by Maggie Cox
At their very last meeting, when he’d all but torn out Caroline’s heart with the vitriolic tirade he’d lambasted her with, telling her that he would never set foot in England again, she’d been convinced that he truly meant every word he had uttered. He hated her for what she had done, and was never, ever going to forgive her. And if his reaction at their unexpected meeting today was any indication, he clearly still saw no reason to rescind his promise…Her throat tightened with agonising hurt at the memory.
‘I appreciate—I appreciate that, Nicholas, but I’m not in any trouble…really. I’ve just had a bit of shock, that’s all.’
Nursing her glass between her hands, Caroline stared down at her lap.
‘What kind of a shock?’
‘A ghost from the past…only he’s not really a ghost. He’s flesh and blood and bone.’ And once upon a time I loved him so much my days were consumed with thoughts of nothing but him…
‘Are we talking about an old boyfriend, perhaps?’
Lowering himself onto the desk next to her, Nicholas put his hand thoughtfully up to his jaw, a subtle draught of the classic cedarwood-scented aftershave he wore briefly stirring the air.
‘I can see that you really are shaken up, darling, so it must have been someone who meant something important to you once upon a time.’
‘He wasn’t a boyfriend.’ Caroline shrugged, the dampness from her thin cotton jacket making her shiver. But she also silently acknowledged that shame factored somewhere in there too. ‘At least…not in public.’
By necessity she’d had to keep her relationship with Jack as secret as possible, because her father had issued dire warnings to her when he’d inadvertently found out she’d been seeing him. He wasn’t from their world, he’d told her and when it came to prospective boyfriends he expected someone much, much better for his only daughter—not the son of a junkie and a drunk.
Three months later, when she’d just turned seventeen and found herself pregnant with Jack’s baby, Caroline had had to confess to her father the truth that she’d been seeing him in secret.
Terrified, because Jack had already told her of his plans to make some ‘big money’ in the City, which would naturally necessitate him moving to London, and that nothing was going to stop him, Caroline had seen all her options dwindling before her eyes. She hadn’t wanted to hold her boyfriend back in any way. She knew what he’d endured and she’d only wanted the best for his future. So, buckling under brutal pressure from her enraged father, Caroline had brokenly agreed to have an abortion.
When she had told Jack what she had done his love for her had immediately turned to hatred. He’d never forgive her, he’d promised and then he had sworn that he would never see her again.
Until today, he had kept that vow.
‘Are we talking about Jack Fitzgerald?’
Caroline glanced up in shock, the colour leaching from her face at Nicholas’s painfully astute question. ‘You know about him?’
‘Your father was my closest friend, my dear. Of course I knew about your infatuation for that boy.’
That ‘boy’ was now a man of thirty-seven—three years older than Caroline.
A startlingly vivid picture of his disdainful handsome face less than an hour ago, now etched with distinct grooves in his forehead, and with bitter lines bracketing a mouth that once upon a time had been devastatingly sensual and charming instead of frighteningly forbidding, flashed up in her mind. A jolt of deep, bruising sorrow almost made her moan out loud.
‘Then you…you know what happened?’
‘That you were expecting his child and had to have an abortion? Yes, my dear…I know about that.’
Thankfully, there was no criticism evident in Nicholas’s voice, and he left Caroline to her own preoccupied thoughts for several seconds, before following up his quiet matter-of-fact statement with a deeply thoughtful sigh.
‘Your father thought it was the best thing to do at the time—and he was right. You were only just seventeen, Caroline, with your whole future ahead of you. He wanted you to go on to university and study, find a career you would love. He knew that a boy like Jack Fitzgerald would never have stood by you. You would have been a single mother, raising a child on your own, while your friends were doing the very things your father wanted for you. He really loved you, you know.’
