had taken the envelope from her pocket, smearing it with green that had adhered to her fingers from her weeding. She had wiped her hands on her shorts before she’d taken out the letter. Lucy hadn’t put a telephone number. Well, she wouldn’t. From the comment about not having to meet her father, Bron guessed that Lucy was hoping to keep the whole thing a secret from him.
She had unhooked the telephone, dialled 192. ‘Directory Enquiries. What name please?’
‘Fitzpatrick. I don’t have an initial. Bramhill Bay, in Sussex.’
‘One moment, please.’ Then, ‘Would that be Fitzpatrick Studios?’
Fitzpatrick Studios? What kind of studios? Film studios? ‘That could be it,’ she said, her heart sinking. That could very well be it She’d all but managed to convince herself that Lucy had chosen Brooke because she was well known, admired. Saving the rain-forest was such a big issue these days, but if her father was a filmmaker the coincidence was just too much... She stopped herself.
What kind of film studios would be in some tiny village in Sussex? A place called The Old Rectory was far more likely to be an artist’s studio, or a pottery, or both. She could just imagine a picturesque tithe barn housing some artists colony... ‘The address is The Old Rectory,’ she said quickly.
There was a click and then she heard the recording, ‘The number that you require is...’ Bronte wrote it down, double-checked it and then hung up. She stared at the number. Well, it seemed to say, you’ve got me, now what are you going to do with me?
The child’s father needed to know what was going on, she rationalised as she made coffee, dumped the bread in the toaster. She couldn’t just ignore it. If Lucy was so desperate for love that she needed Brooke as a fantasy mother... And if she wasn’t fantasising?
It made no difference. She would have to ring. But after breakfast. No one could be expected to deal with something like this on an empty stomach.
Bronte stared at her empty mug, the abandoned toast. Now. Do it now. Delaying was not going to make it any easier. And it might be all right. Lucy might do this once a week, or whenever her mother refused to be blackmailed into more sweets, later TV, a day off school, and she’d get a resigned apology from an embarrassed parent. Maybe. Why didn’t she believe that?
Whatever she believed, she could no longer put off making the call. She picked up the telephone, dialled the number. It rang once. It rang twice. Three times. There was no one there. Relief surged through her and she had the receiver halfway back to the cradle when she heard it being picked up. She couldn’t just hang up...she just hated it when people did that...
‘James Fitzpatrick.’ James Fitzpatrick had a voice like melted chocolate. Dark, expensive chocolate. It rippled through her midriff like a warm wave of pleasure and left her gasping. ‘I can’t come to the telephone right now but if you leave a message I’ll get back to you.’ There was a click and the long bleep of an answering machine. She was still holding the receiver when there was a long, insistent ring on the doorbell.
Fitz had found it impossible to talk to Lucy about her mother. The other way round would not be so difficult, he assured himself, yet when he pulled up outside the steeply gabled house with a large garden overgrown with blowsy midsummer roses, he still wasn’t certain that he was doing the right thing.
It might be wiser to let sleeping dogs lie. Brooke knew where to find him but in nearly nine years had never once bothered to call him, enquire after her daughter, show the slightest interest in her health or happiness.
Well, that was the deal he’d agreed to.
Until the moment when he’d finally realised that Brooke had meant it when she’d said she would have her baby adopted, Fitz had never given much thought to what that would involve. He had never thought of himself as a man wanting a child of his own, but the unseen, unknown life that had been so carelessly created had, with the threat of rejection, become so real to him, so precious that he had been overtaken with the longing to protect her. And with her lying, hours old, in his arms, he’d known he could never bear to let her go.
He would have promised Brooke anything at that moment and he had never once doubted that he’d had the better of the deal. He’d supported her through her pregnancy, looked after her, certain that once the baby was in her arms she would love her. Then after Lucy was born, when Brooke had calmly announced that she was going to give her baby away, she’d seen his reaction and she’d made her bargain with him.
What had been so galling, so unforgivable, had been her amusement...her callous assurance that within weeks he would see it her way and hand the child over to some anonymous couple and be glad to do it. The truth was she really hadn’t cared what he’d done with her baby as long as she hadn’t been the one kept awake at night, hadn’t been the one changing nappies. She hadn’t had time for such mundane nonsense, she’d been going to make something of her life and in return for her baby he’d been going to help her do that. Well, he had to admit that she hadn’t wasted her opportunity.
Maybe somewhere, hidden in the untrodden byways of his mind, he had nursed a secret hope that one day she would realise what she was missing, would come back. Eight years should have been long enough for him to come to terms with the truth, but perhaps Lucy was not the only one with a penchant for fantasy.
Maybe that was why he had found it so hard to tell Lucy the truth; maybe he hadn’t wanted to believe that any mother could be so callous. Well, he could no longer fool himself. Lucy had taken the matter out of his hands, chosen the moment.
But now he was here, parked outside a house which until this moment had simply been an address on the document which gave him sole custody of Lucy, it occurred to Fitz that he was almost certainly on a wildgoose chase.
This had been Brooke’s family home. It was highly unlikely that she had lived here since university, but it was the only address he had. She’d long since left the television natural history unit where he’d got her that first job, easily finding a backer to start her own film company, but no one there would give him an address, advising him to write in and his letter would be passed on. There wasn’t time for that. And his contacts in the business who could have told him what he needed to know would have been just too damned interested.
He watched the postman making his way down the street, dropping letters through the boxes. The man reached The Lodge, turned in at the gate, but he had more than letters—he had something that needed signing for, or wouldn’t fit the box, because he rang the bell. Who would answer? Her mother, a middle-aged version of Brooke? Her father...
‘Brooke...’ Her name escaped him on a breath. It was the last thing on earth he had expected. But she was there, she had opened the door, was talking with the postman, giving the man one of those blazing smiles as she pushed back her hair in an achingly familiar gesture before taking the pen he offered and signing for a letter. Before he knew what he was doing he was out of the Range Rover and across the street. The postman saw him coming, held the gate for him, but halfway up the path he stopped.
Suppose she refused to speak to him, this spectre coming back from the past to haunt her, determined to remind her of something she had chosen to forget? Suppose she shut the door on him? Refused even to discuss Lucy? She had every right to. He had promised he would never contact her, never betray her secret. But then he had never expected to have to keep that promise. And Lucy’s happiness was more important than any promise.
He stepped off the path, followed the lawn around to the back of the house.
