The Baby Bond

His eyes were distracted by something, and he reached to the side-table and picked up the wedding photograph she had been studying before he arrived. Rory’s mouth twisted as he stared down at the differing expressions of the participants, frozen in time in a group combination which could now never be repeated. ‘So, you were reliving happier times, were you?’ he queried, his voice hard and mocking.

‘Is that so very wrong, then?’ She knew she sounded stung, almost defensive. Was this what he did to witnesses on the stand—backed them into a corner until he had them lashing out, saying things they probably hadn’t meant to say? ‘It’s one of the few photos I have of your brother.’

He shrugged. ‘Forgive me if I sound cynical,’ he observed coolly. ‘But, as you know, I never thought that the wedding should go ahead in the first place—’

‘Oh, yes, I know that!’ she whispered back, with a bleak laugh which was the closest Angel ever got to feeling bitter about the whole affair. ‘You made that quite clear at the time!’

‘And circumstances bore out my initial assessment of the relationship,’ he mused.

She stared at him in horror. ‘You stone-hearted beast!’

He didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘I would therefore be an out and out hypocrite if I now professed to approve of the marriage simply because Chad is dead.’

Angel drew in a deep, shuddering breath as he clipped out that cold, final word. ‘Must you put it quite so callously?’ she demanded, wondering whether he had a sympathetic bone in his body.

His lips flattened. ‘How else would you like me to put it? Do you want me to use euphemisms for what was essentially a horrible and violent end to Chad’s young life? He hasn’t “passed on” or “fallen asleep”, you know. He’s dead, Angel—and we both have to accept that.’

‘Are you deliberately being brutal?’ she asked him weakly.

‘Yes,’ he admitted, watching a pulse beat frantically at her throat. ‘But sometimes brutal is best if it makes you face up to facts.’

Facts.

Angel sank down onto the edge of a chair without thinking as she asked the question whose answer she had little desire to hear. ‘So wh-what happened—exactly?’

He seemed to hesitate, the blue eyes narrowing as if he was silently working out a problem. Yet when he spoke he sounded icily calm. ‘His car hit the central reservation, and—’ He stopped when he saw the sugar-whiteness of her skin. If he had thought that she was pale before, well, now she looked positively anaemic. ‘You’re not ready for this,’ he said abruptly. ‘You need a drink.’ ‘No—’ ‘Oh, yes, you do.’ His mouth was grim. ‘And so do I.’

Too weak to object, Angel watched while he located the decanter and two glasses and poured them each a large measure. If she hadn’t been so shell-shocked by the whole sequence of events, then she might have told him that he had picked up the wrong glasses, and that after he had gone Molly Fitzpatrick would crucify her for not giving a man like Rory Mandelson the best Waterford crystal!

‘Here. Drink this,’ he instructed as he handed one to her, in that rather autocratic manner of his which had always used to drive his younger brother nuts.

Angel sipped and fire invaded her mouth as the strong liquor immediately caused her tense limbs to relax. Without realising that she was doing it, she sat back in the chair and closed her eyes. When she opened them again it was to find Rory sitting opposite her, his eyes fixed on her face. He hadn’t touched his brandy, she noted.

‘Are you okay?’ he wanted to know.

Angel nodded. ‘I’m fine now.’

‘You don’t look fine. You’re so pale that you look as though you’re about to pass out. Though that might be due to the fact that you’re clothed from head to foot in black,’ he added critically.

She was sensitive to the unmistakable reproof in his voice. ‘You obviously don’t approve of my wearing black, then, Rory?’

His broad shoulders in the green sweater barely moved, but he managed to convey all the censure of a dismissive shrug. ‘Surely my feelings on the subject are irrelevant,’ he responded quietly. ‘You must wear what you see fit. Indeed you must behave in any way that seems appropriate.’

