by Kitty French
‘I can’t help you. I don’t have a clue who he was.’ She didn’t look at all bothered. ‘He could have been one of quite a few at the time.’
Was she lying? He couldn’t tell that either. It was entirely possible that she didn’t know, but all the same he’d hoped for a different answer. It was something that had begun to weigh on his mind more and more. He’d let himself become preoccupied with his past, with his mother, and with London, and the only way he could see to get it out of his system had been to come here and win. Win so categorically that whenever he thought of London in the future he’d think only of his triumph rather than his childhood. Ripping the theatre apart and placing a clean, gleaming gym in its place was part of it. Facing his mother was part of it. And finding his father was the final piece of the jigsaw. Maybe, if he turned out to be a decent man, it would mean Abel was a decent man too. He didn’t see any of himself in the woman opposite, besides her eyes.
‘Still rolling in it?’ she asked, her words loaded with scorn.
‘I’m doing okay,’ he said. He’d learned his lesson well the last time he’d come here and tried to help. Back then he’d been naive enough to try to think the best of her and hope she’d think the best of him back. This time he knew better. She wasn’t asking in order to feel any sense of pride in her son. She was asking him so she could look down her nose out of some vastly misplaced inverted snobbery.
She snorted, stubbing out her cigarette and almost immediately lighting a second.
‘My son the big shot,’ she mocked.
Abel felt his hackles rise. ‘What’s so wrong with me doing well, mum?’
She shook her head, her lips turned down in a disinterested grimace. ‘What are you really here for? To dirty your expensive shoes on my carpets?’
Abel thought of the years in old, ill-fitting shoes and bit back the angry words that filled his head. If he started, he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to stop.
‘Tell me who he is and I’ll go.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘I’ve told you once. I don’t know.’
‘Think harder. Was there anyone special? Anyone besides your…’ he cast around for a word that didn’t make his mother sound like a prostitute. ‘…Your usual friends?’
She opened her eyes wide at this. ‘So polite. You’ve got me to thank for that.’
He had nothing to be grateful to the woman opposite him for, yet still he didn’t bite.
‘Is his name on my birth certificate?’ He knew the answer to that, of course he had checked years before, but he asked anyway.
‘Australia’s rubbed off on you. Just listen to your voice.’ Her nose wrinkled with distaste. She mocked him again with an awful parody of his accent. ‘Father unknown.’ She laughed, contemptuous as she mimed a tick in the box in the air between them.
Abel scrubbed a hand over his jaw. ‘Do you need money?’
He watched her eyes narrow before she looked down to stub out her cigarette.
‘Are you suggesting that money might improve my memory, Abel?’
He shrugged. The gloves were off. ‘Will it?’
‘Haven’t we been here before? You flash your money around and expect me to be impressed. I’m not interested in your fancy lifestyle or your bulging bank account. Nothing was ever good enough for you, was it? I scrimped to put food on your table and you left me at the first possible chance you had.’
‘I came back for you,’ he said, stung by the injustice and her selective memory.
‘Too little too late, son,’ she spat, more rattled than he’d seen her. What right did she have to her indignation?
‘And now you come around here asking about your father, as if you think he’s going to be some knight in shining armour rather than some two bit nobody who wouldn’t give a stuff about you,’ she said, her cold eyes mocking him again. ‘What do you expect to happen, Abel? You’re going to find out it’s the bloody Prince of Wales, go and knock on his door and be welcomed in with open arms? Get your head out of the clouds, son. They were all good-for-nothings, so either way, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.’
Abel felt every word like a slap, and tried to filter out the insults from the truths scattered amongst them.
‘So do you know who he is?’ He tried again, keeping his voice even.
Her eyes flashed. ‘He’s probably dead.’
It was Abel’s turn to mock. ‘I don’t believe you. You do know. Tell me his name.’
Her face was resolute. This was her only power, and she wasn’t giving it up. ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Believe whatever you want. You’ll never know. Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.’