‘Did he?’ Tears were like a thick net curtain, blurring her vision, as Caroline stared up at the man beside her. ‘If he had really loved me, Nicholas, would he have put me through an abortion at seventeen years of age? Wouldn’t he have stood by me and helped me when I found out I was pregnant, instead of condemning me and helping the man I loved to despise me for ever?’
‘He tried to make amends by leaving you the house, and enough money to set up in business,’ Nicholas asserted, quietly yet firmly—his steadfast loyalty to Caroline’s father was unwavering.
Rising disconsolately to her feet, Caroline delivered her glass to the small leather coaster on the desk. Tossing back her mane of curling blonde hair, she sniffed, regarding the man beside her with distinct hurt in her eyes.
‘He hardly ever told me that he loved me,’ she told him. ‘I could count the number of times on one hand! Do you really think that leaving me a house and money could come anywhere close to making amends for such a grim lack of affection, as well as helping me to lose my baby and driving Jack away?’
When Nicholas said nothing in reply, Caroline inclined her head briefly in sorrow.
‘I should go home now. I shouldn’t have come here and burdened you with all of this.’
‘Your troubles are not a burden to me, Caroline, and they never could be. I would do anything I could to alleviate your pain…you know that.’ Taking her small cold hand in his own, Nicholas squeezed it tight with genuine fondness. ‘But, whatever the reason Jack Fitzgerald has returned here, I really think it best if you don’t get involved with him again.’
Extracting her hand as though it had glanced against burning blue flame, Caroline immediately backed away and walked stiffly to the door.
‘I know you mean well, Nicholas, but you can save your advice. If I lay unconscious on the ground Jack Fitzgerald would step over me…never mind get involved! He despises me for what I did. When I saw him again today I could see it in his eyes.’
CHAPTER TWO
AFTER thrashing out some of the finer details with the contractor he’d hired to oversee the renovation work, Jack left the house that had once been his childhood home, jumped into his car, and drove along the coast for several miles without really paying much attention to where he was going.
Emotionally he was under seige. Seeing Caroline again after seventeen long years had made the blood stampede through his veins like escaping wild horses.
But after almost an hour of aimless driving, and feeling no less overwhelmed, Jack pulled in to the side of the road, switched off the voice of the DJ on the radio that had been droning monotonously in the background and, staring out through the windscreen, vocalised his mounting frustration out loud.
She had no right to look so gut-wrenchingly beautiful…to taunt him with the fact that clearly life had been kind to her since they had broken up. Jack couldn’t bear to imagine that her undimmed radiance was the result of a happy marriage with a man who adored her—who would have died for her as once upon a time Jack willingly would have.
He had fallen so hard for the blonde dark-eyed beauty that her unexpected act of treachery had all but killed him. Since then relationships had come and gone, and although his life had by no means been devoid of sexual passion there hadn’t been the love that Jack had instantly felt in his heart for Caroline. And now, since his divorce from Anna last year, he was alone again.
Rubbing his chest beneath his shirt, he sucked in a harsh breath to steady himself.
Despising the pulse of fear that jolted through him, an aggravating thing that seemed to happen a lot these days since his heart attack, he continued to stare out through the windscr
een.
The surrounding countryside, with its timeless and arresting beauty, should have helped instil some calm inside him—but no such luck. Jack was a million miles away from calm today, and expecting it to suddenly arise was a fruitless undertaking…no matter how long he sat there. All he felt was empty.
He’d come back here to set right a wrong. To prove to himself and the town that despite his poor beginnings, and the mostly negative perceptions people there had had about him, he had achieved success beyond their wildest dreams. He was a multi-millionaire entrepreneur, with several thriving companies to his name and a much-admired reputation for proving that there was still a place for integrity and not just flair and daring in business. That admiration had massively highlighted Jack’s profile in the international business community, and had won him the cover of the New Yorker just one year ago.
