Читать книгу Tall, Dark... Collection - Кэрол Мортимер, Carole Mortimer - Страница 28

NICK’S long strides easily caught up with Hebe’s shorter ones as she left the gallery, and he was at her side when they reached the huge marble entrance hall where Jean and Henry stood waiting.

He felt glad that he was there when he saw the strain on the older couple’s faces, more sure than ever that the disquiet he had felt on Saturday had been justified.

‘I hope you don’t mind, Nick?’ Jean said anxiously, even as she clasped both Hebe’s hands in hers. ‘We need to talk to Hebe. To both of you,’ she added softly.

‘If we could go somewhere—less public?’ Henry prompted quietly, as half a dozen people passed them on their way into the gallery.

‘Mum? Dad?’ Hebe frowned her concern as she looked at them both. ‘What’s wrong? Has something happened?’

‘We just need to talk to you, darling.’ Her mother squeezed her hands reassuringly. ‘We—have some things to explain.’ She looked pained at the admission.

‘We’ll go upstairs to my apartment,’ Nick decided briskly. ‘Hebe?’ he prompted pointedly, as she made no effort to move, her face pale as she looked searchingly at her mother.

Jean, he could easily see, was under extreme emotional pressure. Her eyes looked red and tearful; her face was as white as Hebe’s.

Whatever was going on here, Nick intended being at Hebe’s side when it happened. Whatever it was!

Hebe could feel her tension rising with the lift as it ascended, wondering if what her parents needed to talk to her so urgently about had something to do with Jacob Gardner.

She knew that Andrew Southern must have received her letter and photograph by now, and that even though she had given him the address of her flat, and the number of her mobile if he should want to contact her, there had been no response from him.

She was disappointed—deeply so. But if her parents could tell her something about Jacob Gardner that would at least be something.

Although she wasn’t at all happy at the stress her parents appeared to be under…

‘Here we go.’ Nick led the way into his apartment.

Their apartment now, Hebe supposed, wondering if her parents had tried to contact her at her old flat before coming here, and been surprised when Gina told them she had moved out. She had thought to save that little piece of information until her parents came to London for the wedding, deciding there was no point in their knowing before then.

Little had she known they were going to surprise her with a visit.

‘You look as if you could do with something to drink, Jean?’ Nick frowned. ‘Henry?’

‘Perhaps a small glass of brandy,’ her father accepted gruffly.

To Hebe’s knowledge her father only ever drank brandy when he was sick or worried about something; looking at him, at both her parents, it was easy to see that this time it was the latter.

‘What’s wrong?’she prompted again, once the drinks had been poured and they were all seated in the sitting room.

Her mother gave a shaky sigh. ‘We should have told you at the weekend,’ she said, flustered. ‘Your father wanted to tell you then.’ She gave him a rueful smile. ‘But I begged him not to. I see now that he was right all along—that we should have told you years ago.’ She shook her head sadly.

‘Told me what?’ Hebe pressed anxiously, her tension increasing by the second.

Nick moved to stand behind Hebe’s chair, quietly supportive—whether she wanted his support or not.

Which she probably didn’t, he accepted heavily—but she was going to get it anyway!

‘About your mother,’ Henry said, taking charge of the conversation.

‘My—mother…?’ Hebe repeated slowly.

Hebe’s mother? Nick repeated too, inwardly, having been sure that this conversation was going to be about Jacob Gardner after Jean’s reaction to his name at the weekend.

What did Hebe’s mother have to do with Jacob Gardner?

Besides which, hadn’t Jean and Henry assured him on Saturday that they had no knowledge of Hebe’s mother?

No…he suddenly realised. What Henry had actually said was that the name of Hebe’s father had never been mentioned…

Nick had thought the other man’s reply ambiguous at the time. Now he realised why!

‘What do you know about Hebe’s mother?’ he prompted harshly.

‘Please, Nick.’ Hebe turned to him pleadingly. ‘Let them—let them tell this in their own time.’

