She found it difficult to hold his very direct look but before she could think of a response he continued, ‘Which kind of makes me wonder why you don’t wear an engagement ring. Can’t poor old Howard even rustle up a second-hand one for you?’
It was all she could do to keep her temper under control. Rage fired in her blood until she could see tiny red spots of it before her eyes. She so wanted to let fly at him with every gram of bitterness she’d stored up over the years, but instead of a stream of invective coming out of her mouth when she finally opened it, to her utter shock, shame and embarrassment a choked sob came out instead.
Jake stared at her, his own mouth dropping open as she bent her head to her hands, her slim shoulders visibly shaking as she tried to cover the sounds of her distress.
He muttered one short sharp curse and reached for her, pulling her into the shield of his chest, one of his hands cupping the back of her silky head as he brought it down against his heart.
‘I’m sorry.’ He was surprised it hadn’t physically hurt to articulate the words, especially as he’d never said them to anyone before.
She didn’t answer other than to burrow a bit closer, but after a moment or two he could feel the dampness of her tears through his thin cotton T-shirt.
He couldn’t remember ever seeing her cry before. He’d always secretly admired her for it, actually. His childhood had taught him that tears were for the weak and powerless; he’d disciplined himself not to cry from an early age and, no matter what treatment had been dished out to him, he had been determined not to let his emotions get out of control. He had gritted his teeth, sent his mind elsewhere, planned revenge and grimly stored his anger, and for the most part he’d succeeded.
The only time he’d failed was the day his father had told him his dog had been sent away to the country. Jake had only been about ten and the little fox-terrier cross had been a stray he’d brought home. Her excited yaps when he’d come home from school each day had been the highlight of his young life.
The only highlight.
No one else had ever looked that happy to see him since…well…maybe Ashleigh had in their early days together, her eyes brightening like stars as he’d walked in the door.
Ashleigh eased herself out from his hold and brushed at her eyes with the back of her hand, her other hand hunting for a much-needed tissue without success.
Jake reached past her and opened the top drawer of the chest of drawers and handed her one of the crumpled handkerchiefs. ‘Here,’ he said, his tone a little gruff, ‘it’s more or less clean but I’m afraid it’s not ironed.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, turning away to blow her nose rather noisily.
Jake watched her in silence, wishing he could think of something to say to take away the gaping wound of their past so they could start again. He knew he didn’t really deserve the chance, but if he could just explain…
He wanted to change. He wanted to be the sort of man she needed, the solid dependable type, the sort of man who would be a brilliant father to the children he knew she wanted to have. But what guarantee could he give her that he wouldn’t turn out just like his father? Things might be fine for a year or two, maybe even a little longer, but he knew the patterning of his childhood and the imprint of his genes would win in the end.
He’d read the statistics.
Like father like son.
There was no getting away from it.
He just couldn’t risk it.
Ashleigh scrunched the used handkerchief into a ball in her hand and turned back to meet his gaze. ‘I’m sorry about that…’ She bit her lip ruefully. ‘Not my usual style at all.’
He smiled. Not cynically. Not sneeringly, but sadly, his coal-black eyes gentle, the normally harsh lines of his mouth soft. ‘No,’ he agreed, ‘but everyone has their limits, I guess.’
She lowered her gaze, concentrating on the round neckline of his close-fitting T-shirt. ‘I think it’s this house…’ She rubbed at her upper arms as if she was suddenly cold. ‘It seems sort of…sort of miserable…and…well…sad.’
Jake privately marvelled at the depth of her insight, but if only she knew even half of it! The walls could tell her a tale or two, even the mirror behind her bore the scar of his final fight with his father. He’d been fully expecting to see his blood still splattered like ink drops all over it and the wall but apparently his father had decided to clean up his handiwork, although it looked as if he’d missed a bit in one corner.
He forced his thoughts away from the past and, reaching for the envelope he’d put aside earlier, sat on the bed and patted the space beside him, indicating for her to sit alongside. ‘Hey, come here for a minute.’
He saw the suspicion in her blue eyes and held up his hands. ‘No touching, OK?’
She came and sat on the bed beside him, her hands in her lap and her legs pressed together tightly.
He opened the envelope with careful, almost reverent fingers and Ashleigh found herself holding her breath as he took out the first photograph.
It was the photo she’d seen earlier. It was the spitting image of Lachlan at the age of eighteen months or so—the engaging smile, the too long limbs and the olive skin the sun had kissed where summer clothes hadn’t covered.
She didn’t know what to say, so said nothing.
‘I was about a year and a half old, I think,’ Jake said, turning over the photo to read something scrawled in pencil on the back. ‘Yeah…’
‘What does it say?’ she asked.
He tucked the photo to the back of the pile, his expression giving little away. ‘Not much. Stuff about what I was doing, words I was saying, that sort of thing. My mother must have written it.’
Ashleigh felt the stabbing pain of her guilt as she thought about the many photographs she had with Lachlan’s early life documented similarly.
Jake took out the next photograph and handed it to her. She felt the warm brush of his fingers against hers but didn’t pull away. She held the photograph with him, as if the weight of the memories it contained was too heavy for one hand.
