‘We seem to be a little early, sir. When do the rest of your guests arrive?’
‘I’m afraid there are no other guests, my dear. You have been brought here under false pretences and I understand only after a great deal of manoeuvring by your friends.’
The cup paused halfway to her mouth and she replaced it very carefully on the saucer and set it on the table.
‘I think, sir, you had better explain.’
‘I wanted to meet you.’
‘I don’t understand. I thought I was here to draw—’
‘Yes, I know, but I’m not retiring just yet. Quite the contrary. And there is no dinner party.’ He rose swiftly. ‘If you’ve finished with your tea I’d like to show you some of my pictures.’
Puzzled, thoroughly curious and a little bit piqued, she followed him out of the room and across the hall to the library. Over the fireplace hung the portrait of a woman, fair, very English, her sweet face reflected in the flanking portraits of two sons, one of whom was the young man who had brought her to the house.
‘James is your son?’
‘Yes. I’ve been very lucky with both the boys. His brother is a doctor.’
‘I’m sorry. I understood — I was told,’ she corrected herself, ‘that he was your clerk.’
‘A slight deception on my part. I hope you’ll forgive me.’
‘Forgive you?’ Holly was suddenly, painfully angry at being deceived by people she considered to be friends and the emotion jolted through her like lightning. It was the first time she had felt anything in weeks. But she had been somehow tricked into coming to this man’s house and she wanted to know why. She turned from the portrait in front of her and said stiffly, ‘If I haven’t come here to draw a picture of you, sir, then perhaps you would be good enough to tell me exactly why I am here. ‘
He smiled then, for the first time. ‘You are so like your mother. Not just in looks, although it is just as well I was warned how alike you were or I would have completely disgraced myself when you walked through the door. But in your manner, too. Absolutely straightforward. She was like that.’
Holly’s skin prickled uneasily. ‘You knew my mother?’ she asked. And she knew it was Mary he was talking about.
‘Yes, Holly. I knew your mother.’ His expression was watchful, grave. ‘In every sense of the word.’
He took a notebook from his pocket and handed it to her. A book covered with Chinese brocade. Holly swallowed a cry.
‘Where did you get this?’ It should be at home. Back in the loft. She had braved the spiders and replaced the evidence of her birth in its hiding place. Her mouth tightened. David, still trying to flush out a story. All that nonsense about a new girlfriend. And somehow he had managed to involve Harvey. ‘Who are you?’ she demanded.
‘My name is Andrew Hedley. In her journal, Mary referred to me as ‘A’ in an attempt to hide my true identity. Clearly she was unsuccessful. Mr Kent had very little trouble in finding me.’
He walked across to a padded window-seat and held out a hand, inviting her to join him. She moved on stiff, unwilling legs, the reality of what he said slow to sink in.
‘I always wanted a daughter. My wife gave me a brace of sons but then there were complications and she couldn’t manage any more. She gave me all this, too. I’m afraid I had the best of the deal.’ He looked out over the extensive parkland. ‘She’s a wonderful woman and I do love her.’
‘Do you?’ Holly asked stiffly.
‘Yes, my dear. It was never a wild passion. There’s only room for one, I think, in a lifetime and Mary took up all of that. It’s quite possible, you know, to love two women.’ He paused, going away a little in his head at the contemplation of the awesome difference. She came to me as the perfect wife for a struggling barrister. Good connections, plenty of money. It was a family arrangement and I tried to be a good husband. After Mary…’ He paused as if even the words hurt, then gathered himself again. ‘After Mary sent me packing, it was easy.’
‘Mary sent you… She was the one to break off the affair?’
‘I went to Ashbrooke determined to take her away with me, start again somewhere new.’ Holly stared around her at the beautiful Tudor manor, the vast acres stretching away into the distance. ‘You would have given up all this for her?’
‘Without a second thought,’ he said, so fervently that she knew without doubt he was speaking the truth.