He stared at her, knowing he had nothing to offer that she wanted. She was playing a power game, putting him in his place, keeping him down, as she always had. He realised with a sudden cold drench of conviction that she really didn’t know. She was just toying with him, enjoying withholding a real answer of any kind. There was no big secret. It was as ugly and mundane a truth as that. She had no idea who his father was.
Glancing around the room, his eyes settled on a photograph of her parents, his grandparents. His grandfather had died before Abel was born, but he remembered his grandmother well. Slight like his mother, but warm where she was cold and soft where she was hard. She'd been the one good presence in his early years, and it was the small inheritance that she’d left him which had provided him with his badly needed escape route as soon as he was old enough; money for a one way flight, somewhere as far away from home as he could possibly get.
‘I always wanted you to be more like her,’ he said, not caring if his words hurt.
If they did, she didn’t show it. ‘She always wanted me to be more like her. She was a fool. She babied you, and then left me to pick up the pieces.’
‘She died, mother.’ He couldn’t bring himself to use the more familiar ‘Mum’ any more. ‘I don’t think she did it to inconvenience you.’
‘Yes, and left me to toughen you up for the real world.’ She looked him up and down. ‘Didn’t do a bad job, did I?’
‘Anything I am today is in spite of you, not because of you,’ he said coldly. It came as a release to let go of any lingering childhood hopes of a good relationship with his mother. In that moment he gave himself permission not to love her any more, and there was no accompanying sensation of loss or grief. There was only relief.
‘Well it certainly wasn’t your father’s influence, was it? None of my men friends…’ she placed a heavy, sarcastic emphasis on the word ‘… ever gave you a second look. That’s how much you mean to anyone, so quit looking for something that isn’t there.’
They stared at each brutally across the chipped table. Abel could see the pleasure in her eyes at having denied him something that he wanted.
If the man who was his father had had even had an inkling about him and never bothered to keep in touch, then he was even less of a loss than his mother. Abel reached inside his jacket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper with the theatre’s address on it.
‘This is where I’m staying for the next few weeks, if any particular name should come back to you.’ He knew now that it wouldn’t, but still he dropped the paper on the table before he strode out of the house, down the cracked path and away from it all, forcing himself to walk slowly even though his heart was banging and he wanted to run away, slinking through the shadows just as he had as a boy. He walked. And he walked, and he walked, soaked to the skin, hoping the rain would wash away the smell of his mother’s house from his clothes and the look in her eyes from his memory.
He walked to the cemetery and sat on the wet grass with his back leaned against his grandmother’s gravestone until after dark, and then he walked into a bar and nursed a double scotch until the bartender locked up for the night. And then he walked the streets some more, drenched by the rain and accompanied by a soundtrack of rolling thunder, and finally headed for the only place that felt anything close to home right now. Theatre Divine.
&nbs
p; Chapter Fifteen
Post-show, the packed theatre had emptied out onto the stormy street and all of the staff had hurried home to get out of the worst of the weather, leaving Genie alone on the stage. Tonight’s show had been a sizzler. She couldn’t hide how excited she was about the future and had thrown all of that euphoric, pent up energy into her act tonight, leaving the audience stamping their feet for more even after her encore. Still mostly in costume, she hummed along to her favourite chill-out playlist streaming through the practice amp offstage as she ran through her post show checks of the lamp to keep her beloved prop in tip top condition.
‘Bad luck, showgirl. Looks like your audience lost interest and went home.’
She stilled at the sound of Abel’s voice and pirouetted slowly on her high heels. He’d been missing all day; she knew because she’d tried on several occasions to get hold of him and share the happy news about Dalton Productions. Or rub salt into his wounds. One or the other.
Christ. Had he not heard of an umbrella? He was soaked.
‘And it looks like you’ve spent too much time in the sun and forgotten about the English weather,’ she observed.
‘I wish I’d forgotten a whole lot more about this country than the fucking weather,’ he replied, pushing his wet hair back from his eyes.
