by Penny Jordan
Rocco’s wife’s words had gone a long way to reassure her that she could trust Falcon, and had boosted her confidence in her own judgement. Once she had settled in properly, Julie had promised, she would take her round and show her something of the island. She’d said how delighted she was that Josh, her nephew—now her and Rocco’s adopted son—would have another child to play with.
‘It’ll be lovely to have another woman with whom I’ve so much in common so close,’ Julie had told her warmly.
Annie hoped that they would become friends. Having friends had always been so difficult for her at home and even at university, since she had still been living at home and her mother had always been so anxious about her mixing with the ‘wrong kind’ of people.
It had only been after the shocking accidental deaths of her mother and her stepfather in a minibus crash whilst they had been on safari that she had finally moved away from home, helped by one of her university lecturers to get a job in London at the British Library. She had been lucky enough to rent a room in a house owned by a widow—but that, of course, hadn’t been anything like as much fun as proper flat-sharing with other girls.
As it was, Colin had been concerned for her, reminding her that her mother had left the house and the responsibility for her welfare to him. They hadn’t exactly fallen out over her decision to move to London, but Colin had let her know that her decision had upset him.
It had been a shock for her to return home from work one day to find him sitting in her landlady’s front room, drinking tea with her, having—as he’d told Annie—explained to Mrs Slater that Annie’s mother had made him promise that he would always keep an eye on her.
‘Annie has a tendency to get involved with the wrong sort,’ Colin had continued. ‘Young men who aren’t the type a mother wants to see her daughter associating with.’
Annie’s face burned now, remembering the humiliation and her sense of helplessness at being trapped by his judgement, unable to escape from it as she had sat there listening to him.
Half-heartedly, she started to reach for her old clothes. Her case had now been found. It had been placed in a storeroom—no doubt because of its shabbiness, she suspected. However, now having been reunited with her own clothes, Annie discovered—guiltily—that she had no real wish to wear them. They reminded her of Colin. She had chosen them because of him.
The sun was striking hot bars of sunshine across the polished wooden floor and the silky antique rug that covered it. As she moved the sunlight touched her arm, gilding her skin. Julie had the most lovely light tan. Her skin, like her eyes, almost seemed to glow with good health and happiness. Her own skin looked washed out and almost sickly pale in comparison.
Julie was so obviously happy and in love. Her happiness shone from her. She had confided to Annie that she and Rocco were now expecting their own child.
‘Our second child,’ she had made a point of saying to Annie as she’d hugged her nephew lovingly.
What must it feel like to be so happy and have the confidence to know you had a right to be the person you were, that no one would try to change you?
More than anything else what she wanted for Ollie was for him to grow up with that freedom, and in the knowledge that he was loved. She wanted him to have confidence and to know joy.
Before she could change her mind she dressed quickly in another of her new outfits—a pretty sundress with a neatly cut square neckline, the blue cotton edged with white. The dress was decorated with a row of white buttons that ran down the front, all the way to its dropped waistline. Annie looked at the little cardigan she had put on the bed to cover her arms, and then determinedly put it back in the drawer.
Ollie had now been introduced to his grandfather—who, Annie had sensed immediately, was not in the least bit interested in her. She had not taken to him at all; especially when he had wept emotionally over her baby, referring to him as the son of his own best beloved son.
She hadn’t been able to stop herself from looking at Falcon when the old Prince had spoken of his preference for Antonio, but it had been impossible to gauge what Falcon was thinking or feeling from the shuttered harshness of his face.
She had just reached the hallway with Ollie when Falcon appeared from one of the formal reception rooms opening off the hall, announcing when he saw her, ‘Ah—good. I was just about to ask Maria if she knew where you were. Can you spare me a few minutes?’
‘Of course.’ Annie smiled. She felt more relaxed with him now that Julie had assured her that she could trust him, but not relaxed enough not to flinch when he put his hand under her elbow to guide her towards the terrace.
It wasn’t the first time she had reacted with betraying intensity to either his touch or his proximity, and she could feel him looking at her—although to her relief he didn’t say anything.
He was formally dressed in a summer-weight tan-
coloured suit and a striped shirt. His clothes somehow emphasised his lean masculinity, making her stomach muscles tighten in response to the female awareness of him that a few days ago would have sent her headlong into panic but which now had become so familiar that she was able to control the urgency of her need to escape from what she was experiencing. It meant nothing other than that she knew Falcon was a very masculine and sexually powerful man. She was allowed to recognise that fact after all.
Once they were sitting down, and one of the maids had brought them coffee, and Oliver was happily engrossed in trying to roll over on his blanket, Falcon spoke.
‘Since the castello is now to be yours and Oliver’s home, we need to discuss providing you with something more comfortable and suitable than the two rooms you are occupying at the moment.’
‘Our rooms are fine,’ Annie assured him, but Falcon shook his head.
‘No. I have my own apartment within the castello, my father has his rooms, and it is important that you too have somewhere that is your own—where you can make a proper home for yourself and Oliver. Besides, ultimately there will come a time when you may well want to entertain friends here privately. You are after all a young woman, and it is only natural that one day you will meet a man...’
