by Tara Hyland
‘Why here?’ she asked, as they walked against the bracing wind.
‘I heard you liked beaches.’
Her eyes widened. ‘How did you find that out?’
‘I have my sources,’ he said, tapping his nose.
Franny threw back her head and laughed. ‘You’re unbelievable!’
‘So – does that mean I’ve finally impressed you?’
Instead of answering, Franny called out suddenly, ‘Race you to that rock!’
She was off before he could digest what was happening. He shouted something about her not playing fair, but she only laughed in response, refusing to turn and lose her advantage. Running along the beach, shoes in hand, the wind blowing sand into her face, she felt happy and carefree.
She could feel him gaining on her, his footsteps thudding in the sand as he closed the gap between them. She practically ran into the boulder, her hands slapping the rough, grey face.
‘I won!’ she called out, her voice carrying on the brisk wind.
He drew up in front of her seconds later, breathing hard. ‘You didn’t play fair,’ he panted.
‘I never promised that I would.’
‘And neither did I.’
Before she could ask what he meant, he grabbed her by the shoulders and backed her up against the hard rock. Then he bent his head and kissed her, right there on that cold, empty beach, his warm body stretched across hers, her soft breasts crushed against his chest.
Franny felt her breath catch, making her gasp. Whatever Lily might think, she was truly falling for Max. Perhaps she’d started off thinking that being with him might help her career, but that was no longer her motivation. Her other love affairs paled in comparison to this. Max was in a different league. He wasn’t weak like Sean; he wasn’t self-obsessed like Duke or any of the other actors she’d dated. It was a heady thing, to be able to capture the attention of this powerful, sought-after man. For the first time ever, Franny felt that she had met her match.
Max must have felt the same way, because when he finally broke from their kiss, he drew back a little, so that he was staring straight into her eyes. ‘No more games, Frances Fitzgerald,’ he murmured fiercely. ‘I just want you to answer one question – will you marry me?’
Chapter Nineteen
Cara kicked a stone as she wandered along the rough path that ran through the woods. Usually she would run and jump as she went, but today she wasn’t feeling up to it. It was 4 May 1957, five months since the trip to Brighton. Cara still felt awful about what had happened that week. She’d looked forward to the holiday so much, to finally seeing her mother again, and it had all been a disaster. She kept wishing she could go back in time and relive that week – she would do everything differently then. She hadn’t meant to behave badly, but obviously Franny hadn’t been happy with her – that’s why she’d left her behind again. Since then, her mother hadn’t written much either. Cara knew she was being forgotten. She’d learned to cope with the loneliness, of missing Danny and Aunt Annie, of only having her grandmother to talk to; she’d learned to lose herself in books and make-believe adventures, but the realisation that her mother didn’t want her was the hardest thing to bear.
Cara felt a tear slip down her cheek. Today the feeling of abandonment was more acute than usual, because it was her tenth birthday – something that her mother had obviously forgotten. Franny hadn’t even sent her a card. Her grandmother had tried to make the day special, in her own way. That morning, Cara had got down to breakfast to find a card and a box of chocolates. In previous years, Franny had sent over several beautifully wrapped gifts, but in their absence, Cara had been touched by her grandmother’s gesture. It was a frugal present, in keeping with Theresa’s austere manner. Although Franny sent back plenty of money, old habits die hard, and she preferred to only take what she needed, saving the rest for when Cara grew up.
Along with the card and present, Theresa had made a cake when Cara was out of the house yesterday, and presented it to her after lunch. Over the past three years, their relationship had developed into one of fondness. Cara knew her grandmother was never going to be the most demonstrative person, but the girl had come to realise that Theresa’s small, understated kindnesses meant more than all of her mother’s grand gestures.
Cara was wrong. Her mother did remember her birthday – except not until three days after the date itself. Franny felt wretched when she realised. She guessed it was because she was in the middle of filming, reworking some scenes on The Black Rose. Back in Hollywood, the director had been less than pleased with how things had turned out on the film, particularly with her performance, and the stress from that had obviously distracted her.