Did he always have to be so outright antagonistic? She was on an absolute high and he wasn’t going to pull her down.
‘Where have you been all day? I’ve been looking for you,’ she said, walking around the lamp again, stretching up high to inspect its upper planes.
He walked slowly down the central aisle, coming closer to her. ‘Walking. Thinking about ripping this place apart and starting again.’
Genie smiled inwardly. He’d have to rethink that that one pretty rapidly once he heard her news. ‘I see.’
‘Do you?’ he said, making her turn her head at the sharpness in his voice. ‘Do you really? You see why I want turn this place from a washed up gin palace for perverts into a clean, working gym?’
She looked down at him, one hand on the lamp. She’d had just about as much as she could take of his crap about her career.
‘Drop it, Kingdom. You find it as sexy as every other audience member. I saw you, remember? You can lie to yourself if you like but you’re not fooling me or anyone else. You like to watch me perform.’
He shook his head. ‘You don’t know how wrong you are, Beauty.’ he said softly. ‘It disgusts me.’
His harsh choice of words enraged her.
‘Disgusts you?’ He’d well and truly trampled on her excitement, leaving her ready to kill him. She was no match for him physically, but she was a woman with weapons of her own. There was more than one way to take this man down.
‘How about you prove it?’ she said, her hand balanced on her tipped up hip.
‘I don’t need to prove anything to you or anyone else,’ he said, with a bitter half laugh.
Genie nodded in acknowledgement, and then walked into the wings and knocked down the house lights apart from a couple of stage spotlights. She returned a moment later with a spindle-backed chair, one of The Divine Girls’ stage props. Positioning it carefully on the stage facing the lamp, she turned back to him and opened her hands towards the chair.
‘Take a seat. Let me dance for you.’
Abel locked eyes with her. ‘I know what you’re doing and its not going to work.’
She shrugged delicately. ‘So prove me wrong. I dance. You watch. I’m willing to bet you won’t be Mr Disgusted of Australia by the end of it.’
‘I’m not a gambling man, Genie,’ he said, shrugging out of his wet leather jacket to reveal a dark, just as damp shirt that clung to his body and outlined his powerful frame.
‘Not even for a sure bet?’ She lifted her eyebrows at him and ran her hands down her body to check her costume was in place. ‘You’re so certain of yourself. What have you got to lose?’ she wheedled, moving behind the lamp and using the hidden step to move up onto its lid. He watched her every move from his front row position.
‘Come up here and watch me, Abel. What are you so afraid of?’
Under usual circumstances, Abel wasn’t an easily persuaded man. Under usual circumstances, he had an iron will.
But this wasn’t a usual kind of night, and therefore usual rules didn’t apply. His day had been hell on wheels. He’d possibly seen his mother for the last time ever, faced the fact that he’d never meet his father, and he was saturated to the skin. One double whisky hadn’t even begun to take the rough edges off his day. He could drink a whole damn bottle and still not feel soothed. And then there was Genie, pushing all of his buttons on purpose in order to prove her fucking point. He badly needed one win today. Everything else had gone to hell; he was ready to sit on that goddamn chair and all but go to sleep while she did her stuff, just to prove for once and for all that he’d rather watch a woman strip paint than strip her clothes off for money. She was taunting him, and he knew that the right thing to do was to walk on by and go to bed, especially in the dark frame of mind that he’d arrived at.
‘Not brave enough?’ she said softly, and for a split second in his head it wasn’t Genie speaking. It was his mother, and he was a child again, and this was going to be that one time when he stood up and said yes, I am brave enough. You can’t break me.
And with that, he stalked up the stairs at the side of the stage and dropped onto the chair, legs splayed and arms folded across his chest.
‘Go for your life, Beauty. Give it your best shot.’
Genie didn’t know what had made him change his mind, but she sensed the moment that he snapped. He’d given off an aura of pent up frustration from the second he’d walked in, and now he’d taken his seat she could practically feel it radiating from him like a physical entity. It surrounded her.
