The Secret Daughter

by Catherine Spencer

  “I did what I thought was best for you. What would you have had me do? Keep you here, where everyone knew you, and so make it impossible for you to go forward with your life without your past following wherever you went?”

  “It followed me anyway. Mother. Or did you think I’d simply forget my little daughter?”

  “I certainly hoped you would.”

  “Did you forget me, Mother? Does any woman ever forget the child she gave birth to?”

  “Really, Imogen!” Suzanne set the sterling teapot on its stand with a decided clatter. “I find this conversation most upsetting and, to be perfectly frank, in very poor taste.”

  “Yes,” Imogen said, dismayed to find her mother could still hurt her. “I can see that you do. Perhaps I was wrong to think we could make amends. Perhaps there are things neither one of us can ever really forgive the other for.”

  Agitation lent a hectic flush to Suzanne’s cheeks. “That isn’t so, at least not on my part. I’m happy to see you. If it’s possible for us to start over, I’m willing to try. But I warn you now that it won’t happen if you insist on harping on matters best left alone. That whole business is a closed book.”

  “But it isn’t for me! How can it be, when I never even saw my baby? One day I was pregnant, could feel her kicking inside me, and the next she was dead and gone, and I was expected to behave as if she’d never existed. Well, that isn’t how it works, Mother. Before you and I can resume any sort of worthwhile relationship, I need to find closure, too.”

  “Imogen, I’m begging you!” Ashen-faced, Suzanne put down her cup and saucer and raised ruby-tipped fingers to her temples.

  Her mother looked ill, Imogen realized with sudden compunction. The late afternoon sun slanting cruelly across the fine patrician features revealed a pinched unhappiness about the eyes and mouth, the kind brought about by recurrent pain.

  Fortunately, the maid came in. “Will there be one more for dinner, madam?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Suzanne said. “I feel one of my headaches coming on. I’m sorry, Imogen, but I’m going to have to go and lie down with a cold cloth over my eyes.”

  “Of course. Is there anything I can get for you? An aspirin, perhaps?”

  “No, thank you. I have special migraine medication to take when this happens. Molly will help me.”

  The visit was clearly at an end. Collecting her things, Imogen prepared to leave. “Then I’ll let myself out and call you tomorrow, if I may?”

  “Of course.”

  Imogen hesitated, again tempted to embrace her mother. But when Suzanne got up from the sofa, she swayed on her feet, and it was obvious she really was in pain. Imogen touched her gently on the hand and said, “I’m sorry if my coming here has brought on this attack, Mother.”

  “I’ve brought it on myself, I’m afraid” She twisted the rings on her fingers and knit her finely arched brows as though wrestling with a dilemma. At length, she let out a long, defeated sigh, lifted her head and said in a low voice, “Won’t you stay here while you’re in town, Imogen? I’d really like it very much if you would. I’ve...missed having a daughter all these years.”

  It was the last admission Imogen had expected to hear. She could not believe how it moved her, or how, with so few words, so much healing could begin. Overwhelmed, she said, “I don’t want to put you out, and the Briarwood is very comfortable.”

  “But it’s not your home, and if we are to find our way back to each other, surely the place to start is here under this roof where things went so terribly wrong to begin with.”

  It was so much what she had hoped for that Imogen’s throat ached. “Yes,” she whispered, overcome. “Thank you, Mother.”

  She was smiling as she drove from the house and humming by the time she drew up outside the hotel. “I’m checking out,” she told the young man at the front desk. “Please have my bill ready and send someone for my luggage in half an hour.”

  The clerk looked anxious. “Nothing’s wrong, I hope, madam? No problem with our service?”

  “No,” she said, still all smiles. “Things couldn’t be better.”

  But they could deteriorate rapidly, she soon discovered. When a knock came at her door some twenty minutes later, she opened it, expecting it to be the bellhop arriving early. Instead, Joe Donnelly stood there, the light of battle sparking in his eyes.

