Читать книгу Mistaken Mistress - Margaret Way - Страница 7

FOR over twenty years Owen Carter had tried to forget he had a daughter. Not that he had seen her, not for a second. Not until this day of sorrows; of leaden skies and driving rain. He had journeyed over a thousand miles to sit in the back pew of a lovely old stone church never free of the unshakeable bond that tied him to Cassandra. Her tragic death at the age of forty-three had never been foreseen, now tormented by his memories, he attended her funeral, staring longingly into a face so like Cassandra’s the pull to go to the young woman was enormous. He almost sprang up, but he didn’t dare. Not now.

His daughter was his beautiful Cassandra all over again. The same silky black cloud of hair, the same extraordinary eyes, iris-blue, violet, purple. In Cassandra it had depended on the clothes she wore and the intensity of her moods. On this tragic day, tears starting down her cheeks as she followed her mother’s flower-decked casket, his daughter’s eyes were almost navy, the very white skin, which contrasted so strikingly with her hair, as pale as milk. They had never met but he would have known her anywhere.

It was Cassandra, come back to him.

His eyes so riveted to his daughter, must somehow have broken through her miasma of grief. She turned her head abruptly as if she felt his look, fully focusing on him. It was a deep, direct look so much like Cassandra’s a slight keening broke from him and his broad shoulders crumpled like someone had delivered a king hit to his solar plexus. His daughter. My God! The great love, so deeply rooted in his heart it never saw the sun, suddenly sprang into frantic bloom. Nothing would stop it.

Surely the gods had punished him enough? He had cloistered both of them in his heart, Cassandra and Eden, thinking in some tortured way he’d been protecting the child. Now that was all over as the dynamic force that was in him rose to the challenge. She’s mine, he thought triumphantly. My own flesh and blood. My daughter. The daughter denied me.

Hear me, Cassandra, he cried silently, channelling his thought to the lily draped casket.

This is my daughter. I’ve come to take her home.