A Rekindled Passion

‘What did you tell her?’ Kate asked her quietly. It had always hounded her, this fear that one day Sophy would naturally want to seek out the man who had fathered her. Her fear had not been for herself but for her child…that Sophy would be rejected as she had been rejected.

‘The truth. That you explained to me when I was old enough to understand what had happened…That you had fallen in love with someone who you thought was free to love you in return…and that you had then discovered that he was in fact already married with a child. That on the advice and counselling of Gran and Gramps you had decided not to get in touch with him and tell him about me because, as they had pointed out to you, he had already made it plain that he didn’t want anything to do with you, and that anyway, a man who had already betrayed his marriage vows and his child was only going to cause us both a great deal of unhappiness.

‘I’ve always agreed with what Gran and Gramps told you,’ she added calmly. ‘He couldn’t have been much of a man, to hurt you the way he did. You and Gran and Gramps have always given me so much love…been so honest and truthful with me.’ She looked steadily at her mother. ‘I admire you tremendously for not giving in to the temptation to confront him with your pregnancy, especially when you loved him so much. He has no place in my life or in my heart. How could he have? If I had one wish it would not be for my father, but that Gran and Gramps were still alive and that Gramps was here to walk down the aisle with me.’

They hugged one another silently for a moment, both of them acknowledging the huge emotional debt they owed to Kate’s parents, who had always been so wise and caring, never reproaching her for what she had done but instead gently helping her to understand that for her own sake and her child’s she must put the past behind her.

‘I think what you and I need right now is a bottle of champagne and a weepy movie,’ Sophy said shakily.

Kate laughed.

‘Maybe, but what we have is a potential strawberry mountain waiting to be hulled and washed.’ She saw Sophy’s grimace and reminded her, mock-severely, ‘You were the one who wanted the June wedding…the country setting…the fresh strawberries and cream…’

‘Don’t remind me,’ Sophy protested as they went together to the car to bring in the fruit.

CHAPTER TWO

‘THE MOST BEAUTIFUL girl…’

‘Such a lovely dress…’

‘What a fabulous day…’

The comments washed past Kate as she stood on the steps of the church with Sophy and John and John’s immediate family.

The June sunshine was dazzlingly bright and hot after the cool, cloistered peace of the church. The vicar had held a private memorial service for her parents in that same church after the plane crash…Her breath locked in her chest as she reminded herself that, today of all days, she must not allow anything to cloud Sophy’s happiness.

And Sophy was happy. It radiated out of her.

As she watched, the newly married pair touched hands, a small, private gesture of shared love and reassurance, and then Sophy commented curiously, ‘Heavens, John, who’s that gorgeous dark-haired man over there with the redhead?’

All of them turned to look in the direction Sophy was discreetly indicating.

A couple were standing apart from the rest of the guests, in the shadowy seclusion of the quiet graveyard.

Kate looked at them absently, and then focused abruptly on the man, her heart feeling as though it had suddenly been clamped in a giant vice. The whole world seemed to spin crazily around her as her throat went dry, and she fought off the panic engulfing her. It couldn’t be…Not here! Not now! Not today!

Somewhere in the distance John was pretending to be jealous, and his mother was saying in amusement, ‘That’s my cousin, Joss Bennett.’

‘Oh, is it? I’ve heard you mention him,’ Sophy was responding, enlightened. ‘Funny, I’d envisaged him being much older than that.’

‘You mean rather more around my age,’ John’s mother teased.

Kate heard their conversation. It lapped round her, a lulling, distant noise that couldn’t calm her jangled, discordant nerves. She was concentrating on the man standing within the shadows of the ancient yews, sunlight dappling his features, obscuring them slightly, but not so much that she had not recognised him immediately.

It had been almost twenty-two years…by rights her heart and mind should have forgotten everything about him…but they hadn’t.

She had a confused awareness of a desperate need to keep up appearances, to act as though nothing untoward had happened…as though she hadn’t looked across a sun-dappled churchyard and seen standing there the man who had deserted her all those years ago, leaving her to bear his child…this child who was now a young woman.