With no time to go out to the shops herself, Franny made a hasty list and passed it to her PA to organise.
‘It’s for my niece back in Ireland,’ she explained.
Then, her conscience soothed a little, she went back to her movie.
The parcel for Cara’s birthday finally arrived a month after the actual date. She was so delighted to receive the present that she pushed aside any unkind thoughts she’d had about her mother and tore the paper open. At first all she saw was a flutter of pink and white, ribbons and lace. And then she realised – it was a princess dress! Something so beautiful, that she hardly dared touch it.
But as she took the gown out of the package, her initial delight turned to frustration. Why had her mother bought her something so pretty? It was totally impractical in the rough surroundings of the cottage. Where on earth did Franny think she was going to wear this?
Cara stared at the dress, feeling the luxurious material in her hands. Then, without warning, she started tearing it apart, ripping at the seams and pulling off the bows and pearls.
She was still attacking the material when her grandmother, who’d come to see what all the noise was about, hurried into her room.
‘What in the name of God is going on here?’
The shock in her grandmother’s voice pulled Cara up short. Pausing in her destruction, she stared up at Theresa, tears streaming down her face. ‘I hate her!’ she burst out.
The old woman took in the scene, the torn wrapping paper and ripped dress. She frowned, and then her expression cleared. Walking over to Cara, she eased herself down beside her on the bed.
‘Now, hush, child,’ she said. ‘Don’t ever say something so wicked.’ While Theresa understood her granddaughter’s frustration, her belief in having respect for one’s elders prevented her from denigrating Franny.
‘But I do hate her,’ Cara insisted.
‘No, you don’t,’ Theresa pointed out reasonably. ‘You’re just upset because she forgot your birthday and your present was late, and maybe not what you wanted. You love your mother, you know you do, and that’s how it should be.’
Cara thought about this for a moment. ‘Maybe. But she doesn’t love me.’
Theresa sighed. ‘Of course she does.’
‘Then why doesn’t she come back for me?’
It was the question that Theresa had always been dreading – and one to which she didn’t have an adequate answer. ‘You have to understand your mother,’ she said carefully. ‘She isn’t like you or me. She can’t just settle for an ordinary life. She’s always wanting something more. She needs people around her, telling her how wonderful she is. But she still loves you, even if she can’t be here with you. You understand?’
It was the longest speech that Cara had ever heard her grandmother make.
‘Now, come on, enough of this silliness.’ She gave Cara an affectionate pinch on the cheek. ‘I saw some strawberries on the bushes earlier. Go out and see if you can collect enough for us to make some jam later.’
Cara did as she was told, happy to get away from the remnants of her disastrous birthday.
Later, when she got back, feeling strangely happier, the strawberry-picking having distracted her, she found that the mess had all been cleared away. This little act of kindness meant so much to her.
Her grandmother might be a strange, brittle woman, but underneath, Cara knew that she cared. Whereas her mother, for all her pretty words and promises, didn’t seem to love her one bit.
Chapter Twenty
Like their courtship, the marriage of Frances Fitzgerald to Maximilian Stanhope was a whirlwind affair.
After his proposal on the beach, Max took her back to his gated white-marble mansion in Holmby Hills, the most exclusive neighbourhood in Los Angeles, naturally. In his wood-panelled study, he removed a renaissance-style painting from the wall, to reveal a safe – from which he produced a six-carat square-cut diamond ring in a platinum setting. He hadn’t had it with him at Paradise Cove because he hadn’t planned on proposing to her that day, he confessed with a sheepish laugh. He’d wanted to wait for the perfect moment before asking her to marry him, but then out there on that windswept beach, he’d felt so overwhelmed with emotion that he’d had to ask her, right then and there. He seemed almost embarrassed by the admission, and Franny thought how out of character it was for him, to seem so unsure of himself. It felt good to think that she had the power to do that – to unsettle this strong, commanding man.
