‘Is it Auntie Jo?’
‘No, she’s——’
‘Auntie Maggie?’
‘No, I——’
They both started slightly as a door slammed next door, and then seconds later their front doorbell rang.
‘I’ll get it!’ Beth yelled.
‘Beth, no!’ Anne wailed, but the child was already down the hall, fumbling with the catch.
Perhaps it’s the new next-door neighbours, Anne thought hopefully, but as the door swung open her worst fears were realised.
‘Oh!’ Beth said with characteristic lack of diplomacy as she eyed the big man lounging in the porch. ‘Are you Mummy’s friend? I thought you’d be a lady—Mummy doesn’t have men friends.’
Jake grinned lazily and shouldered himself away from the wall, shooting Anne a teasing glance over the child’s head. ‘Doesn’t she, now?’
‘Not usually—come in, you’ll let all the heat out and we can’t afford to heat the garden,’ Beth told him solemnly, parroting Anne’s frequent plea.
He laughed, and Beth laughed too, her head tipped back, her face alive with humour, the thick black lashes framing the dark chocolate eyes that sparkled with mischief.
And then it happened.
Jake looked at Beth, then looked again, and emotions one after the other chased across his face. Disbelief, and incredulous joy, and a terrible, fierce anger.
‘What’s your name?’ Beth asked him, her head cocked slightly to one side in a mannerism so familiar that Anne knew he would see it.
He looked across the child at her, his face still wearing a smile for Beth, but his eyes like cold steel, slashing through her.
‘Yes, aren’t you going to introduce me to your daughter?’ he said pointedly, only the slightest hint of a tremor betraying the emotions she could feel ripping through him.
She closed her eyes and counted to five.
‘Darling, this is Mr Hunter. He’s doing Auntie Jo’s work while she’s on holiday. Jake, this is—Elizabeth. We call her Beth.’
He held out his hand.
‘How do you do, Beth?’ he said gently, and a spasm crossed his face as Beth placed her hand trustingly in his and smiled.
‘How do you do, Mr Hunter?’ she echoed, and then giggled.
He almost glared at Anne above the slightly fixed smile. ‘I think Mr Hunter’s going a bit far, don’t you? I tell you what, Beth.’ He dropped to one knee conspiratorially. ‘Why don’t we make it Jake for now, eh? Since we’re going to be neighbours as well?’
‘Neighbours?’ Anne croaked.
He straightened. ‘Oh, yes. I’m going to be living in the house next door—won’t that be cosy? We’ll be able to get to know each other really well.’
Anne fled, almost dragging Beth with her up the stairs, aware with every step of Jake’s eyes boring into her spine.
‘We’re going to make a snowman at the weekend—would you like to help?’ Beth said over her shoulder.
‘My pleasure.’
Anne tugged at the reluctant hand. ‘Come on, young lady, it’s way past your bedtime. Say goodnight.’
She spent as long as she dared tucking Beth up again, but finally she had no choice.
Her heart in her mouth, she made her way downstairs.
Jake was in the sitting-room on the sofa, Beth’s latest drawing in his hands, and as she watched he straightened up and glared at her accusingly, his eyes blazing with anger and recrimination.
His voice was deadly quiet in the stillness.
‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me?’
ANNE’S legs were trembling, her whole body starting to shake with reaction. This wasn’t the way she had wanted him to find out!
‘I was going to tell you—tonight. That’s why I asked you here, but——’
‘Just tell me something—if we hadn’t been thrown together like this, would you ever have told me?’
She looked away, unable to bear the anger and condemnation in his eyes.
‘It isn’t that simple, Jake——’
‘Of course it is!’ he growled. ‘How much more bloody simple can it get? “You have a daughter”. Four words. Is that really so hard?’
‘Yes!’ she cried. ‘Yes, it is that hard! And what would you have done about it anyway? We were friends, Jake, just simply friends. That night was a fluke, a one-off. How could I hold you responsible? You made your feelings pretty clear, anyway. Your last words to me were, “This needn’t make any difference to us, Annie. You’re going to marry Duncan and I’m going to finish sowing my wild oats and see the world——” ‘
‘But I said——’
‘I know what you said. I know exactly what you said. We were who we were, Jake. It would never have worked.’
‘You weren’t even prepared to give it a try! Damn it, Annie, if I’d known she was mine——’
‘What? What would you have done? For God’s sake, Hunter, you were a playboy, a womanising, hell-raising, over-sexed, overgrown adolescent! You weren’t ready for the responsibility of parenthood, and I wasn’t ready to risk my daughter’s happiness—or mine—on a feckless, footloose itinerant!’
He snorted in disgust. ‘Come on, Annie, that’s a gross exaggeration——’
‘No, it isn’t! You were appalling—you had the morals of an alley-cat, Jacob Hunter! Every night there was a different victim——’
‘Rubbish! You’ve forgotten——’
‘Bull! I’ve forgotten nothing, Jake. Not one single, solitary damn second of that last year have I forgotten, and I certainly haven’t forgotten the number of nights you never even made it home——!’
She broke off, appalled that she had revealed so much.
‘Did you lie awake and wait for me, Annie?’ he asked, and beneath the softly voiced sarcasm she thought she detected a certain wistfulness.
‘Of course not,’ she denied hotly. ‘Why should I have lost sleep over you?’
He stared at her in silence for a moment, then looked away, his breath leaving his body in a sharp sigh. ‘You think a lot of me, don’t you?’
She slumped into a chair. ‘I think a hell of a lot of you, Jake. I always have done, but that doesn’t mean I’ve ever let it cloud my judgement. You were a good friend, the best, but you would have made a rotten husband and father seven years ago.’
‘And now?’
‘Now what?’
‘What kind of a husband and father would I make now, Annie? Because you can be sure of one thing—I’m not letting her go. I don’t want carefully measured visitation rights, or joint custody or some other legal arrangement. I want to be her father, in every sense of the word. I want a say in her upbringing and education, and I’m not convinced I want you out at work leaving her with a stranger for the weekend while you’re on call!’