Somewhere in the distance, John’s mother was saying easily, ‘Well, of course, Joss is much younger than me, I suppose now he must be forty-two, going on fortythree.’

‘He doesn’t look it,’ Sophy was saying admiringly. ‘Heavens, I would have thought he was somewhere in his late thirties at the most.’

‘Hey,’ John cautioned her teasingly. ‘Watch it…I’m beginning to get worried. I shall definitely not introduce you to him.’

The sun’s heat, the laughter and warmth of the day…all of them might not have existed, Kate felt so cold and alone.

Was it mere coincidence that had brought him here today of all days, or…?

It was coincidence! It had to be. If by some remote chance he had discovered that Sophy was his child, surely he wouldn’t have waited until today, until she was getting married, to claim their relationship?

The vice loosened its grip a little. She drew a deep, shaky breath, trying to control the trembling she could feel threatening her composure. It was just a horrible coincidence. He was John’s mother’s cousin, a coincidence…

Someone touched her arm and she turned her head to look into Sophy’s concerned eyes.

‘Are you all right, Mum? You’ve gone quite pale, and you feel cold.’

Momentarily she was the focus of the small group’s attention. This was Sophy’s day, she reminded herself fiercely, and nothing was going to be allowed to spoil it. Nothing. She could see that John’s mother was already beginning to frown a little, as though picking up the vibrations of shock emanating from her…the kind of shock that had nothing to do with a beloved daughter getting married.

‘It was colder than I’d expected inside the church,’ she managed, forcing herself to smile.

The outfit she had chosen for the wedding consisted of a black and white silk spotted dress with short cap sleeves, in a vaguely twenties style, with a plain white silk jacket and a white silk hat trimmed in black, the colours being perfectly acceptable since Sophy had chosen to wear a dress of heavy cream silk rather than the traditional white she had claimed would look awful with her olive-tinted skin.

Skin she had inherited from her father, Kate acknowledged, unable to resist darting another tormented look at the couple in the churchyard.

They were standing facing one another, Joss bending towards the redhead while she removed something from the lapel of his jacket. She was tall, almost as tall as Sophy, and he didn’t have to angle his head far to look down at her. When he had been with her… Her heart jolted frantically in her chest as memories she didn’t want came surging past the barriers of her self-control. Memories of the first time they had met on the cliffs beyond the windy Cornish fishing village, devoid of tourists during that wet cold summer. She had run into him, having got caught out in the rain. She had been running back to her mother’s aunt’s cottage, her head down, not looking where she was going.

He had caught hold of her as she staggered, and she had lifted her head to apologise and had promptly fallen fathomlessly in love, as only a girl of just sixteen could.

He had seemed so distant and sophisticated: almost twenty-two to her sixteen, a huge distance in terms of life experience. He was already a man, she still a child, but he had offered to walk back to her aunt’s with her, offering her a few personal details about himself as he did so. It was over a mile from the clifftop path to the village where her great-aunt lived, and despite the buffeting wind and icy rain she had wished it might be twenty.

When he had told her how old he was, she had lied about her own age, claiming to be nineteen.

He had almost caught her out, asking her what she was doing, what kind of post-school training, but she had fibbed that she was having to resit A levels and so was having an extra year at school.

She hadn’t known then what had made her lie about her age, only that she desperately wanted to be seen as his equal and not as a silly adolescent schoolgirl.

She had been speechless with bliss when he’d asked her out. He’d been working in Cornwall for the summer, a job with the National Trust, helping to maintain the cliff-paths. He’d been lodging in the village at a house not far from her aunt’s…and so it had begun.

‘Mama…the photographer’s ready.’

Sophy’s calm, firm voice broke into her private world. She blinked, and the vision of the tall, dark-haired young man who had charmed and delighted her so much was gone, and in its place she saw the reality of a man in his forties who, as Sophy had so rightly said, could easily have been mistaken for someone in his late thirties—a man who wore his obvious wealth and sophistication as casually as the boy she had known had worn his jeans.

