Joined By Marriage

‘I don’t want to know,’ she repeated flatly as the two men looked at her. ‘Whoever this woman Rebecca was, whatever she was, she most certainly was not my mother.’ She felt no loss at knowing of Rebecca’s death. How could she? She had never known the lady. And now that Rebecca was dead, there was no reason for her to know that, either. ‘Whatever this is about,’ she told Peter tersely, ‘I want no part of it.’

‘It isn’t as easy at that, Brianna—’

‘It most certainly is,’ she interrupted the older man firmly. ‘My mother abandoned me, gave me up; I now have the right to do the same where she’s concerned.’ She looked at him challengingly.

‘You’re oversimplifying things, Brianna—’

‘I most certainly am not,’ she replied strongly, feeling her self-determination returning rapidly. She had been thrown for a few minutes, but now she was in control again. ‘If a parent can choose to abandon a child, then that child can choose to abandon the parent.’

‘Nathan, will you either come into the room or get out of it.’ Peter Landris spoke sharply to his son as a young woman walked by along the corridor outside. ‘This is an intensely personal matter; I do not want all and sundry to hear about it!’

‘I’m well aware of how private it is,’ Nathan told him icily, moving further into the room and shutting the door firmly behind him.

His father looked at him intently. ‘Exactly what do you mean by that remark?’

The younger man gave him a scathing glance. ‘Exactly what I said,’ he snapped back, before turning his attention to Brianna. ‘I think you should listen to my father, Brianna,’ he told her harshly. ‘You stand to be a very wealthy woman at the end of this conversation!’

She gave him a pitying look. He was neither Clark Kent nor Superman; he couldn’t even see that wealth didn’t interest her in the least. Maybe it was because he obviously came from such a well-off family himself that he just couldn’t imagine anyone being happy without money!

‘I’m not interested,’ she told the elder Landris firmly. ‘I have a family already; I don’t need to know of another one.’

He raised dark brows; she was clearly adamant. ‘I understand your adoptive mother is dead.’

‘What does that have to do with this?’ Brianna bristled indignantly, eyes sparkling angrily, not even interested as to how he knew of Jean’s death. ‘It appears that both my adoptive mother and my biological mother are dead—I can assure you I know which one I mourn! This other woman—Rebecca—means nothing to me. And neither does any money she may have left me. She didn’t care about me enough over the last twenty-one years to seek me out, so I have no intention of her recent death intruding on my life now!’ She was breathing hard in her agitation.

‘But your mother didn’t die recently, Brianna,’ Peter Landris told her quietly. ‘She died twenty-one years ago.’

Brianna blinked at him, totally speechless. She had never really thought of her real mother as she grew up, had been totally secure in the love of her adoptive parents. Even once she had reached adulthood it had never occurred to her to seek out the woman who had given birth to her. She had accepted that the woman probably had—probably still had—a life that wouldn’t welcome the daughter she had given birth to years ago. Somehow she had never imagined that her biological mother might have died so long ago...

She moistened her lips. ‘How did she die?’

‘The cause of death on the death certificate?’ Peter Landris returned hardly.

She frowned at him, at the way he had voiced the question. She knew all about death certificates—as a doctor, sadly her father had occasionally had to sign them—but from the way Peter Landris spoke there was clearly some doubt about her mother’s—Rebecca’s...

‘It’s usually pretty accurate,’ she said flatly.

‘Not in this case,’ Peter Landris countered. ‘The last I heard, they didn’t list a broken heart as the cause of death,’ he added bitterly.

‘Father, you’re too close to this,’ Nathan put in, stepping forward. ‘Too involved. Worse than that, you’re alarming Brianna.’

She wasn’t alarmed; she was confused. Just exactly when had her mother died twenty-one years ago? Obviously some time soon after Brianna’s arrival. But if she had died because of the birth of her baby, why hadn’t Brianna been taken in by relatives rather than put up for adoption. Who were her real family?

Peter Landris drew in a deeply controlling breath. ‘I’m sorry, Brianna. I just—It’s the waste!’ He shook his head, his face pale. ‘I was never able to accept the ending of that beautiful life. The utter futility of it all. You’re right, Nathan, I thought I could deal with this, but I—’ He gave a shaky sigh. ‘Seeing Brianna has brought it all back to me.’ He looked across the desk at her. ‘You look so much like—God, it’s unnerving!’

She looked like her mother... Like Rebecca...? And, from this man’s behaviour now, he had known her real mother very well...

Her mouth tightened. ‘Who was my father?’

Peter Landris grimaced. ‘Your mother refused to name your father.’

Brianna shook her head. ‘I find it hard to believe that no one knew.’