It was a photograph of a small dog.
Ashleigh wished she had her sister Ellie’s knowledge of canine breeds but, taking a wild guess, she thought it looked like a fox-terrier with a little bit of something else thrown in. It had a patch of black and tan over one cheeky bright intelligent eye and another two or three on its body, its long narrow snout looking as if it was perpetually smiling.
She glanced at him, their fingers still linked on the picture. ‘Was this your dog?’
He nodded and shifted his gaze back to the photograph. She sensed rather than heard his sigh.
‘What happened to him?’ she asked after what seemed an interminable silence.
‘Her,’ he corrected, without looking up from the image.
Ashleigh held her breath, instinctively knowing more was to come. Exactly what, she didn’t know, but for now it was comforting that he trusted her enough to show her some precious relics of his past. Somehow she knew he hadn’t done this before.
With anyone.
Jake tucked the photograph behind the others and closed the envelope. ‘I called her Patch. She followed me home from school one day when I was about eight or so.’
‘How long did you have her?’
‘A year or two.’
‘She died?’
He met her gaze briefly before turning away. ‘My father sent her to live in the country.’
Ashleigh felt her stomach clench with sympathy for the child he had been and the loss he must have felt. ‘Why?’
He gave another small shrug. ‘I must have done something to annoy him.’ He pushed the envelope away and stood up. ‘As punishments went it was probably the best he’d ever come up with, not that I ever let on, of course.’
Ashleigh could just imagine how stoical he had been. His chin stiff, no hint of a wobble even though inside his heart would have been breaking. Hadn’t she seen it in Lachlan when Purdy, t
he family’s ancient but much loved budgerigar, had died not that long ago?
‘Did you ever get to visit her?’ she asked.
‘No.’ The single word was delivered like a punctuation mark on the subject, effectively closing it.
‘Can I see the rest of the photos?’ she asked after another stretching silence.
He pushed the envelope into the top drawer of the chest of drawers by way of answer. Ashleigh looked at the stiff line of his back as it was turned towards her, somehow sensing he’d let her past a previously well-guarded barrier and was now regretting his brief lapse into sentimentality. She could almost see the words Keep Out written across his face as he turned to look at her.
‘Maybe some other time.’ He moved past her to the door and held it open for her. ‘Don’t let me keep you from your work.’
Ashleigh brushed past him with her head down, not sure she wanted him to see the disappointment in her eyes at his curt dismissal. He’d allowed her into his inner sanctum for a moment, had made himself vulnerable to her in a way she’d never experienced with him before. It made it extremely difficult to use her bitterness as a barrier to what she really felt for him. The feelings she’d locked away for years were creeping out, finding gaps in the fences she’d constructed around herself. Her love for Jake was like a robust climbing vine that refused to die no matter how hard it was pruned or poisoned.
Ashleigh went into the first room she came to rather than have Jake’s gaze follow her down the length of the hall. It was a dining room, the long table set with an array of dusty crockery and china, instantly reminding her of Miss Havisham’s abandoned wedding breakfast in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.
She reached for the light switch and watched as the ornate crystal chandeliers overhead flickered once or twice as if deciding whether to make the effort to throw some light in the room or not. The delicate drape of spiders’ webs only added to the Dickensian atmosphere. She gave herself a mental shake and stepped further into the room to reach for the nearest blind, but just as she took hold of the tasselled cord a big furry black spider tiptoed over the back of her hand.
It was probably her best-ever scream.
Her mother had always said that Ashleigh held the record in the Forrester family for the scream that could not only wake the dead but everybody sleeping this side of the Blue Mountains as well.
The door behind her crashed open so roughly that the delicate glassware on the dining room table shivered in reaction as Jake came bursting in.
‘What happened?’ He rushed to her, his hands grasping her upper arms as he looked down at her pale face in concern.
‘Nothing…’ She gave a shaky little laugh of embarrassment and moved out of his hold. ‘It was a spider, that’s all.’
He frowned. ‘I didn’t know you were scared of spiders.’
‘I’m not.’ She rubbed the back of her hand on her skirt. ‘I just don’t like them using me as a pedestrian crossing.’
He glanced at what she was doing with her hand and grimaced. ‘Where is it now?’ He swept his gaze across the window-frame before looking back at her. ‘Do you want me to get rid of it for you?’
‘It’s probably long gone,’ she said. ‘I think I screamed it into the next century.’
He gave her one of his rare genuine smiles. ‘I thought you’d seen a ghost. I had no idea anyone so small could scream so loudly.’
Small? One gym workout and he already thought she was smaller? Thank you, Mia!
‘I’ve had a lot of practice over the years,’ she said. ‘Mia and Ellie and I used to have screaming competitions.’
‘Your poor parents,’ Jake commiserated wryly.
‘Yes…’ A small laugh bubbled from her lips before she could stop it. ‘The police were called once. Apparently one of the neighbours thought someone was being murdered or tortured at the very least. You should have heard the lecture we got for…’ Her words trailed away as she saw the expression on Jake’s face. It had gone from mildly amused to mask-like, as if something she had said had upset him and he didn’t want to let her see how much.
