She swallowed. ‘I suppose so. I’m not sure.’
Was a straight yes or no so hard to come by? Suddenly, it was all too much for him. He couldn’t do this now. He needed time to think, to breathe. One more of her cryptic answers and he was going to lose it completely.
‘Fine. If that’s the way you want to play it, I’ll go.’
She looked shocked at that. He didn’t care why.
‘But don’t think you’ve heard the end of this,’he added. ‘You owe me more.And you can start paying tomorrow with answers. Facts. Details. Call them what you want, but I will have them.’
Jackie got over her surprise and pushed herself away from the wall of her grotto with her hands so she was standing straight. She fixed him with that flesh-melting stare he remembered so well. He refused to acknowledge the ripple of heat that passed over him in response.
‘Don’t you dare act all high and mighty about this, Signor Puccini! You and I both know you weren’t ready for fidelity and commitment back then.’
That lid he’d been trying to keep tightly on? It popped.
But he was aware Lizzie and Jack might well still be within earshot and he didn’t have the luxury of using the volume he would have liked to. He did the next best thing and dropped his voice to a rasping whisper.
‘You have no right to judge me. No right at all. You don’t know what I would have done, how I might have reacted. Who do you think you are?’
Jackie marched out of the grotto and for a moment he thought she was going to leave him standing there, all his anger unspent, but she got halfway up the garden and then turned back and strode towards him.
Of course. She always had to have the last word. Well, let her. It still wouldn’t make what she’d done right.
‘Who do I think I am? I’ll tell you who I think I am!’ Her face twisted into something resembling a smile. ‘I’m the poor, pathetic girl who waited at the farmhouse all afternoon for you, scared out of her wits, feeling alone and overwhelmed.’
She wasn’t making any sense.
‘You know I didn’t get your letter,’ he said. ‘You can’t blame that on me.’
She took her time before she answered, her eyes narrowing, faint glimmer of victory glittering there. ‘I saw you, Romano, that afternoon.’
Saw him? What was she talking about? He’d thought the whole point had been that he hadn’t turned up.
‘When I finally gave up waiting, I walked back up the track towards the main road, and that was when I saw you.’ She waited for him to guess the significance of her statement, but all he could do was shrug. ‘I saw you drive past on your Vespa with…her. With Francesca Gambardi!’
Ah.
He’d forgotten about that.
So that was the afternoon he’d finally given in to Francesca’s pestering, had agreed to take her out on his bella moto, as she’d called it, because he’d hoped her presence would make him forget the crater Jackie had left behind when he’d finally got the message she’d wanted nothing more to do with him.
It hadn’t been one of his finest moments. Or one of his best ideas.
And it hadn’t worked. Francesca hadn’t been enough of a distraction. Every time she’d looked at him, every time she’d brushed up against him, he’d only been plagued by the feeling that everything had been all wrong, that it should have been Jackie with her arms around his waist as they whipped through the countryside, that it should have been Jackie sidling up to him as they’d stopped to look at a pretty view. In the end, he’d taken Francesca home without so much as a kiss. A first for him in those days.
Jackie was way off base, thinking he’d had something going with Francesca, but he remembered how insecure, how jealous she’d been of the other girl, and he knew how it must have looked to her. But if she’d only asked, only would have deigned to talk to him, she would have known the truth. He’d acted foolishly, yes, but she hadn’t behaved with any more maturity.
‘And that was why you didn’t bother telling me you were carrying my child? Because you saw me with another girl on the back of my Vespa? Jackie, that’s a pathetic excuse.’
The smug look evaporated and she looked as if she’d been slapped across the face with the truth of his statement. Her jaw tensed. It didn’t take her long to regroup and counter-attack.
‘But I thought you’d read my letter, remember? I thought you knew I was pregnant, that I was waiting for you to discuss our future. And when you rode past the farmhouse—our special place—with that girl pressing herself up against you…well, it sent a message loud and clear.’
Okay, things might not be as black and white as he’d thought.
It was all so complicated, so hard to keep track of who knew what and when. Jackie had always been hot-headed and quick to judge and while he didn’t like her reaction to the situation he could understand it, understand it was the only way she could have acted in that moment. What he didn’t understand was why that one, unlucky coincidence, when he’d driven past with Francesca, had decided everything, had defined both their futures.
‘But you didn’t think to ask me? To find out for sure? Maybe not right then, when you were still angry, but what about the next month or the one after that? What about when the baby was born, or when you registered her? On her first birthday? On any of her birthdays? Hasn’t she asked questions? Doesn’t she want to know?’
Jackie just stared at him.
Maybe his daughter took after her mother. Maybe Jackie had brought her up to be as hard and self-obsessed as she was. Unfortunately he could imagine it all too easily. The elegant flat in one of the classier parts of London, the two of them being very sophisticated together, eating out, going to fashion shows. What he couldn’t imagine was them laughing, making daisy chains or having fun.
He sighed. Jackie had always been such hard work, had always kept him on his toes. What would it be like if he had two such women to placate? It would leave him breathless.
He’d drifted off, almost forgotten Jackie was there. Her voice pulled him out of his daydream…nightmare…whatever.
‘I did think of you when she was born, in the days following…’ She paused, made a strange hiccupping noise. ‘And don’t think that every birthday wasn’t torture, because it was. But by then it was too late. It had already been done. And I wouldn’t have turned back time if I could have done. It would have been selfish and wrong.’
His first reaction was to stoke his anger—she was talking in riddles again—but the weighty sorrow that had settled on her, making her shoulders droop, diluted his rage with curiosity.
‘What do you mean “it was too late”?’
Jackie looked up, puzzled. ‘She’d gone to her new family—the people who adopted her.’
The words didn’t sink in at first. He heard the sounds, even knew what they represented, but, somehow, they still didn’t make sense. He walked away from her, back towards the grotto and stuck his hand—shirtsleeves and all—into one of the chilly black pools, just because he needed something physical, something to shock his body and brain into reacting.
It worked all right. Suddenly his brain was alive with responses. Unfortunately, the temperature of the water had done nothing to cool his temper. He flicked the water off with his hands and dried them on the back of his beautifully crafted, mortgage-worthy suit.
‘You’re telling me that, rather than raise our daughter yourself, rather than telling me—her father—of her existence, that you gave her away to strangers? Like she was something disposable?’