  “I’d invite me in, if I were you,” he said, when she made no move to let him inside the room. “I don’t think you’re going to want the entire floor to know why I’m here.”

  If she hadn’t been taken so completely by surprise, Imogen would have told him she wasn’t interested in finding out the reason for his unannounced visit, either, and shut the door in his face. Common sense demanded that, at the very least, she tell him to wait for her downstairs in one of the public rooms. Sheer self-preservation told her to refuse to see him at all. And ordinarily, Imogen listened to her instincts. But one look at Joe’s face told her this was no ordinary occasion.

  Last night, dusk had hidden what the clear light of day revealed. He had lost his old devil-may-care expression a long time ago. Any vestige of softness his mouth might once have shown was gone. His eyes, though as vividly blue as ever, possessed a wariness Joe Donnelly at twenty-three hadn’t known.

  He had always been ready to take on the world, secure in the belief that he was invincible, but the arrogance of youth had given way to a cynicism ready to flare into anger at the slightest provocation. And somehow, she had provoked him to anger now.

  “What do you want?” she asked, backing away from him, allowing him into the room.

  He followed, closing the door behind him. “Looks as if I got here just in time,” he said, ignoring her question and jerking his head at the suitcase lying open on the bed. “I see you’re getting set to run away again.”

  “I’m not running anywhere, Joe Donnelly. I’m staying with my mother for the rest of the time I’m here—not that I owe you any explanations.”

  “Oh, but you do, Imogen,” he said, stalking her across the room until the backs of her knees hit the edge of the bed and made further retreat impossible. “And you can start by telling me why you skipped town so hurriedly just weeks after we had sex, the year you graduated from high school.”

  We had sex. Even though she’d flung the same callous words at him the night before, having them hurled back at her now stung worse than salt in a newly opened wound. On the other hand, given his present mood, what else did she expect? That he’d couch his anger in euphemisms?

  “I’m waiting,” he said, looming over her. “Why the rapid exit from Rosemont, Imogen?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  He folded his arms across his chest and planted his feet more firmly on the carpet, a statement that he’d allow nothing to deflect his purpose. “As of right now, I’m making it my business.”

  She didn’t like the way he seemed to suck the oxygen out of the air. Even less did she like the way he intimidated her. There was something almost sinister in his velvet tone of voice, so at odds with the hard line of his mouth and the absolute coldness in his eyes.

  “I’m waiting,” he said, still with chilling softness.

  She swallowed, scrambling to find an answer that would satisfy him and put an end to the inquisition. “I went to Switzerland for a year,” she said, stretching the truth by a few months. “To school.”

  He moved suddenly, circling her wrists with his long, strong fingers and hauling her to her feet. “Liar! You had a baby. My baby.”

  The blood drained from her face, leaving her lightheaded with shock. The Joe Donnelly she’d known and worshipped would never have cornered her so mercilessly, but this man was a stranger.

  “Didn’t you?” Imprisoning both her wrists in one hand, he grasped her chin in the other and forced her to meet his scrutiny.

  Mutely, she stared at him, her silence an admission of guilt. There was a time she’d have welcomed being held by him, so close she cou
ld see the faint stippling of new beard growth on his jaw. But not like this, with his eyesblazing in his face and his mouth twisted with rage. As if his rights as a human being, as a man, had been violated.

  Not as if, her conscience scolded. His rights have been violated, pure and simple. He learned from someone else a truth he should have heard from you years ago.

  It was true, and looked at from his point of view, she knew her omission was inexcusable. “How did you find out?” she croaked, too dismayed to consider prevaricating-

  “By accident.”

  “I’m sorry.” She sounded as feebleminded as she felt.

  “For what?” he bellowed. “For the way I found out I’d fathered a child, or that I found out at all? And don’t try telling me it’s none of my business then try to shoo me away, because it isn’t going to happen, Imogen.”

  How he must despise her! “I’m sorry you had to find out like this,” she mumbled.

  “You could have prevented it. You could have told me yourself, at the time.”