Sitting on the leather Chesterfield couch, Franny looked on delightedly as Max knelt down and slipped the ring onto her left hand, hardly able to believe that this was happening. A few short months ago, she’d felt so rejected by Duke, so criticised by the press. Now, it seemed everything was going her way again. Because Max was a million times the man that Duke was. He was handsome and powerful and rich, and he treated her like a queen. What more could she want?
She looked down at him then, feeling more touched than she’d imagined possible.
‘I didn’t expect this,’ she said quietly. ‘Not so soon.’
He smiled up at her. ‘Well, why wait? We’re both free and single. My children are old enough to understand. We only have each other to worry about.’
Franny stared at Max for a long moment. She’d been on the verge of telling him about Cara, thinking that once they were married, she would be able to bring her daughter out to live with them, certain that Max’s clout would provide shelter against any bad press. But the mention of his children had drawn her up short. He’d told her early on about his son and daughter, Gabriel and Olivia, by his first wife. Wouldn’t he think it strange that she’d never mentioned her own child before now? It might seem as if she’d been – well, a little less than honest with him.
Unaware of the dark turn in her thoughts, Max came to sit beside Franny. He reached up to cup her face in his hands, his cool fingertips pressing against her bare skin, as he looked deep into her eyes, just as he had done on the beach earlier. ‘You’re everything to me, my darling,’ he said fiercely. ‘I need you to know that. I never imagined it would be possible to feel this way about someone again. And now I have you, I won’t ever let you go.’
He pulled Franny to him then, his lips seeking out hers, kissing her hungrily, greedily, as though he couldn’t get enough of her. As he tugged down the zip of her dress, pushing the straps down off her shoulders, she dragged the white shirt over his head, her ardour matching his in its intensity. Franny’s last cogent thought was that she wouldn’t tell him about Cara quite yet. She needed to find the right time to broach the subject, once the initial excitement about the engagement had passed.
Lily wasn’t happy when she heard about the engagement. Franny had gone over to her house, to tell her in person, and to ask her to be chief bridesmaid.
‘Well!’ her friend said, sitting down heavily on her cream couch. ‘I wasn’t expecting that.’
Franny noticed the distinct lack of ‘congratulations’ being offered.
‘You’re not happy for me?’ she asked, hurt.
Lily sighed. ‘No, it’s not that. It’s just . . .’
‘What?’
‘I’m just sad to be losing my partner in crime, that’s all.’
‘Oh, darling.’ Laughing, Franny hugged her friend. ‘Don’t be so silly. Just because I’m getting married, it doesn’t mean anything’s going to change.’
‘Really?’ Lily sounded sceptical. ‘Max might not agree with that.’
‘Max?’ Franny scoffed. ‘He loves me the way I am. He wouldn’t ask me to give up anything for him.’
Lily just looked at her friend. ‘Are you so sure about that?’
Max’s associates were equally surprised by the match. Since the death of his wife fifteen years earlier, Max had been out with dozens of women, and yet he’d never got close to marriage. What made Frances Fitzgerald so special? If they’d imagined Max with anyone, it would have been an elegant society lady, born with a silver spoon in her mouth and reared to host his parties and be a good hostess. Franny was a good-time girl, who loved being in the limelight. Surely she would never be content to just be Mrs Stanhope?
‘But why marry her?’ Frank Brewer III asked. Head of a Boston banking dynasty, and equally as wealthy as Max, he was the only one brave enough to say such a thing.
‘Because I love her,’ he replied simply. ‘Isn’t that the usual reason?’
No one dared argue with that.
Max himself couldn’t explain his feelings for Franny – his obsession with her, as he’d come to see it. He knew she was a party girl, and that she had something of a reputation. But still, he really couldn’t get enough of her. After what had happened with his first wife, he’d never thought that he would marry again. He’d dated plenty of women over the years who would have liked to get him to settle down, mainly movie stars and socialites, all of them attractive, witty women. But Franny was different. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful – although of course that didn’t hurt, he admitted ruefully – it was her spirit, her zest for life, which he found so fascinating. He wanted her with him, and he didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought.