The arrival of the photographer gave her a much-needed excuse to slip into the background and be alone. The shock of seeing Joss so completely unexpectedly had made her feel sick and faint. Long, long ago she had accepted that he was gone from her life and that it was right that he should have done so, so that to see him here today of all days was appallingly painful. The redhead must be his wife…and she, like Joss, looked younger than her forty-odd years. She gave another quick, hunted look at the woman’s immaculate make-up and hair. Her clothes were expensive, designer label most likely, but there was a petulant set to her mouth and a frown marring her forehead. Where was their child? Odd that she had never known whether it was a boy or a girl…Sophy’s half-brother or -sister. Her heart gave a frantic twist as the pain splintered inside her. Still, after all this time, when it should have long ago died.

She was starting to shake. Another moment and her distress would be so obvious that it would cause comment. There were still the photographs to get through, and then the reception. The day seemed to stretch endlessly in front of her, like some kind of refined torture.

What would happen when they met? Would he recognise her…and, if he did, would he acknowledge her…or pretend that they had never met?

The latter, most probably. And what about Sophy, standing there with John, laughing up into her bridegroom’s face? She would go through the rest of her life never knowing that John’s mother’s cousin was in reality her own father.

Her heart seemed to bolt with fright. If only her parents were still alive…If only she had someone to turn to…to confide in.

She felt a light touch on her shoulder and jumped in panic, but it was only Sophy’s godfather, James Phillips, the local doctor.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked her frowningly. Today he had stood in for the father Sophy had never had and the grandfather she had lost…giving her away…Tears rose and stung her throat and the backs of her eyes.

‘Just being sentimental and stupid,’ she assured him.

‘Ma…the photographer wants you,’ Sophy called, and distractedly she hurried over to join John’s parents, while James followed at a more leisurely pace.

It was a nightmare. It couldn’t be real…but it was, and sooner or later she was going to have to come face to face with Joss. She shuddered sickly, and the photographer frowned. It was normally the bride who looked faint and sick, and not her mother…although this particular bride’s mother was rather unusual, slim as a gazelle, and young enough to pass for the bride’s sister. It seemed impossible to believe the reality of their relationship. She must have been a child herself when she had had her, he reflected consideringly.

She was a very beautiful woman, and would have been more so if she had not looked quite so strained.

When the photographer had finished, Mary Broderick, who had seen three daughters married herself, went over to Kate and said quietly, ‘It’s awful, isn’t it? You know you should be happy for them…and yet you feel so lost, and you hate yourself for feeling like that. It does get better,’ she informed Kate with a smile.

Privately, when John had announced that he was getting engaged and had explained the circumstances of his new fiancée’s birth, she had been worried about the situation, but she needn’t have been. Sophy was everything she could have wanted in a daughter-in-law, and as for Kate…

Something about the petite woman who was now her son’s mother-in-law made her want to mother her in much the same way she had mothered her own four children. It wasn’t that Kate wasn’t mature and capable. She was both. The way she had brought up Sophy was testimony to that. No, it was her vulnerability—that and the youthfulness of her face and figure. No one looking at her would ever have imagined she was a day over thirty.

‘We’d like you to come and spend a couple of days with us when you can spare the time. We feel we’ve hardly had an opportunity to get to know you yet.’

There was no doubting the sincerity and warmth of the invitation, but Kate could barely respond to it. The moment she was dreading was fast arriving, and it was too late now to bitterly regret that Sophy had ever opted for the formality of a receiving line.

There was no way of avoiding it. She and Joss were going to come face to face.

Face to face with the man who twenty-one years ago had given her her dearly beloved daughter, and who had then walked out on her without even knowing that she had conceived.

The garden was everything a country garden should be, the scent of roses, from the traditional walkway bisecting the lawn, heady with musk. All around her Kate could hear people commenting appreciatively as they congregated on the drive. A light breeze stirred the blue and white awnings of the marquee.