  “I—”

  “Let me guess why you didn’t.” The contempt in his tone seared her. “Donnelly genes didn’t measure up to what it takes to be a Palmer heir. It was easier to write the whole thing off as an accident. Erase the mistake before anyone found out about it. How am I doing so far, princess? Batting a hundred?”

  Too floored to refute such a ludicrous allegation, she stared at him. She’d opened her Pandora’s box so carefully. How had this secret escaped? Who could have told him, when the only people in town who knew were her mother and the family doctor?

  “I always thought your mother was a bitch,” he said savagely, “but I never wanted to believe you were cut from the same cloth. I never thought you capable of cold-blooded murder.”

  “Stop it!” She choked the words out, stirred by the unfairness of his accusation and his unjustified attack on Suzanne.

  “What else would you call abortion? You curled your aristocratic lip last night when you realized Sean and Liz had to get married, as you so prettily phrased it, but at least they didn’t take the easy way out and flush a child, rather than have it screw up their long-term plans.”

  “I didn’t, either!” she cried, hurt beyond measure that he’d leap to such a conclusion. But the ugly fact was, he’d made love to a stranger out of pity. He knew of her—that she belonged to the richest family in town, that she vacationed in the Alps and on the Riviera, had servants to cater to her needs and rode around town in the back of a chauffeur-driven limousine. But he’d never known her, the person she was inside. How could he be expected to understand what her reaction to the pregnancy might have been? “I didn’t have an abortion,” she said quietly. “I never even considered it.”

  It was his turn to be rendered speechless. Eventually, after a silence that thrummed with tension, he said, “Then what the hell happened to my child?”

  “She died, Joe.” The words fell into the room like marbles hitting glass. Their echo seemed to hang in the air forever.

  “What?” His horrified gaze burned holes in her. “How?”

  “She was stillborn.”

  The breath rushed out of him. “Stillborn?” he repeated hollowly, slumping into a chair.

  Witnessing his shock was like reliving her own when she’d first been told. The tears welled up, and she felt again that clutching emptiness no amount of sympathy or kindness had been able to fill. How her soul had ached during those terrible days.

  And how his was hurting now! “Why?” he asked, in that shell-shocked voice.

  “Don’t you think I’ve asked myself that over and over again? Why my baby? Why me?” And because he’d judged her so harshly to begin with, she asked, “And why you? Why not a man who cared enough for me to be by my side, to share the grief?”

  If only he’d reach out to her then, how willingly she’d have gone to him. They had lost a child—surely the greatest sorrow any two people could be asked to bear—and should have been able to draw comfort and strength from each other.

  But he did not. Instead, he swung his head in a slow arc, and she saw that his eyes had turned a winter-sky blue, the kind that comes after a blizzard, so hard and remote that she wondered if there was a spark of warmth or tenderness left in him.

  “If I had known, I would have been there,” he said. “But I did not know. You chose not to let me know.”

  “You left town,” she said, “and since you didn’t bother to say goodbye first, I took that as a clear message that you weren’t interested in keeping in touch.”

  “So you thought you’d punish me by keeping knowledge of my child from me? Or was it more a case of hushing up the whole business entirely so that no one would know you’d rolled in the hay with a peasant?”

  His first question gave her pause. She had been angry with him once the initial hurt of his desertion had subsided. It had been the only way she could cope. But his second accusation made her blush with shame.

  She’d couched it in more refined terms, of course, but Suzanne’s assessment had matched his. “Word of this cannot leak out,” she’d declared. “That anyone should learn of a Palmer giving birth to a Donnelly bastard is insupportable. I will not hear of it! It would ruin our fine family name!”

  Too heartsick to fight and too afraid of what the future held, Imogen the girl had gone along with her mother’s edict. She’d packed her bags and disappeared without a trace. Why not? Joe Donnelly had long since done the same thing, heading west on his beloved Harley-Davidson and leaving nothing behind but a cloud of dust.

  Still, Imogen, the woman, had to set the record straight. “I never—”

  “Don’t bother denying it,” Joe cut in. “Your face says it all.”

