For His Little Girl

If she could have turned around and gone right back home, she would have done so. But the cab was slowing down….

The heart of Luke’s home was the kitchen, a stunning workplace that he’d designed himself, knocking a large hole in a wall so that it could run the whole length of the house.

There were five sinks, so that he was never far from running water, three burners, two ovens and a microwave. Every one of them was the latest, the most sophisticated technology, a mass of knobs that might have seemed excessive on the deck of a spaceship. People who knew Luke only superficially were always surprised by the precision of his kitchen. His looks were the tousled variety, as if he’d just gotten out of bed, and his personal entanglements might tactfully be described as untidy. But the kitchen, where he worked, was a miracle of organization.

In one corner he had a desk and a computer. He switched it on now and got online to Luke’s Place, the restaurant he’d opened with such pride five years ago. The password got him into the accounts, where he could see that last night’s takings were nicely up. A visit to Luke’s Other Place, open only a year, produced an equally satisfying result.

His Web site showed a pleasing number of hits since yesterday, when his cable show, Luke’s Way, had gone out. It was a cooking program, and since the first show, eighteen months ago, the ratings had soared. It was broadcast twice a week, and his site, always busy, was deluged in the hours afterward.

He briefly glanced at his e-mail, found nothing there to worry about and a good deal to please him. Then he noticed something that made him frown.

The e-mail he’d sent to Josie last night hadn’t been collected on the other end. And that was unusual for Josie, who was normally a demon at reading his mail and coming back at him.

For a man who’d never met his daughter, Luke could say he knew her strangely well. He paid generously for her support. He had an account with the best toy store in London, and for Christmas and Josie’s birthday, he would call and ask a pleasant sales assistant to select something suitable for her age and send it to her.

Twice a year he received a letter from Pippa, thanking him for the gifts, giving him news of Josie and sometimes sending photographs. He could see how his daughter was growing up, looking incredibly like her mother. But she’d remained somehow unreal, until the day, a year ago, when he’d collected the e-mail that had come through his Web site and found one that said simply,

I’m Josie. I’m nine. Are you my pop? Mummy says you are. Josie.

The way she wrote Mummy in the English style, rather than Mommy in the American, told him this was real. When he’d recovered from the shock he e-mailed back, “Yes, I am.” And waited. The answer came quickly.

Hallo, Pop. Thank you for the bike.

“You’re welcome. How did you find me?”

Surfed until I found your Web site.

“On your own?”

Yes. Mummy’s all thumbs.

Her initiative and bravado delighted him. It was exactly what he would have done at the same age, if Web sites had existed then. They began a correspondence of untroubled cheerfulness, save for one moment when he begged, “Please stop calling me Pop. It makes me sound like an outboard motor.”

Sorry, Papa!

“‘Dad’ will do, you little wretch!”

At last Pippa had realized what was up, and entered the correspondence. Oddly, he found her harder to “talk” to. She still lived in his mind as a crazy, delightful girl. The woman she’d become was a stranger. But he persevered. She was the mother of his child, and he owed her. Their interchanges were cordial, but he was happier with Josie.

Recently he’d received a large photograph showing mother and daughter, sitting together, smiling at him. She was a great-looking kid, he reckoned.

Impulsively he pulled open the drawer where he kept the picture, took it out and grinned. Across the bottom was written, “Love to Daddy, Pippa and Josie.”

The last two words were in a different hand, large and childish.

That’s my girl! he thought.

He began to replace the photograph, then something stopped him. He drew it closer, studying the faces and the all-important words. An idea had come to him. It grew and flourished.

Wicked, he thought guiltily.

But his hands were already putting the picture in a prominent position. Not prominent enough. He changed it. Then he changed it back.

Wicked. Yes, definitely. But effective.

The good angel had come to his rescue again.

Inspired, he got to work on the perfect breakfast for a model. It was also a new recipe he’d invented for his restaurants. There was nothing like killing two birds with one stone, he told himself.

Onions, red wine vinegar, lettuce, fruit pieces, masses of strawberries, alfalfa sprouts. He laid them all out, then started on the salad dressing. This was going to be a work of art.

