Penny Jordan (2 page)

Not knowing what to say, Jon sighed as he heard the emotion breaking up his son's voice.

His twin and their father had always been close, far closer than he had ever been to either of them, but it had been a closeness founded on their mutual promotion of David into a person he had never actually been. Keeping up that kind of fiction, that kind of falsity, year after year, decade after decade, had ultimately resulted in the relationship self-destructing or being destroyed, which, in effect, was what David had done with his disappearance.

Of course, Jon knew how much his father missed David, but the David Ben missed was someone he himself had created.

Jon suspected that the realisation that he was not the superhuman that his father had always lauded him as being had been as traumatic to David as its discovery would have been to their father. But that was in the past now. David's dramatic exit from their lives had heralded a series of transformations that had seen his own marriage develop into the deeply fulfilling emotional and physical bond he had always longed for.

If David were to return now, Jon suspected that he would be thoroughly bemused by the changes that had taken place. David's daughter, Olivia, was now married and a mother. Jack, his son, had grown from a boy into a young man, just nineteen and about to start his first year at university. Max, Jon's son, was married and the father of three.

Yes, there had been plenty of changes and a whole new generation of babies born, including David's own granddaughters.

Olivia, he knew, had never forgiven her father for what he had done nor for the fact that his actions had almost resulted in the destruction of her relationship with her husband, Caspar.

Her mother, Tania, a victim of the eating disorder, bulimia, had been more the child in the relationship between herself and Olivia than Olivia herself had ever been, and although she had never said so, Jon knew that Olivia placed a large part of the blame for her mother's disorder on David's shoulders.

Olivia. Jon frowned as he released his son. He had become increasingly concerned about his niece over the past few months. When he had tried to suggest to her that she was working too hard and that for her to be at the office before him in the morning and still there when he left at night was an excessive devotion to duty, she had snapped crossly at him.

Later, she had apologised, explaining tiredly that it was impossible for her to take work home.

'Caspar feels that when we're at home we should spend as much time as we can with the children.

Of course I agree with him, but sometimes when I've got statements or counsel's opinions to read through...'

Jon had given her a sympathetic smile, but he couldn't help thinking a sense of responsibility to one's work was one thing, but using it as a means of putting a barrier between oneself and one's family was another entirely. Perhaps he ought to ask Jenny if she could have a word with Olivia.

They had always got on well together.

A
LITTLE LATER
that evening as they were preparing for bed, Jenny told Jon musingly, 'I was just thinking about that time when Louise gashed her leg so badly and Katie, who was miles away at the time playing with a school friend, insisted on coming home because Lou had hurt her leg and needed her to be with her. Do you remember?'

'Mmm...' Jon acknowledged, guessing what his wife was leading up to.

'When you were boys, did you and David ever...?' Jenny persisted, then stopped as she saw the look in his eyes.

'David and I never shared the kind of relationship that Lou and Katie have. You know that,'

Jon told her quietly and then added almost brusquely, 'Do you think if there was any way, any way at all I could bring him home for Dad that I wouldn't use it?'

As she heard the pain in her husband's voice that couldn't be masked by his anger, Jenny went up and put her arms around him.

Even though he was in his fifties and had a relatively sedentary lifestyle, Jon still had a very sexy body—well, she certainly thought so, and after all the sterile, weary years of having to hide her feelings for him, to be able to caress it...
him...
freely and openly was something that never failed to give her joy, but the caress she gave him now was one of tender emotion rather than teasing sensuality.

Like all the Crighton men, Jon was good-looking, tall, broad shouldered with a very mas-culine profile. His hair was thick and closer to caramel colour than blond. Women's eyes still followed him when they went out and hers followed them. Not that Jon ever noticed their glances of discreet female appreciation. He was a wonderfully loyal and loving husband and she was a very lucky woman to have such a fulfilling marriage, such a truly loving and lovable man, but Jon was no saint. He could be stubborn and even a little blinkered at times, but for him to be angry was a very rare occurrence indeed and she knew that the fact he was now was an indication of how deep his feelings went over the issue of his twin.

A man with a weaker personality than Jon's, a man lacking in his emotional strength and compassion, might have been badly warped by the obvious and relentless favouritism of their father for David. But Jon was too kind, too caring a person to fall into that trap, and Jenny loved him all the more for what his father had once so contemptuously dismissed as Jon's softness.

'Come on,' she said now, kissing his chin.

'Let's go to bed.'

JON GLANCED
at the bedside clock. Jenny was asleep at his side, curled up next to him like a little girl. He smiled as he looked down into her sleeping face. They had made love earlier and she had fallen asleep almost immediately afterwards,
his
prerogative as a male, surely? And to be fair to Jenny, he was the one who normally fell asleep first, but tonight for some reason he just hadn't been able to do so.

For some reason... There was only one reason why he couldn't sleep—David. Not even to Jenny had he confided...admitted...how often he thought about his twin, or how much he missed him. It was ironic, really, because he knew damn well that David wouldn't be thinking about or missing
him
and he knew, too, that without David's presence in it, his own life had improved immeasurably.

Where was David now? Did he ever think of them...of him? Deliberately, Jon closed his eyes, letting his mind drift back through the years to their shared childhood. Those childhood years had been so painful for him, pushed as he was by their father into the shadows, ignored and unwanted, unloved, he had always felt, constantly reminded by their father of just how lucky he was to be David's brother.

'David is the first-born,' their father used to say, and Jon had known almost before he could analyse what that knowledge meant how important it was that David should
be
the first, the sun, the star, and that he should never attempt to pre-empt David's role.

As they grew up, it had become second nature to him to remain in the shadows, to withdraw into himself so that his twin could be first.

David... Stored away in his memory, Jon had a thousand, a million different images of him. David...

