Читать книгу The Holiday Escapes Collection - Сандра Мартон - Страница 47

‘I—I HAVE to go…’ Charlotte almost fell over her feet to get to her clothes, struggling back into them with jerky agitated movements. ‘I have to go now…’

‘Who is Emily?’ Damon asked again, this time restraining her by the arm.

She looked up at him in desperation as she tugged her arm out of his hold. ‘She’s…she’s my daughter; now please let me go—I have to go to the hospital. Oh, God!’ She began to cry as her keys dropped out of her grasp. ‘This is all my fault. I knew something like this would happen. It’s all my fault.’

‘Your daughter?’ Damon stared at her in stupefaction. ‘You have a child? You really have a child?’

She nodded as she scooped up her keys, tears running down her cheeks. ‘I was going to tell you…I just didn’t know how to go about it.’

His frown was so heavy his brows met over his eyes. ‘You agreed to have a relationship with me while you are married with a child?’ He looked at her incredulously. ‘What sort of woman are you?’

She brushed at her eyes and said, ‘I’m not married…’

‘Where is the child’s father?’

She bit her lip. She couldn’t tell him like this. ‘I have to go, Damon. We can talk some other time. Please.’

‘You are in no fit state to drive,’ he said, reaching for his coat. ‘Give me your keys. I will take you.’

‘No, you don’t know your way around the city and I’ll be much quicker on my own.’

He took her arm again and this time there was no hope of escaping. ‘Then we will go by cab, which will be even quicker. You will not have to worry about parking.’

It made good sense to Charlotte, although she knew there would be a price to pay for accepting his help. But she was beyond caring. She had to get to the hospital to see what was wrong with Emily.

Guilt struck at her from every angle. She should never have left her daughter tonight. For days now Emily had seemed unusually clingy, but she’d put it down to her being over-tired. And now her little girl was in hospital, all because of her neglect.

The cab trip was mercifully swift but, although Charlotte did her best to resist any attempts at conversation with Damon, he was not so easily put off.

‘Shouldn’t you be contacting her father?’ he asked.

She huddled herself into the corner of the cab. ‘No.’

‘What do you mean, no? Surely her father should know of this emergency?’

‘He doesn’t even know she exists.’

He stared across at her in the semi-darkness of the cab’s interior. ‘What do you mean, he does not know? Why have you not told him? Surely every man, no matter what the circumstances, has the right to know he has fathered a child.’

She gave him a resigned look, as if the world had finally caught up with all of her frantic attempts to escape from it. ‘Actually, I did tell him but he chose not to believe me.’

Damon felt as if someone had just struck him in the chest with a blunt object. Surely it couldn’t be true?

It wasn’t possible.

A niggling doubt crept into his mind, like a curl of smoke finding its way under a locked door. He had thought she’d been lying to save her pride, but what if he’d got it wrong?

They had used protection, he reminded himself. But the doubt tapped him on the shoulder again as he recalled those last few times before he had sent her away…

His passion for her had been uncontrollable. He had surged into her warmth, relishing the intoxicating experience of feeling her silk against his steely strength without a barrier.

‘I’m her father?’ he croaked.

She answered him with a tiny nod.

‘I do not believe you.’ He regretted the words as soon as they left his lips but there was no way he could take them back. He saw the way they wounded her, the hunch of her shoulders as if protecting herself from further pain, the stiffness of her limbs and the set of her mouth making him realise how hard she was trying to cope.

‘Well, that’s to be expected, of course,’ she said with bitterness sharpening every word to a dagger-point. ‘You have never believed me before, so I don’t expect you to do so now.’

He finally found his voice, although it didn’t really sound like his when he finally spoke. ‘Why did you not tell me?’

Her blue eyes were brimful of resentment. ‘I did tell you, but you refused to accept the possibility that I was carrying your child. You accused me of theft. It was clear from what you said that you thought I was lying to get you to do something you weren’t prepared to do, like give my child a name—your name.’

The cold hard vice of guilt pressed against him. He felt it in every part of his body. His chest felt so constricted he could hardly breathe and his stomach was churning with a nauseating dread that he had somehow got it wrong.

He had sent her packing with the threat of exposure and immediate deportation. He had been so convinced of her guilt that he hadn’t even bothered to look for another suspect.

But there were no other suspects, he reminded himself, not unless he was prepared to lay the blame at his mother or sister’s feet.