She had a feeling she knew at least part of what her parents were going to say, as she was sure now that they had known of her mother’s connection to Jacob Gardner all along—if not to Andrew Southern. They probably knew her name too.

Hebe had no idea why they would have kept such a thing from her, as they had always been so open about everything else, and had brought her up to be the same way. They must have had a good reason for not telling her about her mother. And, having seen the portrait, with its overt sensuality, she could perhaps guess what that reason was.

‘You asked about the medical history of Hebe’s real parents on Saturday, Nick,’ her father reminded the younger man ruefully. ‘I told you then that we had no idea. I wasn’t exactly truthful. We really don’t know anything about Hebe’s real father.’ His voice hardened slightly. ‘But now we know of Hebe’s pregnancy, we—’

‘Your mother died in childbirth, Hebe,’ her mother told her emotionally. ‘She was so tiny, so delicate, and they left it too late to do anything about it. The birth went terribly wrong, and—and she died and the baby lived. You lived.’ Tears glistened, and then fell from pained brown eyes.

It was all too much for Hebe to take in. Her mother was dead.

It was a possibility she had never even thought of.

When she had first learnt of her adoption, before dismissing the whole thing as unimportant, she had imagined lots of reasons why her mother had given her up. Perhaps she had been very young, a single mother, or even a married woman who hadn’t been able to support another child in the family. But death—death had never been an option…

The woman in the portrait, so young and alive, had died giving birth to her?

It didn’t seem possible. It was a cruelty that shouldn’t have been allowed.

Like the death of Nick’s son Luke…

She turned to him as his hand came down firmly on her shoulder. ‘I can’t—’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t believe it, Nick—can you?’

Oh, he could believe it, all right. It wasn’t the believing of it that was the problem!

He fixed his glittering gaze on her parents. ‘Are you saying—are you telling us that Hebe may have a similar medical problem when she gives birth to our baby?’ He had caught the relevance of Jean’s statement even if Hebe hadn’t.

‘It’s a possibility.’ Henry was the one to answer him. ‘Can you see why we had to tell you?’

‘I can see why you should have told us on Saturday, not waited until now—’

‘Nick!’ Hebe cautioned emotionally.

He shook his head impatiently. ‘I’m sorry, Hebe, but your parents knew all the time that your mother had died in childbirth, knew the risk of the same thing happening to you, and yet only now—’ He broke off abruptly, turning sharply to look searchingly at the older couple.

There was something else significant in what Jean had just said about Hebe’s mother…

‘How do you know that Hebe’s mother was, to quote you, Jean, “so tiny, so delicate”?’ he prompted shrewdly.

‘You’re an intelligent man, Nick,’ Henry complimented him gruffly. ‘The reason we know those things is because Claudia, Hebe’s mother, was our daughter.’

It was Nick’s turn to be left speechless.

And if he was stunned by this revelation, how much more shocked must Hebe feel?

Except she didn’t appear shocked when he glanced down at her. Instead there was an excited glow in her golden eyes as she turned to him, a look of anticipation on her face.

‘Would you go and get the portrait, Nick?’ The animation was audible in her voice.

‘Portrait?’ He frowned his confusion.

‘The portrait, Nick,’ she said, very firmly.

What the hell did she want her portrait for now? Why show that to her adoptive parents—her grandparents?—at all? They were talking about her mother, for God’s sake—

Nick froze. ‘Hebe…?’ he questioned slowly.

She nodded. ‘Please.’

Nick moved to his bedroom as if in a dream, a truth—a startling truth—hitting him right between the eyes.

A truth he had scorned.

A truth he had accused Hebe of lying about.

The woman in the portrait was her mother!

‘Are you okay, darling?’ Hebe’s mother prompted anxiously once they were alone. ‘We shouldn’t have deceived you, I know…’

‘I’m okay,’ Hebe assured her warmly. ‘I’m not too sure about Nick, though,’ she added ruefully, having seen the stunned look on his arrogantly handsome face as he went into his bedroom.

