by Anna Clifton
Adam’s eyes rose questioningly as he stood up and shifted his look back to Abbie again. “That okay with you? It means you’re stuck next to me for the whole flight.”
Abbie shrugged but a warm flush filled her cheeks.
There was no doubt about it. Those feelings she’d harboured for Adam all those years were tough to get rid of. But a wiser part of her warned that one plane trip would never bridge the gulf between them.
Sure, they’d once shared three incredibly intimate weeks together, hardly emerging from Adam’s hotel room for the entire time he was in Sydney. But since then there’d been nothing but distance, deceit and disappointment.
And the truth was, as Abbie knew all too well, McCarthy women keeping the men in their lives was as likely as painting the wind. A couple of peaceful days under an agreed truce was no foundation upon which to build hope when the truth was she was nothing to Adam beyond his younger son’s mother—he’d announced that with cutting brevity not two weeks ago.
But she didn’t have an opportunity to contemplate Adam’s feelings for long.
They were soon fully occupied juggling hand luggage, passports and boarding passes and keeping a careful watch on the boys. It wasn’t until she finally sank back into her comfortable airline seat after they’d been served dinner that she realised how exhausted she was.
“Do you suppose we’ll hear from them again?” Adam asked as he unbuckled his belt and leant on the armrest towards her. He nodded at the boys across the aisle. They had headphones on and were immersed in the inflight entertainment.
“I doubt it. They’ll probably be asleep in a couple of hours anyway. They’ve had it.”
“They’re not the only ones,” Adam sighed, sitting back in his seat and stretching his long legs out in front of himself.
“Thank you for organising this trip,” Abbie said. “You need to let me know how much the tickets were so that I can pay you back.”
Adam shot a quizzical blue-eyed look at her before shaking his head and replying shortly, “My treat and no arguments.”
And with that he turned to the flight attendant who’d appeared at his side with two glasses of champagne on a tray.
“I ordered these for us,” he explained as he handed her a glass with a conciliatory smile. “I think we could both do with it, given the week we’ve had.”
Abbie accepted it thankfully.
“Did you get held up at work?” he asked, turning to her again.
She nodded. “An injunction application came in an hour before I was due to leave—always the way, isn’t it? Jackie has it under control now. And Justin said he’d keep an eye on it for me when I’m in the air.”
“That’s what I like about flying,” Adam declared. “The whole world could be coming to an end below and you’d never know it. I always get off the plane feeling incredibly calm.”
“You’re always calm. And I wish I had half your self-control,” Abbie finished ruefully, the champagne bubbles working their magic as her tired, taut muscles began to relax.
“Don’t ever wish that,” he replied with cryptic brevity before adding, “And thank you again for this afternoon. I know how hard it was for you to stand back and let me take over when Henry was in trouble.”
Abbie looked at Adam but couldn’t speak for a few moments. She’d noticed for a couple of days that the suspension of cold war activities between them had softened their manner towards each other.
And sure, that was precisely what she’d wanted so that she could help Henry find his way towards trusting Adam. But it was also throwing up an unwanted side-effect, because they were going way beyond the resumption of diplomatic talks and were actually being nice to each other. At that moment Abbie was seriously struggling to absorb the intimacy of their conversation when from the night of the Incipio ball their lives had been little more than traffic jams of tight schedules and strained conversations.
“You don’t need to thank me,” she answered eventually. “You have as much right to deal with those situations as I do. And how dare that creep grab Henry like that!” she added in an outburst of fresh outrage as she thought again about the incident. “Did you see how tightly he was holding onto him? He’ll have a bruise on that arm tomorrow!”
“The thing that amazed me most was that Pete held it together,” Adam murmured thoughtfully. “Just weeks ago something like that would have sent him into an emotional tail-spin for hours. Yet there he was, not only keeping his cool, but taking care of Henry too.”
“Pete always finds his inner strength when Henry’s in trouble. At the playground yesterday Henry’s leg got caught up in the wooden swing bridge and Pete held him up until I could reach him to get it out. He’s a great kid, Adam. He’s going to be okay with time, I’m sure of it.”
“You’re already growing fond of him, aren’t you?”
Abbie nodded readily.
“I know his confidence issues will take time to sort out, but already he seems better since you and Henry came along. Tonight was just another example.”
Abbie turned away to take another sip of champagne, unsure what she might have done or said if their gazes hadn’t unlocked in short order. But Adam wasn’t of like mind. She could feel the weight of his heavy look upon her before she finally turned back to him.
“What is it?” she asked.
“What would happen to the boys if something were to happen to one of us?”
“I know what you’re getting at and I have to sort that out,” Abbie confessed readily. “We need to get you on Henry’s birth certificate and have court orders made for shared custody as soon as possible.”
“Of course. But what if something happens to me? Where will Pete go?”
“Wouldn’t his grandparents …”
“My parents are in their seventies,” Adam interrupted. “I couldn’t leave them with that responsibility. Anyway, I want Pete to go to someone who will look after him as I would want him looked after.”
Abbie stared at Adam in stunned incredulity before asking, “Would you like me to be Pete’s guardian if something happens to you? Is that what you’re trying to say?”