The impending marriage brought up other issues – namely, meeting Max’s two children, Gabriel and Olivia. While Franny and Max had been courting, they had been able to keep everything light-hearted, and the past had seemed like less of an issue. But now they had to make the effort to integrate each other’s lives.
Franny knew just the barest details of Max’s first wife, Eleanor, the beautiful only daughter of a wealthy Bostonian financier. Max had been twenty-seven when they first met at a fundraiser, and they’d married six months after that. Their son, Gabriel, was born the following year, and a daughter, Olivia, two years after that. That was when the problems set in. Eleanor, plagued by depression after the birth of her second child, had committed suicide when Olivia was just three months old.
In his grief, Max had blamed Olivia for his wife’s death. Unable to look at or hold his baby daughter, he’d arranged for his children to be brought up by a series of governesses, while he’d immersed himself in work. Everyone had assumed that as time passed, Max would relent. But unfortunately as Olivia grew older, she began to resemble her mother: a permanent reminder to Max of the wife he had lost. Not that he’d treated his son any better. It was as though on the day his wife died, Max had decided to withdraw from fatherhood completely. As soon as Gabriel had turned seven, he’d been packed off to an exclusive boarding school outside San Francisco. Once she was old enough, Olivia had suffered the same fate. The result was that, even though Gabriel was now seventeen and Olivia fifteen, Max hardly knew his children.
‘I’m afraid they lost two parents the day that their mother died,’ Max confessed to Franny. ‘I haven’t been a very good father to either of them. But now that I’ve found you, I want all that to change.’
This came as news to Franny. She hadn’t reckoned on becoming a stepmother to two teenagers, and she wasn’t sure how kindly they were going to take to her marrying the father they hardly knew.
Max warned her that his children had reacted very differently to the distance he’d put between them. While Gabriel had grown into a tough, independent young man, Olivia was a much more fragile creature.
‘I hope in time you may come to
be a mother to her. Or at least a friend. At her age, she needs some guidance from another female.’
Franny wasn’t entirely sure she would provide the best role model for an impressionable young mind. But she kept her thoughts to herself.
The following week, Max arranged for her to meet his children, over dinner at his mansion in Holmby Hills. When Franny arrived, Max was on a call to Europe, so she went into the drawing room to wait. She walked in to find a tall, slender young man, with dark hair and intense dark eyes, lounging across one of the couches, reading The Catcher in the Rye. He glanced up as she entered, a look of amusement crossing his face.
‘Ah! So you must be my new stepmom.’ He got up and sauntered over to her, planting a kiss on each of her cheeks. He smelled of cigarettes and too much aftershave. His years at boarding school had clearly made him self-sufficient, and he had a confidence about him that bordered on arrogance. Dressed in blue jeans and a black leather jacket, with his hair worn long and floppy, he looked like he had stepped out of Rebel Without a Cause.
‘It’s good to finally meet you,’ Franny said. ‘Your father talks about you all the time.’
Gabriel gave a disbelieving snort. ‘I somehow doubt that.’ His eyes swept over her in a way that made her feel distinctly uncomfortable, which she had a feeling was his intention. She wondered if there was something strange about feeling so unnerved by a seventeen-year-old boy. Except maybe that was her mistake, to think of him as a boy when he was far closer to being a man.
‘Now,’ he pretended to muse. ‘Have you given much thought to what I should call you? I have. Personally, I think Mother seems a little too formal. Then there’s Frances, but that just seems a little . . . well, impersonal.’
He took a step forward. Franny instinctively tried to move back, but she’d forgotten the marble statue that was there, and stumbled a little. Reaching out to steady her, he continued talking, ‘So, after much long, hard thought, I decided on Mummy.’ He emphasised the word, affecting the accent of an upper-class English schoolboy. ‘What do you think?’