He could hear Dominique moving about upstairs, the sound of the shower. He prepared coffee and laid the breakfast bar to tempt a lady. He was a master of presentation.

Her eyes gleamed when she saw the trouble he’d taken for her, and she gave him her most winning smile.

“Darling Luke, you’re so sweet.”

“Wait until you see what I’ve created for you,” he said, pulling out a high stool and seeing her into it with a flourish. He laid the beautiful dish before her. “Less than two hundred calories, but full of nourishment.”

“Mmm! Looks delicious.” She put the first forkful into her mouth and made a face of ecstasy. “Heaven! And you invented it just for me.”

And for the customers who would pay $25 a throw, and a few hundred thousand people who watched every Tuesday and Friday.

“Just what a hard-working model needs,” he assured her. “Only three grams of fat. I measured each gram personally.”

“What about each calorie?”

“All 197 of them.”

She chuckled. “Oh, Luke, darling, you are a fool. It’s why I adore you so madly. And you adore me, too, don’t you? I can tell by the way you like to do things for me.”

Sensing the conversation straying into dangerous waters again he filled her coffee cup and kissed the end of her nose.

But Dominique wasn’t to be diverted. “As I was saying earlier, we go together so perfectly that it seems to me…” Just in time her eyes fell on the picture. Luke breathed a prayer of heartfelt relief.

“I’ve never seen that before,” Dominique said, frowning.

“What—oh, that? I just had it out for a moment,” Luke said quickly, moving as if to hurry the picture away, but actually relinquishing it into her imperiously outstretched hand.

“‘Daddy’?” she echoed, reading the inscription. “You been keeping secrets, Luke? Is this your ex-wife?”

“No, Pippa and I weren’t married. I knew her in London when I worked there eleven years ago. She still lives there.”

“The child doesn’t look anything like you. How do you know she’s yours?”

“Because Pippa wouldn’t have said she was if she wasn’t. Besides, Josie and I talk over the Internet.”

The supreme idiocy of this last remark burst on him only when it was too late. Dominique laid down the picture and regarded him very, very kindly.

“You talk on the Internet, and therefore she must carry your genes? I guess it beats DNA testing.”

“I didn’t mean that the way it came out,” he said hastily.

“Darling, don’t treat me like a fool.”

No. Big mistake. Dominique’s eyes were sharp as gimlets. They always were when she was in an acquisitive mood, he realized.

“Josie’s mine,” he repeated. “We have a very good relationship—”

“Over the Internet? Boy, you’re really a close father, aren’t you?”

“Considering we live on different continents, I’m a very close father,” he said, stung.

“Luke, honestly, there’s no need for this.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that this child is no more your daughter than I am. You’ve probably never even met her mother. I expect you picked this up in some junk shop and wrote the inscription yourself. It was a clever idea putting ‘and Josie’ in different writing, but you were always a man who thought of the details.”

He took a long, nervous breath. This wasn’t going right. He grasped her hand.

“Dominique—sweetheart—”

“Luke, it’s all okay. I understand.”

“You…do?”

“It’s natural for you to be a little scared at first. You’ve avoided commitment for so long, and now that things are changing, well—I guess it’s all strange to you. But you show me in a thousand ways what I mean to you, and I can hear the things you don’t say aloud.”

Luke gulped. When a woman got to hearing things a man hadn’t said, he was in big trouble.

“Dominique…I swear to you that picture is genuine. Josie is my child, and Pippa is the very special lady who bore her—”

“Shh!” She laid a beautifully manicured finger over his lips. “You don’t have to keep this up. We understand each other too well for pretenses.”

Luke couldn’t speak. Now he knew how a drowning man felt when he was going down for the third time.

It was the perfect moment for a shadow to appear outside the back door, for a tap on the frosted glass, for him to open the door, for Pippa to be standing there with Josie, and for Josie to hurl herself at him with a cry of “Daddy!”

Chapter Two

The first words Luke Danton had ever spoken to Pippa eleven years before were, “Get out of here, quick!” after she’d barged into the kitchen of London’s Ritz Hotel, where he’d been working.

He’d followed it up by grasping her elbow and hurrying her out of the door about as ungallantly as possible.

“Hey!” she objected.