Her heart was beating very fast. Too fast. ‘Why wouldn’t she go with you?’
‘Because she knew it would destroy my career. I was already a recorder — a sort of junior judge. I was pointed at the top.’ He smiled at an old memory. ‘Mary was so very clever about it. She knew that if she said it was for my own good I wouldn’t listen, so she told me that she had met someone else. That she was going to get married.’
‘And you actually believed her?’ She glanced at the book with its burning outflow of passion and found it hard to accept.
His eyes, amber like her own, followed her gaze. ‘She was very convincing. She hurt me so badly, twisted the knife, laughed at me. I left without looking back, hating her.’
Holly almost cried out. She bit her lip in a desperate need to keep the sound in and Andrew Hedley looked at her with deep concern.
‘I’m sorry. This must have come as a shock to you. I think perhaps I’d better get you a drink.’
‘No!’ she stopped him. ‘Just tell me.’ He looked doubtful, but then, after a moment in which her eyes begged him, he continued. ‘It was years before I found out that she had been lying. I saw her photograph in one of the papers. When she launched her charity.’
Holly looked down at her hands, the notebook twisting between her fingers. ‘Did you get in touch with her?’
‘What good would it have done? It was over. Years over. I had a wife, my sons… Hurting one woman in a lifetime is enough guilt for one man to live with.’
‘I thought you had abandoned her.’
‘And hated me for it?’ She didn’t answer, but he didn’t need an answer. ‘Respect her decision, Holly. She was the strong one. She knew that if we took my way it would destroy us both. She set me free.’
‘She paid a high price.’
‘I want you to know that I have done my best to live a good life, Holly …’
‘As she did.’
‘And now I have the chance to get to know a daughter that I never knew I had. If you will permit it?’
‘But what about your family? Do they know? Have you told them?’
He shook his head. ‘Not yet. Who you are, Holly, is your story. I gave up every right to ask you to acknowledge me as your father the day I let a young woman bamboozle me with a pack of loving lies. But I’ll tell them now.’
She put out a hand as if to stop him. ‘No, sir. I’d rather you didn’t.’ Pain crossed his strong features and she reached out and touched his hand.
‘That’s not a rejection of you. But you’re right, Mary made her decision and lived with it. We must both live with it. I’m sure she never regretted it. And I had good parents who loved me.’ She smiled tentatively. ‘Stick to your story. It’s true. I am the daughter of an old friend.’
Like her mother, she had made a decision to drive away the man she loved. Unlike Mary, she had been wrong. But she, too, would have to live with it. There was at least a little consolation to be gained from knowing the truth.
The library door opened and Jamie put his head around it. ‘Sir, mother’s asking for you. She wants to know how many people will be staying for dinner.’
‘Thank you, Jamie, I’ll come now. Look after Holly, will you? Show her to her room. The blue bedroom.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Jamie led Holly up the wide staircase, chatting amiably about nothing much. She watched him. Saw his father in him now. He was still young. Another ten years and his features, too, would harden with the demands of his career.
He stopped by a door deeply inset in the panelling. ‘This is the blue room. If you need anythi
ng, just pick up the house phone.’ He smiled awkwardly. ‘I’ll see you at dinner.’
‘Thank you, Jamie.’ She watched him turn and walk quickly away, then glanced down at the book in her hand, wondering how her father had come by it.
She didn’t think David would have easily parted with it. She sighed. They would talk again tomorrow. Surely then everything would be clear.
She caught the handle impatiently and opened the door and was halfway through before she stopped abruptly, realising there was someone already in the room. A broad back, a dark head staring out of the window at the park.
‘Come in, Holly, and shut the door.’
The room began to close in and the blood pounding through her head was louder and louder until she thought her ears would burst with the pressure. Then, thankfully, everything went black.
The cold flannel on her forehead dragged her back into semi-consciousness and she tried to open her eyes.
‘Joshua? What are you doing here?’
