‘N-no—’ It would have been the perfect excuse, but then she would have had to invent some man, a relationship that had gone off the rails. She’d told Hannah that she didn’t see her father because he lived in another country but that he had been kind when her mama had been very sad.
Her best friend at preschool had a daddy who lived in Australia so she’d accepted it without question.
For now.
She knew that if Hannah was ever to know who her father was, she would have to tell Kit, but she was very afraid that he wouldn’t want to know.
‘He was there at a bad moment,’ she told Martha. ‘That’s all.’
True, and less embarrassing than admitting that her precious daughter was the result of a one-night stand at a beach party with her mother’s ashes barely in the ground.
Shame had sent her running back to England and then a pregnancy that would have caused gossip, raised eyebrows, a stain on her mother’s memory, had kept her away.
Her daughter had turned three at the beginning of May, time enough, she hoped, for dates to have blurred.
‘Did you ever tell him about Hannah?’ Martha asked.
‘I... No,’ she admitted. ‘He was long gone before she arrived.’
To say that Martha pulled a face would have been an exaggeration. There was the slightest movement of muscles, more than enough to show her disapproval. ‘And now you’re hiding out, afraid to get involved again.’
‘It’s simpler this way.’
‘Men do tend to complicate life,’ Martha agreed, ‘but they add a little spice. You’re a single mother, Eve, not a nun.’
‘Martha! I’m shocked.’
‘Are you?’ Her godmother could write an essay with the lift of an eyebrow. ‘Clearly you haven’t heard the rumour that it was my generation that invented sex as a recreational pastime.’
It was perhaps as well that, having arrived at the entrance to the ballroom, Martha didn’t wait for a response, but reached for a glass of champagne.
‘This is stunning,’ Eve said, following suit as she took in the magnificence of the ivory-and-gold ballroom.
She’d never been to the resort as a girl, although she’d instantly recognised Kit Merchant when he’d left the party to come and talk to her.
She hadn’t wanted to talk, and she was pretty sure he hadn’t followed her for the conversation. A local hero, he could probably have had any girl on the beach, but they were his kid sister’s friends, pretty and no doubt keen to attract his attention. Trouble, in fact, which might have accounted for his eagerness to get away.
Normally, she’d have told him to get lost, but she’d been a mess. Her mother had just died, and her father hadn’t felt the need to fly in to support her at the funeral. Her boyfriend had felt the same way, sticking to his plan to go backpacking around Europe during the spring break rather than fly to Nantucket, and she’d dumped him by text from the airport.
She’d been at the party because her cousins’ arms had been twisted to take her with them and she had only gone to get away from another miserable night sitting in with Nana.
She had been desperate for someone, anyone, to put their arms around her, to hold her, and Kit had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Not that he’d failed her. Far from it. No doubt used to females throwing themselves at him, he had responded with some truly outstanding sex. Not the wham, bam, anonymous stuff she’d expected, had wanted right there on the beach to drive away the pain. Instead he’d grabbed her hand, racing with her to his beach hut where they’d had hot, mindless sex, as if they were both desperate to blot out the world. But then he had slowed everything down. They had drunk a rich red wine under a star-filled sky before making slow, sweet love; the kind that could break your heart. That you would never forget.
She swallowed, looking at the men in dinner jackets, the women in their beautiful clothes, and had a moment of regret for the head-turning red curls, wishing she were wearing something a little less...classic.
Wanting, just for a moment, to feel that alive again.
But only for a moment.
She’d been there and done that. She had Hannah, with her own Titian curls and Kit’s bright blue eyes, as a constant reminder of the night she’d lost her head.
Her baby girl. The love of her life.
She knew she should tell him, that he had a right to know, but her world was complicated enough. She wasn’t going to stick around and risk blundering into the man who’d made her laugh, made her cry, made love to her with a sweet passion that had changed everything in one starlit night.
The man who, at the fierce banging on his beach cabin door, the call that he was needed, had rolled out of bed, pulling on his jeans and grabbing his sweatshirt. All he’d said was, ‘Stay out of sight...’ on his way out.
She had waited until the first pink edge of dawn appeared on the horizon and then she had run back to her grandmother’s house and thrown her things into a bag. Nana had been asleep, so she’d left a note, caught the first ferry back to the mainland and been back in London twenty-four hours later.
Had he waited, holding his breath, waiting for the call from one of the less glossy gossip mags asking for a comment on the story they were about to run?
My Night of Sex... Sex in the Sand... Abandoned After a Night of Sex...
There had been stories in the past and, even if some of them were pure fiction and others heavily embellished to make better headlines, he had clearly made the most of his youthful fame. There were still photographs of him with beautiful women, but these days no one was talking, and neither would she. Not even when, weeks later, after her finals were over, she’d had time to realise what was happening to her body and two pink lines had changed her life for ever.
She hadn’t talked and she couldn’t call Kit.
The news had been full of the start of the single-handed round-the-world yacht race, or maybe that was all she had been noticing because Kit was the skipper that every camera had been watching, the man already making the headlines after rumours that his entry had caused a rift with his family.
Calling him on the satellite link would have been a very public way to inform him that he was about to become a father. While the headlines would have cheered a newspaper man’s heart and set Twitter alight, the trolls would have been out in force. She would have been mobbed by the press, her poor grandmother would have been under siege, and she would have had to go into hiding.
It had given her plenty of time to think. Time for her heart to stop when, two months into the race, his radio had gone silent after a storm. She’d hugged her belly protectively during the ten long days before he’d been spotted by search aircraft.
The photographs had shown that his damaged mast had been lashed back into place and the pundits had speculated with sickening detail how he must have climbed in heavy seas to repair it.
Worse, he’d signalled that his communication equipment had been smashed in the storm that hit his mast, but he was okay and was continuing with the race.
He’d finally limped home after more than four months in third place. A great feat of sailing, according to the yachting community.
Eve hadn’t cared about the sailing or the press, she’d just been furious that he would recklessly endanger himself for a piece of silverware to stick on the mantelpiece.
Had he no feelings for his family and what they must have gone through?
She