Her Sister's Baby

by Alison Fraser

  She shook her head. ‘I’d promised Jill she could leave before four. Where is Tom?’

  ‘In his own office.’ He leaned forward to flick a switch. ‘Tom?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I have those figures ready.’

  ‘Right, I’ll come through.’

  Dray clicked off the intercom switch before Cass had time to catch up with this conversation.

  ‘He doesn’t know she’s coming, does he?’ she concluded with some horror.

  ‘If he did,’ Dray drawled, ‘I suspect he’d be making a bolt for the lift now.’

  ‘Is this wise?’

  ‘It’s a high-risk strategy, I agree, but I think it’s time things were resolved, one way or the other.’

  He made it sound like business, pure and simple.

  Cass had just time to figure out his current game plan. Reunite father and baby—or not, as the case might be. Either way, hand over the baton of responsibility to someone else. Thus dispense with any need to have Cass in his life.

  The door opened behind Cass before she could ask him if that was it: his desire to get rid of her was really the driving force.

  She turned with Ellie in her arms.

  Tom had taken a couple of steps inside the office and now froze at the sight of them.

  The initial expression on his face suggested that, at any moment, when he remembered how his legs functioned, he would turn tail and run.

  But the horror gave way to fascination as he stared at the beautiful wide-eyed baby he’d last seen as a wrinkled scrap of less than thirty-six hours old.

  Seconds ticked by in suspended animation, then Tom again looked ready to take flight and Cass shook herself into action.

  She gave Tom no choice in the matter. She walked up to him and placed the baby into his arms. She held onto her until she was sure he was supporting his daughter properly, then took a step backwards.

  For a moment he looked almost scared of the little bundle he was holding. Perhaps he had never cradled a baby before. But the shock on his face gradually changed to wonder.

  When finally he smiled and, fortuitously, Ellie smiled back—she might have cried at this stranger—Cass had an overwhelming sense of relief.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ Tom remarked, still in a daze, and, after several more seconds, murmured, ‘I didn’t know.’

  He could have meant, Didn’t know she was beautiful, but Cass thought it went deeper: that he hadn’t known he’d feel this way about her. It was quite obvious that Tom had just fallen in love with his baby daughter.

  ‘I thought—’ He shook his head but felt a need to explain to Cass. ‘I was so angry, finding out about her other baby, one more lie on top of the rest she’d told me. It began to seem as if it were all lies. But she isn’t.’

  ‘No, she isn’t,’ Cass echoed the thread of hope in his voice.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ he said once more, then, choked with emotion, turned towards the door.

  The baby was still in his arms.

  Cass had an urge to follow but Dray was suddenly behind her, holding onto her arm. ‘Let him go. He needs to be on his own with her.’

  Cass had realised that. It was Ellie’s welfare which concerned her. But she allowed Dray to stop her and came round to face him, lightly pulling her arm from his.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asked uncertainly. ‘What if she cries?’

  ‘Then he’ll do what most men do,’ he assured her dryly, ‘and hand her back. Meanwhile, perhaps you’d like to enlighten me as to what Tom meant by her other baby. I presume he was talking about your sister.’

  To lie or not to lie, that was the question. She’d promised Tom at the funeral but he’d just let most of the cat out of the bag.

  ‘Yes,’ she confirmed.

  ‘And?’ A black brow was raised.

  ‘Pen had a baby,’ she admitted flatly, ‘an earlier one.’

  Of course he’d already deduced that, as he asked, ‘Was it put up for adoption?’

  ‘No, that baby died.’

  ‘The same as yours?’

  Cass nodded.

  ‘That’s some coincidence.’

  He caught and held her eyes. She managed to keep her gaze steady but a guilty tinge crept up her face.

  ‘Boy or girl?’

  ‘Boy.’

  ‘Birthday?’

  ‘The twenty-fourth of April.’

  ‘And your baby’s?’

  ‘I—’ Cass was loath to invent a date.

  ‘Let me guess,’ he helped her out, ‘The twenty-fourth of April.’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted at length.

  ‘So,’ he ran on, ‘only one question remains—was he yours or hers?’

