Bound by Contract

by Carole Mortimer

  Madison knew all too well how true that was—but she had fallen in love with him anyway. And it was a love that, even if Gideon had been a man who could ever fall in love with anyone, would never be returned; she was the last person Gideon would ever be able to love! And he didn’t know the whole truth yet… How much greater his anger was going to be when he did know!

  ‘You could have talked to me about it first, Edgar,’ her mother reproved huskily, her face pale. ‘But instead of that I opened a newspaper on Sunday morning and saw a photograph of Gideon Byrne at a film première—with my daughter hanging on to his arm!’ She swallowed hard at the shock she had received on seeing the publication. ‘His “mystery friend” was no mystery to me!’

  Madison turned to look at her brother. ‘Simon sends his regards,’ she told him quietly.

  Jonny nodded before turning back to their mother. ‘Mom, this has been as much, if not more, of a shock to Madison as it has to you.’ He gave Madison a rueful look. ‘You love the guy, don’t you…?’ he prompted gently.

  She swallowed. Yes, she loved the guy—for all the good it would do her!

  Jonny didn’t need an answer to his question, the distress on her face enough; he looked across at Edgar with flinty eyes. ‘Did you take that into account when you did your thinking, Edgar?’ he rasped angrily. ‘Did you really stop to think what a Pandora’s box you were opening by introducing Madison to Gideon?’

  Edgar drew in a sharp breath. ‘As a matter of fact, I did,’ he answered hardly. ‘Gideon has been completely alone in the world since his mother died ten years ago. He was bitter enough before then, but in the years since he’s become so hard and cynical it’s almost impossible to reach him. It’s all right for you, Jonny,’ he continued firmly as Madison’s brother would have interrupted. ‘You have people who love you—a family,’ he added pointedly.

  ‘That still didn’t give you the right to interfere like this, Edgar,’ Madison’s mother said agitatedly. ‘As Jonny had just said, you’ve opened up a part of our lives that was better left as a closed book.’

  ‘Better for whom?’ Edgar challenged impatiently. ‘I’ve watched Gideon grow up, seen what the past has done to him. And although this touches you—obviously—I no longer think it was just your decision to make. Maybe I should have discussed it with you, but I— Gideon has no one, Susan. He’s grown up believing his father left not only his mother, but him as well, because he loved someone else—you!—more than he loved either of them. Do you have any idea what effect that has had on him over the years? Of course you don’t.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve never had children of my own, and Gideon is about as close as I’ve ever come to having a son. I made a decision, rightly or wrongly, that it was time he knew he isn’t alone in the world, after all.’ He looked challengingly at Madison’s mother and brother.

  Madison looked at them, too. She had seen Jonny’s reaction when told of Gideon’s identity, knew in that moment that he was aware of exactly who the other man was.

  ‘It’s all right; I know Gideon is—’ She broke off abruptly as the man in question strode arrogantly into the room, none of them having heard the arrival of his car as they’d sat talking so emotionally.

  Madison paled when she saw the look of utter contempt on his face as he slowly looked around the room at them all, that hard gaze finally coming to rest on her.

  ‘We weren’t expecting you back just yet,’ she murmured huskily; she hadn’t ever expected to see him again!

  ‘Obviously,’ he scorned harshly. ‘But as I have more right to be here than any of you I think I’ll just sit here and wait for you all to leave.’ He made himself comfortable in an armchair. ‘Don’t let me interrupt your conversation. You had got as far as “Gideon is”…?’ he reminded her coldly.

  As if she needed any reminding! She looked across at her mother, not knowing what she should do now. She couldn’t just baldly come out with her original statement now—could she…?

  Her mother’s hands shook as she clasped them tightly together, her face paler still beneath her make-up. She inclined her head slightly.

  Her mother wanted her to tell Gideon the truth! But what would that do to him? What was it going to do to all of them…?