“I didn’t want you to be in trouble, and you would have been. You had no right to be in there.”

“How do you know I haven’t?”

“Because you’re a chambermaid. I’ve seen you coming to work, and I asked about you.”

“Oh,” she said, taken aback.

“What time do you finish?”

“In an hour.”

“Me, too. I’ll meet you in the park, on the bench near the entrance. Don’t be late.” He was gone before she could answer.

She scooted back to her own work, indignant, or trying to be. Suppose she didn’t want to meet him in the park? He had an almighty cheek. But he also had laughing eyes and a vibrant presence, not to mention being tall and handsome. In fact, she didn’t mind at all that he’d been asking about her.

After work she quickly changed out of her uniform and into her normal clothes. Not that most people would have called them “normal.” They were young and crazy and turned heads wherever she went. The tight orange jeans shrieked at the purple cowboy boots. The big floppy hat was deep blue, and the multicolored sweater went with everything almost, and nothing exactly. She was eighteen and sassy. She could carry it off.

She checked herself in the mirror, pushing back a strand of her red-brown curly hair. Then she ran all the way to Green Park, the huge swath of grass and trees that stretched behind the hotel. It annoyed her to realize that she was actually hurrying so as not to miss him.

Glorious as a peacock, she sat on a bench that gave her a good view of the path he would have to take, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

She leaned back, resting one elegantly booted ankle over the other knee, the picture of impish nonchalance. After a while she changed legs.

And waited.

At the end of an hour she was in a temper, less with him than with herself for still being there. Fuming, she rose and began to walk away in the direction of Buckingham Palace, but she couldn’t resist one look back, and was in time to see him racing along the path as if his life depended on it. His hair was tousled, and his expression was desperate. She hadn’t enjoyed a sight so much in years.

“Oh, no!” he yelled as he saw the empty bench. He raised his arms to the sky. “Please, please, no!”

“Hm!” she said, coming from behind a tree to stand before him.

He leaped a foot in the air. “You waited! Bless you!”

“I most certainly did not wait. I left after five minutes. I just happened to come back this way.”

“Really!”

“Really. I hope you’ve got a good excuse.”

“Actually,” he said airily, “I forgot all about our meeting.”

“It looked like it.”

“Well, I thought I’d better drop by in case you’d hung around in hope.”

Hands on hips, she confronted him. It was hard because she was five foot seven to his six foot two, but she did her best.

“Oh, yeah?” she challenged.

“Oh, yeah!” he returned.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Oh, yeah!”

“OH, YEAH?”

“OH, YEAH!”

They both began to laugh at the same moment. He took firm hold of her hand and said, “There was a last-minute crisis in the kitchen, and I couldn’t get away. I was going crazy thinking of you here. Still, I knew you’d wait for me, no matter how long.”

“I’d thump you if I could get my hand free.”

“Great. I’ll consider myself thumped. Now let’s find something to eat.”

She thought he meant a burger bar, but when she mentioned it, he said, “Burgers?” in such a tone of loathing that she knew him at once for a kindred spirit.

He took her back to the guest house where he lived, and where he partly paid his rent by cooking the evening meal twice a week. The rest of the time he had the run of the kitchen to do his own experiments. Pippa watched in admiration as he concocted a delicious salad, unlike anything she’d ever eaten before.

“I’ll show you what real food is,” he said with unashamed arrogance. “Burgers, indeed!”

“Hey, I’m a cook, too. I don’t like burgers, either,” she said.

“Then what made you think I would?”

“Well—you’ve got an American accent—”

He gave her a speaking look.

“Sorry, sorry!” she said hastily.

“I’m American, and it therefore follows that I have the taste buds of an ox and the refined sensibilities of a fence post,” he said, sounding nettled.

“I’m sorry I spoke.”

“You should be!” But he was grinning. “I thought prejudice against foreigners was outlawed in this country.”

“It is, but Americans don’t count as foreigners, despite the hideous things you do to our language.” She added provocatively, “After all, most of you are descended from us.”

“Not guilty,” he said at once. “My ancestors are French, Spanish and Irish. If there are any British in that tree they’re hidden in the closet with all the other skeletons. Now, come upstairs and eat.”