She’d never performed for an audience of one before. It brought a new intimacy, a whole different aspect to her act that she hadn’t considered hitherto. She was generally so blinded by the stage lights that she couldn’t pick out faces in the crowd, but Abel was close enough for her to really be able to see him, to watch his expressions.
She’d positioned his chair beneath a spotlight, and from here she could see the way his damp shirt pulled taut across his chest muscles, and the droplets of rain that still spiked his dark eyelashes like mascara. He was a big man in every sense: tall and robust with a presence to match. There was a quiet, brooding charisma about him tonight, a tight intensity, and Genie found herself more nervous than she expected to be. She’d engineered this situation, and now she had to see it through.
Abel didn’t want to look her in the eyes. He could get through this as long as he didn’t see the real woman behind the dancing girl she was so intent on making him want. What he didn’t want was to see the pretty girl in cut offs and a t-shirt, or the almost virginal one in a white lace nightdress, or the one whose body he’d licked melted chocolate off. He didn’t want to connect with her at all, and he figured that as long as he didn’t look her in the eyes then he’d be okay. Then she threw her head back and struck a pose, her red curls wild over her shoulders, and he gave up on any plan and just watched her dance.
Genie knew she needed to do something different if this was going to work. He’d seen her current routine on several occasions, and she wanted the element of surprise. Besides, she’d removed her nipple covers after the show and hadn’t bothered to put her stockings back on either, so had only the corset and knickers she’d finished her encore in now covering her body.
It wasn’t much to work with, but it was going to have to be enough. Closing her eyes, she listened to the current playlist track, finding her rhythm, letting her body undulate to the steady, pulsing beat. Its sultry dance sound wasn’t anywhere near as loud as her show music, but it was just enough to give her something to follow.
Rippling her hands down her body, she toyed with the corset catches, watching the spotlit man in front of her. He clearly wanted to give t
he impression he didn’t want to be there. His folded arms, his set jaw, his indifferent expression all said ‘bored’. But his eyes didn’t as he watched her fingers play with those hook and eye fastenings. However hard Abel tried not to be, she could see he was interested.
He shifted in his seat now, becoming more agitated, and she bypassed her corset to hook her thumbs into the sides of her frilly silk knickers. She saw him swallow, noticing the way he closed his eyes momentarily as he did it. She was so very aware of him, of his proximity, and of his potential to combust. She just didn’t know how long his fuse was.
There was only one way to find out. She lifted one eyebrow and smiled a little, suggestive, then slid the knickers down her thighs to reveal the tiny crystal g-string that covered her modesty on stage.
Look me in the eyes, Abel Kingdom.
He looked everywhere else, but he steadfastly refused to meet her gaze. She danced just for him, and every single second she longed for him to look up. It was as if he’d only half accepted her challenge, and given the fact that she was the one who’d thrown the dice, she certainly wasn’t prepared to play by his rules.
Leaving her corset in place for now, she struck a new pose, slithering her body over the lamp’s jewelled paintwork. It was time to take it up a level.
Fuck. This wasn’t her usual act. He’d banked on knowing what came next so he could mentally prepare himself, and now she’d gone a step ahead of him and mixed things up. Abel couldn’t help but connect with the way her body moved; she was at one with the music, mermaid-like, her lamp a rock in the ocean as she perched on it and beckoned him to come over and break himself against it. He didn’t. He wouldn’t. Thank God she’d had that g-string on. She’d nearly stopped his fucking heart. And then she nearly stopped it again, because she was sliding her glittering body down from the lamp and coming straight for him.
Genie’s heart was beating unnaturally fast as she drew closer to him. She’d never danced like this for anyone, and in climbing down and stepping closer she’d crossed the line from showgirl to something else, something closer to all of the accusations he regularly threw at her. She knew that she was breaking the rules, but Abel wasn’t a man who played fair anyway. He played dirty, and right now this was starting to feel pretty dirty too, in a sexy way.