But it was clear that he considered her mourning clothes to be highly in appropriate! Angel put her glass down with a trembling hand. Just who did he think he was? Coming over to Ireland when she hadn’t even wanted him to! And with a face like thunder! Sitting there in judgement of her as though she were some kind of floozie—when everyone knew that Rory Mandelson had had more women in his thirty-four years than any man had a right to have.

‘Oh, I will,’ she responded, with a defiant little shake of her head. ‘Never you fear about that, Rory—but I want to know just what it is that you object to. Do you think I have no right to mourn my husband?’

His eyes narrowed sharply, so that they appeared like two bright sapphire shards which slanted beneath the ebony-dark brows. ‘But he was your husband in name only, wasn’t he, Angel? He disappeared from your life over a year and a half ago. The marriage vows which you made so enthusiastically ended up not being worth the piece of paper they were written on.’

She lifted her chin. ‘Just as you predicted, in fact.’

His gaze didn’t waver. ‘Yes. Just as I predicted.’

Angel bit her lip. ‘And I suppose it gave you pleasure, knowing that you were right. Knowing that all your gloomy prophecies were fulfilled. That we couldn’t live together and that I drove him away. Did it, Rory?’

His eyebrows knitted together and he gave a small laugh that was totally devoid of humour. ‘Did it give me pleasure? Is that what you think of me then, Angel? That my ego is so insufferably huge that I would enjoy seeing your marriage crumble simply because I had anticipated that it might happen?’

‘You tell me,’ she responded tonelessly.

Shaking his head with exasperation, he turned on his heel and walked across the room to the window, where the beauty of the spectacular backdrop of mountains momentarily took his breath away—something which did not happen to Rory Mandelson very often. He waited for a moment before he turned round and leaned negligently against the windowsill, and the semi-relaxed stance showed off his physique to perfect advantage.

Did he not realise, Angel wondered rather helplessly, that with his long legs stretched out in front of him like that, and his ruffled dark hair and eyes of deepest blue, he looked like most women’s fantasy come to life? You would have thought that he might have the decency to wear something dull or at least something that camouflaged his body. Or was it his intention that the soft cashmere of the jade sweater should cling so lovingly to each hard sinew of his torso?

Angel shook her head slightly, recognising with a shock the path her thoughts had been leading her down. What was she doing, for pity’s sake—drooling over her ex-brother-in-law?

Rory’s mouth tightened as he registered the way she was looking at him. ‘What kind of brute would I be,’ he challenged softly, ‘if I rejoiced in the demise of my only brother’s marriage? God, Angel—is that the type of man you think I am? No, on second thought, please don’t answer that!’ He threw her a look which was tinged with regret. ‘Once I could see that you were both determined to go through with it, then naturally I wanted to see it last.’

‘But then I drove him away?’ she quizzed.

He looked at her with ocean-dark eyes. ‘I don’t know. Did you?’

Angel shook her head violently, and a black corkscrew curl dangled in a glossy spiral by her pale cheek. ‘Oh, what’s the point in discussing it now? Chad is dead! He isn’t coming back!’ Angel’s voice started to crack as she acknowledged for the first time in her life her own mortality.

For, yes, she had grown up in a remote and fairly inaccessible part of Ireland, where the existence of a close-knit and small community meant that death was less feared than in many places—and many had been the time that Angel had been to pay her respects at houses where families sat and mourned, the body lying in the parlour while people laughed and drank and cried around it—but death had never affected her personally. Like it was affecting her now.

Tears began to slide down her white cheeks. ‘It’s as though he never existed,’ she sobbed quietly. ‘As though he was never here!’

Rory frowned at her obvious distress. He had seen Angel cry only once before, when Chad had disappeared without trace and she had come—inexplicably—to him for assistance. At the time he had been resolutely un-impressed by her distress, partly, he suspected, since he had so adamantly warned her off the marriage in the first place.

But this time for some reason he found the sight of her tears unbearably moving. ‘Of course he existed,’ he contradicted softly, and, coming back to perch on the edge of the chair opposite hers, he took one pale, cold hand between his and rubbed at it absently with the pad of his thumb.