‘Jake?’ She looked at him questioningly, her hand reaching out to touch him gently on the arm.
He moved out of her reach and turned to raise the blind.
The angry black clouds had by now crept right over the garden, their threatening presence casting the room in menacing, creeping shadows. The flickering light bulbs in the chandelier over the table made one last effort to keep the shadows at bay before finally giving up as a flash of sky-splitting lightning came through the window, momentarily illuminating the whole room in a ghostly lucency. The boom of thunder was close on its heels, the ominous sound filling Ashleigh’s ears.
‘Are you afraid of storms?’ Jake asked without turning to look at her.
‘No…not really,’ she said, waiting a few seconds before adding, ‘are you?’
She watched as he turned to look at her, the eerie light of the morning storm casting his face into silhouette.
‘I used to be,’ he answered, his voice sounding as if it had come from a distant place. ‘But I’m not anymore.’
She waited a heartbeat before asking, ‘How did you overcome your fear?’
It seemed an age before he responded. Ashleigh felt the silence stretching to breaking-point, her mind already rehearsing various phrases to relieve it, when he suddenly spoke, shocking her into vocal muteness.
‘My father always used nature to his advantage. If a storm was loud and ferocious enough it would screen his activities from the neighbours.’ He gave her a soulless look. ‘Of course none of the neighbours called the police. They thought the booms and crashes going on were simply the effects of the storm.’
Ashleigh felt a wave of nausea so strong she could barely stand up. How had Jake survived such a childhood? She almost felt ashamed of how normal and loving her background was. She had been nurtured, along with her sisters, like precious hothouse flowers, while Jake had been consistently, cruelly crushed underfoot like a noxious weed.
‘Oh, Jake…’ She breathed his name. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
He gave a rough sound that was somewhere between scorn and dismissal. ‘I’m over it, Ashleigh. My father’s dead and I have to move on. Storms are just storms to me now. They hold no other significance.’
For some reason which she couldn’t quite explain, her gaze went to the scar above his right eye. The white jagged line interrupted the aristocratic arc of his eyebrow like a bulldozed fire trail through a forest.
‘Your eye…’ she said. ‘You always said you got that scar in a fight.’ She took an unsteady breath and continued. ‘Your father did it, didn’t he?’
Jake lifted a hand and fingered the scar as if to make sure it was still there. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was the last chance he got to carve his signature on me. I was two days off my sixteenth birthday. I left and swore I’d never see him again.’
‘You kept your promise…’ She said the words for him.
He gave her a proud defiant look. ‘Yes. I never saw him alive again.’
‘I wish you’d told me all of this when we…when we were together,’ she said. ‘It would have helped me to understand how you—’
His lip curled into one of his keep-away-from-me snarls. ‘What good would it have done? You with your perfect little family, everyone chanting how much they love each other every night as the night closed in like in all of those stupid TV shows. Do you know anything about what really goes on behind closed doors? Do you even know what it is like to go without a meal?’ he asked, his tone suddenly savage, like a cornered neglected dog which had known nothing but cruelty all its life. ‘Do you know what it is like to dread coming home at the end of the school day, wondering what punishment was in store if you so much as made a floorboard creak or a door swing shut too loudly?’
Ashleigh’s eyes watered and she bit her lip until she could taste the metallic bitterness of blood.
Jake slashed one of h
is hands through the air like a knife and continued bitterly. ‘I had no respite. From the day my mother died when I was three I lived with a madman. Not a day went past when I didn’t have fear turning my guts to gravy while he watched and waited, timing his next hit for maximum effect.’ He strode to the window once more, the next flash of angry lightning outlining his tall body as he stared out at the garden.
Ashleigh wanted to say something but knew this was not her turn to speak. Jake had been silent for most of his life; it was his turn to talk, to get what he could out of his system and he had chosen her to be witness to it.
He gave a deep sigh and she heard him rub his face with one hand, the slight raspy sound making her weak with her need to go to him in comfort. How she wanted to wrap her arms around him, to press soft healing kisses on all the spots on his body where his father had kicked, punched or brutalised him.
It was almost impossible for her to imagine someone wanting to harm their own child. She thought of Lachlan and how she would gladly give her life for his, had in fact given up so much for him already and not once complained. How could Jake’s father have been so heartless? What possible motive could he have had to inflict such unspeakable cruelty on a defenceless child?
Jake turned around to look at her, his expression bleak. ‘For most of my life I have done everything possible not to imitate my father. My life’s single goal has been to avoid turning into a clone of him.’
She drew in a shaky little breath, hardly able to believe she was finally witnessing the confession she had always longed to hear.
‘He remarried more often than he changed his shirts,’ he continued in the same flat tone. ‘I had a procession of stepmothers come in and out of my life, each of whom left as soon as they found out the sort of man my father was. I decided marriage was never going to be an option for me in case I ended up the same way, leaving a trail of emotional and physical destruction in my wake as my father did.’
‘He abused you…didn’t he?’ Her voice came out on a thin thread of sound.
The Secret Baby Bargain Page 9
