She crossed the room to his side. ‘Just stand it on the sofa, would you, please, Nick?’ she requested softly, knowing by the grim expression on his face that he was still far from satisfied with the explanation they had been given.
Well, maybe once her parents had seen Claudia’s portrait he would be given an explanation he could accept!
Nick heard Jean give a pained gasp as he stood the portrait up against the back of the sofa, turning to see Henry walking dazedly across the room for a closer look, the lines of strain on his face making him look every one of his sixty-odd years.
Henry reached out a hand, just as Hebe had the first time she’d seen the portrait, not quite touching the canvas, but almost tracing a hand lovingly over the creamy contours of the beautiful face.
‘Tell me, Dad,’ Hebe said softly as she stood beside him in front of the portrait. ‘Did Claudia have a birthmark?’
‘She did.’ Jean was the one to answer as she moved to join her husband and granddaughter. ‘A tiny red rose-shape, just—there…!’ She gasped as she saw the portrait fully. ‘Claudia…!’ she cried brokenly, her tears falling in earnest now as she gazed in awe at the portrait. ‘But how…?’
‘It’s the portrait I told you about on Saturday—the one that Nick found hidden away in a man’s house after he died,’ Hebe explained happily.
‘Jacob Gardner’s house,’ Nick put in harshly, wishing he felt as happy as she did about all of this.
This portrait obviously was of Claudia Johnson, as Hebe had always claimed it was. Henry and Jean’s reactions to seeing it were too genuine for it to be otherwise. But if that was true then it made a complete nonsense of the things Nick had accused Hebe of doing. Accusations she had vehemently denied. He had called her a liar. A liar and a gold-digger…!
Henry turned to look at him questioningly. ‘This is the Andrew Southern portrait you told us about?’
‘Yes,’ Nick bit out tautly.
‘Twenty-seven years ago, Claudia was engaged to a man called Jacob Gardner.’ Jean sighed. ‘He was much older than her, thirty years or so, but he was very wealthy, and when he asked her to marry him she accepted.’
‘And then she met Andrew Southern and fell in love with him instead,’ Nick grated grimly.
Everything he had accused Hebe of doing, in fact.
Accused and punished her for. His jealousy of the other men such that he had wanted to make Hebe his over and over again, in order to banish them from her mind and heart.
Dear God, how she must hate him!
He couldn’t even look at her at this moment. He needed time in which to re-evaluate this whole situation.
And time, it seemed, was something he didn’t have.
‘We don’t know that for certain,’ Hebe spoke quietly. ‘Although admittedly this portrait looks as if it was painted by a man who—knew his subject more intimately than an artist and his model.’
She couldn’t quite look at her parents. Claudia might have been her biological mother, but she was a woman Hebe had never known. Whereas she had been Henry and Jean’s daughter—someone Jean had given birth to, that the two of them had brought up and loved.
‘We don’t really know what their relationship was,’ she added firmly.
‘I can’t believe this is our Claudia.’ Her mother still gazed tearfully down at the portrait. ‘She was so beautiful, wasn’t she? She was absolutely adorable as a child, too. It was only when she got to about sixteen that—well—’ She broke off, looking to her husband for assistance.
‘She became a little wild.’ Hebe’s father spoke sadly, shaking his head. ‘We don’t know where we went wrong. She started going out all the time, sometimes staying out all night. And when we tried to talk to her she just shrugged it off as fussing and carried on exactly the same as before. And then finally—finally she ran away from home, when she was seventeen.’ He sat down abruptly in one of the armchairs.
‘She had such a love of life,’ Jean added chokingly. ‘But we didn’t know what to do with her any more—couldn’t seem to reach her. She ran off, didn’t contact us for months, and then it was only the one letter. We didn’t even know she was pregnant until we received an urgent telephone call from the hospital. We were too late. When we got there Claudia had already died,’ she sobbed. ‘But there was Hebe,’ she said, smiling through her tears. ‘And we believed we had been given a second chance, that with Hebe we would not make the same mistakes.’ Tears began to fill her eyes once more.
‘You didn’t make any mistakes,’ Hebe hastened to assure her, holding tightly on to her mother’s hand. ‘Not with Claudia or with me. You’re the best parents anyone could ever have,’ she said with certainty. ‘And if she had been given the time Claudia would probably have calmed down, settled down, maybe even married and provided you with lots more grandchildren.’
‘As it was, it broke our hearts when she ran off like that,’ Henry continued heavily. ‘Not knowing where she was, what she was doing. Then, as Jean said, after six months of silence she wrote to us, without giving us an address to write back, to say she had a job singing in a hotel in the north of England somewhere—’
‘Leeds,’ Nick put in quickly.
‘Yes, that’s right.’ Hebe’s father nodded. ‘She met Jacob Gardner there one evening when he went in to have dinner with friends. Apparently he fell in love with her on sight. She was so excited about her engagement. She wrote that she would bring him down to meet us before the wedding.’ He sighed heavily. ‘It all seemed so incredible, so—’ He shook his head. ‘She was only eighteen years old.’
Hebe looked at the portrait, at her mother, eighteen years old, with all her life ahead of her. Within a year she had been dead.
Nick looked at the portrait too, at those differences Hebe had insisted existed. Apart from the birthmark, the woman in the portrait still looked like a slightly younger version of Hebe to him, if a more knowing, more feral version of her.
But it wasn’t Hebe.
No wonder she had been so angry with him for not believing her when she’d claimed it wasn’t her. When she had denied ever having been engaged to Jacob Gardner or having an affair with Andrew Southern either.
Which meant her innocence completely undermined his other accusation—that she was a gold-digger…
He looked at Hebe now, at those beautiful eyes that entranced him, the sensual fluidity of her body that enraptured him, her intelligence that enthralled him.
And he knew that she didn’t want his money at all—that he was the one who had assumed that rather than Hebe ever having said that was what she wanted. Now he realised that she had only agreed to marry him because he had threatened her—threatened to take her baby away from her if she didn’t.
Thinking of Luke, of his own pain when he’d died, of how Sally’s heart had been broken when she’d lost her child, he knew Hebe must hate him for threatening to do the same to her if she didn’t marry him.
Had he expected, had he seriously expected them to make a marriage based on his threats and Hebe’s fear that he might take her baby from her if she didn’t stay with him?
The signs had all been there if only he hadn’t been blinded by his own unforgiving attitude: the fact that Hebe wouldn’t accept that huge diamond engagement ring, her disgust over the expensive car, her refusal to leave her job and be kept by him. But he had chosen to think she was just acting as if she wasn’t interested in those things, that the demands would begin once they were married.
What sort of hardened cynic had he become?
More to the point, how could he ever hope to have Hebe fall in love with him after