As physical consolation went, it was merely a crumb of comfort, and yet Angel derived an extraordinary sensation of calm just from the touch of his hand. She sniffed, and took the handkerchief he silently proffered and blew her nose like a child.

‘You still haven’t told me exactly how it happened,’ she said.

For the first time since his arrival Rory looked uncomfortable. He had rehearsed what he was going to say over and over again in the car—aloud and in his head—and yet now his pat words of explanation seemed curiously inadequate, especially when he was confronted by the sight of Angel’s over-bright eyes.

He decided to try a different approach from the one he had planned. ‘Tell me about the last time you saw Chad,’ he instructed softly.

Angel blinked. ‘But you know all about that! When he just completely disappeared like that, I came to see you.’ Thinking that if anyone would be able to trace Chad, then it would be his dynamic older brother.

‘But at the time you explained very little, Angel—other than the fact that he had gone,’ he reminded her quietly.

Because she had felt raw and humiliated, with her confidence in tatters. Wondering just what sort of person she must be if her husband of less than a year could go off and leave her like that, without a word to anyone.

‘So tell me again, Angel,’ he insisted, in his deep, compelling voice. ‘Only this time tell me everything.’

And, despite any reservations she might have had about discussing something as painful as Chad’s departure, Angel was no exception to anyone else in responding to the force of Rory’s personality. With those blue eyes boring into her like that it was impossible not to answer him. She focused her mind to concentrate on what he had asked her, though, to be perfectly honest, it was a relief to have something else to focus her thoughts on other than the wrenching realisation that Chad was dead.

‘The last time I saw Chad he was leaving for work,’ she began slowly, as she cast her mind back to that morning more than eighteen months earlier. ‘I remember that it was a glorious, golden June day. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, and I was going to meet him for a drink after work that night.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing.’ Angel shrugged. ‘That was it.’

Rory’s face became shuttered. ‘Did he show any signs that something could be wrong?’

She frowned at him in confusion. ‘Wrong?’ she echoed. ‘What could be wrong?’

‘With the relationship,’ he elaborated. ‘Anything which might have indicated to you that he was planning to disappear from your life without a word?’

Angel bit her lip. With the benefit of hindsight it was easy to see that there had been plenty wrong with their relationship—but she had been so young. So green. So determined to prove wrong everyone who had prophesied disaster that she had ignored the danger signs looming large on the horizon. But she couldn’t possibly tell Rory about those, now, could she? She couldn’t really start explaining that within mere months of her marriage to his brother their sex life had not merely died down but had petered out all together.

‘We weren’t communicating that well,’ she hedged, which she supposed was one way of saying it.

‘But you hadn’t argued?’

Angel shook her head. ‘No. That was the oddest thing. We hadn’t. Chad just seemed very distracted during those last few months. That’s all.’ She fixed him with an unblinking green stare that dazzled him with its emerald blaze. ‘But that’s all irrelevant, surely? Isn’t it time that you told me exactly what you’ve found out, Rory?’

There was a fractional pause. ‘Do you want me to break it to you gently?’

She cocked her head to one side and looked at him perceptively. ‘Is that possible?’

‘Not really, no,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘He had another woman, you see.’

His words confirmed her unspoken fears. Yes. Of course he had. Some part of her had known that all along. The part that wasn’t affected by her relative youth and lack of experience. The part that was passed on down through the generations and was known as a woman’s instinct. The part that had registered his complete lack of desire for her whenever he had looked at her. Angel swallowed.

‘He had another woman,’ Rory repeated baldly, because her total lack of reaction to his controversial statement made him imagine that she had not heard him the first time.

‘Yes,’ said Angel, and let out a long, low sigh. ‘That figures.’

‘Do you want me to continue?’ he questioned.

She drew her chin up proudly. ‘I hope to God that I’m not the kind of person who runs away from the truth, Rory. So, yes, please continue. Tell me about this woman. Does she have a name?’