  She drew in a shaky breath, knowing that to delay wouldn’t change anything, that this had gone too far now for Gideon not to be made aware of the truth. All of it. ‘I was about to say,’ she began shakily, ‘to say—’

  ‘No, Madison,’ her mother cut in breathlessly. ‘I’m not being fair to expect you to do this. I—’ She stood up agitatedly, looking at Gideon. ‘There’s a lot you don’t know about thirty years ago—’

  ‘I know what I need to know,’ he assured her scathingly.

  ‘No, you don’t.’ She shook her head, suddenly looking every one of her fifty-three years.

  Madison ached for her! She didn’t need to know the whole truth about the past to know that she loved her mother, that nothing that would be said today, or at any other time, would, or ever could, change that love.

  ‘No matter what else happened thirty years ago, there is one fact, one unchangeable fact, that—’ Madison’s mother faltered, her eyes swimming with unshed tears. ‘That—’

  ‘The truth is, Gideon,’ Jonny was the one to take over the conversation, his hand on their mother’s arm in gentle support ‘—that you’re my brother!’

  Madison gasped at the starkness of the statement. She had known it, guessed it—of course she had—but to actually hear the words…!

  She had known it as she’d looked at the two men together in Claire’s hospital room, had seen the similarity between the two men: the same dark hair, flinty grey eyes, the square jaw—even their height and build were the same.

  Several times she’d felt that Gideon reminded her of someone—but there was no way, until she’d actually seen the two of them together, that she could ever have dreamt it was her own brother Gideon resembled!

  Jonny had to be John Byrne’s son and not, as Madison had always believed, the son of her own father, Malcolm McGuire…

  Madison had no idea how that could be, especially when their mother denied ever having an affair with the legendary actor; she just knew it was a fact…

  She looked at Gideon now, trying to gauge his reaction. There didn’t seem to be one. He still sat in the armchair, his expression as contemptuous. Almost as if the statement had never been made…

  Except that his eyes had taken on a silver sheen. And there was a nerve pulsing in his rigidly clenched jaw. But other than those two things he might just as well have been informed that it was quite mild for this time of year! Madison knew that she would have been knocked off her feet it someone had just told her that she had a brother she had never known existed. Although she supposed, as Gideon was already sitting down, that he couldn’t be knocked off his feet!

  But even as she watched him so apprehensively, waiting for some other outward sign that he was disturbed by what he had just heard, he turned easily to Edgar, giving the older man a derisive smile. ‘I went back in to see Claire after you had all left,’ he drawled. ‘It seems the two of you have become more than a little—friendly, recently? To such an extent,’ he added caustically, ‘that the two of you were able to collude over the casting of Madison as Rosemary in my film!’

  There was a ruddy hue in Edgar’s cheeks now. ‘I think “collude” is rather a strong word to use—’

  ‘Do you?’ Gideon cut in viciously. ‘I think it more than adequately described Claire telling you which restaurants we were going to, Claire’s championing of Madison, of her telephoning you when I ended up in hospital so that you could tell Madison.’ He shook his head disgustedly. ‘Any number of little incidents that didn’t quite add up at the time, but which make perfect sense to me now!’

  Madison had no idea where this conversation had even come from! Okay, so she’d worked out a lot of what he had just said for herself—but was Gideon going to say nothing about just being told he was
Jonny’s brother?

  Edgar sighed heavily. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any point in trying to explain to you exactly why we did those things?’

  ‘None at all,’ Gideon grated.

  ‘And what Jonathan just told you?’ Edgar prompted impatiently. ‘I take it you did hear what he said—’

  ‘Of course I heard what he said, damn you!’ Gideon was on his feet now, that relaxed pose completely gone as he stood tensely in the middle of the room, his hands clenched at his sides, his expression savage.

  ‘Gideon—’

  ‘Don’t, Madison!’ he warned icily as she would have reached out to him, his eyes glittering dangerously as his gaze moved across each person in the room in turn. ‘I heard the comment, Edgar,’ he told the other man harshly. ‘I simply chose to ignore it. I still choose to ignore it. And them.’ He looked contemptuously at Madison’s mother and brother.

