“He left me a thousand bucks. To show he hadn’t forgotten me.”
“That was the lawyers’ doing and not what I meant. He would have made you a beneficiary, Tristan, if you’d come to see him when he asked.”
“Guess I must have missed that.”
“I guess so,” she said with a damn-you note to her voice. With great care she snipped off another pink bud and added it to her collection. The petals quavered—because her hands were shaking?—and when she looked up again, her eyes glistened with moisture. “Ignoring his letter, not even bothering to reply—that was just plain cruel, Tristan. He was your father and he was dying. Would it have hurt to swallow your pride and pick up the phone?”
Hit hard by the husky edge to her voice and the sheen of emotion in her eyes, it took a moment for the words and the message to register. Then everything inside him went still. “What letter?”
“He wanted to see you or at least to speak to you, to explain his side of the story. I suggested he write—that he might find that easier than trying to explain over the phone.”
“And he sent it?”
“I posted it myself.” She stared back at him, at first with that same hard edge as earlier and then with slowly dawning comprehension. “You really didn’t receive it, did you? And when I tried to call …”
He’d deliberately stonewalled her, not taking the calls and then not returning her increasingly insistent messages until it was too late. His father had passed away an hour before.
What-might-have-been frustration swelled inside him, tightening his chest, his throat, his expression. “If he wanted to talk to me so badly, why the hell did he leave it so late?”
“Because he was as proud and as stubborn as you! He poured his heart and his soul into that letter and when you didn’t reply, when he got nothing but stony silence, he gave up.”
“But you didn’t.”
In her eyes, he saw that truth. She’d pushed Stuart to write the letter. And she’d made those calls when his father was hospitalized, a last ditch effort to reconcile them: the husband she’d loved and his only child.
“That’s when he made up his mind about the will.” Carefully she closed the shears and clicked the safety lock into place. The metallic snick punctuated the finality of his father’s decision. Closed, done, ended. “He said you’d made your own life in Australia. You were a success. You didn’t need his money and you didn’t need him.”
She was right. At thirty his time of needing a father had long passed into a faded, bitter memory of the years when he’d silently yearned for that support. Even if he had read the letter or if he’d taken her calls, he doubted it would have led to anything but cold, hard words. “Too little, too late.”
For a moment he thought she might dispute that, but then she changed tack—he saw the switch in her expression and the set of her mouth as she gathered up her bunch of cut roses and started to move off. “You might not believe this,” she said, “but he never forgot you were his son. He told me once how glad he was that your football career took off, because that made it so easy to keep up the connection. The more your star rose, the more stories he found in the press.”
“His son, the famous footballer.”
A vehement spark lit her eyes. “It wasn’t like that, Tristan! Of course he was proud of your success—what parent wouldn’t be? But this was about knowing some part of you, about having that connection. He learned all about your Aussie Rules game and he read all the match reports and stats. He watched the games on cable.
“One night I found him sitting in the dark, in the theater room where he watched the games. And the television was showing, I don’t know, ice-skating or rhythmic gymnastics or something I knew he wouldn’t watch. I thought he’d gone to sleep so I turned on the light to rouse him and send him back to bed.”
She paused in a gap between two heavily-laden bushes, her expression as soft as the mass of creamy-pink roses that framed her slender curves. And, damn it her eyes had gone all dewy again. He braced himself, against the punch-to-the-heart sensation the sight of her caused and against whatever she was about to tell him.
“He didn’t turn around because he didn’t want me to see his tears, but I heard them in his voice. I knew he was sitting there in the dark crying. He told me later that you’d been playing your two hundredth game and they’d run a special on you during the halftime break. He was so proud and I was so damn mad at you both for not doing something about your rift.”
Rift? The gap between him and his father had been more in the scope of a canyon. If there’d ever been any chance of bridging it … “That was up to him.”
“Would you have listened?”
For several seconds they stood, gazes locked, the atmosphere taut with that one telling question. And when he didn’t answer, she shook her head sadly. “I didn’t think so.”
“It makes no difference.”
“You’re that callous?”
“I am what I am.”
She nodded slowly. And the disappointment in her eyes hit him like a full-throttle shoulder charge. “You are also more like your father than you know.”
“Kind. Generous. Concerned,” he quoted back at her.
“Proud. Stubborn. Unprepared to step back from your line in the sand.” Her eyes narrowed with a mixture of challenge and speculation. “Why is the inheritance so important to you? Your success at football carried on into business. You just sold your company, advantageously, I gather. You can’t need the money.”
“Money isn’t everything, duchess.”
“Is it the house you want?” she persisted, ignoring his gibe. “Does it have special meaning?”
“Not any more. Does it to you?”
“It meant a lot to Stuart, so, yes.”
“I’m asking about you.” And even as he asked the question, he felt its significance tighten in his chest. “Is this your idea of home, Vanessa?”
“It’s the only place I’ve ever felt happy to call home.”
“You’re happy here, living this life?”
She looked him square in the eye. “Yes, I am. I work hard on fund-raising committees. I love the volunteering work I do.”
“A regular philanthropist, are you?”
It was a cheap shot but she took it on the chin without flinching. He sensed, in the briefest of pauses before she responded, that she’d taken a lot of hits in her life. That she was a lot less delicate than she looked. “I do what I can. And just so there are no misconceptions—I like most everything about my life. I like the security of money, of knowing all my needs are taken care of.”
“Not to mention the things that money can buy.”
“I don’t care about the things.”
Really? “You told me you love your car. Your clothes aren’t from Wal-Mart. And what about the trinkets?” Forgetting the self-defensive caution that had driven him to keep a garden’s width between them, he rounded the end of the bay and closed down that separation. “If things don’t matter, then why were you so upset when the figurine smashed?”
“It was a gift.”
“From Stuart?”
A