‘I didn’t realise…’ she began after a while, but broke off. There couldn’t be any mistake, could there? Logan, he had said. How much clearer could he have made it?
‘Are you all right?’ Tom was frowning, looking perplexed, and his sister pulled in a shaky breath and tried to show her concern, too.
It wasn’t fitting that she should be here, Katie decided suddenly. These were Jack’s children, and they had the right to grieve in peace. She had to get out of here. ‘Yes, I…’ She swallowed hard. ‘I have to go… I need to get some air…’ This wasn’t the time or the place to explain who she was and where she had come from, was it? They’d obviously had no idea that she existed before this.
She swivelled round, desperate to get out of there, away from all these people. All at once she felt as though she was part of a topsy-turvy world where nothing made sense any more. She needed to be alone, to try to take it all in.
‘Katie’s upset,’ she heard Nick saying. ‘This has all been a bit too much for her. Excuse us, please. I think I’d better take her home.’
Katie was already out of the front door, standing on the drive, when she realised that she didn’t have her own car there. But perhaps that was just as well. She was probably in no state to drive.
Was it too far away for her to walk home? She could always get a taxi, couldn’t she? But for now she just needed to keep moving, to get away from there, to get her head straight.
‘Katie, wait, please.’ Nick dropped into step beside her.
‘Why would I do that?’ She shot the words at him through gritted teeth. ‘I really don’t have anything to say to you.’ She kept on walking. Hadn’t he known all along?
‘But we need to talk this through,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a shock—a double shock, given what’s happened to Jack.’
‘Yes, I’ve had a shock—and whose fault is that, precisely?’ The words came out flint sharp. ‘Did you really think you could hide it from me for ever? Why would you want to do that?’ She clamped her lips together. ‘No, don’t answer that. I don’t want to hear it. You colluded with him, let me go on thinking I was the daughter he loved and cared about, when all the time he…’ She couldn’t get the words out. Her anger was rising in a tide of blood that rushed to her head. It made her feel dizzy, and it thumped inside her skull like the stroke of a relentless mallet.
‘It wasn’t the way you think…believe me…’
‘Believe you?’ She gave a harsh laugh. ‘Why should I believe you?’ She looked at him, her green eyes glinting with barely suppressed fury. ‘Why should I listen to anything you have to say? I was foolish enough to think that you had some integrity, that you were different to the others… that you could be honest with me. Well, I was wrong.’ She was still walking, her footsteps taking her out through the large wrought-iron gates, flanked on either side by stone-built gateposts.
‘Katie, this is madness. At least stop and talk to me. Let me explain.’
‘There’s nothing to explain, is there? I know exactly how it went. You knew all along that my father had another family, a family he didn’t want me to know about… or my mother, for that matter. How old is Natasha, do you imagine? Twenty-four? That means she was born while he was still married to my mother. How do you think I feel about that? Can you imagine? And yet I still would have wanted to know that they existed. Don’t you think I had a right to know?’
‘Of course you did. And he would have told you, given time. It’s just that he wanted to pick his moment. You were getting along so well together. He didn’t want to spoil that.’
He frowned. ‘Katie, you’ve only just discovered that he’s passed on. You’re bound to be upset and not thinking clearly about things. You’re emotional and overwrought, and you should give yourself time to get used to the idea that he’s gone before you start dissecting his behaviour and giving yourself grief over it. You’ll have a much more balanced outlook in a day or so’s time.’
‘Will I? I think I have a pretty firm handle on the situation right now. I might even forgive my father for his deception…after all, I’ve been there before. He left us back in England and eventually I managed to come to terms with what he had done. I know what kind of man he is…’ her voice lowered to a whisper. ‘Was.’
She stopped walking and faced him head on. ‘It’s you I have a problem with. You’re the one who kept the pretence going. You banded together to keep me in the dark about it, about my family—my brother and sister, for heaven’s sake.’
She shook her head as though to throw out all the debris of broken dreams that had gathered there. ‘You knew how lonely I was through all those years after he left us,’ she said, her eyes blurred with tears. ‘You knew how much it hurt me to be rejected and how desperately I needed to know the reason for that. You should have told me the truth… that he had another family out here, one that he was prepared to stand by, to love and protect. It would have helped me to understand. I wouldn’t have kept my hopes up that my relationship with my father could have been something more than it was.’
Her gaze locked with his. ‘Instead, you let me flounder and lose my way. You made it so that I stumbled across his children at the worst possible moment. You could have stopped all that, and yet you did nothing.’
‘Katie, I had to keep it from you. Jack made me promise. He wanted to tell you himself when the time was right.’
‘Well, you should never have made that promise,’ she told him flatly. ‘Because of it, all my illusions are shattered. I thought I knew you... I thought I could trust you but I was wrong.’ She took in a shuddery breath. ‘You should go back to the house, Nick. I need to be alone.’
‘IF THERE’S anything at all that I can do to help you through these next few weeks, Dr Logan, please be sure to give me a call…at any time.’ The lawyer handed Katie his embossed card. ‘I know this must be a particularly difficult time for you.’
‘Thank you.’ Katie accepted the card and slipped it into her bag. She was still numb from everything that had happened over the last couple of weeks. Her father had died, the will had been read and now she had to try to pick up the pieces and go on with her life.
How was she to do that? Nick had betrayed her. The one man she’d thought she could trust had let her down, with devastating consequences. He’d once told her that she was special and that she’d shaken him to the core, and yet those had been empty words. It seemed those feelings were fragile, and he was easily diverted.
His duplicity left her feeling utterly lost and alone and she couldn’t see how she was ever going to recover from this.
Even now, Nick was watching her from across the room. It was bad enough that he was there at all, but there was nothing she could do about that. She could feel his dark gaze homing in on her, piercing like a laser, but she was determined to ignore him. She wanted to avoid him at all costs. He’d known all along about Tom and Natasha, but he had said nothing. How could he have left her to find out about them that way? If he had cared anything for her, wouldn’t he have told her?
‘It can’t have been easy for you, discovering that you had a family out here in California,’ the lawyer commented.
‘No,’ she confessed. She’d had two long weeks to think about that awful day at her father’s house, and now she was here with her half-brother and-sister, gathered together under the same roof once more, and it was every bit as unsettling now as it had been then. ‘I’m finding it all a bit of a strain, I must