  Cass saw no purpose in lying any more. Pen’s reputation was already in tatters and Tom no longer seemed to care what Dray thought.

  ‘Hers,’ she said simply.

  He nodded, as if that truth didn’t surprise him, as if, indeed, it made more sense.

  ‘Well, it’s not hard to figure why she kept that quiet.’ He sounded bitter but Cass didn’t see why he should be.

  ‘What choice did she have?’ she threw back. ‘You were scarcely keen as it was. If you and the rest of your family had known she’d had a child at sixteen, what chance would you have given her?’

  He didn’t argue the point, saying instead, ‘But why make out you were the one who’d gone through such an experience?’

  ‘She didn’t exactly say that, did she?’ Cass recalled. ‘You were the one who jumped to conclusions.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he conceded, ‘but it was hardly surprising I couldn’t think straight at the time. You’d just dumped me flat and left your sister to do the explaining.’

  ‘What?’ She wasn’t going to let that pass. ‘Hold on a minute. It was you who failed to turn up for our date, you who chose to go to Paris instead—and not alone!’

  ‘There was a sudden crisis at our European headquarters.’ He sighed heavily. ‘Tom and I had little choice but to fly over. I imagined you’d understand—not use it as an excuse to go out with someone else.’

  Cass stared at him in bewilderment. What was he talking about? There had been no one else. And Tom was meant to have been with him? But Pen had said…

  That Tom was away on business, yes. But that Dray was with…there had been no details. Cass had just assumed…too much. And Pen had let her.

  She shook her head, as she suddenly began to see the past rewritten before her eyes.

  He misunderstood the gesture, saying, ‘Don’t deny it. I phoned late that night, I phoned the next day but you were still out. Pen tried to cover for you before coming clean.’

  ‘I was there.’ Cass was quietly insistent.

  He gave her a look of disbelief. ‘Like you were there all the other times I rang? Or on the Friday when I turned up in person and sat outside your door till one a.m.?’

  ‘I’d gone to Yorkshire by then,’ she admitted with a distracted air.

  She was still struggling to take in her sister’s part in all this. It seemed Pen had gone out of her way to ruin her relationship with Dray.

  ‘If that was the case,’ he grated back, ‘why didn’t your sister tell me as much? Why make me think you were off with some other lover?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cass said rather weakly.

  ‘Are you saying she lied?’ He remained incredulous.

  Cass didn’t want to accept it, either. Of course she knew Pen had told lies, but she’d never imagined her sister had been capable of duplicity on this scale—and against her.

  She ignored his question to ask instead, ‘The things you said at the funeral—about my being promiscuous—did Pen really tell you that?’

  He hesitated for a moment, before nodding. ‘She made some oblique comments when she returned from honeymoon to discover we were dating but I didn’t really taken them on board. It was only later when I’d gone to Paris and you’d disappeared that she decided to be more specific. She wanted to save m
e from making a further fool of myself,’ he concluded bitterly.

  Cass saw now: Pen had actually made fools of them both. They’d helped her, of course. She’d filled in Pen’s silences and Dray had offered her a receptive ear.

  ‘Are you saying she lied?’ he repeated his earlier question.

  She finally replied, ‘Yes, totally,’ but wasn’t surprised when he continued to look sceptical.

  ‘So why would she do that?’ he added.

  Jealousy? Was that it? Had Pen resented Cass succeeding with Dray where she had failed?

  It seemed so terrible a reason Cass looked round for another, if only to give to Dray.

  ‘Perhaps she was testing how tolerant you’d be to girls with a past,’ she suggested, and her mouth twisted at the idea. ‘Obviously you failed.’

  ‘Did I?’ he challenged in reply. ‘I kept calling you right up to the day you put the phone down on me. I got the message after that.’

  The wrong one, of course, but Cass didn’t want to dwell on the if onlys. It would drive her crazy, imagining a future that might have been.

  ‘Does it matter who did what to whom?’ she said at length. ‘You were never going to be serious about me. Not a shop girl, a nobody,’ she threw at him.

  ‘If I’d any bloody sense at all, I wouldn’t have been!’ he threw back.