Annie was so agitated that she would have stood up and run out of the room if it hadn’t been for the fact that she couldn’t leave Oliver.
‘I don’t want to meet a man. I will never...’ She was too upset to be able to continue to speak, but Falcon could guess what she must be thinking.
‘What my half-brother did was unforgivable, but you cannot let his behaviour deprive you of the right to enjoy your womanhood. If you do, you will be allowing him victory. And besides, you have Oliver to think of. I don’t wish to lecture you, but I have seen at first hand the effects that my own mother’s victimisation by our father has had on the emotional development of my brothers and I. It can be hard to recognise love as an adult when one has not witnessed it as a child. I fully intend to provide Oliver with a male influence in his life, but that cannot replace what he would learn from living with two people who love one another. I know that letting go of the horror of what Antonio did to you and learning to trust my sex again demands courage, but I believe that you have that courage.’
Annie couldn’t let him go on. To do so would be unfair and dishonest. His comments about the duty she owed Ollie had hit home very sharply indeed. After all, she knew all about the long-lasting effect of emotional damage that could be caused in childhood. She sat down again, folding her hands together in her lap so that he wouldn’t see how badly they were shaking. She couldn’t look at him. She knew if she did that she’d never be able to get through saying to him what honesty compelled her to say.
‘I... It isn’t just because of what Antonio did to me that I don’t want to meet anyone.’
Falcon studied Annie’s downbent head. There was absolutely no mistaking the intensity of her reaction.
Suddenly he was very sharply aware that he had walked into a potential minefield and must tread extremely carefully indeed.
Mentally he rapidly reviewed everything he knew about her, double checked it, and then said as casually as he could, ‘It seems to me that someone must have given you your dislike of men. Perhaps you didn’t like it when your mother remarried—which is not an uncommon reaction after all? You were twelve at the time, as I recall. A difficult age for us all. If your stepfather wasn’t kind and understanding...’
‘No.’ Annie shook her head fiercely. ‘No. That was not the case. In fact, both my stepfather and Colin were...they were both very kind. Colin especially.’
Colin. Colin her stepbrother. The man Falcon had disliked so very much on sight and who had been so insistent that Falcon informed him if he managed to track Annie down. Immediately and instinctively, with a gut-twisting kick of certainty, Falcon knew exactly who had damaged her beyond any kind of doubt!
‘It’s because of your stepbrother, isn’t it?’
‘No!’
Now Falcon could hear the fear in her voice.
She was on her feet, her agitation ten times stronger than it had been before, her hand beating the table as she reinforced her denial with another forceful ‘No!’ that sent her cup of coffee flying, soaking into the skirt of her dress.
Falcon reacted immediately demanding, ‘Are you all right? Has the coffee scalded you? It was hot.’
Annie could see Falcon coming towards her, snatching up the bottle of water that had been on the table as he did so. Another minute and he would be touching her, and she couldn’t bear that now—she really could not.
‘No...’ She drew out the word like a frightened child, holding out her hands to keep him at bay.
‘It’s all right, Annie,’ Falcon told her calmly. ‘I won’t touch you or come near you, I promise. But I need to know if you have been burned.’
His voice was so calm that it brought her back to reality and sanity.
‘No. I’m fine.’
‘Good. Now, can we sit down and talk?’
Talk about what she had just said—what she had just admitted, he meant. Annie knew that. She was beginning to feel slightly sick and uncomfortably light-headed. She tried but could not stop herself from looking anxiously over her shoulder towards the doors leading on to the terrace.
Again Falcon realised that he could interpret her thoughts as clearly as though she had spoken them.
‘Colin can’t hurt you here, Annie,’ he assured her. ‘He won’t ever hurt you again. Because I won’t let him.’
Her mouth trembled as she sat down and told him, in a mechanical voice, ‘He’ll tell you that I’m a liar, and that all he wants to do is protect me. He’ll tell you that I make the wrong kind of friends, just like he had my mother.’
The past was threatening to drag her back into its possessive embrace. Heroically, Annie pushed it away. She wasn’t a child or a teenager any more. She was an adult. Falcon was watching her, quite plainly awaiting a proper explanation. There was no point in trying to pretend to him that there was no reason for him to require one. Not now, after what she had already betrayed.
‘I know what you must be thinking,’ she acknowledged. ‘But it wasn’t like that. There was never anything sexual about...about the way Colin spoke to me or behaved towards me. It was just that he was... Well, he called it being protective, but to me it felt as though I was being smothered. There wasn’t anything he was doing that was wrong, and it was hard for my mother to understand. She thought I was being difficult and unreasonable. I’d just started senior school, and I was making friends, but Colin insisted on meeting me from school. I had one particular close friend, but he didn’t like her. There was nearly an accident. She was on her bike and he was reversing his car.’
Now that she had started to speak the words wouldn’t be stemmed, and the fears and doubts poured out of her in relief at the release of finally being able to speak without the fear of being reprimanded, as her mother had always done.
‘I tried to tell my mother how I felt, but she liked Colin. She said that I was being difficult.’