‘You wouldn’t if you’d known Giles,’ Peter Landris rasped with feeling.

‘Who was Giles?’ She sighed her impatience with this disjointed conversation. This was becoming more and more complicated by the moment!

‘Your grandfather. Rebecca’s father,’ Nathan told her without hesitation. ‘Rebecca was terrified of him.’

Brianna turned to him with shadowed blue eyes. ‘You knew my mother too?’ Twenty-one years ago Nathan would only have been fourteen!

‘I did,’ he confirmed curtly. ‘She was four years older than me, but—’

‘My mother—Rebecca,’ she corrected herself, ‘was only eighteen when she gave birth to me?’ No more than a child herself! ‘And when she died...’ Brianna realised dazedly. She had been far too young to die. And yet Rebecca had loved, and apparently lost, and had given birth to Brianna in those brief eighteen years...

‘I’m afraid this interview isn’t being carried out very professionally.’ Nathan gave his father a reproving look. ‘Ordinarily, in these circumstances, we would ask you for documentary proof of who you are. And then—’

‘She’s Rebecca’s daughter.’ Peter Landris was staring at her now as if he was seeing a ghost. ‘Without a shadow of a doubt!’

‘I agree with you,’ Nathan concurred. ‘I knew that the moment I saw her in Reception yesterday.’

‘You could have told me!’ Brianna snapped angrily. ‘Instead of which you carried out some sort of elaborate delaying charade. This all happened twenty-one years ago, isn’t that delay enough?’ she bit out accusingly, looking from one man to the other to emphasise the point that she was tired of this further prevarication. She wanted the facts, and she wanted them now. There would be time later, once she was alone, to sit and brood over the significance—or otherwise!—of them to her life now. ‘Nathan?’ she pressed. ‘You seem to know all about this, so you tell me what happened all those years ago!’ The need to return to work was right at the bottom of her priorities now!

‘Rebecca was my client—’

‘Rebecca is dead,’ Brianna coldly cut into Peter Landris’s protest. ‘I appear to be your client now—and I would rather hear this from Nathan.’ He, at least, appeared able to talk about all of this unemotionally.

‘Father?’ Nathan glanced at the older man.

‘Go ahead,’ his father invited dully. ‘I—Seeing Brianna, the likeness to—It’s been a shock...’

‘Have a cup of cold coffee and a rapidly curling sandwich.’ Brianna poured the coffee for him, before turning back to the younger man. ‘Nathan?’ she pressed again, his father forgotten.

Nathan sighed, pulling up another chair and sitting down on the same side of the desk as Brianna, his pale blue eyes strangely compassionate. ‘We have to start with your grandparents—’

‘Rebecca’s mother and father?’

‘This will be much quicker if you don’t interrupt after every statement,’ Nathan told her sharply.

Much quicker. Although she had pushed the need to return to work firmly to the back of her mind, time was still passing rapidly. ‘Sorry,’ she ventured.

He acknowledged her apology with an arrogant nod of his head. ‘Your grandparents—Joanne and Giles. Joanne was the daughter of a very rich man; Giles was a local farmer. But, nevertheless, the two of them apparently fell in love and married. A year into the marriage Joanne gave birth to Rebecca. There were to be no more children.’

This was much better, much easier for Brianna to deal with emotionally.

‘Despite its apparently romantic beginning—’ Nathan couldn’t seem to help the cynical twist to his lips that accompanied this statement ‘—it wasn’t a particularly happy marriage. Giles came to quickly resent the fact that it was his wife who held the purse-strings, and he didn’t care for his daughter, or the pull she had on her mother’s time and love.’

‘It should have read “broken heart” on Joanne’s death certificate too,’ Peter Landris muttered harshly.

Nathan glared his father into silence. ‘At the age of eight, Rebecca was sent away to boarding-school,’ he continued evenly. ‘Her mother, it seems, never got over the loss.’

‘But there must have been holidays—’

‘Giles always made sure they were out of the country for those.’ It was Peter Landris who answered her. ‘Leaving Rebecca in the care of a housekeeper when she was at home. Joanne rarely saw her daughter during the next three years.’

‘I—But that’s inhuman!’ Brianna protested. ‘How could anyone be so cruel?’

‘If I could just continue?’ Nathan cut in icily, his brows raised as he waited for Brianna’s attention to return to him.

‘But this is all so—it’s like something out of a Victorian novel.’ Brianna shook her head dazedly. ‘I can’t believe anyone could get away with treating his wife and daughter in that way less than forty years ago!’

‘Can’t you?’ Nathan said bleakly. ‘Then perhaps you should see some of the cases that come to court nowadays!’