‘You’re not upset or angry, or feeling we’ve let you down, because all this time we’ve never told you we’re your grandparents and not your adoptive parents?’ her mother probed emotionally.

It was a little strange, Hebe had to admit, but at the same time it all made perfect sense. Her mother—Claudia—had died giving birth to her, and so Claudia’s parents had taken Hebe in as their own.

She stood up, moving to hug the people who had been the only parents she knew. Kind, giving people, who had loved her and cared for her all her life. How could she possibly be angry with them? Whatever they had done, she was sure they had done it out of love and nothing else.

She smiled tearfully as she stood back. ‘How could I possibly be angry with you? You did what you thought was best, I’m sure.’

‘We still should have told you,’ her father admitted heavily. ‘But we had lost Claudia, and you—you were so like she was as a baby.’ His voice grew husky with emotion. ‘A tiny little thing, with a mop of blonde hair. We loved you on sight. And we had made so many mistakes with Claudia, it seemed. We so wanted a second chance with you.’

‘A second chance…?’ Hebe had time to ask curiously, before Nick came back into the room with the portrait.

She crossed the room to his side. ‘Just stand it on the sofa, would you, please, Nick?’ she requested softly, knowing by the grim expression on his face that he was still far from satisfied with the explanation they had been given.

Well, maybe once her parents had seen Claudia’s portrait he would be given an explanation he could accept!

Nick heard Jean give a pained gasp as he stood the portrait up against the back of the sofa, turning to see Henry walking dazedly across the room for a closer look, the lines of strain on his face making him look every one of his sixty-odd years.

Henry reached out a hand, just as Hebe had the first time she’d seen the portrait, not quite touching the canvas, but almost tracing a hand lovingly over the creamy contours of the beautiful face.

‘Tell me, Dad,’ Hebe said softly as she stood beside him in front of the portrait. ‘Did Claudia have a birthmark?’

‘She did.’ Jean was the one to answer as she moved to join her husband and granddaughter. ‘A tiny red rose-shape, just—there…!’ She gasped as she saw the portrait fully. ‘Claudia…!’ she cried brokenly, her tears falling in earnest now as she gazed in awe at the portrait. ‘But how…?’

‘It’s the portrait I told you about on Saturday—the one that Nick found hidden away in a man’s house after he died,’ Hebe explained happily.

‘Jacob Gardner’s house,’ Nick put in harshly, wishing he felt as happy as she did about all of this.

This portrait obviously was of Claudia Johnson, as Hebe had always claimed it was. Henry and Jean’s reactions to seeing it were too genuine for it to be otherwise. But if that was true then it made a complete nonsense of the things Nick had accused Hebe of doing. Accusations she had vehemently denied. He had called her a liar. A liar and a gold-digger…!

Henry turned to look at him questioningly. ‘This is the Andrew Southern portrait you told us about?’

‘Yes,’ Nick bit out tautly.

‘Twenty-seven years ago, Claudia was engaged to a man called Jacob Gardner.’ Jean sighed. ‘He was much older than her, thirty years or so, but he was very wealthy, and when he asked her to marry him she accepted.’

‘And then she met Andrew Southern and fell in love with him instead,’ Nick grated grimly.

Everything he had accused Hebe of doing, in fact.

Accused and punished her for. His jealousy of the other men such that he had wanted to make Hebe his over and over again, in order to banish them from her mind and heart.

Dear God, how she must hate him!

He couldn’t even look at her at this moment. He needed time in which to re-evaluate this whole situation.

And time, it seemed, was something he didn’t have.

‘We don’t know that for certain,’ Hebe spoke quietly. ‘Although admittedly this portrait looks as if it was painted by a man who—knew his subject more intimately than an artist and his model.’

