Penny Jordan (29 page)

As Olivia stiffened and turned towards him with a hostile look in her eyes, Max cursed himself under his breath. He just wasn't any good at this sort of thing and heaven alone knew why Maddy, a normally very perceptive woman, should have been so insistent that he be the one to try to talk to Olivia.

'Really. Well, he needn't be. I'm just as capable of doing my job properly as anyone else.'

Max stifled his irritation. It was so like Olivia to go on the defensive and to think she was being

'got at' when, in reality, all he had been doing was making polite conversation.

'I think we all know that, Livvy,' he tried to placate. 'Ma's a bit upset that you won't be there this evening,' he told her quietly.

Olivia tensed.

'I think that Caspar would be equally upset if I cancelled going to this wedding just so that I could pay court to the father we all know...' Her lips tightened. Then she informed him coldly, 'If Jenny has sent you here to try to make me change my mind, you're wasting your time, Max. I've already told Jon that I have no intention of seeing my father again—
ever
—and if that means I don't see any of
you
again, well, so be it.'

Max tried not to show his shock. He had been warned that Olivia was taking her father's return very badly but he had not realised just
how
badly.

'Look, Livvy, I can understand how you feel—' he began urgently, but it was as though he had put a lighted match under a keg of dyna-mite.

'No, you can't,' Olivia exploded without allowing him to finish. 'You
can't
understand at all.

Your
father didn't treat you as though you were an encumbrance, a nuisance, a useless piece of flesh he wished he had never given life to. He didn't laugh at
you
and put
you
down.'

'Livvy!' Max protested, dismayed not so much by her outburst but at the pain it revealed.

As he put his hand out towards her in an instinctive gesture of male comfort, she retreated from him, saying sharply, 'No, don't touch me.'

'Livvy...' Both of them turned towards the door as Caspar walked in. 'Oh, hello, Max.' He smiled, turned to Olivia and continued, 'I phoned for a taxi and asked them to pick us up a bit earlier—just in case the traffic is heavy. Everything's packed.'

'I won't delay you,' Max said formally. 'I have to get back for the kids anyway. Maddy is going round to give Ma a hand with this supper she's planned for Uncle David.'

'David?' Caspar looked from Max's face to Olivia's in bewilderment. 'Does Max mean your father?' he demanded. 'But...'

Too late Max recognised that Olivia hadn't told Caspar about her father's return.

'My father has reappeared, yes,' Olivia agreed curtly. 'But as I've just told Max, I neither want to talk about him nor see him.'

'Olivia...!' Caspar began, but she only shook her head.

She turned to her cousin. 'I'll see you out, Max.'

As she ushered him towards the door, Caspar disappeared into the kitchen.

'Olivia, I'm sorry,' Max apologised. 'I didn't realise you hadn't told Caspar what's happened.'

'I didn't tell him because it simply isn't rele-vant to our lives,' Olivia retorted sharply as she opened the door.

'OLIVIA, WOULD YOU MIND
explaining to me what's going on?' Caspar demanded as she walked back into the kitchen a few minutes later.

'The only thing that's going on so far as I know is that in—' she looked at the kitchen clock '—

about five hours' time we shall be flying to New York.'

'Olivia,' Caspar warned grimly, 'don't play games with me. You
know
what I'm talking about. Why didn't you tell me that your father was back?'

'Perhaps because it isn't something I want to discuss with you,' Olivia said carefully.

'For God's sake, I'm your husband,' Caspar exploded. 'What the hell is going on? Your father comes back after disappearing for years and years and you act like...like it just isn't happening.' He pushed his hand into his hair and looked at her in exasperation. 'Sometimes, Livvy, you...

'Is this why you changed your mind about coming to the wedding?' he demanded sharply. 'Olivia! Answer me,' he said as she turned and started to walk out of the kitchen.

'I've got to go and get the girls,' she told him.

'It's almost lunch-time.'

