by Anna Clifton
“My job tonight is to introduce you to my colleagues who are much more knowledgeable than I am about Incipio’s day-to-day activities and the science around cancer research,” Adam began, and with every word he uttered he seemed to gain momentum. “I’d prepared a speech to do that, but as of a few minutes ago it seemed … I don’t know … somehow inadequate. So I’ve decided to throw it away and just talk to you about how I come to be standing here in Sydney—in this stunning city of yours—of which I have such bittersweet memories.”
And right then Abbie simply stopped breathing, for Adam’s gaze was making a slow, periscopic sweep of the crowd in remorseless search of something or somebody. But then that gaze halted and nose-dived into hers.
Abbie sat as still as possible, desperately trying to conceal the hurricane he was whipping up inside her as his gaze bored straight into hers. Yet try as she might, she couldn’t stop her cheeks filling with searing heat as two hundred pairs of eyes seemed to turn towards her. But in the next second Adam’s look had moved on again as swiftly as it had arrived, leaving Abbie wondering whether she’d imagined the whole thing.
“Some of you …” he continued, straightening his six-foot-plus physique as he allowed his eyes to continue to roam with thoughtful composure across the sea of faces before him, “some of you had the special privilege of knowing my wife. What can I say about Ellen except that no woman could have lived life with more courage and strength, or with greater vision about how to make the world a better place. During her illness, she endured with incredible dignity the ravages of cancer, gave birth to our baby boy Peter and five years ago, started up one of the most successful charities for cancer research and respite care in the UK. And if that was not enough, as one of London’s most loved artists, she also had to deal with the relentless and often intrusive public interest in our marriage and in her declining health. Yet even as her death approached—at the age of just twenty-eight—Ellen never put herself first. All she thought about was her baby, me, the family she was leaving behind, and the women enduring the same physical and emotional ordeal that she was.”
Adam halted for a moment, dropping his head again as though waiting for his own emotional ordeal to pass so that he could continue. He then lifted his head and was speaking as though he’d never stopped. His voice—slightly more croaky than before—was the only sign that he was battling—big time.
“The rest, as they say, is history. I won’t take up your time with Incipio’s vision for Australia—our very capable CEO will soon walk you through all of that. But what I would like to briefly touch upon tonight is my conviction that women’s cancers wage a kind of war upon all of us as they strike down our wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, friends and girlfriends. The ripples of permanent loss from this war are endless and ongoing. In my own life, the four-and-a-half years since Ellen died have disappeared in the blink of an eye. I still feel as though I’m floundering around as much as I was at the time I lost her; as you can imagine, that’s had an enormous impact upon our son. It’s that kind of irreparable loss, which so many of us share, which is the driving imperative to keep building our armoury against women’s cancers. It’s an honour to be here tonight to celebrate Australia joining the UK and throwing in its hand for our cause. And on that note, I’d like to now thank a number of my colleagues at Incipio and other supporting organisations. Without these people, we—and I mean everyone here tonight—would never have achieved the success that we have in this collective endeavour of ours.”
Adam then went on to introduce and thank a long list of his colleagues. When ten minutes later he gathered up his papers, moved away from the lectern and lowered himself into visible obscurity at a nearby table, the gathering exploded into applause once again.
Abbie sat perfectly still, reeling in the face of the wave of respect and appreciation for a man whose perfect marriage and love for his wife was still so vibrant, it felt as though Lady Ellen Blackwood was present at the ball that night. And when a band began to play, enticing a crowd to the dance floor, Abbie stood and Justin rose up next to her.
“Dance with me, Justin?”
“You’re kidding, Abbie,” he threw at her in challenge. “You never dance at balls. In fact, you never dance at all!”
“I know I don’t, but tonight I need to. Just one, and then I’m going home, where I should have stayed. It was a mistake to come here, but thank you so much for agreeing to bring me. You weren’t to know …” Abbie couldn’t go on because a lump had stubbornly wedged in her throat, making it difficult to talk.