‘Hush. You’ll be fine in a minute. Just lie still.’ Her head ached dreadfully and she had no confidence in that remark. But she did as she was told because moving would be too much effort.
The bed moved slightly under his weight as he sat beside her and she protested weakly as he undid the top button of her blouse and loosened her waistband. But he ignored her complaint and it felt so much better that she didn’t care.
‘Did I faint?’
‘Yes, my love. I’m afraid you did. When you’re better you can ring a peal about my ears for giving you such a fright.’
‘I wasn’t frightened. It was the shock…’ Too many shocks for one day. ‘How did you find out?’
‘How did I find out why you ran away from me?’ he asked.
‘That will do for a start.’
‘It took a while. Your sudden and complete turn-about rather numbed my thinking cells. I thought, hoped, that you loved me and to be quite that wrong about anyone is totally unnerving. And then you had lied to me about the phone call and for a while I was so angry that I didn’t actually care why.’
She stared at him. ‘How did you know I lied?’
‘Because, my sweet, idiotic, beautiful Holly, David could not possibly have given anyone your telephone number that Saturday.’
‘Oh?’ she said, cross that her subterfuge had been so easily seen through.
‘Oh?’ he mocked her gently. ‘I’ll tell you why. Because David Grantham never went back to his office on Saturday. He made it as far as Ashbrooke Hall and decided he was a danger to himself and other road users and very wisely took a room for the rest of the day in order to catch up on some sleep. He was just leaving when I got back from Exeter, over the moon with happiness and that damned ring almost burning a hole in my pocket.’
‘Oh, David!’
‘Not a man to be relied upon, Holly,’ he warned her. ‘And very easily browbeaten into becoming an ally. How else do you think I would have got into your house and helped myself to Mary’s book?’
‘How did you know where to look for it?’
‘You left the ladder on the upstairs landing for David to put away. Careless.’
‘I’m sorry, Joshua. I had to do it. I couldn’t think of any other way.’ She was beginning to feel a little less faint and moved up against the pillows.
‘I can see how everything must have slotted into place when you saw that photograph. Mrs Austin told me that you asked three times if my father’s name was Alexander. Quite odd, she said. I had to see the notebook, of course, but it didn’t take much working out.’
‘No. But how did you know it wasn’t the truth?’
He took her chin and lifted it gently so that she was forced to face him. ‘I picked up the telephone, my love and called my father.’
‘You asked him?’ She went pale. ‘Mrs Austin said your mother had a lot to put up with…’ she mumbled. ‘I shouldn’t have listened.’
‘My father had a long rein, Holly, but he always knew who was holding it. And he confined his affairs to ladies who knew the score. He wasn’t in the market for the kind of complication that an affair with Mary would have involved. And my mother loved him despite all his faults.’
‘But you said…’
He let his hand fall. ‘I know what I said. That my father carried a torch for Mary. And it was true. After my mother died, Mary was very good to him. I thought for a while that they might have made something of it. But she was clearly a one man woman.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.
‘Don’t be. Anyone might have leapt to the same conclusion.’ He brushed the hair back from her face. ‘Feeling better?’ She nodded and after a moment he went on. ‘But the thing is, Holly, after he got over the shock, my father was able to suggest who the mysterious ‘A’ might be. Andrew Hedley stayed with us whenever he came for the quarter sessions. My father saw Mary and him together once, up on the moor. They were just walking together, but clearly it was surprising enough to stick in his mind.’ He smiled slightly. ‘I thought, under the circumstances, that it might be best not to ask what he’d been doing up there.’
‘So you knew him? Andrew Hedley?’
‘Only as someone I had to be very polite to. I had no idea his name was Andrew. But when I confronted him with the notebook he admitted it immediately. If only you’d let me look for him when I first offered…’ She groaned and he caught her up in his arms and held her close. ‘Unless, of course, you prefer me as a brother?’ His eyes glittered inches from her own.
It would be so easy to be swept away on that tide of passion he woke in her with such frightening ease. But she held herself rigid.