It was the kind of dreamed-for reputation that should have long ago rubbed out the taint of his boyhood shame—of having an alcoholic father who had abandoned his family and a mother who had heavily relied on prescription drugs to sedate her from the hurt she’d known was waiting if she should try and face her days without them. But Jack had to silently acknowledge that seeing Caroline again—the sight of her cruelly reminding him that she had not thought him good enough to be the father of her baby, and had preferred to have an abortion rather than raise their child together—had frankly robbed him of the sense of triumph at returning home that he’d been hoping for.
But he had laboured too hard and too long for success to let this unexpected, glitch completely quash his satisfaction at buying the house that had once belonged to his parents but had been repossessed for non-payment of the mortgage. That unhappy and shameful fact had forced Jack and his mother to be housed in run-down council flat accommodation on the outskirts of town, and had no doubt helped contribute to her growing despair and eventual demise. Now that the place was his again, Jack’s plans were to have it converted into a stunning showpiece of a home that would elevate it into one of the most desirable properties in the area—in any area—and would obliterate every bruising, shameful memory that might still be lurking there from his past.
His mother might no longer be alive to witness his achievement—but he wasn’t going to let that stop him from seeing through the burning desire that had gripped him with a vengeance while he was recovering from surgery in hospital six months ago, after suffering his heart attack. But how was he going to deal with the startling discovery that the girl who had broken his heart when he was just twenty was still living in the area? It was definitely a complication he hadn’t foreseen.
‘Goddamn!’
Colouring the confined space with his invective, Jack impatiently switched on the ignition and roared out of the lay-by, as if by putting his foot down hard on the gas he could outrun the threatening cloud of his own troubled past…
‘My idea was to make a collage of butterflies…’
‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’
Guiltily, Caroline brushed back her hair with her hand and deliberately focused her attention on the pale young teenager in front of her, a swift upsurge of concern galvanising her attention. A shy, unconfident girl, Sadie Martin had latched onto Caroline at the school where she taught arts and crafts once a week and now regularly visited her shop—often with no other aim in mind than to chat.
‘I said I wanted to make a collage of butterflies. They’re so beautiful, don’t you think? I got some books from the library to study them.’
A soft, self-conscious tinge of pink seeping into her naturally milk-pale complexion, Sadie sighed wistfully—as though her dream of creating something beautiful out of butterfly imagery was somehow just out of reach.
Caroline empathised. She knew what it was to have a dream that was out of reach. Once she had dreamt that she and Jack would be together for ever, but it had all ended in a dreadful nightmare. Now that he was back she found herself dreaming about him again…only this time there was no prospect of a happy resolution, or even the remotest possibility of one. He had clearly hardened his heart so emphatically where she was concerned that he found it difficult to even look at her, let alone converse.
All morning Caroline had speculated feverishly about why he had come home. Would he be staying long? Would he ignore her every time their paths accidentally crossed? It was only a small town—it was inevitable that they would. She didn’t think she could bear to see that despising glance he had swept her with for a second time.
‘Well…’ Diverting her own unhappy thoughts, she levelled a tender smile at Sadie instead. ‘Books are a good place to start if you want to study butterflies. But if you want to start work on a collage why don’t you look through some magazines for pictures you can cut out? I have a pile of them at home I could bring to class on Friday for you, if you like?’
Sadie’s pale lips edged upwards. ‘Would you? Oh, that would be great! My mum doesn’t read magazines, and I can’t afford to buy them myself.’
‘I tell you what…I’ll help you get started, if you like. I’ve got loads of material scraps out at the back of the shop that you can have. You’ll be able to create something really amazing.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Miss Treymayne.’
‘I told you…call me Caroline.’
‘All right. I’ll see you on Friday, then…at school?’
‘I’ll look forward to it…and, Sadie?’
‘Yes, Miss?’
Smiling at the automatic barrier of formality that the girl could not so easily relinquish, Caroline reached out to tenderly smooth away a stray auburn hair from her earnest young face.
‘Any time you need to talk…I’m here for you, okay?’
