by Anne Mather
‘Hi there, champ.’ Ellie hugged him back and then bent down to kiss the tip of his nose, ‘How did you get out of going to crèche, you monstrous little rascal?’
‘I wanted to be with Mummy,’ Lachlan answered, his cheeks tinged with pink as he lowered his eyes.
Ellie straightened and, giving his hair a quick ruffle, kept her hand on his little head as she turned to face her sister. ‘I saw your note so I thought I would come instead. I took the bus so it will be a bit of a trek back, but Mum met up with an old school friend. I thought it best if I left her to catch up over a long lunch. Besides…’ She tucked her spare hand into her torn jeans pocket and tilted her platinum blonde head at Jake. ‘I wanted to check out what Jake thought of his son now that he’s finally met him.’
Ashleigh felt every drop of blood in her veins come to a screeching, screaming halt. She even wondered if she was going to faint. She actually considered feigning it to get out of the way of the shockwaves of the bomb Ellie had unthinkingly just delivered.
Six sickening heartbeats of silence thrummed in her ears as she forced herself to look at Jake standing stiffly beside her.
‘My son?’ Jake stared at Ellie in stupefaction.
Ashleigh saw the up and down movement of her sister’s throat as she gradually realised the mistake she’d just made.
‘I—I thought you knew…’Ellie turned to Ashleigh for help but her older sister’s expression was ashen, the line of her mouth tight with tension. She swivelled back to Jake’s burning gaze. ‘I kind of figured that since Lachlan was here at your house…’ Her words trailed off, her eyes flickering nervously between the two adults. ‘I sort of thought…she must have told you by now…’
‘Mummy?’ Lachlan piped up, his childish innocence a blessed relief in the tense atmosphere. ‘Can I show Auntie Ellie the garage for my cars I made under the tree?’
Ashleigh gave herself a mental shake. ‘Sure, baby, take her outside and show her what you’ve been up to.’
‘Come on, Auntie Ellie.’ Lachlan took Ellie’s hand and tugged it towards the door. ‘I made a garage out of sticks and a driveway and a real race track. Do you want to see?’
‘I can hardly wait,’ Ellie said, meaning it, and giving her sister one last please-forgive-me glance, closed the door firmly behind them.
As silences between them went, this one had to be the worst one she’d ever experienced, Ashleigh thought as she dragged her gaze back to the minefield of Jake’s.
‘My son?’ He almost barked the words at her.
She closed her eyes on the hatred she could see in his eyes.
‘My son?’ he asked again, his tone making her eyes spring open in alarm. ‘You calculating, lying, deceitful little bitch! How could you do this to me?’
Ashleigh had no defence. She felt crushed by his anger, totally disarmed by his pain, not one word of excuse making it past the scrambled disorder of her brain.
He swung away from her, his movements agitated and jerky as if he didn’t trust himself not to shake her senseless.
She watched in silent anguish as his hand scored his hair, the long fingers separating the silky strands like vicious knives.
‘I can’t believe you did this to me,’ he said. ‘I told you from day one this must never happen.’ He swung back to glare at her. ‘Did you do it deliberately? To force me into something I’ve been avoiding for all of my god-damned life?’
‘I didn’t do it deliberately,’ she said evenly, surprised her voice came out at all.
His heavy frown took over his entire face. ‘You were on the pill, for Christ’s sake!’
‘I know…’ She bit her lip. ‘I had a stomach bug when you were in New York that time…I didn’t think…I thought it would be all right…’
‘Why didn’t you tell me, for God’s sake?’
She stared at him, a slow-burning anger coming to her defence at long last. ‘How could I possibly tell you? You would have promptly escorted me off to the nearest abortion clinic!’
He opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out.