Something about the quality of Falcon’s intently listening silence made Annie look at him. The angry contempt she could see in his eyes made her flinch.
‘You think the same as my mother. I can see it from your expression—’ she began, only to have him cut across her.
‘My expression, as you call it, is for your mother,’ he said harshly. ‘Your stepbrother may not have touched you sexually, but his behaviour towards you was abusive.’
Falcon believed her. He understood. He was taking her side.
A huge dizzying wave of relief and gratitude surged through her. You can trust Falcon, Julie had told her, and now Annie knew that to be true. She could trust him. For the first time in her life there was someone prepared to listen and understand and believe her.
‘It can’t have been easy for my mother.’ Annie felt duty-bound to defend her parent. ‘She was grateful to Colin for accepting us both in his father’s life, I suppose. He often used to say to me that his father would never have married my mother if he hadn’t wanted him to. My mother was the kind of woman who needed someone to lean on. She’d been very angry with my father for dying, and sometimes I felt that she wished she didn’t have me—that it would have been easier for her to remarry if she didn’t have a child.’
Deep down inside himself Falcon was aware of the most extraordinary sense of rapport stretching between them. He didn’t like talking about his own childhood, and rarely did so, but now—with Annie—inexplicably it felt both natural and easy to do so. Because he wanted to help her—not because he needed to share his own pain, he assured himself, as he told her quietly, ‘It’s hard for a child to come to terms with the fact that the person who should love them the most does not do. It makes it very difficult for them to recognise and accept love as adults. My brothers have both been lucky in that respect, meeting women who are prepared to help them recognise what love is.’
‘I think they were also lucky in having you to love and protect them,’ Annie found herself saying hesitantly, but very truthfully.
It was a new experience for her to be able to speak honestly about what she thought and felt—an empowering freedom after years of having to cautiously monitor what she said, as well as what she did, in case Colin pounced on it and used it to accuse her of some fresh wrongdoing.
His brothers had had him, Falcon acknowledged, but for Annie there had not been that all-important older someone to give her a true sense of her right to be loved and valued, to show her what true self-esteem was. That was a lack they shared, and he knew very well the effect that lack could have.
‘Your stepbrother treated you very badly.’ It was all he could trust himself to say to Annie.
‘It probably wasn’t all Colin’s fault,’ Annie felt bound to say. ‘I probably was difficult. Sometimes teenagers are. But...but when he started to criticise me, telling me what I should and shouldn’t do, what I should and shouldn’t wear, warning me about...about the consequences of my behaviour, I started to feel scared.’
Which was exactly what her stepbrother would have wanted, Falcon recognised.
The more he learned about Annie’s stepbrother the more he despised and disliked the other man—and the more challenged he felt to free Annie from the prison in which her stepbrother had put her.
‘It was the way he manipulated the truth to make it seem as though I was the one at fault that frightened me the most. Sometimes I even wondered if I had done the things he was accusing me of doing.’
‘He was trying to destroy your right to make your own moral choices and judgements.’
With every word Falcon said he was lifting from her the terrible weight she had been carrying.
‘Colin told my
mother that I’d got in with a wild crowd at school—just because he’d seen me giggling with other girls and some boys when he came to collect me. It was all completely innocent, but he was awful about it. He said things that at thirteen I wasn’t really able to deal with—things about boys and sex, suggesting that I was leading boys on, and that I wanted...’
She couldn’t go on, but it seemed she didn’t need to—because Falcon understood. She knew that because he was speaking evenly.
‘He said things to you that made you feel ashamed of your sexual curiosity and of yourself?’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. Falcon had put it so simply, eloquently putting into words exactly what she had felt. ‘He must have said something to my mother, as well, because she gave me a lecture about provocative behaviour and...and the danger of wearing provocative clothes. She took me out shopping and bought me longer skirts. I hated them, didn’t want to wear them—they made me look so different to the other girls. But Colin said that if I didn’t wear them it must be because I wanted boys to look at me.
‘He used to come to my room at night after I’d gone to bed, and sit on the end of the bed to question me. He’d keep asking me over and over again who I talked to at school, and if I talked to any boys, if I wanted to talk to them. Sometimes I lied and said no, just to make him go away, but one day he’d been watching me and he knew I was lying.’
Annie started to tremble.
‘It was awful. He was so cold, and yet so angry. He took the little china ornaments that I’d been collecting and threw them on the floor one by one, until they were all broken. He said that he didn’t want to be angry with me but that it was my fault, because I’d lied to him. He said that all he wanted to do was look after me because he cared about me, and he didn’t want boys thinking I was cheap.
‘My mother was always saying how lucky I was to have such a loving stepbrother. She didn’t understand. No one did. I wanted to go to university, and when I was offered a place at Cambridge, I was over the moon. But my mother started saying that she didn’t think I was mature enough to live away from home, that it would be much better if I did what Colin had done and went to the local university so that I could still live at home. I know it was his idea—just as I know that the dent Colin put in the car belonging to the boy who took me to the school prom wasn’t an accident at all.’