The staff she and Lucy had hired to serve the meal were moving deftly among the guests, gently encouraging them on to the lawns as they circulated offering pre-wedding breakfast drinks.

James took her arm and gently guided her towards the marquee where it had been decided they would line up to receive the guests. Slowly the guests filed past, all of them beaming their pleasure and enjoyment of the day. Old friends, whose faces were as familiar to her as her own…strangers, people who belonged to John’s side of the family, but who nevertheless were reaching out to her with warmth; all of them passed her in a blur, until the shocking moment she had been waiting for, and she heard John’s mother exclaiming warmly, ‘Joss! It’s lovely to see you. We weren’t sure you could make it…’

And then she heard the familiar timbre of a voice she had never, ever forgotten. A voice that had whispered such things to her that she had shivered in unbearable pleasure and arousal, now saying mundanely, ‘We only just made it, but it’s lovely to be here.’

Sophy was speaking to him, flirting lightly with him, and then it was John’s turn…John who was turning to introduce her to him.

‘You won’t believe it, but Kate is my new mother-in-law,’ he said gallantly, and the whole world stood still as they looked at one another, and she saw from his face that this meeting was as much a shock to him as it was to her.

‘Kate,’ he said hoarsely, and the hand touching hers gripped her so tightly that she actually winced with pain.

He had aged, but only slightly. He was no longer a young boy, but a man…tall, dark, powerful, his jaw lean and clean-cut, bearing no trace of too selfindul-gent living, his skin bronzed and his grey eyes as clear as those of his daughter.

His hair was just as thick and dark as she remembered, and his body as he had walked towards her had moved lithely and easily.

He was a man in his sexual prime, she recognised numbly, and it didn’t need the sidelong looks the other female guests were giving him to tell her so.

Shock absorbed her and held her, and then abruptly released her so that she started to shake and her eyes stung with tears. Totally unable to hold on to her composure, she tugged her hand from his and looked past him to the woman accompanying him. Her mouth had tightened into an unattractively thin, tight line. She glared pointedly at Kate as she stretched out her hand, and Kate said mindlessly, ‘Mrs Bennett.’

John waited until they had gone past to chuckle and say to her, ‘Not Mrs Bennett as yet, although I suspect she’s hoping to be. She’s Joss’s secretary.’

His secretary. A cold, sour sickness rose up inside her. So he hadn’t changed, she thought bitterly. He was still the same lying cheat who had deceived her. And yet outwardly he looked too uncompromisingly honest and steadfast…

His appearance was as deceitful as his nature. Where were his wife…and his child? Something inside her twisted painfully as she stopped concentrating on the line-up of guests waiting to smile and shake her hand, and remembered instead the shocking agony of that cold, blustery September day when, not having heard from Joss for almost twenty-four hours, she had gone round to his lodgings to find out why he had broken their date. She had discovered from his landlady that he had packed his bags and gone…‘Gone back to his wife and child,’ she had told her maliciously, leaving only the cursory message that their affair was over and that she was not to try to get in touch with him.

She could remember even now the pebble-hard acidness of the woman’s cold eyes…and how, despite her casual attitude, she had sounded as though she had enjoyed delivering Joss’s message.

She had only met the woman on a couple of previous occasions. Normally she and Joss met just outside the village on the cliff-path. She hadn’t liked his landlady then, and she had liked her even less at that moment.

Joss, married. She had hardly been able to take it in. He was still only a student, in his last year at Oxford and, although she had surmised from the odd comments he had made about them that his family had money, he had said nothing to her to indicate that his family consisted of anything more than parents, and various aunts, uncles and cousins. He had certainly never intimated that he was married…and not just married, but a father as well.

His landlady had watched her unkindly, callously smiling at the tears she had been unable to stop stinging her eyes.

‘What did you expect?’ she had scoffed. ‘He was just using you, that’s all. Did you really think he intended it to be anything more than a brief fling? He’s told me not to give you his address. So don’t bother asking for it,’ she had added brutally and triumphantly, starting to close the door.