‘You were always so adamant about no kids, no pets and no permanent ties,’ she went on when he didn’t speak. ‘How was I supposed to deal with something like an unexpected pregnancy? I was just twenty years old, I was living in another country away from the security I’d taken for granted for most of my life, living with a man who had no time for sentimentality or indeed any of the ethics that had been drummed into me from the day I was born. How was I supposed to cope with such a heart-wrenching situation?’She drew in a ragged breath. ‘For all I knew, you would have had me off to the nearest facility to get rid of “my mistake” before I could even think of an alternative. I wanted time to think of an alternative…’
‘What sort of alternative were you thinking of?’ he asked after a stiff pause.
She met his eyes for a brief moment. ‘I couldn’t face… getting rid of it…’ She turned away and examined her hands. ‘I considered adoption, but having seen Ellie go through the heartache of wondering whether to seek out her blood relatives or not, I just couldn’t do it. I knew I would spend the rest of my life wondering what my child was doing. Whether his new parents would love him the way I loved him…whether he was happy…’ She lifted her head and gave him an agonised look and continued. ‘I knew that on his birth date for the rest of my life I would wonder… I would ache…I would want to know how he was…I couldn’t go through with it. I had to have him. I had no other choice.’
She stared back down at the tight knot of her hands. ‘I knew you wouldn’t want to know about his existence, so I decided to go it alone. I knew it wouldn’t be easy but my family have been wonderful. They love Lachlan so much…I can’t imagine life without him now.’
Jake turned away, not sure he could cope with Ashleigh seeing how seriously he was affected.
A son!
His son!
His father’s grandson…
His stomach churned with fear. This is what he had spent his lifetime avoiding and now here it was, inescapable. Ashleigh had given birth to his child without his permission and now he had to somehow deal with it.
‘I want a paternity test,’ he said. ‘I want it done immediately and if you don’t agree I’ll engage legal help to bring it about.’
Ashleigh felt another corner of her heart break.
‘If that’s what you need I won’t stop you.’
‘I want it done,’ he said, hating himself for saying it. ‘I want it done so at least I know where I stand.’
‘I don’t want anything from you,’ she said. ‘I’ve never wanted anything from you. That’s why I didn’t tell you. I couldn’t bear the thought of you thinking of me as some sort of grasping woman who wanted their pound of flesh on top of everything else.’
‘Were you ever going to tell me?’
His words dropped into the silence like a bucket of icecold water on flames.
She seemed to have trouble meeting his eyes. He wasn’t sure what to make of it but he assumed in the end it was guilt. Her shoulders were slumped, her head bowed, her hands twisting in front of her.
‘Answer me, damn you!’ he growled. ‘Were you ever going to tell me?’
She lifted her head, her eyes glazed with moisture.
‘I thought about telling you that first night…at the bar…’ Her teeth caught her bottom lip for a moment before she continued raggedly. ‘But you were so arrogant about insisting on seeing me again, as if I’d had no life of my own since we broke up. It didn’t seem the right atmosphere to inform you of…of Lachlan’s existence.’
Jake turned away from her, his back rigid with tension as he paced the floor a couple of times.
He couldn’t take it in.
He tried to replay their conversation at the hotel bar, to see if there had been any hint of her well-kept secret, but as far as he could recall she had only met him under sufferance and had given every appearance of being immensely relieved to escape as soon as sh
e possibly could.
‘Jake, please believe me,’ she appealed to him, her voice cracking under the pressure. ‘I wanted to tell you so many times but you seemed so out of reach. And when you finally told me about your father I knew that if I told you it would only cause more hurt.’
‘Hurt?’ He swung back to glare at her. ‘Do you have any idea of what you’ve done? How much you have hurt me by this?’
She tried her best to hold his fiery look but inside she felt herself falling apart, piece by piece.
‘I know it seems wrong now but I thought I was doing the right thing at the time,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want an innocent child to suffer just because his father didn’t want to be a father. I thought I’d do my best…bring him up to be a good man and one day…’
Jake slammed his hand down on the nearest surface, the crash of flesh on old wood jarring her already overstretched nerves.
‘Don’t you see, Ashleigh? If things were different I would have gladly embraced fatherhood.’ One of his hands moved over his face in a rubbing motion before he continued, his eyes dark with immeasurable pain. ‘If I didn’t have the sort of gene pool I have, do you not think I wouldn’t have wanted a son, a daughter, maybe even several?’