  ‘Well, there you are!’ Cass thought she’d proved her point.

  But he grated in return, ‘Where am I exactly? Sitting outside your house like a lovesick boy, waiting for you to return from God knows whose bed.’

  It seemed he still believed Pen’s lies and Cass was already tired of telling him otherwise. It wouldn’t change things, anyway.

  ‘This is all past,’ she dismissed and would have walked away if he hadn’t grabbed her arm.

  ‘Is it?’ He pulled her round and, without warning, lowered his mouth to hers.

  She was too startled to react at first, but, as the kiss deepened, demanding a response, any response, she felt a confusion of passion and anger that made her cry out in both pleasure and protest as her lips opened to his. Then she was in that lost world again, where time and place and differences meant nothing, and the only reality was the hands drawing her body to his and the hard hurting race of her heart.

  His breathing was harsh when he finally raised his head from hers. He searched her face for the truth.

  It was there, in eyes slanted with desire and lips parted with longing. She could hide it no more.

  ‘Tell me it’s past now, Cass,’ he muttered low in his throat, knowing she couldn’t.

  He would have kissed her again and she would have let him but a door opened without warning.

  It was Tom with Ellie in his arms. He looked from Dray to Cass.

  Cass pulled herself free from Dray’s embrace, although it was quite obvious what they’d been doing.

  ‘I…um…sorry.’ A surprised Tom kept glancing from one to the other, unsure how to react.

  Cass finally recovered her wits, saying, ‘Do you want me to take her, Tom?’ and reached for a lightly crying Ellie.

  He handed her over with some relief but his eyes followed the baby. It seemed an attachment had been made.

  ‘I need a lift back to North Dean.’ She spoke to Tom. ‘Could you possibly drive me?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he agreed straight away, before referring to his brother. ‘You don’t need me for anything?’

  ‘No,’ Dray denied but his eyes were on Cass and they accused her of running from the situation.

  Cass didn’t care. She crossed to the door and escaped while she could.

  She had to sort out her thoughts, ask herself what she wanted. She knew what he wanted. He’d made that abundantly clear.

  ‘You and Dray,’ Tom prompted when they were on their way to North Dean, Ellie strapped in the back, ‘are you…?’

  He tailed off and waited for her to fill in the appropriate word, but Cass wasn’t sure of it, either. Not ‘in love’: that took two. ‘Seeing each other’? Well, only because it was unavoidable at present. ‘An item’? Hardly that. So what exactly?

  ‘No,’ she finally replied.

  ‘Oh? I thought, when I came back…’ He left it hanging again.

  She shook her head. ‘Just a quick visit down memory lane, that was all.’

  Tom frowned before declaring, ‘Of course! I forgot Dray and you were once…er…’

  ‘Friends?’ Cass suggested the euphemism while her tone revealed they’d been anything but.

  ‘I never knew what happened there,’ Tom ran on. ‘Dray wouldn’t talk about it and Pen just said you’d both woken up to how incompatible you were.’

  Cass felt renewed anger. Pen, with her scheming, had been the one to give them a wake-up call.

  Nevertheless she granted, ‘She was right. We had—have nothing in common.’

  Cass had to keep reminding herself of that fact. Wanting to go to bed with him was something else.

  She put that out of her mind, too, and changed the subject. ‘What are your plans—regarding Ellie, I mean?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He glanced in the mirror at Ellie in her baby seat. ‘I’d like to have her home soon but I’m not sure how I’ll manage.’

  He sounded uncertain but Cass’s hopes were raised. At least he recognised that home was with him.

  ‘Do you have a housekeeper?’ she asked.

  ‘Not as such,’ he relayed. ‘Pen always preferred to have a couple of cleaners from town.’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t be easy,’ she continued, ‘but with them to look after the house and a nanny to look after Ellie, you could manage.’

  ‘Yes, well—’ he chewed on his bottom lip ‘—I’ll have to see.’

  He was obviously nervous at the prospect and Cass decided not to push him. His renewed interest in Ellie was enough for now.