Some indefinable emotion briefly escaped from the shuttered confines of his face, hardening his mouth into a forbidding line. ‘Jo-Anne. Jo-Anne Price.’

Angel wrinkled up her nose as the name struck a familiar chord in her memory. ‘And she’s Australian. Am I right? She worked as a temporary at the advertising agency.’

‘That’s right.’

‘She had just finished uni,’ Angel remembered, racking her brain. ‘And she had come to get work experience in England.’ Angel pushed a stray strand of hair off her forehead, finding that actually she seemed to know an awful lot about a woman she had only met once or twice. So how was that? Maybe Chad had spoken about her lots, and she simply hadn’t noticed. ‘Hadn’t she?’

Rory nodded uncomfortably. ‘Yes, that’s right. She had. Chad met her in a pub near the office, found her a temporary job at the agency, and, bingo, suddenly he was in love.’

Angel drew in a deep breath, stunned by his cruel candour, despite all her protestations that she could take whatever he had to tell her. ‘And I was his bride of less than a year,’ she reminded him bitterly. ‘So was he not still in love with me?’

There was a small, uncomfortable pause. ‘I think that Chad thought he loved you, Angel, and that’s why he married you.’ Rory’s face hardened again with the pain of the truth. ‘Only then Jo-Anne appeared on the scene, and…’

‘And?’ prompted Angel acidly, glaring at him, as though it was his fault.

Rory held his palms out in a gesture of apology, realising that he owed her the truth, however painful. ‘He wasn’t quite sure what had hit him. This wasn’t just a fling, you see. It was that once-in-a-lifetime thing—if you believe it exists. I don’t, personally.’ His face darkened. ‘But Chad certainly did.’

Angel winced.

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said—’

‘Oh, yes, you should!’ she declared fiercely. ‘I told you that I wanted the truth, and that’s exactly what you’re giving me. And, yes, you are absolutely correct in your assessment, Rory. Chad thought he was in love with me—that’s why he married me. And then…’ But she shook her head, unwilling to pursue it further. What on earth was the point of dissecting her relationship with her husband? Especially now. And especially not with his big brother.

But Rory did not prompt her, or press her to continue. Instead he sat back in his seat and raised the glass of brandy to his mouth to take his first sip, then he put the glass carefully back down on the table.

‘Chad couldn’t face telling you what had happened. Or me, for that matter. He and Jo-Anne just took off for Australia. They wanted to get away from anyone who might cast censure on their perfect relationship. A form of geographical escape, I guess.’

‘Well, not quite—since I presume that she had family living in Australia? And most parents wouldn’t really want their daughter involved with a married man, surely?’

‘No, you’re right. They wouldn’t.’ Rory frowned. ‘But that wasn’t going to be a problem. Not in Jo-Anne’s case, anyway. All her family were dead, you see. She was completely on her own, and I think that fact triggered a protective quality in Chad which he hadn’t realised existed.’ He gave a deep sigh, as though his next words were the hardest of all to say. ‘And it meant, of course, that they had something very big in common. They were both orphans—united against the world.’

Angel’s green eyes narrowed as something in his voice alerted a sixth sense in her. A sense of danger. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there, Rory? Something that you aren’t telling me?’

He gave her the kind of smile which told her she shouldn’t worry her little head about anything, but Angel had grown immune to men with dazzling smiles. Immune to most men generally. Broken marriages tended to have that effect on women.

‘Why don’t we take this one step at a time?’ he suggested silkily, but his eyes had taken on a watchful gleam.

‘Because you’re hiding something from me!’

He expelled the breath he had been holding. Damn the woman, and damn her intuition, too! ‘Okay then, Angel,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll give it to you in a nutshell. Chad and Jo-Anne went to Australia together and travelled around and were, by all accounts, extremely happy together.’

‘And how did you find all this out?’ she demanded. ‘You can’t have just pieced it together since Chad’s death. You told me that the accident only took place…’ she frowned to remember ‘…twelve days ago.’