She couldn’t quite look at her parents. Claudia might have been her biological mother, but she was a woman Hebe had never known. Whereas she had been Henry and Jean’s daughter—someone Jean had given birth to, that the two of them had brought up and loved.

‘We don’t really know what their relationship was,’ she added firmly.

‘I can’t believe this is our Claudia.’ Her mother still gazed tearfully down at the portrait. ‘She was so beautiful, wasn’t she? She was absolutely adorable as a child, too. It was only when she got to about sixteen that—well—’ She broke off, looking to her husband for assistance.

‘She became a little wild.’ Hebe’s father spoke sadly, shaking his head. ‘We don’t know where we went wrong. She started going out all the time, sometimes staying out all night. And when we tried to talk to her she just shrugged it off as fussing and carried on exactly the same as before. And then finally—finally she ran away from home, when she was seventeen.’ He sat down abruptly in one of the armchairs.

‘She had such a love of life,’ Jean added chokingly. ‘But we didn’t know what to do with her any more—couldn’t seem to reach her. She ran off, didn’t contact us for months, and then it was only the one letter. We didn’t even know she was pregnant until we received an urgent telephone call from the hospital. We were too late. When we got there Claudia had already died,’ she sobbed. ‘But there was Hebe,’ she said, smiling through her tears. ‘And we believed we had been given a second chance, that with Hebe we would not make the same mistakes.’ Tears began to fill her eyes once more.

‘You didn’t make any mistakes,’ Hebe hastened to assure her, holding tightly on to her mother’s hand. ‘Not with Claudia or with me. You’re the best parents anyone could ever have,’ she said with certainty. ‘And if she had been given the time Claudia would probably have calmed down, settled down, maybe even married and provided you with lots more grandchildren.’

‘As it was, it broke our hearts when she ran off like that,’ Henry continued heavily. ‘Not knowing where she was, what she was doing. Then, as Jean said, after six months of silence she wrote to us, without giving us an address to write back, to say she had a job singing in a hotel in the north of England somewhere—’

‘Leeds,’ Nick put in quickly.

‘Yes, that’s right.’ Hebe’s father nodded. ‘She met Jacob Gardner there one evening when he went in to have dinner with friends. Apparently he fell in love with her on sight. She was so excited about her engagement. She wrote that she would bring him down to meet us before the wedding.’ He sighed heavily. ‘It all seemed so incredible, so—’ He shook his head. ‘She was only eighteen years old.’

Hebe looked at the portrait, at her mother, eighteen years old, with all her life ahead of her. Within a year she had been dead.

Nick looked at the portrait too, at those differences Hebe had insisted existed. Apart from the birthmark, the woman in the portrait still looked like a slightly younger version of Hebe to him, if a more knowing, more feral version of her.

But it wasn’t Hebe.

No wonder she had been so angry with him for not believing her when she’d claimed it wasn’t her. When she had denied ever having been engaged to Jacob Gardner or having an affair with Andrew Southern either.

Which meant her innocence completely undermined his other accusation—that she was a gold-digger…

He looked at Hebe now, at those beautiful eyes that entranced him, the sensual fluidity of her body that enraptured him, her intelligence that enthralled him.

And he knew that she didn’t want his money at all—that he was the one who had assumed that rather than Hebe ever having said that was what she wanted. Now he realised that she had only agreed to marry him because he had threatened her—threatened to take her baby away from her if she didn’t.

Thinking of Luke, of his own pain when he’d died, of how Sally’s heart had been broken when she’d lost her child, he knew Hebe must hate him for threatening to do the same to her if she didn’t marry him.

Had he expected, had he seriously expected them to make a marriage based on his threats and Hebe’s fear that he might take her baby from her if she didn’t stay with him?

The signs had all been there if only he hadn’t been blinded by his own unforgiving attitude: the fact that Hebe wouldn’t accept that huge diamond engagement ring, her disgust over the expensive car, her refusal to leave her job and be kept by him. But he had chosen to think she was just acting as if she wasn’t interested in those things, that the demands would begin once they were married.