After she had gone, Caspar leaned his forehead against the cool wood of the kitchen unit. There was no point in provoking another argument. Not now. Why on earth hadn't Livvy said something to him instead of... God, but he just didn't have time to think about the complexities of the situation now. He was on edge enough as it was because of the wedding, wondering what sort of reception he was going to get from his now complicated and disunited family without having to cope with Olivia's almost neurotic resentment of her father.

Caspar knew that David hadn't exactly been a good father, but neither had his own, and he...

Impatiently, he pulled open the fridge door and took out a can of beer, flipping back the top and taking a deep gulp. Once he and Livvy got back from America, they needed to have a serious talk, a
very
serious talk.

Upstairs in the
en suite
bathroom of their bedroom, Olivia stared at her reflection in the mirror.

Her face was white and drawn, her eyes dark and shuttered, but it wasn't her
own
face that she saw but her mother's. Tania with her pretty, delicately fey face and her too-thin, damaged body. Tania with her eating disorder and her loveless marriage. Then, next to her mother's face, Oh via could see her father's, his expression holding just the same irritation and impatience she had seen in Caspar's downstairs.

A tremor ran through her, quickly stilled, her muscles tensing tightly with the kind of pressure that might have been applied to an arterial wound, the kind of wound that if left would bleed away a life.

Distantly, Olivia was aware that behind her anger was fear—the kind of fear that choked out love and life. But just acknowledging that it might be there sent her into such a spiral of terror that she automatically drew back from it, ignoring it, denying it. She took a deep breath and opened the bathroom door.

'You
DIDN'T CHANGE
your mind about coming to the wedding with me at all, did you?' Caspar asked again after they had checked in for their flight. 'You're just coming so that you don't have to see your father.'

'Yes, that's right,' Olivia agreed tonelessly.

Caspar's mouth compressed and he turned his head away, too quickly to see the panic and fear that momentarily broke through the indifference clouding Olivia's eyes.

'DON'T WORRY
, everything's going to be fine.'

In her car, David turned to smile at Honor. 'It's probably going to be harder for them than it is for me. I suspect that Jenny must be cursing me for putting her to such a lot of trouble. It was very good of Jon to offer to host a family get-together.

At least it gets everything over and done with in one fell swoop and, much more importantly, it gives me an opportunity to show you off to my family,' he added tenderly.

He had heard the curiosity and the surprise in Jon's voice when he told him that he would like to bring Honor with him to the family supper.

Typically though, Jon hadn't either pried or objected, simply saying warmly that they would look forward to seeing them both.

'Olivia won't be there, of course,' David remarked.

Honor said nothing. David had already told her of Jon's disclosure to him that Olivia felt unable as yet to see or talk with her father.

'As it happens, she wouldn't have been able to join us anyway,' Jon had told him, not quite truthfully. 'She and Caspar have a long-standing arrangement to fly out to attend a family wedding on his side in Philadelphia.'

They had almost reached the house now, and from the number of cars parked outside, David realised that he was about to face a pretty full family turnout.

'You don't
have
to go in,' Honor said, guessing what he was feeling.

'Yes, I do,' David corrected her with a small smile. 'I can't run away again, Honor.'

It was Jack who opened the door to them, a Jack who was a little stiff and unbending, nervous, as David was himself. He looked tenderly at his son but made no attempt to force any unwanted fatherly embrace or intimacy on him.

'Honor, this is Jack,' he said simply.

Jack's smile for Honor was, he noticed, much warmer than the one his son had given
him.
Then Jon was coming towards them, his eyes widening in recognition as he saw Honor, his touch on David's arm not just reassuring but somehow strengthening, as well, almost as though he was giving
him,
David, some of his own courage and life force. David suspected that it was no mistake that when he walked into Jon and Jenny's large drawing room, he was flanked on one side by Honor, who was gripping his hand protectively, and on the other by Jon, who was standing shoulder to shoulder with him, making a silent declaration to all those present that he accepted and supported him.

It was that far more than their father's emotional and in some ways almost distasteful glori-fying of his return that made it possible for David to get through the evening. Every time he felt his spirits flagging, every time he saw doubts about him in someone's eyes, he found he was turning his head to search for Jon. He took strength from the quiet, calm reassurance he could see in Jon's eyes as he returned David's anxious look.