But what if Charlotte had planned this? A few sculptures were nothing compared to this. As revenges went this was surely up there with the best. She had kept his child from him all this time, not once trying to resume contact after those first few times.

‘I have a daughter…’ The words felt strange on his lips, like a language he had never learned to speak but, to his surprise, was now suddenly fluent in it.

‘I called her Emily Alexandrine,’ she said into the taut silence.

He swivelled his tortured gaze back to hers. ‘You gave her the name of my mother?’

Her eyes were still shining with tears. ‘I thought it was the least I could do. Your mother had been so kind to me in offering me a job at the gallery…’

Damon turned away to look at the glittering lights of the highway as the cab made its way to the hospital he could see in the near distance, his throat closing over with pain.

His daughter was within the structures of that concrete and glass building. A daughter he had never realised existed until this moment, a daughter who connected him with Charlotte in the most intimate way possible, the combination of their blood flowing through her tiny veins.

‘How old is she?’ he asked, his voice sounding hollow.

‘She turned three years old three months ago—her birthday is the fifteenth of April.’

Damon closed his eyes against the rush of emotion her words evoked. He had missed out on so much. Her entire babyhood had gone and he hadn’t seen a thing. She would be walking and talking and yet he had never held her as an infant, had never changed her nappy, had never seen her first smile or first tooth or first anything. He could have walked past her on the street and would never have known she was his child.

‘How could you have done this to me?’ His words fell into the silence like a solid weight against a fragile glass surface.

Charlotte flinched beside him. ‘I had no choice. You believed me to be a thief. You sent me packing with your threats ringing in my ears. I tried to tell you so many times.’

His eyes met hers in the subdued lighting of the cab as it pulled into the emergency bay of the hospital. ‘But you are a thief, Charlotte.’ His voice was tight with anger, each word hardbitten. ‘You have stolen from me my daughter and I swear to God you will not get away with it this time. I let you off lightly when you betrayed my family’s trust the last time, but not now. A few ancient sculptures are nothing to the value of my own flesh and blood. You will regret not telling me of my child’s existence—I guarantee it.’

Charlotte stumbled from the cab with his words reverberating in her pain-racked body as she made her way to the reception desk to find out where her daughter was being held. She had tried Caroline’s mobile in the cab but it had frustratingly gone to message service each time.

‘Emily Woodruff?’ The hospital receptionist looked through the long list of patients on her computer. ‘I’m sorry, but there’s no patient of that name who has been admitted up until the last hour. Have you tried Accident and Emergency? She might still be being assessed.’

Damon took Charlotte’s elbow as they made their way through the endlessly long corridors to the Accident and Emergency bay on the ground floor.

Charlotte pressed the security button and quickly explained the situation to the receptionist who appeared at the window.

‘Oh, yes, the little girl—she’s being assessed right now,’ the woman said, releasing the door. ‘Come on through.’

There were numerous curtained cubicles with a variety of people moving in and out of them, nurses and doctors and worried-looking relatives adding to the general sense of urgency and despair of the place.

‘Excuse me…’ Charlotte began as a doctor rushed past.

‘I need a chest drain in Emergency One, stat,’ the harried doctor said to a nurse before turning to Charlotte. ‘Could you please wait in the waiting room? Someone will attend to you shortly.’

Damon stepped forward. ‘Our daughter has been admitted to this hospital and we would like to know where she is.’

The doctor stopped in his tracks at the authority in Damon’s tone. ‘You must be little Emily Woodruff’s parents. I’m sorry—we’ve been so busy this evening. She’s just been taken down to X-ray.’

‘What’s wrong with her?’ Charlotte asked, panic beating like the wings of a startled bird in her chest.

The doctor gave them both a reassuring smile. ‘Nothing too serious. It looks like a greenstick fracture to her arm. It won’t even need plaster. The X-ray is just to confirm my diagnosis. The young woman who brought her in is in Emergency Bay five.’

Caroline must have heard their voices as she was already coming out of the cubicle with Janie half asleep in her arms.

‘Oh, Charlotte, I’m so sorry. It happened so quickly. I was on the phone to my mother. The girls really should have been in bed but they were playing so happily and I wasn’t watching for a moment and Emily fell off the sofa. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say…’

‘It’s all right.’ Charlotte gave her a quick hug, careful not to disturb little Janie. ‘The doctor said it’s just a greenstick fracture.’

‘It is serious,’ Damon said with a glaring frown. ‘What sort of babysitter allows a small child to injure herself?’