His room consisted of a bed, a table, two chairs and shelves full of cookery books. In these shabby surroundings he gallantly pulled out a chair for her and served up the meal with as great a flourish as if they were in the Ritz dining room.

“What were you doing down there, anyway?” he wanted to know.

“I just wanted to look at the kitchens, to know what I’m aiming for.”

“And what’s that?”

“I’m not really a chambermaid,” she confided. “I’m actually the world’s greatest cook in disguise. Well, I will be, when I’ve finished learning. I’m going to be so great that one day the Ritz will beg me to return, to reign over its kitchen. And people will come from far and wide to taste my creations.”

Luke was a good listener, and soon she’d told him everything, especially about her mother, her most precious memory.

“She was a fantastic cook. She’d have liked to be a chef, but she got married instead. Women did in those days,” she said, speaking as though it was a distant age instead of twenty years ago. “And all my dad wanted was fish and chips, egg and chips, beans and chips.”

“Chips? Oh, you mean French fries.”

“I mean chips,” she said firmly, trying to not respond to his grin. If she died for it she wouldn’t let him tease a rise out of her. Well, not that easily, anyway.

“If she offered him anything imaginative he’d say, ‘What’s this muck?’ and storm off to the pub. So she started teaching me how to cook properly. I think it was her only pleasure in life. We used to plan how I’d go to cookery college. She got an extra job so that she could save up to give me a start. But it was too much for her. We didn’t know it then but she had something wrong with her heart. Mitral stenosis, the doctor said. It killed her.”

For a moment her pixie face was sad, but she recovered.

“Rough deal,” Luke said sympathetically. And through the conventional words she could sense the real kindness.

“Yes. The next thing I knew, Dad got married again, and suddenly I had a stepmother called Clarice, who loathed me.”

“Real Cinderella stuff.”

“Well, to be fair, I returned the compliment with interest. She used to call me Philippa,” she added with loathing. “It wasn’t enough that I never had time to do my homework because she developed a headache whenever there was any dusting to be done, but she actually addressed me as Philippa.”

“A hanging offense,” Luke said gravely.

“Yeah!”

“Any wicked stepsisters?”

“One stepbrother. Harry. But he made enough mess for ten and expected me to be his slave.

“When I mentioned going to college, Clarice glared at me and said, ‘Where do you think the money for that’s coming from? You’ve got grand ideas, think you’re better than everyone else.’

“I argued, though you’d think I’d have known better by then. I said most people went to college these days. She sniffed and said, ‘Not Harry.’ And I said that since Harry was a moron that didn’t come as a surprise, and she said I was an insolent little cow, and I said—well, you get the drift.”

He was chuckling. “I wish I’d been there to see it. I’ll bet you’re a heckuva fighter.”

“I am,” she said, stating the simple truth.

“What about your mom’s savings?”

“Dad took them. I remember him looking at the bank passbook and saying, ‘I knew the bitch was hiding money from me!’ I think he spent most of it on a honeymoon with Clarice.”

“Wasn’t there anyone to stick up for you?”

“Frank, my mother’s younger brother, had a go at Dad. But Dad just told him to mind his own business. What could he do? I stuck it until I left school, then I got out.”

“Cheered on by the dreadful Clarice?”

“No, she was furious. She’d got it all planned for me to work in her brother’s grocery store for slave wages, and go on doing all the housework.” Pippa’s eyes gleamed with mischief. “I told her where she could put that,” she said, with such wicked relish that Luke laughed out loud.

“I’ll bet you did!” he said admiringly.

“She said she’d never heard such disgraceful language. I told her she’d hear it again if she didn’t get out of my way. She screamed at me while I was packing, down the stairs, through the front door and all the way to the bus station.

“She said I’d come to a bad end in London, and I’d be crawling back in a week. I told her I’d starve first. I got on the bus and watched Clarice getting smaller and smaller until she vanished from my life and I vanished from hers. I’ve kicked the dust of Encaster off my feet, and it’s staying off.”

“Encaster? Don’t think I’ve heard of it.”

“Nobody’s heard of it except the people who live there, and most of them wish they hadn’t. It’s about thirty miles north of London, very small and very dreary.”