'I always knew he'd come back,' he could hear Ben boasting to Saul Crighton. 'And who could blame him for leaving that wife of his? All her doing that he damn near died.'

'My heart attack wasn't Tiggy's fault,' David denied immediately.

'Nonsense,' Ben declared. 'You should never have married her. She trapped him into the marriage,' he continued, addressing Maddy, who was standing next to Saul and his wife Tullah. 'Ruined his career, too. David would have been a QC if it hadn't been for that woman.'

'No, Dad,' David interrupted him firmly. 'I could never have been a QC, and the only person responsible for ruining my career was me.'

He saw that Jack was looking at him and went on to explain as though only the two of them were in the room.

'Your grandfather may have forgotten how id-iotic I was, but I certainly haven't, Jack. I thought I knew it all...and that I could do it all. But as anyone with any sense will tell you, working for the bar and partying all night just don't mix!

'I behaved like a crass, arrogant fool and I deserved everything I got, including my dismissal from chambers.'

Into the small silence that followed his admis-sion, David threw down the gauntlet as he knew he should have done to his father a long, long time ago.

'If it hadn't been for Jon, I dare say I would have got the punishment I richly deserved. Certainly there was no way I could ever have worked as a solicitor, never mind calling myself senior partner.'

'You had every right to be the senior partner,'

Ben blustered. 'You were the first-born. Jon knows that it's your right to head the partnership, David.'

'No,' David corrected his father calmly. 'What Jon knows is that there is no way legally I should
ever
have been allowed to take that position. I don't have the qualifications, and besides...'

He paused, wondering how far he should go and how much he should say. Instinctively, his gaze was drawn to his twin, and from the other side of the room Jon gave a small shake of his head.

'Besides,' David continued, conceding authority to Jon, 'the law has never held any appeal for me. I'm far happier working with my hands than my brain.'

'You've
done this,' he could hear Ben shouting to Jon, his face red with anger.'
You've
forced him to stand down in your favour. Well, I'm telling you...you'll
never
be the man that David is.

You'll always stand in his shadow. You should be ashamed of yourself.'

'David,' Honor protested as David left her side and strode across to Ben, then leaned over him.

'That's
enough,'
he told him fiercely. Turning to face the room, he declared firmly, 'Whilst I'm well aware that no one apart from my father needs to hear me say just how wrong he is and whilst I know, too, that Jon himself has no need of my support...I have a need to say it.

'Dad, you're a fool,' he admonished Ben bluntly. 'Everyone else in this room knows perfectly well that, of the two of us, it is
Jon
who deserves the palm, Jon who should be feted and praised. Nature might have decided that I should arrive in this world ten minutes ahead of him, but
she
wasn't responsible for the fact that instead of being protected and cherished by me, his twin brother, I allowed him to be cast in the role of second-best. The blame and the responsibility for that lies solely with me.

'We all know what you suffered as a child through losing your own twin, Dad,' David continued, 'and we sympathise with you because of it, but I'd like to put it on record that the reason I came back, and the
only
reason, selfish though I know it is, is because I needed my brother.'

David could almost feel, as well as hear, the shocked reaction that rippled through his audi-ence.

'That does not mean that I don't love my children—my daughter and my son—or my father. I do, but I can love them from any place in the world, wherever I happen to live. Probably the best gift I ever gave Jack was to absent myself from his life so that he was able to experience what true parenting is all about.

'Why I should feel so strongly that I needed Jon, I don't know. Perhaps it was to look for his forgiveness, to make reparation. I really don't know and maybe I never will know.

'As my family you have a right to reject or accept me as you choose.' He paused and looked at Honor and smiled.

'For those of you who choose to accept me, I shall be living permanently at Foxdean—when I am not acting as my wife-to-be's assistant and crawling through the Amazon rain forest picking flowers.'

David was all too aware of his family's astonishment and heard them offer their confused congratulations, but he wasn't really listening to them. Instead, he was watching Jon.