  Madison looked from her mother’s palely distressed face and Jonny’s set one to Gideon’s stonily unyielding features. ‘Look at Jonny, Gideon,’ she pleaded brokenly. ‘Please—just look at him!’ she encouraged emotionally. ‘Look at the likeness between the two of you! My father is blond and fair-skinned.’ She’d never thought about that before, but now she realised it as a fact. Her mother was blonde too. ‘Jonny is my brother, Gideon; I’ve never doubted that. But now I can see all too clearly that he’s your brother too! Look at him, Gideon,’ she pleaded again, tears streaming hotly down her cheeks now as her emotions became too much for her to even attempt to control. ‘Just look at him…!’

  He didn’t want to look at Jonathan McGuire, the man they were all claiming—including Jonathan himself!—was his brother.

  He’d been alone for so long—most of his life, it seemed, more of a support for his mother than she was parent to him after she and his father had separated. And he didn’t want Jonathan McGuire, of all people, to be connected to him in any way. Certainly not as a brother!

  He gave Susan Delaney a chilling look. ‘You told me there was no affair,’ he reminded her accusingly.

  She chewed on her top lip, a habit he’d noticed with Madison when she was nervous or upset about something. But he had found the vulnerability provocative when Madison did it; in his mind Susan Delaney was about as vulnerable as a piranha!

  ‘There wasn’t,’ she finally murmured softly, before turning to Edgar with pleading eyes. ‘Edgar, you started this—and now I have no idea how to tell Gideon what happened between his father and myself!’

  ‘Don’t even bother,’ Gideon dismissed heavily, turning to Jonny with emotionless eyes. ‘Even if what you said was true—’

  ‘Oh, it’s true, all right,’ Jonny assured him grimly. ‘My mother explained it all to me when I was eighteen. She talked it over with—my stepfather, Malcolm, and the two of them felt I should know who my real father was. John Byrne,’ he added softly.

  Gideon felt a physical pain in his chest. When he was a child he had loved his father with an emotion that bordered on adoration. He’d believed his father could capture the moon for him if he asked for it, and when his father had left his mother it had felt as if he had rejected Gideon too, that somehow he must have done something so that his father no longer wanted to be with him, either. Oh, he had still seen his father on what was called ‘reasonable access’, but more often than not his mother would become hysterical when the time came and the visit with his father would never happen.

  And then his father had died, the suddenness of that death meaning there had been no chance to say goodbye to him, just a separation that had been final. But still unfinished, he recognised.

  ‘Gideon,’ Jonny said softly, ‘would you take a walk outside with me?’

  No! He didn’t want to hear—

  Come on, Gideon, you aren’t seven years old any more, he inwardly rebuked himself. And, of course, he’d realised as he’d matured that what had happened between his parents, their separation and divorce, had happened to thousands of other couples too, thousands of other children; that a parent wasn’t rejecting the child by leaving their partner, only acknowledging that they no longer loved the person they were married to.

  He’d realised that—but the painful loss of his father had lingered, had coloured all of his own life, it seemed. And, ridiculous as it seemed, he didn’t even want to share the memory of his father with a man who claimed John Byrne was his father too…!

  He assumed an uninterested air. ‘Sure.’ He agreed to Jonny’s suggestion. ‘But nothing you have to say will make any difference to how I feel about this situation,’ he added in warning as he turned to follow the other man from the room.

  Jonny gave a rueful inclination of his head. ‘That’s your perogative.’

  Gideon found Madison looking at him with tear-wet eyes as he drew level with her, the tears she hadn’t been able to stop from overflowing earlier still dampening her cheeks. And for a brief moment Gideon was tempted to reach out and wipe away those tears, to caress her creamy cheeks, to reassure her that everything was going to be all right. Except that it wasn’t.

  He had been telling the truth earlier when he’d said he had gone back in to see Claire once they had all left in the taxi, but he had stayed with her only briefly, needing time to do some thinking of his own. And the conclusion of those thoughts made it impossible for him to even touch Madison. He simply didn’t dare.

