Читать книгу Mother's Day Treats - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 16

‘FELICITY walked out late last night. A friend in the media phoned to warn her about the story appearing in the Sunday Globe,’ Maurice Denton shared in a shattered tone as Lizzie paced the room, too restive to stay still. ‘Felicity isn’t coming back. She made it clear that she wants a divorce.’

‘But…but what about the baby?’ Lizzie pressed, disconcerted by the speed and dexterity of her stepmother’s departure from the marital home.

The older man regarded her with hollow eyes. In the space of days, he seemed to have aged. ‘There is no baby…’

Lizzie’s mouth fell wide. ‘You mean, Felicity’s lost it…oh, no!’

‘There never was a baby. She wasn’t pregnant. It was a crazy lie aimed at persuading you not to tell me about her affair with Connor.’ Her parent shook his greying head with a dulled wonderment that he could not conceal. ‘Felicity thought that if she tried, she could get pregnant easily and then pretend she’d mixed up her dates. But it didn’t happen: she didn’t conceive. As time went on and she was forced to pretend to go to pre-natal appointments she decided that she would have to fake a miscarriage…thank heaven, I was spared that melodrama!’

‘Do you think…er…Felicity’s having a breakdown?’ Lizzie suggested worriedly. ‘I mean, maybe it was one of those false pregnancies that come from genuine longing for a baby—’

‘No.’ Maurice Denton’s rebuttal was flat, bitter. ‘Last night, she informed me that she didn’t even like children and that she was fed up not only with the whole insane pretence that she had foisted on us all but also sick and tired of living with a man old enough to be her father! She wasn’t even sorry for the damage she did to you, never mind me!’

Lizzie flinched. ‘I’m so sorry…’

‘Perhaps when a man of fifty-five marries a woman more than thirty years younger he deserves what he gets. Why didn’t you come to me about her and the Morgan boy?’

‘I…I told myself I couldn’t tell you for the baby’s sake…but possibly, I just couldn’t face the responsibility.’ Listening to the mayhem of raised voices outside the front door, Lizzie said gently, ‘Look, maybe the reporters will go away if I make a statement to them…what do you think?’

‘Do as you think best,’ Maurice Denton advised heavily. ‘Felicity is gone and it can only be Felicity or you that those vultures are interested in. I’ve never had much of a public profile.’

Lizzie went outside to address the assembled journalist and parry some horrendous questions of the lowest possible taste. ‘Was Morgan sleeping with both you and your stepmother?’

‘Connor and I were only ever friends,’ Lizzie declared with complete calm.

‘What about you and Sebasten Contaxis?’ she was asked.

‘Oh, I’m not friends with him!’ Lizzie asserted without hesitation and there was a burst of appreciative laughter at that response.

It was only later while she was making a snack for her father that she truly appreciated that her own name had been cleared. Would Sebasten find out? Sooner or later, he would discover that he had targeted the wrong woman. How would he react? But why should she care? What he had confessed to doing was beyond all forgiveness. She looked into the fridge, where a jar of sun-dried tomatoes sat, and her tastebuds watered. Sun-dried tomatoes followed by ice-cream. She shut the fridge again in haste, unnerved by recent food cravings that struck her as bizarre.

An hour later, Sebasten sprang out of his Lamborghini outside the Morgan household in the leafy suburbs. A lingering solitary cameraman took a picture of him. Waving back the bodyguards ready to leap into action and prevent that photo being taken, Sebasten smiled. Sebasten had been smiling ever since he read Patsy Hewitt’s hatchet job on Lizzie’s stepmother. The wicked stepmother, a typecast figure and a perfect match to Sebasten’s own prejudices. He could not imagine how he had contrived not to register that Lizzie’s father had a very much younger wife who bore more than a passing resemblance to the evil queen in Snow White. He could not imagine how it had not once crossed his mind that Lizzie might be engaged in protecting a member of her own family.

‘Lizzie’s not friends with you, mate,’ the cameraman warned Sebasten.

‘Watch this space,’ Sebasten advised with all the sizzling, lethal confidence that lay at the heart of his forceful character. He just felt happy, crazy happy, and all he could think about was reclaiming Lizzie.

‘She’s a gutsy girl…I wouldn’t count my chickens.’

Sebasten just laughed and leant on the doorbell and rattled the door knocker for good measure.