Justin didn’t reply straight away. Instead he made a close study of her, his eyes narrowing in thoughtful response.
“Why this dance, Abbie?” he asked gently.
“Just to prove I can,” she replied, knowing she was being impossibly cryptic. Yet how could she explain to Justin why she needed this one last grab at dignity in Adam’s presence before the heartbreaking showdown that would unfold the next time they met? She couldn’t explain her motives to herself, let alone anyone else.
And once she was in Justin’s arms, Abbie was glad she’d instigated the dance because the music was slow and incredibly soothing; it was soon having a powerful effect on her frayed nerves.
At the precise moment she let her eyes close and her thoughts drift away under the strong encouragement of two glasses of champagne, she sensed Justin’s body draw back from hers. Before she knew what was happening his arms had also disappeared from around her waist, only to be replaced by another set of arms. Sensing a stronger, taller physique against hers, and breathing in an unsettlingly familiar scent of aftershave, Abbie lifted her face to find she’d been seamlessly passed into the arms of another.
Adam Cooper.
Abbie wanted to pull away, but she couldn’t have if she’d tried. How could she when he was pinning her down into a helpless, unchallenging silence with his heavy gaze as he gathered her left hand in his? Meanwhile, his other hand was moving up to find a home against her bare back. And not a square inch of her dress was within reach of impeding that slow advancement of his cool palm and fingertips.
Despite his gentle touch, Adam’s expression was about as warm and readable as a stone sphinx; Abbie was certain that he was about to tell her exactly what he thought of her for turning up on a private mission to one of the most important public events of his life. With nowhere to run and definitely nowhere to hide, Abbie’s hand also had nowhere else to go except up and over his broad shoulder as he drew her close.
For an entire song he held her like that, radiating through his inscrutable gaze an intensity in his mood that at once thrilled and disturbed her. But then he was pulling away, his eyes finally revealing their deep blue depths as they were caught within a fleeting flash of light from the dance floor.
“I’m so sorry, Abbie,” he began in a low voice, his warm breath like a caress against her cheek. “Seeing you earlier caught me off guard, but I should never have spoken to you like that—not under any circumstances. What happened between us all those years ago was my fault, not yours. My life was an unfolding disaster and I should never have mixed you up in it. So if you need to talk to me about that then I’ll make myself available to you. I owe you that.”
Abbie stiffened and bit down hard on her bottom lip in instinctive response. In the next moment she’d stepped backwards and was extracting herself from Adam’s arms.
An apology.
She’d rather have had a telling-off, a rebuff, a dismissal; anything. Just not an apology. For an apology reduced her to nothing more than a minor piece of unfinished business—a box he had to tick to put that part of his life behind him for good.
Waves of humiliation had Abbie trapped in their current and were carrying her steadily away. At that moment she forgot about everything except fighting for that same shred of dignity she’d wanted to cling onto when she’d asked Justin to dance—the one that would be wiped out for good when Adam finally discovered the kind of woman she really
was.
“Please don’t do that, Adam,” she said when she’d found her voice, frosty and unwavering, despite her battle to suppress the violent tremble in her bottom lip. “Don’t apologise, and don’t ever speak about me as though I was some … some hapless blip in your life. What happened between us meant something to me, if not to you. But you’re right, what I do want from you is your time. So as you suggested, I’ll ring Justin’s secretary for an appointment and we’ll keep all our communications at arm’s-length from now on. I was a fool to think it could have been otherwise. It’ll never happen again.”
With that, Abbie turned and walked away from Adam through the crowd, the teetering ruins of belief that he might once have cared for her now a formless pile of rubble behind her on that dance floor. And within that rubble lay her last tentative hope that old feelings might have offered him a softer landing for the truth that would soon make him despise her forever.