This had been one of the questions he had been dreading answering. ‘He wrote to me just before Christmas,’ he admitted quietly.

‘He did what?’ Angel rose to her feet, her face disbelieving. ‘Then why the hell didn’t you tell me then?’

‘Because he asked me specifically not to—’

‘And blood is thicker than water, I suppose?’

‘That wasn’t why I agreed—’

‘And tell me, Rory,’ she cut across his words sarcastically, ‘if Chad hadn’t died, how long would you have kept news of his whereabouts from me?’

‘It wasn’t my decision to make. It was Chad’s. He wanted to speak to you himself. Face to face. Not by letter.’

‘But he decided to wait until after Christmas?’ she questioned frostily. ‘So why put off the moment of truth? For surely once he had seen me then he would be able to ask for a divorce.’

‘He had to. He wasn’t able to travel until then.’

Angel glanced at him suspiciously. ‘Because?’

This was proving a lot more difficult than Rory had imagined it would, but then he had quite forgotten the impact that his sister-in-law could make with those beacon-bright green eyes of hers. God, a man could lose his soul in eyes like that…And yet it wasn’t fair on her to pussyfoot around like this, was it? To search for polite platitudes where none would ever be appropriate.

‘Because Jo-Anne was expecting Chad’s baby,’ he told her bluntly, ignoring Angel’s shocked intake of breath as he ploughed relentlessly on. ‘And she was naturally precluded from flying in the latter stages of her pregnancy. Chad wanted to come and see you in person, to ask your forgiveness for his behaviour and to request an early divorce. And he wanted me to meet my brand-new nephew,’ he finished heavily.

Fragments of what he was saying began to make sense at last, and the picture that they formed in Angel’s brain had connotations which made her blood run cold.

‘You mean that they all came over?’ she demanded in horror. ‘Jo-Anne and Chad and—’

‘And the baby,’ he concluded, only now his words sounded as though they were steeped in something bitter that he wanted to spit as far away from him as possible.

Still standing, Angel gripped onto the arms of the chair, her fists white-knuckled with fear. ‘Wh-what happened?’ she whispered.

‘They were on their way from the airport to my house,’ he told her. ‘We don’t know exactly what caused the accident. The other driver had been drinking, but he was still within the legal limit. Chad was under the limit, too,’ he added quickly, meeting the question in her eyes. ‘He’d changed, Angel, I knew that much from our telephone conversation. He had become a family man, proud of his new baby—nothing would have induced him to wreck all that. He may have been jet lagged. The baby might have been crying. Who knows? No one will ever know. Not now.’ A muscle began to work convulsively in his cheek, but that was the only outward sign of his grief. ‘Anyway, the car hit the central reservation just beyond Heathrow Airport. Chad and Jo-Anne were killed instantly—’

Angel’s heart was in her mouth. ‘And the baby?’

Rory buried his head in his hands so that his face was hidden, and Angel was suddenly filled with an unpalatable fear.

‘Rory!’ she demanded urgently. ‘What happened to the baby?’

As he slowly lifted his head his features looked so ravaged with pain that Angel feared the very worst. Then he suddenly said in a bleak voice, but a voice nevertheless, which held more than a trace of hope in it, ‘Somehow the baby survived. Miraculously. Without a scratch. He’s fine.’

‘Oh, thank God!’ cried Angel, and sank back down onto her chair, not noticing the tears of relief which slid down her cheeks. ‘Thank God!’

He glanced over at her gratefully, incredibly moved by her generosity of spirit. ‘Thank you for that, Angel,’ he said softly. And in a way her reaction justified his reasons for coming to see her. Made what he had to say next a little bit easier…

‘Where is he now?’ she demanded quickly.

His eyes narrowed. He was unsure of whether she meant her husband or his son, and knew that a huge degree of sensitivity would need to be employed if she was referring to Chad.

‘The baby,’ she enlarged. ‘Where is he? And what’s his name?’

‘He’s here with me now,’ Rory told her steadily. ‘I brought him with me.’

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