She knew it wasn’t the ‘done thing’ to encourage pupil/teacher relationships outside of school. But, remembering her own sense of abandonment and isolation living with her father, Caroline believed that everyone deserved a helping hand now and then, as well as emotional support—and there was something about Sadie Martin that indisputably tugged at her heartstrings.
‘Thanks, Miss.’
The bell over the door briefly jangled, and Caroline stood alone in the ensuing silence and reflected how hard it was to teach someone how to have self-confidence at the tender age of sixteen. God knew it was enough of a challenge sometimes even at thirty-four!
Jack had been walking with no particular aim in mind other than to reacquaint himself with his home town. When he left the main street and turned into a series of charming connecting lanes—the chocolate-box imagery of typically pretty English country villages springing immediately to mind—his pulse accelerated sharply as he came upon a small shop with a bright blue, painted frontage and a swinging sign that declared ‘Caroline’s Paintbox’. He knew before he even glanced in the window and saw her serving a customer, amid picture frames and paintings decorating the walls, that the purveyor of the business was none other than the woman who had been haunting his dreams all these years…
He hadn’t intended to go inside, but before he knew it Jack’s hand was gripping the brass handle on the front door and he was stepping into a colourful treasure-trove of paints and paintings, pencils and stencils, racks of handmade occasion cards, artists sketchbooks and much more besides.
The customer Caroline had been serving—a middle-aged woman, immaculately dressed in a smart pearl-grey trouser suit—smiled almost girlishly at him from beneath her heavily mascaraed lashes as she passed him. A waft of Chanel No 5 impinged strongly on his senses. But the woman’s smile glanced off Jack like water sliding down glass, hardly registering with him at all. All his attention—all his focus—was intently on Caroline.
‘Just a minute and I’ll be with you.’
She was bundling up some unwanted paper and depositing it in the bin with her back to him as she spoke, clearly unaware of who her next customer was. She straightened again, a ready welcoming smile on her it had to be said radiant face. The smile vanished almost instantly when she saw that
it was Jack.
‘Was there something you forgot to be rude to me about?’ she asked stiffly, her arms folded defensively across her chest in her chocolate-brown wool sweater.
‘I was passing and saw the sign with your name on it. I wondered if this might be your place.’
Deliberately avoiding looking directly into her wary brown eyes, Jack instead took inventory of his surroundings, minutely interested in every detail—every corner and every crevice overflowing with artistic implements of one kind or another—simply because this venture belonged to Caroline. Was this what she had done with her love of art? Somehow he told himself it didn’t sit right. The Caroline Tremayne he remembered hadn’t been a facilitator of other people’s artwork—she’d created her own.
Back then, she’d been bursting with excitement and ideas about what she was going to do when she finished art college. Her aim had been to eventually have a fantastic studio overlooking one of the London parks ‘to inspire her’ she’d said. Where she would create the most wonderful paintings that she would exhibit in galleries and that the great and the good would admire and hopefully buy.
‘Eat your heart out, Leonardo!’ she’d used to say with great delight and not a little self-mockery.
Jack had truly believed she’d be a roaring success. Her ravishing beauty and the utter passion she’d exuded for life had swept him off his feet like a sensual cyclone…how could it not have? His mother—during some of her more lucid bouts with reality—had used to tell him that Caroline would break his heart. Well, she’d been right on the money with that one.
‘Take your time, why don’t you?’ Her voice was tinged with sarcasm. ‘But you’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got work to do.’
When she would have turned away from him again, Jack’s next words kept Caroline rooted to the spot.
‘Any of the stuff on the walls yours?’ he asked, nodding his head towards the three rows of paintings behind him. Her chin came up and her dark eyes glittered, as if she was offended by the question, and Jack knew that if he had been an artist himself he would have been spoiled for choice of which angle to paint her from, because she looked so damn good from whatever perspective you gazed. A sizzle of molten heat carved a direct path south in his anatomy and made him feel momentarily dizzy.