Surely he couldn’t have that much faith in her after what she’d done to him over Henry?
He looked at her in silence before speaking. “Would you be prepared to do that?”
“Yes, of course, but what about Ellen’s family? Wouldn’t they want him?”
“They might, but I’d prefer him to be with you and Henry. I know that’s where he’d be happiest.”
“Then I’d be honoured,” she replied, her heart thundering in her chest. “So would Henry.”
And then he gave her one of those heart-melting smiles with his eyes that she hadn’t felt the full one hundred volt wattage of in four-and-a-half years.
“Are you sure you would want him in a family where there’s no man around?” Abbie asked doubtfully.
“You managed without a father, didn’t you?”
“I suppose you can’t miss what you never knew. I was only six when he left so I barely remember him.”
“Why did your father leave?” Adam asked gently.
“The note he left said he couldn’t cope with my mother’s illness, let alone look after me. He’d left me with neighbours, saying he was going to the shops, only he never came back. My parents hadn’t told their families that Mum was sick so when she died a few days later, all alone, I ended up in foster care. It took two months for social services to find Maeve in Ireland.”
“God, no wonder you’re so fiercely independent. It’s a wonder you have faith in men at all.”
“What makes you think I do?” Abbie threw back at him, but then flushed. For she was talking to a man who was a good father and who’d stood by his wife to the end as she’d suffered the very ordeal her own mother had gone through.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you. You’re a wonderful father, and I know you stood by Ellen …”
“I know you didn’t mean me,” he reassure
d her immediately. “But the thing is, I left Pete for those three weeks after Ellen died.”
“But you went back to Pete. My father never came back for me ...”
“I still left. And I’m ashamed to admit that I probably understand what motivated your father to leave. Especially as I …” He stopped and raked a hand through his short blonde hair.
“Especially as you what?”
Adam’s eyes volleyed back to hers. “Especially as I forced her into the pregnancy which fuelled her illness. You see, but for me Ellen might still be alive today. We wouldn’t have Pete but she’d have had a chance at life.”
Adam stared at Abbie as he swallowed hard. She wondered whether she should prompt him to go on, but she didn’t need to.
“You’re confused, understandably. But the truth behind Ellen’s death is that she fell pregnant when we’d been going out for less than a year. I didn’t tell you this when I first met you, but Ellen wanted to terminate the pregnancy. She said she wasn’t sure our relationship would last the distance and that a baby would lock us together. But I wouldn’t have a bar of it. Even though we’d never discussed marriage before, I proposed to her and talked her into keeping Pete. I knew she was dead against getting married and becoming a mother at that time but I didn’t let up on her until I’d worn her down.”
“It’s always hard to know what to do when a baby’s unplanned,” Abbie offered soothingly. “All of a sudden your life is turned upside down and it’s utterly petrifying.”
“But the problem in my case was that the decision I forced on Ellen was catastrophic for her health,” Adam confessed, his voice desolate. “We didn’t find out she was sick until the second trimester. By then she’d felt Pete moving and seen him on the ultrasounds. The doctors told her that the chances of the cancer spreading were increasing with every week she delayed the treatment. But Ellen could be very stubborn sometimes. She refused to jeopardise Pete’s life or development by exposing him to the treatments. She was determined to take the risk all on herself.”
“Oh God, Adam …” Abbie murmured in shocked dismay as she imagined the hell that the mysterious and brave woman in Adam’s past must have gone through. But she couldn’t offer any more words of understanding as she watched him stare blindly ahead before switching his eyes back to her.
“Justin and JP know what I did,” he confessed. “And now you. Our friends and family think Ellen wanted the baby from the start, when the truth is she didn’t want the baby at all.”
Adam’s eyes bored into Abbie’s as though he was confiding directly to her very soul. She wanted to say something … anything to console or comfort him over the fateful part he’d played in Ellen’s pregnancy. But there didn’t seem anything to be said that wouldn’t come out as trite when their marriage had turned into one of those perfect marriages that most couples only ever dream about.
“You believed you were doing the right thing,” Abbie murmured. “You couldn’t possibly have known that Ellen would get sick.”
“No, Abbie, I wasn’t solely motivated by trying to do the right thing. What I wanted above everything else was my own way, which is what I’ve felt entitled to every day of my life. I’ll never forgive myself for what I did to her.”
Adam sat back in his seat and stared into space in the opposite direction. At that moment he withdrew from Abbie, back into his own world of merciless self-recrimination. She knew that nothing she said or did would bring him back. And not knowing whether he would ever reach out to her again made her feel desperately lonely for him, even though he was right there next to her.
God, how she wished she didn’t care—but she did, and she couldn’t help it.
Caring for him was bigger than every fear she had about the power he had to turn her life into topsy-turvy-town again. Yet he didn’t care for her. She wasn’t sure he ever had. The love of his life was dead, and as he’d said not two weeks before, the only reason he was with her now was for his boys.
Chapter Eight
As Abbie had predicted, she had no more intimate conversations with Adam on the plane.
