an hour later, on her way back to her apartment, she acknowledged that this was not precisely how she had envisaged ending her evening.
So what had she wanted…? Sex…a final fling before she settled down? A nostalgic trip back into the past to a world when her whole universe had been bound by Jay’s arms, when all she had wanted or needed was her love for him…? Her whole world… Not his…never his—which was why she had ended their relationship in the first place.
Why would any woman ever be stupid enough to love such a man…? Why…? Because she was a woman, and because Jay, for all his faults, possessed that dangerous brand of masculinity and maleness that women, even grown-up, adult, mature, intelligent women like her had been programmed to ache for in a way they could never ache for a nice, kind, worthwhile man like Alaric.
Damn Jay. Damn him. Damn him, damn him…! She was, Nadia recognised, crying.
As Jay strode out of the restaurant a cruising taxi pulled to a halt alongside the kerb, but Jay dismissed it with a curt shake of his head.
Human company or conversation, no matter how mundane, was the last thing he felt like, right now. He was not a physically violent man, and certainly had never felt even remotely tempted to strike a woman, but if he had stayed in that restaurant much longer, listening to Nadia’s taunts… She had always been good at getting under his skin, trying to dig too deeply into his most personal thoughts and feelings. What the hell had she meant, suggesting that his father might want to marry, have children?
Just for a moment he closed his eyes, the noise of the traffic becoming a muted, distant roar as he was swept back into the past, to a memory of his seven-year-old self saying angrily to his father, ‘You don’t love me.’
‘Of course I love you, Jay,’ had been his father’s calm, gentle response.
‘But you didn’t want me. You never wanted me to be born,’ Jay had insisted, recalling the cruel comments his grandparents had often made about his conception.
And Bram, of course, with his belief in honesty, had not been able to refute his accusation.
His father marrying, conceiving children, whose birth was something wanted, planned, children whom he would welcome and love, and not have foisted on him the way that Jay had been. Children who would believe it when Bram told them that he loved them, children who would have no idea of what it meant to doubt their right to their father’s love. Unlike him.
But then, long, long before Bram had even come into his life Jay had known the truth about his own conception.
Bram’s parents and Jay’s mother’s parents had been neighbours in the small, exclusive, upper-middle-class area of the town with its large detached houses each set in its own grounds.
Jay’s mother’s father held a high-ranking local government position at county level. Jay’s mother had been an only child. Bram’s father had been an architect, the senior partner in a prestigious local practice. Bram, too, had been an only child. Neither wife had worked; both sets of parents had socialised together occasionally; both men had played golf and both women had given their time to the same local charities. So it was inevitable that Bram and Jay’s mother should have known each other, even though they were at separate, single-sex schools and she had been two years Bram’s senior.
Jay’s earliest memories of his mother were of someone pretty and loving, but also someone lacking in any real authority or power. It was his grandparents, and especially his grandfather, who decided how they all lived their lives.
His mother pouted, wheedled and manipulated her father into buying her new clothes and paying for expensive holidays. But when it came to her son… Jay had quickly learned that her quick, almost frightened, look at her father meant that he, Jay, had done something to displease his grandfather and that, for his mother’s sake, he must not do it again.
As he grew older, it sometimes seemed to him that he was making his grandfather angry just by being there. Despite all the attention his grandparents lavished on him whenever other people were around, when he was on his own it was obvious they didn’t really like him at all. His grandfather often got very cross and talked angrily about ‘that bastard who caused us all this trouble.’
It was when he started playschool that Jay first realised he didn’t have something that other children had—or rather, someone.
He could still vividly remember another boy coming up to him and saying importantly, ‘My daddy’s a doctor. What does your daddy do?’
Nonplussed, Jay had stared at him, but when he got home he had asked his mother, ‘Where’s my daddy?’
She had burst into tears and cried so much that his grandmother had come to see what all the fuss was about. His mother’s tears and his grandmother’s consequent anger frightened Jay so much that when his grandmother had insisted he repeat his question for his grandfather when he came home later, he had stammered so badly he had hardly been able to get the question out.
‘Where’s your daddy…? A father is something you haven’t got. Your father doesn’t give a damn about you or about anyone just so long as he—’
‘Daddy, please…’ Jay’s mother had intervened, but his grandfather had overruled her.
‘No. If he’s old enough to ask questions then he’s old enough to learn the truth. To be told how his precious father ruined our lives.’
It was years later when Jay learned the complete truth. After one of his quarrels with Helena, she had turned on him and told him fiercely, ‘You ought to be damn glad you’ve got a father like Bram. When I think… He was fourteen when you were conceived. Fourteen. Under age still, while your mother…well, of course Bram’s far too much of a gentleman to say so, but it’s obvious that she must have been the one to…
‘Your grandfather, her father, wanted her to have a termination when he found out she was pregnant, but it was too late. Bram’s parents offered to adopt you, but her parents wouldn’t hear of it. No. Bram was to agree to have nothing whatsoever to do with either her or you, ever again, and in return for that they’d actually allow Bram’s parents to give their precious daughter ten thousand pounds to help to bring you up.
‘If you want my opinion,’ Helena had added viciously, ‘the chances are that Bram isn’t really your father at all. Your mother had been involved in a relationship with someone else, and it was when that ended that she turned to your father for consolation. That was when you were conceived, according to her. Personally, I would be surprised if…’
Jay hadn’t wanted to hear any more. He had walked away from her in the same way he had walked away from Nadia tonight. He had been thirteen then. Now he was twenty-seven—old enough to know that walking away from a problem never solved it.
No one else had ever suggested to him that Bram might not be his father, least of all Bram himself, and physically they were so much alike. Knowing Helena, her comment was probably something she had made up on the spur of the moment, driven by the frustration of her resentment of him and her belief that he came between her and his father.
She would undoubtedly have denied it, but Jay knew that her feelings for his father went far deeper than those of mere friendship, and while she might have forgotten the taunt she had thrown at him in the heat of the moment, Jay himself had not.
The sharp, angry blare of a car horn brought him out of his
