tied just so. So sophisticated was his appearance it held them all speechless for a while.
But none more transfixed than Cate.
Time collapsed. How vivid was memory; how powerful was the past!
For a fleeting moment she felt her breathing had stopped. Then as air came back into her lungs she knew such fright she thought she had actually fainted while still remaining conscious. Her whole body was shaking, her mind sliding out of kilter. Thank God she didn’t have a glass of mineral water in her trembling hand for everyone would have watched her drop it to the ground where it probably would have shattered.
This is it, she thought. The heavens had shifted. She knew he had taken her in at once.
Lord Julian Ashton Carlisle, Fifth Baron Wyndham.
The father of her child.
She had come to him a virgin, the man who had devastated her life. So this was the way Karma worked? Action, effect, fate. She was trapped in the same room as the man she had never succeeded in erasing from her mind or her heart and hated him for it. He was indelibly fixed there by lost love, sorrow and humiliation. She had tried with every atom of her being to put the past behind her, but the past had had its effect on all of her subsequent relationships. No other man measured up.
Now her brain was signalling warnings.
The Day of Reckoning is at hand.
Over the past years she had almost succeeded in convincing herself Jules was solely hers. A virgin birth as it were. She knew now she had lost all touch with reality. Jules at some point in his life was going to want to meet his father. Jules’ father might very well want to meet the son he had hitherto known nothing about. The only way she could avert such a thing happening was to keep them far apart. At least until Jules was of an age to undertake his own search for his biological father, who probably by now had children with his aristocratic wife. Impeccable breeding, of course. It was expected, after all. Someone had to inherit the baronetcy, keep up tradition. Social status was something to be cherished.
Cate made a massive effort to calm herself by focusing on how appalling things had been for her. Alicia, steely eyed, tall, rail-thin body vibrating as she told her to go away and not come back. All Alicia had ever been up to then had been no more than a bit on the snobbish side—a woman with a mindset stuck in the early twentieth century, very patronising to a young woman from the colonies, but pleasant enough. Then everything had abruptly changed. It had been crisis time, with Ashe away for a few days in London on family business. It had all been stunningly, shockingly sudden.
“There’s simply no place for you here, Catrina.” Alicia had spoken with a gleam of triumph in her slate-grey eyes. “My son has acknowledged that. I am sorry for you, my dear, but you allowed yourself false hopes. You made a terrible mistake, but then you’re so very young. So ignorant of the ways of the world. Frankly I did try to warn you. There are unwritten rules to our way of life. We all understand them. You don’t. You would never have fitted in. Marina was born for the role. Julian may have thought you special for a time, but now he knows he has to take a step back. Life is all about doing one’s duty, assuming one’s responsibilities.”
Cate hadn’t accepted that blindly. She had fought back claiming all were equal under the sun, her expression so combative any other woman but Alicia might have ducked for cover. She’d told Alicia she needed to hear it all from Ashe himself.
Ashe, please help me.
Only Ashe wasn’t there.
“That’s the thing, my dear. Julian is in London,” Alicia had countered, trying to sound pitying and only succeeding in sounding chilling. “He’s not there on business. I assumed you would guess that. He went away because he couldn’t bear to tell you himself. It was far from an easy decision but I helped him see it was the best way. Indeed the only way. You are both far too young. Julian simply didn’t realise you were taking him so utterly seriously. Holiday romances tend to fade pretty quickly, my dear. You’ll find that out when you get back to Australia. You have your own life. My son has his.”
And so she had vanished. It took her a couple of months more to come to the devastating realisation she was pregnant. Hello, pregnant? When they had practised safe sex. She had never trusted safe sex from there on. She was pregnant to a young man, to a family, who didn’t want her. Moreover would not be eager to know her child even if it had their blood. She wasn’t good enough. It was a grave situation and one of her own making. She had turned to the only mother she had ever known to help her.
Stella.
CHAPTER TWO
England, 2005
CATE HAD BEEN driving for miles through the picture-perfect English countryside, a patchwork of emerald-green fields bordered by woods, lovely towering trees and wondrously neat hedges. Miraculously it had stopped raining. She had only been in England a couple of weeks, and the rain had been falling without end. And, Lord, was it cold! The European winter was fast setting in. But for now the sun shone, however briefly, and what lay before her was a pastoral idyll, a symphony of soft misty colours. It made her feel good to be alive. On her own at last. Freedom! Was there anything so good? Freedom. She sang it aloud. No one to hear her anyway but the woolly white sheep that dotted the enchanting landscape. It was simply wonderful to be footloose and fancy free.
Her base for her gap year was the great historic city of London, squeezed into a teeny flat with two of her university-going pals. Not that they noticed the lack of life’s little luxuries to which all of them had long been accustomed. They were too busy enjoying themselves and exploring the cultural wonders the great city had to offer. This was to be a great year for them, their Grand Tour. Afterwards all three would embark on their chosen careers. Josh came from a long line of medical doctors, so it was Medicine for Josh. Sarah with her legal family would read Law. Cate had decided on the high-flying world of Big Business, maybe along the track of an MBA from Harvard? So that had meant an Economics degree. At school her brilliance at Maths had set her apart. That didn’t bother her. She had been something of an oddity all her life.
Why wouldn’t she have been, given her history? She had been raised not knowing who her biological parents were. That alone put a girl at a severe psychological disadvantage. But at least she had been adopted as a baby by a beautiful young Englishwoman who to her great sadness couldn’t carry a baby beyond a couple of months without suffering a miscarriage. She had come by all accounts as a gift from God, albeit a giveaway baby to the right couple. Stella and Arnold certainly were. She knew they loved her. She loved them. They were good people, kindness itself, encouraging her in every way. But she had never truly felt she belonged. Forever a step away. Despite all their efforts—and she had been a difficult child she had to admit—she was and remained, in her own mind at least, an outsider.
Stella had had no idea when Cate left Australia that her adopted daughter fully intended tracking down the Cotswold manor house where Stella and her sister, Annabel, had grown up. “Lady” Annabel, her ravishing adoptive aunt, had only visited her sister in Australia a mere handful of times in the last two decades. A true and loving sister. Annabel had remained in England where she married one Nigel Warren, knighted by the Queen for something or other and a seriously rich man many years her senior. Stella, on the other hand, had married someone her own age. The great mystery was Stella and her new husband had abandoned their gracious lives in England to migrate to the opposite end of the earth: Australia. An extraordinary move, one would have thought. They hadn’t arrived penniless, however. Quite the reverse, which surely had some significance?