  When they arrived back at North Dean, she invited him inside and managed things so he held the baby while she made coffee and some milk for Ellie. He looked daunted when she handed him the feeding bottle but he soon got the hang of it.

  She sat with him, sipping coffee and watching father and daughter get to know one another. It seemed Dray’s high-risk strategy might have paid off. Clearly Tom was entranced with his baby.

  It was into this scene of apparent domesticity that Dray Carlisle walked, but, if Cass thought he might be pleased, he certainly didn’t show it. He refused her offer of coffee and left without another word.

  Cass wasn’t conscious of pulling a face at his back until Tom said, ‘If he has a grievance, it’s with me, not you.’

  ‘With you?’ Cass had understood that the grievances were Tom’s.

  ‘I…um…I thought for a while that he and Pen…’ he hesitated to put it into words ‘…well, that they’d been intimate.’

  ‘Yes, he told me.’

  ‘Ridiculous, I know.’

  Cass just stopped herself from saying, Is it? If Tom needed to believe otherwise, then who was she to disillusion him?

  ‘I’m not sure he even liked her as a person,’ Tom ran on, ‘far less in that way. It was just a silly idea on my part because I thought Ellie couldn’t be mine.’

  He gazed down at his baby. She’d fallen asleep, sucking the bottle, and now looked angelic. She was equally like both Carlisle men.

  ‘Why did you think that?’

  ‘Pen claimed the baby was due in mid-summer so when Ellie was born in May, full term, I began to wonder why she’d lied about her dates and why she’d kept the pregnancy from me for the first two months.’

  ‘I can help you with that,’ Cass put in gently. ‘Pen came to ask me the medical risks if she had another baby. Unaware she was already pregnant, I advised her strongly against. She must have gone away and thought over her options before telling you.’

  Tom nodded. ‘I can see now that must be the case, but, at the time, I was questioning everything. When the doctor dropped the bombshell about it not even being her first pregnancy, it ju
st encouraged my paranoia… Why had she kept that from me?’

  ‘She thought you’d reject her,’ Cass said simply.

  He shook his head, even as he admitted, ‘It made our whole marriage seem a sham. I asked myself why the lies about her due date, if this was my baby, and I remembered I’d been in America for a week round the time Ellie would have been conceived. I became convinced she couldn’t be mine.’

  Cass also wondered if it could have been an escape route. Pen’s loss had rocked him to the core and there he was, left with the responsibility of a newborn. Perhaps denial had been his way of coping.

  ‘Considering the situation,’ Cass said at length, ‘I don’t think anyone blames you.’

  His lips quirked downwards. ‘Apart from Dray, you mean? When he brought the first test to me, proving she was a Carlisle, I was still so sure she wasn’t mine that I actually accused him of fathering her,’ he confessed with a shame-faced look. ‘Dray didn’t deny it, but then that’s not his style. “Never defend the indefensible or apologise for someone else’s mistakes,’” he quoted in his brother’s deeper tones.

  ‘You mean he would react the same, guilty or innocent?’

  ‘I suspect so. At any rate, all he said was “Get up, get dressed and get tested”, then walked coolly out the door. We’ve barely spoken since.’

  ‘He believes you still think that he and Pen had an affair,’ Cass told him.

  Tom emitted a groaning noise. ‘I didn’t realise. I have been avoiding him, but only because I feel such a fool over the accusations I made. I must have been mad to think it for a second. Even if he’d liked Pen, Dray is too decent to do that to me.’

  Cass wasn’t so convinced. With her, he’d never let notions of decency stand in his way.

  ‘Perhaps I should go and speak to him now,’ Tom said in resigned tones.

  Cass made no comment. The thing between the brothers was their business. She just hoped that, if Dray had deceived Tom, it would be a truth that died with Pen.

  ‘What about you?’ Tom added.

  ‘Me?’ she echoed.

  ‘I realise you can’t stay here for ever,’ he remarked, ‘looking after Ellie.’

  ‘No.’ Cass suspected she’d already been here too long. ‘I intend to go when a suitable live-in nanny’s found. In fact, I interviewed a possible this afternoon… Maybe you’d like to meet her.’