Numb with pain and shock, somehow or other Kate had managed to drag herself back to the cliff-path which had been their trysting place. She still could not take it in. Only forty-eight hours ago he had held her, kissed her, whispered to her that he loved and wanted her…and she had thought that implicit in those words was a promise for the future. And now…

She started to tremble violently realising what she had done. She had given herself to him with joy and fervour…given herself to a man who was already committed elsewhere…a man who was married with a child.

Mercifully, then, she hadn’t known that it wasn’t only a broken heart he had left her with.

She had only discovered she was pregnant six weeks after she had returned home. Shocked and bewildered, she had made no attempt to hide the truth from her parents; they, having observed the stunned, silent state in which she had returned to them after her holiday, had already guessed that some emotional trauma was at the root of her distress.

It had not occurred to them that it might be more than a mere holiday romance that was making her so pale and listless until she started being so violently ill.

After that…she had told them haltingly and miserably what she had done, how she had betrayed the mores they had taught her, how defiled and unhappy she felt, not at making love with Joss—that she could not regret—but at having made love with him believing him to be free when he wasn’t…at having participated, however innocently, in the breaking of marriage vows she considered to be sacred.

Her parents had been marvellous…wonderfully supportive and caring.

She had never gone back to the village. There had been no point…her mother’s aunt, disgruntled with the appalling summer weather, had sold the cottage and moved back to London, announcing that country living was not for her, and Joss had been someone she had resolutely shut away in a dark corner of her mind, refusing to allow herself to think about.

Except when Sophy was born…except when her parents died…except this morning, dressing for the wedding and grieving for all that might have been.

Seeing him had shaken her out of those idiotic daydreams, reminding her of what reality was. Reality was a man who had cold-bloodedly seduced her knowing that he was committed elsewhere, and who, it seemed, still continued to break those same marriage vows he had broken with her.

No wonder he had been so shocked to see her. He was probably wondering how quickly he could make his excuses and leave.

As the thought formed, she looked across the flower-decked marquee and saw him standing with a group of people, but slightly to one side of them, as though apart from them. He was looking directly at her, the grey eyes focusing on her with such intensity that for a moment she actually took a step towards him.

‘Kate, the girls are getting twitchy about serving the buffet,’ Lucy came up to warn her.

Thankfully Kate turned aside and glanced at her watch.

‘Yes. We’d better get everyone sitting down.’

Sophy and John had opted for an informal arrangement of round tables in the marquee, apart from the top table for close members of the family, and as James tactfully organised the ushers into making sure that everyone found their tables and sat down Kate turned her back on Joss and escaped.

The meal was a blur of tension and misery. Conversation hummed around her, Sophy and John as euphoric as the bubbles in the champagne. Someone—one of John’s married sisters, she thought vaguely—complimented her warmly on the food. She smiled, feeling as though her whole face had become frozen.

Joss was sitting right in her line of vision; the redhead clawed possessively at his arm whenever his attention wavered from her, and Kate thought viciously that he deserved the other woman’s petulant possessiveness.

All through the toasts and speeches she was conscious of growing tension, of an anxiety that balled in her stomach and made it impossible to concentrate on anything bar the dark-haired man sitting just within her vision.

Afterwards, while Sophy and John circulated among their guests, she tried to escape, but she had barely reached the opening of the marquee when Joss stopped her.

Her heart lodged painfully in her throat, her pulses hammering frantic messages of fear.

‘Your daughter looks very beautiful,’ he told her gravely. ‘John is a very lucky man.’

Stock compliments and phrases, with no nuance in them to make her muscles tense and her eyes flicker with distraught dread…nothing in his eyes to warn her that he had guessed that Sophy was his child…just a fine hardening of his mouth that made him suddenly look older and very bitter as he added devastatingly, ‘And so is James.’

James…She looked round wildly, her heart hammering with frantic, desperate ferocity. James was standing several yards away, talking to John’s mother.