us either.’
‘We had enough love to make it work,’ he contradicted. ‘I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love you. When you came back, I did gen
uinely intend to try and be a friend. Only I wasn’t capable of that. I saw you again and that was it. Even though I couldn’t get near you, even though I was eaten alive with jealousy, I could have laid my heart at your feet on the first day…’
‘Why didn’t you tell me what your mother had done?’ she prompted frustratedly
His firm mouth compressed. ‘At the beginning I thought I’d be making an ass of myself. You didn’t want to know. And then that day at the Grange, I remembered how I’d felt that night and I’d have told you then.’
‘I cut you off. I was scared,’ she admitted.
‘That makes two of us,’ he confessed wryly. ‘But when I got you to the church, I didn’t believe that anything could ever come between us again.’
‘And I let Grant come between us. I think I believed that, as long as you thought someone else might want me, you’d want me more. I was so terrified of losing you,’ she confided half under her breath.
‘Kitty.’ It was an aching reproof. ‘You never lost me. Never once in all these years. I didn’t have any right to be jealous, but just the thought of you with another man turns me into a vicious bastard. I’ll get over it. I’m not asking any questions.’
Her heart was in her damp eyes. ‘There’s never been another man, Jake. I’ve always loved you and I always will.’
He took her mouth in a passionately hungry assault, his hand roving to the ties on her filmy covering, jerking them loose to explore beneath. Her fingers tugged his shirt out of his jeans, her breath sobbing in her throat as she made contact with his warm, sensuous flesh.
With an inarticulate sound of frustration, he lifted his head. ‘If you don’t stop doing that, I won’t be able to control myself long enough to explain why I lost my head over the Grange.’
‘Stop doing what?’
He intercepted the hand roaming over the silk-smooth skin just below his waistband. ‘You can take up exactly where you left off in a few minutes,’ he promised unsteadily. ‘Last winter on my thirtieth birthday I came into my grandmother’s money. My father was a big disappointment to her, and before she died she cut him out of her will and made me her beneficiary. I was only a child and, since she had no idea how I would turn out, she ensured that I couldn’t touch a penny before I was thirty.’