‘That rather depends.’
‘I see.’ He stepped back, and his look became detached, as if he was preparing himself for something so awful he would need every ounce of strength to keep his feelings hidden. ‘If you still have doubts, Holly, I’d like to hear them. I think this time you should give me the opportunity to defend myself.’
‘Everything out in the open?’
He nodded.
Holly had no doubts about her own love. She was ready to open her arms and her heart, but he had been so unconcerned by his father’s unfaithfulness and she remembered all too clearly the look in Lisa Stamford’s eye when they had met in the reception hall at Ashbrooke Hall that first evening. She was exactly the sort of woman who “knew the score”.
‘I love you, Joshua,’ she said evenly. ‘With all my heart. Wait!’ She held him back when he would have drawn her into his arms again. ‘I have to tell you that I’m not like your mother. I could never look the other way. If you want a long rein, then we have no future together.’
He gripped her arms quite painfully. ‘Marry me, Holly, and you’ll need no rein to keep me by your side. I love you. There will never be anyone else. You’ve turned my life upside-down and that’s the way I like it.’
It was the truth. Absolute and direct. She raised her arms to him. ‘Then why are we still talking?’
‘Because, my darling, we need to get a few things straight while I’m still capable of stringing a coherent sentence together.’ He produced the velvet box from his pocket. ‘Shall we try again?’
‘Yes, please.’ He took the ring from the box and once again held it at the tip of her finger, then raised his eyes to hers.
‘Will you marry me, Holly?’ She nodded, quite unable to speak with happiness. He slipped it on and turned her hand slightly so that the sunlight flashed and broke in a thousand sparks. And then he kissed her.
It was Holly who finally realised there was someone knocking at the door and pushed Joshua away: ‘Come in,’ she called as he quickly stood up.
Andrew Hedley glanced from his daughter, taking in the dishevelled state of her clothes, to the man standing beside the bed. There was a certain chill in his voice as he said, ‘I take it that all confusion is at an end, Mr Kent?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Joshua said. ‘But this isn’t what you’re thinking. Holly fainted…
’
‘And you were giving her the kiss of life?’
Holly laughed and struggled up from the bed. ‘Something like that.’ She went across to the older man and took his hands. ‘Will you do something for me?’ she asked. ‘A very special favour.’ He nodded, his face softening. ‘Anything.’
‘When I marry Joshua, will you give me away?’
‘My dear, dear Holly, it will be my honour.’
*
Joshua’s father decided to stay on in England for a few weeks after the wedding and lent them his house for their honeymoon. But now it was over and as the car approached Ashbrooke, Joshua was very quiet.
Holly glanced at him once or twice, then put her hand on his arm. ‘What is it, darling?’
‘I’ve been thinking about the stable flat. You do realise that it isn’t going to be big enough for the two of us?’
‘It will be for a while. After all, we’ll be in London for a lot of the time.’
He wasn’t convinced. ‘Will you ever forgive me for selling the Hall? It should have been yours.’
She laughed. ‘Don’t be silly. I couldn’t possibly live in a place like that.’
‘You’re sure?’ he asked.
‘Positive. I’d hate it. And that four-poster bed.’
His eyes glinted. ‘I think you could get to like it. Now you’ve given up wearing nightgowns.’
She blushed. ‘We’ll never know.’
‘Pity.’
‘Yes.’ She glanced quickly away to hide a tear of regret for Highfield.
‘Unless this would do?’ He offered her a long manila envelope.
She glanced at it and frowned. ‘What is it?’
‘A slightly belated wedding-present. I should have given it to you before, but somehow we always had something more interesting to do.’ The document slipped on to her lap and even before she read the words she knew what it was. She turned to him.
‘You bought Highfield! But how…? Oh, it doesn’t matter.’ She flung her arms about his neck. ‘Oh, Joshua, how can I ever thank you?’
Old Desires/A Stranger's Kiss (2-in-1 edition) Page 16