For although Adam didn’t know it, a child had been conceived during their three weeks together and then kept from him for nearly four years; a baby boy conceived amidst a tidal wave of his father’s grief over the tragic death of his young wife just weeks before—a wife who was then, and clearly always would be, the love of Adam Cooper’s life.
Chapter Two
“Excuse me, sir! Your name please!” The woman seated behind the school registration table repeated her request with unconcealed impatience.
She had a nametag on—Janet Wilson. She also had a long queue of parents banking up behind Adam as they waited to gain entry into the school hall.
Yet despite the queue Adam remained frozen in place, helplessly transfixed by that one nametag lying on the table amongst the many still waiting to be claimed. For on that nametag the black lettering was as stark and accusatory as if it were a warrant for his arrest: Abbie McCarthy.
“Name please!” Janet Wilson barked in a shrill voice.
“Abbie McCarthy!” Adam heard himself breathe as he lifted his hand and knotted his fingers into his hair in stunned disbelief.
Was he seeing things? Were his memories of last night so insidious that he was now reading words on nametags that weren’t actually there?
Anything was possible. For Abbie was nowhere if not on his mind. In fact, he hadn’t been able to get her out of his head from the moment she’d ticked him off last night and then abandoned him on the dance floor like some modern-day Cinderella on steroids.
“Oh ... no. I’m sorry. My name’s Adam Cooper,” Adam explained to the school registrar, finally waking up out of his head-trip.
“That’s better,” Janet Wilson snapped in exasperation, her eyes dull with humourless efficiency. “Here’s your nametag, Mr. Cooper. And please take a folder from the end of the table, otherwise you’ll have no idea what’s happening on your son’s first day of school next Monday.”
“Could you tell me where I can find my son please?” Adam jumped in before Janet Wilson had time to turn to the parents behind him. “Pete was very upset when I left him here this morning. I’d like to see him as soon as …”
“Sir!” Janet Wilson interrupted sternly, irritated at his disruption to her registration process. “If you could move to one side, there are parents behind you who are just as anxious as you to gain entry to the hall.”
And with that she turned her face away in a deliberate gesture of dismissal.
Frustration surged but Adam bit his tongue. He knew it would be useless to argue.
Slipping the folder under his arm, he moved away from the registration table and sighing roughly, rubbed the nine-hour stubble on his jaw with his fingertips.
Man oh man! A possible run in with Abbie and a collision course with his four-year-old in the one afternoon—could his day get any more intense? For Pete would never understand how his father could have abandoned him to a bunch of terrifying strangers in an unfamiliar school that morning. And Abbie clearly had issues about his brutal reversal out of her life all those years ago; she hadn’t booked that meeting with him tomorrow to discuss recent amendments to the Corporations Act, of that he was sure!
Adam wandered through the crowded space towards open windows. He hoped they might offer up some fresh air to ease his edginess over finding a feisty Abbie McCarthy back in his life, steadily fuelling the stubborn migraine that had been pounding away behind his right eye since breakfast time. But Lord knew his problems had begun well before breakfast. They were up and running the moment he’d walked across that dance floor and placed his hand on Justin’s shoulder to let him know he wanted to dance with his partner.
God, what had he been thinking? He should never have done it. And yet he’d had no idea his whole body would go into overdrive the second she was back in his arms. After all, he’d managed to stop thinking about her a very long time ago. For she was right, he’d dismissed their three weeks together as nothing more than a blip in the middle of his grief over losing Ellen. The other blip he’d managed to stop thinking about was the way he’d turned his back on every responsibility bearing down on his life at that time: Ellen’s recent death, her distraught family, a growing charity that badly needed direction, but most of all, his three-month-old baby boy waiting for him back in England.
So many people who needed him.
And where was he? Ten thousand miles away and losing himself in a three-week re-enactment of a John and Yoko bed-in with a girl he’d only just met!
“Hello, Adam Cooper. I’m Emma Martin. You’re new to the school, aren’t you?”