'You
SEEM... PREOCCUPIED
. Is there something on your mind?'

David smiled warmly at his companion and teased him gently. 'Once a Jesuit priest, always a Jesuit priest.'

The older man laughed. 'I confess that there are times when the habit of encouraging another's confession is too strong to resist, but purely for the most altruistic of reasons, I hasten to add.'

Looking away from him, David said passionately, 'On a night like this, I can't help wondering what it is about us human beings that compels us to behave so imperfectly when we have been given the gift of such a perfect universe, the potential to enhance our lives, to be the best we can be....'

'It is a perfect evening,' Father Ignatius agreed gravely as he sat down slowly next to David on the rocky outcrop of land from which it was possible not just to look up into the star-studded Jamaican sky above them but also out to sea. 'But there have been other equally perfect evenings and they have not resulted in such a philosophical outburst.'

'Philosophical.' David shook his head. 'No. To be philosophical is to be detached, to talk about the human condition in general terms, whereas I was thinking...wishing...regretting...'

He stopped whilst the priest looked at him and said knowledgeably, 'You want to go home.'

'Home!' David gave a mirthless laugh. 'This is my home and a far better one than I deserve.'

'No, David,' the priest corrected him gently.

"This is where you
live.
Your
home
is where your heart is. Your
home
is in England...in Cheshire...'

'...in Haslewich,' David supplied wryly for him. 'I dreamed about my father last night,' he said to the priest abruptly. 'I wonder what they have told him...about me...about my disappearance. I wonder if...'

'From what you have told me of your family, your brother, your
twin,'
the priest emphasised, 'I doubt they will have told him anything that might hurt him. But if you really wish to know, then you should go back,' he said gently.

'Go back,' David repeated brusquely. 'No, I can't do that.'

'There is no such word as "can't",' the priest replied sturdily.

I ' m a thief, a criminal. I stole money,' David reminded him sharply.

'You sinned against one of God's laws,' the priest agreed. 'But you have repented your sin, acknowledging it with humility and genuine contrition. In God's eyes, you are making atonement.'

'In God's eyes, maybe,' David agreed grimly.

'But in the eyes of the law, I am still guilty.'

'Which is more important to you, David?' the priest questioned him softly. 'The burden of guilt you carry for the debt you owe your family or that which you carry in the eyes of the law?'

'My father might no longer be alive.'

'You have other family,' the priest pointed out.

'A brother...a daughter...a son...'

'They are better off without me,' David told him curtly, turning his head away so that the priest couldn't see his expression.

'Maybe...maybe not.'

'I
can't
go back,' David repeated, but the priest could hear the uncertainty and yearning in his voice.

Ever since he had read the report of David's nephew, Max's knife attack, in the island's paper, he had been preparing himself for this moment.

David had become as close to him as a son and the love he felt for him was that of a father, but he was
not
David's father, and had he been he knew perfectly well that it was the duty of a loving father to set even his most beloved child free to live his own life.

Since David had been working here helping him in his self-appointed task of nursing the island's terminally sick, those too poor...too shunned by society to merit any other kind of help, Father Ignatius had come to realise just how solitary and lonely his life had been.

He had found David lying drunk in one of Kingston's stinking gutters and even now had no real idea just why he had stopped to help him, a man who had cursed him and who, when he was sober enough, had blamed him for not allowing him to die.

It had been months before David had finally brought himself to start talking to him about his life, his past, but once he had done so, the priest had not passed any judgement. Why should he?

Judging others was not what
he
was here for.

Helping them, healing them, loving them;
those
were his duties.

Originally, when he had entered the priesthood, he had been filled with such ideas, such visions, but then had come the faith-shaking discovery that the man he most admired, his inspiration and guiding light, had been guilty of one of the most unforgivable of sins. Father John had broken his vow of chastity and had not just had a secret relationship with a woman but had also given her his child. Torn between conflicting loyalties, tor-tured by what he should do, in the end the younger man had simply felt obliged to speak up.

The result of his action had been catastrophic.

Father John had taken his own life and he, Francis O'Leary, known by the church as Father Ignatius, had been to blame. Totally and absolutely. Even the bishop had seemed to think so.

He had been sent away out of the area, hope-fully to get a fresh start, but the news of his role in the tragedy had followed him and he had become untouchable, defiled, someone to be avoided, a priest whose faith not just in others but in himself had been destroyed. He had volunteered for missionary work and had been granted it.

'Even if I wanted to go home, I couldn't,' David said, bringing the priest back to the present.

'There's no way I could raise the cost of the air-fare.'

It was true they lived very simply and mea-grely, growing as much of their own food as they could and relying on the generosity and gratitude of the patients and their families for the rest of it.

'There are other means of travel,' Father Ignatius pointed out and then added, 'There's a yacht in the harbour now waiting to be sailed back to Europe. The captain was in the Coconut Bar yesterday saying that he was looking for a crew willing to work their passage.'

'A yacht bound for Europe? What's her cargo?

Drugs?' David asked him drily.

'No, but her owner is dying and he wants to go home.' The two men exchanged looks.

'AIDS?' David asked him forthrightly.

'I imagine so,' the older man agreed.

A very large proportion of the priest's patients were in the final stages of that ravaging disease, abandoned by their frightened families and friends. Working alongside him, David had learned to respect the disease and those who suffered from it. To respect it and not to fear it.

'I can't go...not now....' David resisted, but there was no denying the longing in his voice.

'Do you often dream of your brother?' Father Ignatius asked him obliquely.

'Not like I did last night,' David admitted. 'I dreamed about when we were children. It was so vivid. It was when we got our first bikes, but the odd thing was...' He paused and frowned. 'In my dream, though I could see myself riding my bike, my
feelings
were Jon's.'