She choked back a sob without answering.
He gave a serrated sigh and continued. ‘I have spent my life avoiding exactly this sort of situation. I even went as far as insisting on a vasectomy but I couldn’t find a surgeon who would willingly perform it on a man in his early thirties, let alone when I was in my twenties, especially a man who supposedly hadn’t yet fathered a child.’
‘I’m so sorry…’
He turned to look at her. ‘Does your fiancé know I’m the boy’s father?’
Ashleigh raised her eyes to his, her head set at a proud angle. ‘His name is Lachlan. I would prefer it if you would refer to him as such instead of as “the boy”.’
‘Pardon me for being a bit out of touch with his name,’ he shot back bitterly. ‘I have only just been informed of his existence. I don’t even know his birth date.’
‘Christmas Eve,’ she answered without hesitation.
Ashleigh could see him do the mental arithmetic and silently prepared herself for the fallout.
‘You were almost four months pregnant when you left me?’ he gasped incredulously.
She hitched up her chin even more defiantly. ‘It wasn’t as if you would have noticed.You were no doubt too busy with one of your other international fill-ins. Who was it now…Sigrid?’
He lowered his gaze a fraction. ‘I wasn’t unfaithful to you that weekend.’
‘Why should I believe you?’ she asked. ‘I read her e-mails, don’t forget. She said how much she was looking forward to seeing you, how much she had enjoyed meeting you that first time and how she hoped your “association” with her would continue for a long time.’
Jake closed his eyes in frustration and turned away, his hands clenched by his sides as he bit out, ‘She means nothing to me. Absolutely nothing.’
‘That’s the whole point, isn’t it, Jake?’ she said. ‘No one ever means anything to you. You won’t allow them to. You keep everybody at arm’s length; every relationship is on your terms and your terms only. You don’t give, you just take. I was a fool to get involved with you in the first place.’
‘Then why did you get involved with me?’ he asked, turning around once more.
She let out a tiny, almost inaudible, sigh. ‘I…I just couldn’t help myself…’
Jake straightened to his full height, his eyes clear and focused as they held hers. ‘I mean it, Ashleigh, when I say I wasn’t involved in any way with Sigrid Flannigan.’
‘Why should I believe you?’
‘You don’t have to believe me, but I would like you to hear my side of it before you jump to any more conclusions.’
‘I asked you four and a half years ago and you refused to tell me a thing,’ she pointed out stringently.
‘I know.’ He examined his hands for a moment before reconnecting with her gaze, a small sigh escaping the tight line of his lips. ‘Sigrid is a distant cousin of mine. She was conducting some sort of family tree research. To put it bluntly, I wasn’t interested. However, she was concerned about some health issues within the family line and I finally agreed to meet her. We met in Paris. She was there on some sort of work-related assignment and, as I was close by, I decided to get the meeting over and done with.’
‘And?’
‘And I hated every single minute of it.’ He dragged his hand through his hair once more. ‘She kept going on about how important family ties were and even though we were distantly related we should keep in touch. Apparently I have the questionable honour of being the one and only offspring of Harold Percival Chase Marriott, the last of the male line on that side of the family.’ He sent her an accusing look and added, ‘Or so I thought.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me the truth about her?’ she asked, choosing to ignore his jibe. ‘Why let me believe the worst?’
‘I wasn’t ready to talk to anyone about my background,’ he said. ‘I was tempted to tell you a couple of times but I couldn’t help thinking that if I told you the truth of my upbringing it would in some way make the differences between us even more marked. Sigrid was an annoying reminder of where I’d come from and I wanted to forget it as soon as I could.’
‘So you deliberately let me think she was your lover, even though in doing so it broke my heart?’
He gave an indolent shrug of one shoulder. ‘I didn’t tell you what to believe. You believed it without the slightest input from me.’