She had seen some of the battered wives and children that were brought into the hospital. ‘But Joanne was the one with the money.’ She frowned. ‘Surely that gave her a certain amount of—freedom?’

‘Giles was Rebecca’s father—a fact he never let Joanne forget,’ Peter Landris put in baldly. ‘I can assure you, Joanne was by no means a weak woman, but she did have a weakness. And that weakness was her child.’

Not physical cruelty, Brianna realised, but emotional blackmail—who could say which was worse?

‘Go on,’ she invited gruffly, wondering what other horrors she was going to hear about her family; perhaps Rebecca had done her the biggest favour of all by keeping her well away from them!

‘When Rebecca was thirteen, her mother died.’ Nathan was now the one to continue. He shot his father another censorious look as he added, ‘In a car accident. But her death left Rebecca with only her father.’

‘He didn’t take her out of boarding-school?’ Brianna said worriedly, beginning to care about Rebecca in spite of herself. Her own childhood had been such a happy one, with parents and a brother who loved her, she simply couldn’t bear the thought of the loneliness Rebecca must have endured as she was growing up.

‘No, he didn’t do that.’ Nathan gave the ghost of a smile in reassurance. ‘Rebecca continued to stay at the boarding-school; her father continued to be absent when she came home for the holidays. But there were no letters or telephone calls from her mother to sustain her. As was to be expected, Rebecca became desperate for love, for someone to care about her. As she got older there were—relationships. The majority of them with totally unsuitable men. But in this Giles had no say. What could he have threatened Rebecca with?’ Nathan stated frankly. ‘He had never given her anything he could possibly take away from her.’

Brianna was watching Nathan closely, questioningly. ‘You liked my mother,’ she said slowly, realising there was a warmth in his voice as he spoke of her.

Emotion flashed briefly in those pale blue eyes behind the glasses, and then it was gone, replaced by that mask of professionalism she was used to. ‘Rebecca, despite her unorthodox upbringing, was impossible not to like. She was full of life, and laughter, and beauty. Perhaps too much of the latter,’ he added wistfully. ‘It left her prey to the—attentions of men.’

Brianna frowned. ‘Are you saying my mother was promiscuous?’

‘Certainly not,’ he snapped, his mouth a thin line. ‘I’m saying she didn’t always love wisely.’

‘As she didn’t where my father was concerned. Did he happen to be married to someone else?’ Brianna guessed shrewdly.

‘We don’t know,’ Nathan said flatly. ‘Perhaps.’ He shrugged those broad shoulders. ‘Perhaps her letter to you will explain all that to you,’ he added gruffly, glancing briefly at his father.

Brianna looked at him sharply, disbelievingly. She had learnt so much of Rebecca’s background in the last few minutes. Her father, she believed, had been a despot who denied his wife and daughter their love for each other. Rebecca had been the emotionally deprived child of that union, a child who had grown to young womanhood craving love, and not always finding it in the places that she should have.

Brianna had listened to all of this, had felt pity for her grandmother and her mother in an abstract way, even a little for the grandfather who must have been a very insecure man to have ruled his family in the way that he had. She had listened and had felt sorrow for such unhappiness, but it was a story of someone else’s life—a life unrelated to her own.

But a letter... A letter written to her by her mother was so much more...

She didn’t want it.

Didn’t want it.

Couldn’t read it...

CHAPTER THREE

‘GENTLEMEN.’ She stood up. ‘I thank you for your time, and the information you’ve given me today. Now I have more of an idea of what my natural mother and her family were like.’ She turned to leave.

‘Where are you going?’ Pete Landris sounded bewildered by her dismissal.

She turned back only slightly. ‘I have to get back to work now.’

‘But—’

‘I’ll drive you.’ Nathan had moved silently to her side.

‘But we haven’t finished,’ his father protested behind them. ‘There’s so much more. Rebecca’s death. Brianna’s inheritance—’

‘And Brianna has had more than enough already today for her to cope with,’ Nathan told him harshly, before turning back to Brianna. ‘I’ll drive you wherever you want to go,’ he offered gently.

‘I’m sure you’re very busy,’ she refused vaguely, needing to be away from these offices, away from the two Landris men. ‘I can get a bus. Take a taxi.’

‘I’m not busy at all,’ Nathan said firmly, lightly grasping her arm as they went out into the corridor. “The buses are incredibly irregular around here. And a taxi would be an unnecessary expense when I’ve already offered to drive you wherever you want to go.’

Brianna didn’t argue any more, standing silently by while Nathan informed Hazel of his departure, taking no interest in the brief conversation he had with a grey-haired man passing through Reception, although she sensed the other man’s interest in her as she left with Nathan. Not another one who recognised her as Rebecca’s daughter...! It was a very strange feeling to know she looked so much like someone she had never even known—and would never know...