  So instead of touching her he gave her a tight, meaningless smile before following Jonny outside.

  The sun, it seemed, knew nothing of the darkness of their situation, and was shining brightly; birds were singing—gulls crying as they flew overhead in the light breeze.

  The two men walked some way from the house in silence, to stand on the cliff that overlooked the gentle swell of the Irish Sea. They stood there for some time, neither inclined to break the peace of the silence that surrounded them.

  Gideon didn’t break that silence, but he did take the opportunity to do what Madison had pleaded with him to do earlier; he looked at Jonathan McGuire. Really looked at him.

  He saw a tall man of about thirty, his build athletically fit, rugged rather than handsome, with dark hair that was inclined to curl, and metallic-grey eyes. Gideon saw himself as he had been a few years earlier…!

  As if aware of his critical gaze, Jonny turned to look at him, giving a slight, humourless smile. ‘Weird, isn’t it?’ he murmured softly, giving a slight shake of his head. ‘Until Edgar told me earlier who you were, it hadn’t even occurred to me…! But once I knew you were Gideon Byrne I—’ He frowned. ‘I know this probably sounds strange to you, but—seeing you is like finding the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle!’

  It didn’t sound strange at all; in the last few minutes Gideon had realised he felt the same way. He had a brother! The how or why of it—well, that was too painful still to guess!—but that didn’t change the fact that this man was his brother, that the same blood flowed through their veins: their father’s blood.

  But Jonathan was Madison’s brother, too—Jonny, as she called him. God, how he had hated the man Jonny that she talked about, believing he was someone she was romantically involved with back home. But the fact that Jonny was her brother only made things more complicated—because he was Gideon’s brother too. Hell, it might even make him and Madison related in some way…

  ‘I still remember how I felt when my mother told me the truth of my parentage when I was eighteen,’ Jonny continued softly, once again gazing out to sea, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets. ‘And don’t take this wrong, Gideon, but the truth of the matter is I felt very little—had no interest in searching out this other family I seemed to have acquired. Malcolm had been my father from the day I was born, had always treated me as his real son. And none of what I was told that day made any difference to that. I still work with my father in the family business, and I probably always will. It was only today, when I saw the impact my existence as your brother had on you, that I realised that, without my even being aware of it, so
mething had been missing from my life.’ He frowned.

  Gideon’s mouth twisted. ‘The missing link, hmm?’ he murmured self-derisively. ‘Is this the point in the conversation where we’re supposed to fall into each other’s arms like—?’

  ‘Long-lost brothers?’ Jonny quirked dark brows humorously.

  Gideon gave a deep, throaty chuckle, even as he shook his head ruefully. ‘Yep, you’re my brother, all right!’ he acknowledged dryly. ‘Mockery in the face of emotion is definitely a family trait,’ he explained ruefully.

  ‘Really?’ Jonny pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘I wondered where that came from!’

  Gideon sobered, frowning slightly. ‘So what do we do now? I accept that you’re my brother.’ It would be impossible to deny it when faced with such physical evidence as the clear similarities between Jonny and himself! And he doubted Edgar, or even Susan Delaney, had any reason to claim the relationship between them if it wasn’t the truth.

  Even Susan Delaney…!

  There lay a very serious problem in discovering he had a younger brother. A brother, he freely acknowledged to himself, he would probably, in time, grow to love and admire. But he actively hated the woman who was Johnny’s—and Madison’s—mother!

  ‘But you aren’t so sure about accepting my mother,’ Jonny softly finished for him, having stood and watched the different emotions flickering across Gideon’s face.

  His mouth tightened. He was very sure about his feelings concerning Susan Delaney, and the fact that she was the mother of his brother didn’t change that.

  ‘How about my sister?’

  Gideon looked up sharply, finding himself looking into a pair of grey eyes that were as sharply intelligent as his own. ‘Madison?’ he questioned with deliberate lightness. ‘What about her?’

  Jonny shrugged, his expression mild. ‘You tell me.’