“Didn’t your dad want you home?”

“I called him at his work once to let him know I was all right. He told me to ‘stop being an idiot’ and come back, because Clarice was giving him a hard time about it. That was all he cared about. If he’d been just a little bit concerned about me I’d have told him where I was. But he wasn’t. So I didn’t. That was the last time I talked to him. I’m still in touch with Frank, but he and Dad aren’t speaking. He won’t give me away.”

“So you came to seek your fortune in London? At sixteen? Good for you, kid! Did you find the streets paved with gold?”

“They will be, one day. I do cookery courses in the evenings, and when I’ve got some diplomas I’ll get a job as a cook. Then I’ll do more courses, get a better job, and so on, until the gourmets of the world are beating a path to my door.”

“S’cuse me, ma’am, but it’s my door they’re going to beat a path to.”

“Well, I expect there’ll be room for both of us,” she conceded generously.

“You mean the three of us, don’t you?” he asked with a grin. “You, me and that colossal ego of yours. They’ll have to build somewhere just to house it.”

“And the rest! Everyone knows Americans can’t cook.”

“Can’t—May you be forgiven! And since you come from the nation that eats French fries—”

“Chips!”

“—with everything, doesn’t think food is properly cooked unless it’s swimming in grease, and can’t make decent coffee—”

“All right, all right, I give in.” She threw up her hands in mock surrender, then pointed to her plate. “This is really delicious, I’ll admit that.”

“All my own invention. When I’ve got it perfect I’ll present it to the head chef.”

“Oh, great! Now I’m a guinea pig. If I don’t drop dead after eating this you’ll know it’s safe to offer it to the Sultan of Thingy and the Duke of Whatsit?”

“Something like that,” he admitted with a grin.

She saw him regarding her outfit and said, “Nice, huh?”

“Love it, and the purple thing you were wearing when I saw you the other day.”

Pippa chuckled. “The head housekeeper nearly fainted. She couldn’t get me out of it and into my uniform fast enough. But I don’t like people to overlook me.”

“No danger of that. How do you afford fashion and pay for classes, as well?”

“I make my own fashion from other people’s rejects. The jeans came from a rummage sale, the boots had been reduced five times because the color frightened people, the hat came from an Oxfam shop, and I knit the sweater from remnants.”

He grinned, enchanted.

His own story delighted her. He was, as she’d guessed, American, from Los Angeles, and his life seemed to have revolved around sun, sea and sand. His passion was cookery and the only books he ever opened were recipes. Beyond that there wasn’t a thought in his head apart from swimming, bodysurfing, eating, drinking and generally having a good time. There had been so little fun in Pippa’s life that this young man, who seemed to make almost a religion of merriment, seemed to usher her to a new and magical world, one in which the light was always golden, the sensations exquisite and youth would last forever.

He had ambition, of a kind.

“I don’t just want to be a cook, there are plenty of them,” he explained. “I want to be the cook, so I had to find something that would make me stand out from the others. I scraped together all the money I could and came to Europe, to work in some of the great hotels. I did six months in the Danieli in Venice, six in the George V in Paris, and now I’m doing the London Ritz. When my work permit’s up I’ll go back to Los Angeles as Luke of the Ritz. Hey, have you swallowed something the wrong way?” For Pippa was doubled up and apparently choking.

“You can’t do that,” she spluttered when she could speak. “Luke of the Ritz? Nobody will be able to eat for laughing.”

“Oh!” he said, deflated. “You don’t think they’ll be impressed?”

“I think they’ll chuck tomatoes at you.”

The awful truth of this hit him suddenly and he began to laugh, too. The more he laughed, the more she laughed, and it became funnier and funnier.

If this were a romantic comedy, she thought, they would laugh until they fell into each other’s arms. She found herself tingling with anticipation.

But Luke pulled himself together and said in a choking sort of voice, “It’s late. I ought to be getting you home.”

“It’s not that late,” she protested.

“It is when I have a 6 a.m. start. Come on.”

He borrowed a battered old car from one of the other residents, and drove the couple of miles to the hostel where she lived. As he pulled up, Pippa waited for his arm around her shoulders, pulling her close, his lips on hers…