  Conscience-stricken, Imogen turned away, knowing she’d left it eight years too late to expect him to believe his being the father would have been reason enough for her to have adored their child.

  Her action seemed to infuriate him. Surging to his feet, he let fly with a string of curses and strode to the French window. She held her breath, anticipating another outburst. When one wasn’t forthcoming, she ventured another look at him.

  He stood with his back to her, one hand braced against the wall. The sun, half-hidden behind the branches of a tree, haloed his bowed head and the stiff, unyielding line of his shoulders. The atmosphere hummed with anger and suspicion.

  Just when Imogen thought she could bear the tension no longer, another knock came at the door. “Bellhop, Ms. Palmer.”

  She could not respond. Could not, if her life had depended on it, have navigated the stretch of carpet between her and the door. She was shaking. Shaking and empty and sick with useless regrets.

  Finally, Joe went over and opened the door. “Take the bags,” he told the man, passing him a tip, “and have Ms. Palmer’s car brought to the front. She’ll be down in a couple of minutes.”

  When they were alone again, he went into the bathroom and brought back a glass of water. “Here,” he said.

  “No.” Feebly, Imogen tried to slap him away.

  He didn’t budge. “Drink it, Imogen. You’re in no shape to get behind the wheel of a car in your present condition, and I’ve got enough on my conscience without your adding to it by driving off the road and winding up wrapped around a tree.”

  “I’d think you’d be glad if I did,” she said, his unexpected concern undermining her even more thoroughly than his rage. The tears swam in her eyes, clogged her throat.

  “That goes to show how little you know me. I happen to place a very high value on human life.”

  He was right again. She no more knew him than he knew her. But she hadn’t let that stop her from judging him and finding him wanting. “I’m afraid I owe you a very great apology.”

  “You owe me a hell of a lot more than that, Imogen,” he said flatly. “And you can be sure I intend to collect, very soon.”

  She had no doubt he meant every word. “Then I’ll give you a call once I’ve settled in at home,
” she said.

  So often when she’d been young, she’d seen Deepdene as a prison, its high stone walls a barricade between her and the life she longed to enjoy. But that night, when the gates at the main entrance swung closed behind her, it struck her for the first time as a refuge.

  Once again, the maid Molly opened the door, this time with a smile. “Madam has retired for the night, but she hopes you’ll join her for breakfast tomorrow, Miss Imogen.”

  Just as well. She’d had enough confrontation for one night.

  Molly bent to pick up the suitcase. “If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you upstairs. Your old room’s ready.”

  “Don’t bother,” Imogen said, forestalling her. “I know the way.”

  So much had remained the same on the main floor that she didn’t expect to find changes upstairs. Still, it came as a shock when she opened the door at the end of the hall and stepped into the room she’d occupied from the time she was born until just after her eighteenth birthday.

  Nothing had been touched. Absolutely nothing. The same blossom-sprigged paper covered the walls. The same Savonerie rug lay on the oak floor. The four-poster bed with its embroidered cotton canopy and cover, the books and photographs, the equestrian trophies, her old stuffed teddy bear—all were exactly as she’d left them. Even her writing materials sat on the desk under the window in the alcove as if she’d just stepped out for a moment before finishing a letter to a friend.

  Leaving her luggage by the door, she went into the adjoining bathroom. Her favorite soap, bath oil and body powder were neatly arranged on the broad deck surrounding the soaker tub. Her favorite shampoo hung in the glass-enclosed shower. Her monogrammed towels hung from the brass rail. A half-empty bottle of the perfume she’d favored as a teenager stood in the mirrored cabinet above the washbasin, along with a pale pink lipstick and an opened tube of toothpaste, for heaven’s sake!

  A. chill touched her, tiny, ghostlike fingers creeping over her skin. Uneasily, she backed into the bedroom and eyed the wardrobe on the far wall, the chiffonier beside the fireplace, the cedar chest at the foot of the bed.