At that moment Adam was side-tracked out of his world of Abbie-induced headache. A woman—thankfully not his tetchy Cinderella from last night—had emerged out of the crowd. Tossing a stream of glossy dark hair back from one shoulder, she held out a hand for him to shake in greeting and smiled.
“Yes … yes, I am new,” Adam heard himself stammer, cursing yet again those courtroom nerves of steel that mysteriously vanished in a heartbeat the moment an attractive woman was in front of him.
“I thought so, Adam. I didn’t think I’d missed seeing you around the place.”
Emma smiled with her mouth, her unsmiling eyes skipping across his face before locking with his own. Adam managed to smile back politely, but was lost for words when he guessed he was being hit upon. It had been a regular problem since Ellen’s death when he’d been so focused on raising Pete that he hadn’t bothered to try and resurrect any pre-marriage, sweet-talking skills he might have once had. In fact, who was he kidding? Mr Bean was probably more adept at smooth repartee with women than he was.
“So, Adam, who have you got starting at St James’?”
“My son, Peter. He’s starting in the prep class today.”
“How lovely! My Hughie’s starting in prep too!” Emma declared before adding, “My other son, Sebastian, is in year two.”
“Is that right?” Adam replied, but immediately flinched at the disinterest he could hear in his own voice.
Quickly collecting himself, he gathered his thoughts and trained them on the woman in front of him rather than on Pete and Abbie. After all, it wasn’t this woman’s fault he was completely distracted by Pete’s meltdown that morning. And it most definitely wasn’t her fault that he was side-tracked by the possibility that Abbie might re-descend into his life again that afternoon.
But if Emma Martin had noticed his high level of distraction she wasn’t showing it. At that moment her eyes were drifting languorously across the line of both of his shoulders before glancing suggestively down his tie to his belt buckle. And with a quick, instinctive intake of breath Adam knew that Emma would not be put off by any Mr Bean impersonation he might unwittingly dish out that day.
“So tell me, Adam,” Emma began again, her eyes making a suggestive elevation back up his tie and settling on his face. “What made you choose St James’?”
“Pete and I have just arrived in Sydney and I had to make a quick decision about a school for him—a friend of mine recommended this one.”
“Well, you
’ve made the right decision. St James’ is the best primary school in the Eastern Suburbs.”
“Really? That’s good to hear,” Adam replied, his mind drifting again as he glanced across the room at a far door. He was wondering whether Pete might be on the other side of it when he added, “Do you think our children might be brought to us soon, Emma? Pete had a bad start this morning and I’d feel a whole lot better if I knew he was okay.”
Yet even as Adam heard his own description of Pete’s morning, he knew it was nothing short of a laughable understatement. For at half-past eight that morning one of the well-meaning teachers had prised the arms of his sobbing four-year-old from around his neck and carried Pete away to begin his prep orientation day at St James’.
“Oh no, Adam! We won’t see the children for ages yet,” Emma offered in an amused, tinkly voice. “I remember when Seb started here I waited in this hall for almost an hour!”
On hearing that dire prediction, Adam pulled a hanky out of his pocket and began to mop up the beads of sweat that had formed across his forehead, unable to drag his thoughts away from the events of that morning.
Not that Pete’s reaction to starting at St James’ had come as any real shock. Adam had known the anxiety issues haunting his son for the last two years would spiral him into a maelstrom over his first day at school. And it hadn’t been a good sign when he was weeping over his toast and milk that morning. But not for a minute had Adam expected Pete to become completely hysterical when they walked through the school’s front gates. It was as though his four-year-old had suddenly discovered an extra set of lungs and four extra limbs, all of which were operating at full throttle.
“So where’s Pete’s mum today?” Emma asked with a lightness that failed to conceal the curiosity shining in her green eyes.
Adam didn’t answer straight away, wondering whether there was any way he could avoid the question that always felt like a body blow—but of course there was not.