What sort of hardened cynic had he become?

More to the point, how could he ever hope to have Hebe fall in love with him after the way he had treated her?

‘You don’t think that Jacob Gardner was your father?’ Jean was the one to prompt Hebe softly.

Hebe gave a rueful smile. ‘Look at the portrait, Mum. What do you think?’

‘Hmm.’ Her mother grimaced. ‘I think Andrew Southern was in love with Claudia.’

‘But was Claudia in love with him? That’s the question.’ Hebe shrugged.

‘I think so,’ her father answered consideringly. ‘Look at Claudia’s face—that glow. It’s the glow of a woman who has just been thoroughly loved,’ he acknowledged with a wince. ‘What do you think, Nick?’

‘I think it’s not the sort of portrait you would hang over the family fireplace,’ Nick acknowledged stiffly.

‘Only in a man’s bedroom, hmm?’ Hebe turned to mock him, only to find herself frowning when she saw the grim expression on his face, felt the restless anger emanating from him.

What was wrong with him?

She had tried to tell him all these things when he’d first showed her the portrait, that it wasn’t her but her mother, so why—?

That was what was wrong with him. The fact that she had been right. And he had been wrong. About her, most of all.

Hebe gave him a searching look, and Nick, becoming aware of that look, turned to her with glittering blue eyes so fierce and angry that she only just stopped herself taking a step back from him.

Obviously Nick didn’t like to be wrong!

‘I also think,’ Nick bit out forcefully, ‘that with Claudia and Jacob Gardner both dead, there is only one person left in this triangle who can tell us the truth. It’s Andrew Southern we need to talk to next.’

‘I’ve already tried to contact him—with no luck,’ Hebe revealed with a disappointed shrug.

‘You have?’ Nick frowned darkly.

‘Yes, I have,’she confirmed defensively. ‘I gave his agent a letter and a photograph to forward on to him last Friday. No response, I’m afraid,’ she confided to her parents.

‘A photograph?’ Nick prompted suspiciously.

‘Of me,’Hebe told him dryly. ‘You said it yourself, Nick. My likeness to the woman in the portrait, to Claudia, is too much of a coincidence for it to be accidental. I was hoping that Andrew Southern would think so too, would realise that I have to be Claudia’s daughter, and possibly his too. But he hasn’t responded, so I guess that theory was wrong.’

And she had been so hopeful too—had hoped to be able to throw the truth in Nick’s face once she had it, to prove that the things he believed about her were completely untrue.

Of course Jean and Henry had done that for her by explaining exactly who Claudia was, but she was still disappointed that Andrew Southern hadn’t even bothered to so much as acknowledge her letter.

‘Not necessarily,’ Nick muttered grimly. ‘It’s only Monday now, Hebe,’ he said. ‘We have no idea when his agent forwarded the letter; Andrew Southern may not even have received it yet.’

She supposed that could be a possibility…

‘So you think I could still hear from him?’ she asked slowly.

‘I believe it’s a possibility, yes.’ Nick nodded tersely. ‘And if you don’t, I’ll go and see his agent myself. You need to get to the bottom of this.’

She did?

Or Nick did?

‘In the meantime,’ Nick added briskly. ‘Hebe has an appointment with a specialist this afternoon; we’ll talk to him about Claudia’s medical history, and ask him to check whether or not Hebe could have a smiliar problem.’

Hebe had forgotten all about her doctor’s appointment this afternoon in the excitement of this conversation.

But Nick obviously hadn’t…

He couldn’t seriously think that just because her mother had died in childbirth she might too, could he?

Even if he did, hadn’t he realised yet that it would solve all his problems for him—that he would be able to have his baby and get rid of his gold-digging wife in one fell swoop!

At the moment he looked like that saying—‘found a penny but lost a pound’.

Although quite what the ‘penny’ and the ‘pound’ were in all of this Hebe had no idea…!