that I won’t be long and you can get on your way the minute I get back.’
Then she gave him a lopsided grin. ‘I was forgetting! This is your chance to catch up with all of the gossip. Won’t that be the best fun?’
BEING interrogated by Yvette for almost an hour about every detail of where he had been, what he had studied, what he had done and where he had travelled in the past eighteen years had not been what Seb called fun.
And she had made him work. By the time Ella wheeled her bicycle around the corner of the house, he had emptied three wheelbarrows of plant clippings, heard potted histories of most of his old schoolmates and made rash promises to welcome assorted members of Yvette’s extended family to Sydney.
So he was more than happy to hand over the reins to Ella, who vanished into the kitchen with Yvette the minute she got back, leaving him trapped outside on the patio.
At last! It was finally time to get packed and on his way back to the business world he understood.
So he had to find a way into the house that did not involve going through the kitchen. The fastest way would be to sneak in through the sitting room and what had been his mother’s salon.
Sebastien glanced through the open patio windows of the long wide room and stopped dead in his tracks—his feet frozen to the floor.
Hanging above the heavy stone mantelpiece of the original fireplace was a photograph he had never seen in his life. Of his mother.
Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes, startling him with their intensity, after the shock of seeing her picture, life size, smiling back at him.
Hardly believing his eyes, he clenched his toes hard inside his made-to-measure shoes and breathed out slowly through his nose before taking a step across the threshold onto the marble tiles.
Only the fireplace was familiar in this strange mix of a room that had originally been two rooms—the formal parlour and the salon. The dividing wall was gone and the long sitting-room windows had been replaced by wide glass doors that opened out into the garden and allowed light to flood into what had been a rather dark space.
That light seemed focused like a spotlight on his mother’s image. She must have been in her twenties when the photograph was taken and the photographer had captured her in a moment when every aspect of her beauty and grace were at their height.
She looked stunning. More like a film actress or professional fashion model than the woman who had kissed him goodnight and made his favourite chocolate cake every Friday—just because she felt like it.
How had he forgotten how very beautiful she had been?
Her sparkling hazel-green and amber eyes shone out from the flat surface behind the glass, as bright as her perfect smile that could light up any room in seconds. Even now this simple colour photograph dominated the room.
She was wearing a pale pink dress with the slight shimmer of silk in the ruffles on the collar, and a single string of pearls he knew that his father still kept in a wooden box in his bedroom that Seb was not supposed to know about.
On one shoulder was a corsage of white and pale pink rosebuds chosen to match the exact same shade as her dress and she had raised her left hand towards it. She was wearing a ring with a large heart-shaped diamond-cut pink stone on the fourth finger—but it was not a ring he recognised.
Intrigued and fascinated by the maelstrom of emotions whirling around inside him, Seb moved closer to the fireplace until he was within touching distance of what was obviously an amateur photograph.
One thing was clear. She was looking straight into the lens of the camera and at the person taking the photograph with a look in her eyes that was absolutely unmistakable. It was the look of love. Because if Helene Castellano had a flaw, this was it.
She was incapable of hiding her true feelings—about anything.
She might have told him that the garden frog he had presented her with when he was seven was the best she had ever seen, but he had only had to look at her face to know the truth. And she had released the poor frog back into the river by morning.
He had loved her so very much. When she was taken ill, he had felt so powerless to do anything to help her that her last weeks were a whirlwind of kind words and fierce anger and frustration, which he took out on everyone and everything around him.
In life she had taught him about respect and hard work. Her death had taught him what it felt like to love someone so much and then have that love snatched away from you.
Her heart had been an open book.
His heart was locked tight closed and was going to stay that way. Other men might be foolish enough to risk falling in love and start a family. Not for him.
The blood pounded in the veins in his neck.
The photograph could have been taken by Luc Castellano, the man he had called his father for the first thirty years of his life. But it could equally have been a friend or relative at the same party. He simply could not know! And yet this photograph had been deliberately left behind when they emigrated!
Possibilities raced through his mind in tune with the blood pounding in his heart. What if his birth parents had been in the same room when this photograph was taken?
This photograph could be the clue he had not even acknowledged that he had been looking for. The first step to finding the answers to so many questions he had buried deep inside about his parentage.
Questions which now burned to be answered.
He had been a fool.
The growing feeling of unease and anxiety that had sat on his shoulders ever since he found out that his dad could not be his natural father suddenly made sense.
It had nothing to do with the business deal, and everything to do with understanding who he truly was, and the decisions his parents had taken to give him a safe family life.
Instead of feeling elation and exhilaration that he was within sight of the greatest business deal of his life, standing at that moment in front of his mother’s portrait, all he could feel was a hollow emptiness that needed to be filled.
The Helene Castellano Foundation meant everything to him going forward and he refused to let that work suffer because he was preoccupied with his heritage and his past. He had to put that behind him.
He had come here to ease his mind before starting work on the greatest adventure of his life. Nicole was not around. So he would have to do the job himself.
It was time to face the facts and get the answers he needed.
There was a rustle of movement behind Seb and he swung around, his mouth hard with emotion and resentful at the intrusion. Ella bustled happily through the patio doors, her arms wrapped around a china bowl packed with a stunning arrangement of fresh early sunflowers and green foliage, which she carefully lowered onto the low coffee table in front of the sofas, turning the bowl from side to side to give the best viewpoint.
Only
