Liberty seemed to recall Joan and her husband had emigrated to Australia or New Zealand, she couldn’t remember which. ‘I thought she lived abroad?’
‘She did. They did, her husband and Joan. The thing is…’
As his voice trailed away again, Liberty’s heart began to race slightly. He’d said ‘the thing is’ twice in the space of a minute; something was afoot. What was the thing? She asked just that but her father didn’t reply to this directly. Instead he said, ‘Joan’s husband was an alcoholic; that was one of the reasons they emigrated. He had a brother out there who owned a large farm and was prepared to take Joan’s husband on as manager. She was hoping it would be enough for him to give up the drink.’
‘Was it?’ She wasn’t quite sure why they were discussing Joan’s husband.
‘For a time, then he started drinking worse than ever. She stayed with him till the end. It was his liver that finally gave out.’
‘Right.’ She waited for the rest of it.
‘We fell in love, Liberty, all those years ago. Hard to believe more than two decades have passed. We never did anything about it, of course—she had her husband and she wouldn’t have abandoned him, it’d have been the death of him, and I—’
This time she spoke into the pause. ‘You had me to look after,’ she said softly.
‘You weren’t an issue; Joan adored you,’ he said quickly. ‘She couldn’t have kids of her own; her husband had a motorbike accident just after they were married and the result was that all that side of their marriage was null and void. That’s what started him drinking apparently, poor devil.’
Liberty found she didn’t know what to say. She’d had no idea her father had ever felt that way about Joan or Joan about him, but then she had been a mere child at the time. She tried to keep her voice normal when she said, ‘When did you meet her again?’
‘Two days ago. She just walked into the surgery.’ The lilt in his voice was back. ‘Her husband died three months ago and she’s been busy putting her affairs in order but now she’s back in England for good. She said she was making contact with old friends but as soon as we saw each other again we knew we felt the same. Absence really had made the heart grow fonder.’
She could hardly take it in. Her father carrying a secret love in his heart all these years? But it explained a lot. He was a very handsome man with the added allure of being a doctor; she had seen women making goo goo eyes at him over the years. But he’d never been interested and now she knew why. Joan Andrews. She shook her head slowly in amazement.
‘I’m glad for you, Dad.’ And she was, she really was, in spite of the selfish little pang her heart had given at the knowledge that she wouldn’t be the number one person in his life any longer.
‘You’ll come and meet her again tonight then?’
‘Of course I will, I’d love to,’ she lied enthusiastically. The truth of the matter was that she would have liked twenty-four hours to get used to the fact that her father had turned into a couple overnight.
‘Great. Joan’ll be thrilled. I think she was a bit worried you might feel she was taking me away from you.’
He laughed with the insensitivity of a father who thought his daughter was perfect and could never have a self-centred thought in her life, and Liberty responded with an appropriate laugh of her own before she said, ‘It’s high time you had someone to share your life with and from the sound of it she’s had no picnic up to yet.’ And she meant every word.
‘Thanks, Pumpkin.’ Her father’s voice was husky now, and there was a brief silence before he said, ‘Eight o’clock at the Phoenix suit you?’
‘The Phoenix?’ This really was true love. It cost an arm and a leg for so much as a glass of wine at the Phoenix, one of London’s most exclusive nightclubs. Liberty had only been there once before when a date had been hoping to impress her. The man in question had been hoping for a lot more too—courtesy of payment for her dinner—and had been more than a little offended when she had rebuffed his arrogant advances and compounded what he saw as an insult to his male prowess when she had sent a cheque for the cost of her dinner to him the next day. ‘Best bib and tucker then?’ she teased lightly.
‘You bet.’ Her father chuckled like an excited schoolboy. ‘See you later. I’ll be watching out for you. And…thanks again, Pumpkin,’ he added softly.
This was turning into one crazy day. She sat for a full minute more mulling over all her father had said before she started the engine, but on the drive back to the office it wasn’t her father and Joan Andrews who filled her mind, but a tall, broad, tough-looking individual with eyes the colour of a stormy winter sky. And she knew she was going to ring Carter Blake’s number.
CHAPTER TWO
LIBERTY told herself she shouldn’t have been surprised when the rest of the afternoon turned into a maniac merry-go-round, mainly due to an extensive power cut just after she returned from lunch. One of her father’s favourite sayings was that it never rained but it poured, and with all the practice computers rendered helpless and irate clients at every turn, the day just got worse and worse.
By six o’clock she felt a frazzled wreck, and if it had been anyone else but her father she was seeing that night she would have rung and made her excuses, the thought of a long hot bath and an early night taking on the appearance of heaven.
She was one of the last to leave the offices in Finsbury, east London, but that wasn’t unusual. She was aiming to become a junior partner within the next five years, and that wouldn’t happen without dedication and hard work. Normally she caught the tube to and from work, but owing to her lunch date with her mother she had decided to use the car that morning. As she stood and stared at it in the practice car park, she reflected that it hadn’t been one of her better decisions.
But she couldn’t think about booking the car into a garage just now. She had the evening to get through and then a long day in front of her tomorrow; the car could wait.
She drove home very carefully, conscious that she was tired and that another accident was the last thing she needed. Her mood lifted as she drew into the tree-lined street in Whitechapel where she had recently bought her first home. After leaving law college, she had spent two years serving articles with her present firm whilst still living at home with her father, but once she had been offered a permanent position had felt the time was right to leave the nest for a rented bedsit. Another rented property, this time a one-bedroomed flat, had followed three years later, but at the beginning of the year she had come across the small, one-bed seventeenth-century almshouse—originally built for ‘decay’d’ seamen or their widows, according to the estate-agent blurb—being advertised in the local paper. She had felt good about the house even then.
The ground floor consisted of a living room and bedroom, with a kitchen, dining room and separate bathroom in the basement and a Lilliputian garden at the rear just big enough to hold a garden table and two chairs and a selection of flowering potted shrubs grouped round a stone bird table and bird-bath.
The lady owner had been retiring and moving to live with a sister in Cornwall after twenty-five years in the house and, against all the advice she would have offered someone else, Liberty had immediately declared herself to be in love with the place and offered the full asking price. She had been installed in her quaint little home within the month, complete with a hefty mortgage which meant she