He slept, watched movies and discussed Incipio and the firm—anything to keep personal conversation with her at bay.
When they reached Heathrow there were new distractions to make sure communication between them was business as usual: boys to keep close, customs to clear, luggage to collect and a car to rent.
Adam took responsibility for the paperwork, and Abbie was happy to take responsibility for two tired boys. Without a hitch, they were soon in a rented car and flying along the motorway towards Gloucestershire and Adam’s childhood home.
“Are you sure you’re happy to go straight out to my parents’ place?” Adam asked her quietly as the boys chatted in the backseat. “I know you’d rather spend time with JP and Alex in London first. I would too, to be honest.”
Abbie thought longingly of turning the car around and heading straight back to London, because Adam was right. She would far prefer to spend a few days with their two friends than face the music with his family. But she shook her head in decided response.
“We’re doing the right thing, Adam. Your parents are waiting anxiously—it would be heartless to make them wait any longer than necessary.”
Within a couple of hours Adam was pulling off the bleak, wintry motorway and onto a side road, and then another. Soon they were making their way along miles of quiet country lanes lined with dry stone walls, woods, pretty farms and the occasional Cotswold village. Each one was picture perfect.
Eventually he began to slow down as he drove past an old church and through the centre of a particularly gorgeous village straddling a meandering river, an old mill perching on its edge.
“This is it,” he announced as he pulled into a driveway next to the last of a line of attached cottages.
“Adam, it’s beautiful,” Abbie breathed in wonder as she gazed at the cottage’s warm Cotswold stone exterior, deep-set dormer windows and pretty cottage garden.
“You like it!” he declared with a satisfied smile, turning off the engine and leaning on the steering wheel to look across at her.
“It’s absolutely gorgeous. How old is it?” she asked as the boys jumped out of the car and disappeared into the back garden to go exploring.
“Three hundred and thirty eight years, to be precise. When they built this place, Charles II was on the throne.”
“You mean son of …” Abbie made a gesture of someone’s head being chopped off.
“Yes, Abbie,” Adam laughed, “the very same.”
Abbie shook her head in disbelief as she drank in its quaint appeal. “It’s wonderful. I’m in love.”
“I’m glad you like it, but you know that you and Henry don’t have to stay here, don’t you? In fact my parents are very disappointed you’re not staying up at the house.”
“Thanks, but this is a better arrangement,” Abbie replied as she turned her eyes away from the cottage towards its owner instead. “If I’m down here, it will give your parents and Henry some space to get to know one another—much better than all of us being cooped up together in one house.”
But just half-an-hour later Abbie realised the idiocy of her comment about being cooped up, for Adam was driving down a long gravel driveway lined with perfect hedges. An imposing manor house waited for them at the end, made from the same Cotswold stone as the cottage. But there was nothing quaint about it. It was three-storeys high and sported four imposing stone gables along its endless frontage. Glimpses of the sides of the house suggested that it was as deep as it was long.
Abbie had been nervous about meeting Adam’s parents for a few days but at that point a whole new sense of foreboding took over. For as she tried to absorb the stately dignity of the house looming before her, she knew she was about to immerse herself in a family whose heritage of power, influence and wealth was at a level she’d never experienced before.
All she had to do was look at Adam’s childhood home to know that he and his fo
rebears were marked out for public distinction from the day they were born—whether they liked it or not. And Adam, with his intelligence, his charm and his natural gift for leadership was perfect material for the next generation.
“Whoa, it’s a mansion!” Henry announced in delighted wonder, expressing his mother’s reserved admiration through the unfiltered eyes of a three-year-old.
Adam swung the car around in the driveway to come to a halt next to the enormous stone portico entrance. At that moment a flood of yellow light streamed out across the gravel driveway.
A heavy wooden front door was thrown open and two Golden Retrievers, tails wagging exuberantly, came rushing out into the night.
Abbie climbed out of the car and stood back in the dim light. As she shivered in the bone chilling cold, she watched an elderly couple emerge and throw themselves into Adam’s and Pete’s arms.
Cries of excitement from Adam’s parents rose above their reunion as Henry came and stood next to Abbie, slipping his hand into hers. Abbie squeezed it back, knowing that her boy was having a rare attack of shyness as he met his new grandparents.
“And you must be Henry!” Tony Cooper announced as he strolled across to where the two of them were standing.
He gave Abbie a friendly wink of acknowledgment before kneeling in front of Henry and holding out his hand. Henry took it and they shook hands solemnly. And at that moment Abbie was taken back to the afternoon Adam had met Henry in the supermarket aisle—when they’d shaken hands in exactly the same way.
Abbie watched as Adam’s father, tall and lean like his son but with snowy white hair, gazed at Henry in wonder before muttering almost inaudibly, “My God! You’re a chip off the old block, aren’t you? Come and meet your grandmother.”
Henry took Adam’s father’s outstretched hand and walked across to Clarissa Cooper. In the dim light Abbie could see Adam’s mother cover her mouth in astonishment. Abbie then switched her eyes to Adam to find him standing to one side, hands deep in his pockets, surveying the family scene with a slightly amused but contented look on his face.