‘My uncle, Roger Davis,’ Nathan supplied as he took her out to the private car park at the back of the building. ‘He’s married to my mother’s sister.’

He was also Nathan’s father’s partner. It really was a family-run business. And the Landris family seemed to know rather a lot about her mother and her family. Too much so, in the circumstances, Brianna was beginning to realise. ‘Nathan—’

‘Here we are.’ He unlocked a dark green Jaguar saloon car, opening the passenger door for Brianna to get in. ‘Just tell me where you want to go,’ he said, once he was seated beside her.

She gave him the name of the hospital where she worked, watching him as he drove. He handled the car in the same way he seemed to deal with everything, capably, with the minimum of effort, and completely unemotionally—even when another driver cut dangerously in front of the Jaguar at a busy junction. The Ice Man, no matter what the situation.

‘Have dinner with me this evening?’

His invitation was so at odds with her thoughts of him that for a moment Brianna was stunned into silence. The icy Nathan Landris had just invited her out to dinner with him!

‘Why?’ she returned abruptly.

Dark brows rose over those pale blue eyes, his mouth quirking, although his visual attention didn’t waver from the road and traffic in front of him. ‘Is this your usual response when a man invites you to spend the evening with him?’

Her mouth curved upwards, some of her earlier tension leaving her. ‘No,’ she acknowledged. ‘But then, it wasn’t a usual invitation!’

‘I can assure you that it was,’ he drawled.

Her eyes widened. ‘It was?’

‘It was,’ he confirmed dryly. ‘Unless there’s a young man in your life somewhere whom you feel might object to your accepting?’

Brianna had the feeling the question wasn’t as casually asked as he’d made it sound. Although why he should have any interest in the romantic side of her life, she couldn’t imagine. Even if he had invited her out to dinner...

‘Not at the moment, no,’ she answered him smilingly.

Her most recent relationship, with a young doctor at the hospital, had ended three months ago, by mutual agreement; Jim had worked nights and Brianna had worked days, and the strain of trying to keep up even a casual relationship had finally proved too much of a strain.

‘Then I repeat, would you have dinner with me this evening?’ Nathan pressed her.

In her head she repeated her own question—why? Nathan didn’t give her the impression he was in the least impulsive—in fact quite the opposite!—and, despite what he said, she didn’t think this invitation was unpremeditated, either.

Nathan turned and smiled at her, the smile that transformed him from a coldly removed man to a rakishly charming one, as she had glimpsed yesterday. A dangerously attractive one...! He couldn’t be two people, and yet...

‘Is there a young lady in your life who might object to my accepting?’ she returned evenly.

His mouth quirked again. ‘Not at the moment, no.’ He repeated her words of a few minutes ago.

It was the answer Brianna had expected him to make. Not because she didn’t think there hadn’t been women in his life—that smile said otherwise!—but because she didn’t think he was the type of man to invite one woman out while he was involved with another. For one thing, she doubted he would want the complications that would involve.

‘In that case, I accept,’ she told him.

He nodded, showing no emotion at her capitulation. ‘I’ll call at your home for you, at eight o’clock. I have the address.’ He forestalled her next comment. ‘It’s on file at the office.’

Of course it was. As were a lot of other things, things personal to her, things that, until today, she’d had had no knowledge of. Most of which she would rather still have no knowledge of, including a letter Rebecca seemed to have left for her!

The puzzle of that letter was going to burn a hole in her curiosity; she knew it was. Already part of her was wondering what was written there, what her mother had wanted to say to her daughter once she reached twenty-one. Had Rebecca loved her baby? Hated her because she had complicated her life? Did she say who Brianna’s father was? Had she even known who he was?

Did it matter? Did any of it matter? It was the past, the principal player dead and buried long ago—

‘He’s still alive, you know.’ Nathan spoke softly at her side.

She gave him a startled look. ‘Who is?’ She was completely taken aback, both because he seemed to have read her thoughts so easily, and by the statement itself. He had stated earlier that her mother hadn’t said who her father was, that no one knew—

‘Your grandfather,’ Nathan said in reply. ‘Giles is still alive.’

Brianna looked at him uncomprehendingly for several long seconds. That man, the man who had made her grandmother’s and her mother’s lives such a misery, was still living? It didn’t seem fair somehow, not after all the misery he had caused to his family.

‘Did you hear me, Brianna?’ Nathan glanced at her frowningly. ‘I said—’

‘I heard you,’ she said tensely, surprised—and pleased!—to see that they had arrived at the hospital. ‘Thank you for the lift, Nathan.’ She gave him a bright, meaningless smile. ‘I’ll see you later this evening.’

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