She let out a choked gasp of outrage. ‘How can you say that? You deliberately misled me! You were so cagey and obstructive. You wouldn’t even look me in the eye for days on end, much less speak to me!’
‘I was angry, for God’s sake!’ he threw back. ‘I was sick to my back teeth with all your tales of how wonderful your family was and how much you missed them. I was sick and tired of being the dysfunctional jerk whose only memories were of being bashed senseless until I could barely stand upright. Do you think I wanted to hear how your mother and father tucked you into your god-dammed bed every night to read you a happy-ever-after story and tell you how much they loved you?’
Ashleigh had no answer.
She felt the full force of his embittered words like barbs in her most tender unprotected flesh. She had no personal hook to hang his experience on. She had never been shouted out; no one had ever raised a hand to her. Her parents had expressed their love for her and her sisters each and every day of their lives without exception. She was totally secure in their devotion. She had absolutely no idea of how Jake would have coped without such consistent assurances of belonging, no idea how he would have coped with nothing but harsh cruelty and the sort of vindictiveness which she suspected had at times known no bounds.
‘Is this a good time to interrupt?’ Ellie spoke from the doorway, for once her usually confident tone a little dented.
Jake recovered himself first and turned to face her, his expression giving away nothing of his inner turmoil.
‘Sure, Ellie.’ He stretched his mouth into a small smile. ‘Do you need a lift back into town? I’m just about to leave.’
‘No,’ Ellie insisted. ‘I’ve already promised Lachlan a ride on the bus. He’s looking forward to it.’
‘So you haven’t got your licence yet?’ he asked.
Ellie gave him a sheepish grin. ‘I’ve failed the test ten times but I haven’t entirely given up hope.’
Jake couldn’t help an inward smile. Same old delightful Ellie.
‘Is there an instructor left in the whole of Sydney who’ll take you on?’
Ellie pretended to be offended. ‘I’ll have you know I’ve been with the very best of instructors but not one of them has been able to teach me to drive with any degree of safety.’
‘Tell me when you’re free and I’ll give you a lesson,’ he offered. ‘After driving in most
parts of Europe I can assure you I can drive under any conditions.’
Ellie grinned enthusiastically. ‘It’s a date. But don’t tell me I didn’t warn you. Ashleigh will vouch for me. She gave up on lesson two when I ploughed into the back of a taxi.’
Jake swung his gaze to Ashleigh. ‘What did she do, rattle your nerves?’
No more than you do, Ashleigh felt like responding. No, she would much rather have Ellie trying to drive in the peak hour any day than face the sort of anger she could see reflected in his dark eyes.
‘I have learnt over time to recognise when I am well and truly beaten,’ she said instead. ‘Ellie needs a much more experienced hand than mine.’
‘I don’t know…’ He rubbed his jaw for a moment in a gesture of wry speculation. ‘Seems to me you’re pretty experienced at most things.’
Ellie interrupted with a subtle clearing of her throat, Lachlan standing silently by her side, his small hand in hers.
‘Excuse me, but we really need to get going if we’re going to make the next bus.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want a lift?’ Jake asked again, his glance flicking to the small quiet child at her side.
Before Ellie could answer, Lachlan piped up determinedly, ‘I want to go on the bus.’
Jake met the dark eyes of his son, the sombre depths staring back at him sending a wave of something indefinable right through him.
He knew a paternity test was going to be a complete waste of time. This was his flesh and blood and there was clearly no doubt about it. Even the way the boy’s hair grew upon his head mimicked his. It was a wonder he hadn’t recognised it from the first moment but his shock in discovering Ashleigh had a child had momentarily distracted him. He had still been getting used to the idea of her carrying someone else’s progeny when Ellie had dropped her bombshell.
‘Don’t hurry home.’ Ellie filled the small silence. ‘You two must have lots to catch up on. I can mind Lachlan tonight. I’m not going out.’
‘That won’t be necess—’
‘That’s very kind of you, Ellie.’ Jake cut across Ashleigh’s rebuttal. ‘Your sister and I do indeed have a lot of catching up to do.’