‘Damon, please…’ Charlotte put a hand on his arm. ‘This is not the time to—’

‘Not the time to what?’ he said, interrupting her coldly. ‘To tell me what I should have been told nearly four years ago? That is my daughter in there and I want to know how she came to be injured.’

‘You’re Emily’s father?’ Caroline said somewhat unnecessarily.

Charlotte’s eyes closed, her fingers coming up to pinch the bridge of her nose as the tension of the evening built to explosion point in the middle of her forehead.

‘Yes,’ Damon answered stiffly. ‘Although I have only been informed of the fact less than fifteen minutes ago. How did my daughter injure herself?’

Charlotte, seeing the distress on her friend’s face, stepped forward. ‘Damon, please—this is not Caroline’s fault. Children hurt themselves all the time. Emily gets clumsy when she’s tired and falling off a sofa is virtually an everyday occurrence in a child of three. It’s not fair to blame Caroline.’

Damon turned his glittering gaze on her. ‘So it is you I should blame, is it not? For you are her mother and you left her under inadequate supervision.’

Anger flared in her eyes and, even though she knew it was unfair to dump what was really her own guilt on him, she did so regardless. ‘You were the one who insisted I spend this evening with you. If I hadn’t been forced to be with you, this might never have happened.’

Damon opened his mouth to defend himself when the rattle of a trolley turned his head and he saw his little daughter for the very first time…

‘Mummy?’ Emily’s little voice was strained and fearful as her chocolate-brown eyes went to where Charlotte was standing beside Caroline.

‘Oh, precious…’ Charlotte rushed to her and kissed her gently on her forehead, both her cheeks and the tip of her tiny nose. ‘Are you all right, darling? The doctor said you hurt your arm. You’re being so brave. Does it hurt very much?’

Emily’s bottom lip wobbled precariously. ‘Not now…I just wanted you to be wif me…’ She began to cry, big tears popping out of her eyes like oversized crystals.

Damon swallowed the rising emotion in his throat. He felt shut out and isolated. His own flesh and blood didn’t even recognise him, although he could see without a doubt she was his child. He had considered demanding a paternity test but he could see now it would be pointless. Emily looked exactly as Eleni had looked at the same age—the same dark brown, almost black hair, the same bottomless brown eyes and the same rosebud mouth and button nose.

Pain twisted inside him like a trapped and angry serpent, the venom of his anger stinging him in every possible place.

He had a child—a little daughter that Charlotte had kept from him. In spite of his earlier refusal to believe her, she’d had almost four years to tell him and yet she hadn’t. She hadn’t even told him over the last few days and yet she’d had every possible chance to do so. Three of his daughter’s birthdays had already passed; what else would he have missed if he hadn’t found out?

‘Ms Woodruff?’ The doctor who had spoken to Charlotte earlier came over with an envelope containing Emily’s X-rays. ‘Your daughter is free to go home. It is, as I suspected, a greenstick fracture, which requires nothing but a firm bandage and a review by an orthopaedic surgeon in three weeks. Here is a list of names of orthopaedic surgeons—you can choose one of these or go to your GP and they will refer you to one.’ He turned to his little patient with a smile. ‘You were very brave, Emily. I had a ten-year-old boy in here the other night with exactly the same condition and he yelled the place down.’

Emily’s big brown eyes went wide. ‘Weally?’

He gave her hair a quick but gentle ruffle. ‘I didn’t just have to bandage his arm—I was tempted to put a big plaster over his mouth.’

Emily giggled.

‘Thank you so much, Dr McHenry,’ Charlotte said after a quick glance at his name tag. ‘I’m so sorry I wasn’t here with her when she came in.’

The doctor gave her a tired smile. ‘I’m a parent myself,’ he said. ‘My wife and I both work shifts, so I know what a juggle it is with childcare and babysitting. Your friend did the right thing in bringing Emily in so promptly. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must see to the rest of my patients. I’ll send a nurse over to see to that bandage. I even think we’ve got a pink one especially for little girls. Good luck, Emily, and don’t go falling off the sofa any more.’

‘I won’t.’ Emily smiled shyly.

Charlotte stood to one side as the nurse gently and expertly bandaged her daughter’s arm.

Caroline had quietly excused herself just moments before with Janie fast asleep on her shoulder, but Damon was still standing watching her with a stony expression on his face and Charlotte knew without a doubt that her nightmare of a night was far from over…