Faith’s eyes grew wide. ‘You mean that he’d meant to do it?’
Marcus just looked at her. ‘That’s about the gist of it.’
‘You don’t believe that, do you?’ she said, horrified.
‘I try not to.’
Faith reached over and laid her hand on his arm. He looked down at it. They hadn’t touched since their first meeting, and that one simple, spontaneous gesture completely arrested him. He looked back at her face—really looked at her—and saw warmth and compassion and gentle strength. Instead of climbing back behind her walls, he could feel she was reaching out to him, and it made him ache for her in an entirely new way.
No. He couldn’t want this. Shouldn’t.
But he could feel himself slipping, forgetting why.
‘You can’t take the blame for this, Marcus. It was nothing to do with you.’ She shook her head as she talked. ‘You can’t carry this round with you, believe me. For your own sanity you have to find a way to separate yourself, to disconnect.’
That pulled him up short. She was good at that, wasn’t she? He needed to remember that.
‘Is that what you did?’
She stopped shaking her head. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Disconnect?’ he said. ‘I might be too wrapped up in my family, but you seem cast adrift from yours. Is that how you cope? Running away? Living in a different country? I can’t do that, Faith. I have to stay and fight—for Bertie, for my children and their children.’
He knew he sounded angry, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. He was angry with her for showing him parts of herself she’d never let him have, at his father for leaving him in such a mess, even at Hadsborough for the way it hung around his neck like a millstone. Telling her the truth had opened a floodgate. And he needed desperately to break this sense of intimacy weaving its way around them both and binding them together. He needed to push her away, to make that soft compassion completely disappear from her eyes.
She pulled her hand back and glared at him, and he knew his accusations had struck home. He should have been pleased.
‘You don’t know anything about me, so don’t you dare judge.’
‘I’m not judging you,’ he said. ‘You’re right. I don’t know anything about you. Because every time anyone asks you block them out.’ It irritated him that she’d been able to run from her family, to taste freedom, when he’d been trapped by his. ‘So shock me. Tell me. Tell me what awful thing happened to make you avoid your home and family like the plague.’
Faith looked up at him, her eyes huge, and swallowed. For a few hot seconds she’d been furious, but then something else had crept up on her and taken her completely by surprise—the urge to do just what he suggested.
Could she tell him? Would it really be as easy as that? She never wanted to talk about this. Not to anyone. And especially not to the rest of her family.
But he wasn’t family. And she was thousands of miles away in a soundproof cellar. Somehow it seemed safer to let the words out here than anywhere else.
Also, Marcus had shared something incredibly painful and personal with her, and she couldn’t ignore the sense of imbalance that left her with. She needed to get them back on an equal footing again so she could put her defences in place.
‘You…’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You’ve always known who you are, where you belong in the world. I don’t know if I can explain it…’ She swallowed. It had been so long since she’d talked about this with anyone that she didn’t know if the words were still there. ‘I don’t know where to start,’ she whispered.
He held her gaze. There was still fire in his eyes, but it was softening, brightening. ‘Try the beginning,’ he said in a low voice.
Faith nodded and moistened her lips. ‘My mom… She’s a bit of a…’
How did she put this? Calling your own mother a flake out loud, no matter how many times you did it in your head, did not seem right.
She shrugged. ‘She likes to move around, has sudden passions for hobbies or places—even people—that are all-consuming.’ Faith looked down at her denim-clad thighs. ‘While they last. And they never do last.’
Marcus gave her his half-smile, the one that curved the right side of his mouth so deliciously. ‘A bit like Bertie, then?’
She gave an exasperated puff. ‘No way! Bertie is sweet and charming. Mom… Well, Mom is just…infuriating.’
He laughed a dry little huff of a laugh. ‘And you don’t think I find my grandfather the slightest bit exasperating?’
Faith pinned her bottom lip in the centre with her top teeth. Okay, maybe he had a point there. But she doubted he’d find her mother sweet and charming. Nutty as a squirrel, maybe.
‘The same pattern applied to her marriage. She and my dad were on again, off again, for so long. And then one day he’d had enough of trying to make her see sense and he left. Or that’s what I thought at the time.’
Marcus nodded. ‘My mother left my father under very similar circumstances. She loved him, even though he was a bit of a cad, but she couldn’t deal with all that and this place as well. Eventually she had enough.’
A well of sympathy opened up inside Faith. She knew just what that was like, to see a parent leave, promising it was nothing to do with you, that it was the grown-ups who were to blame.
‘How old were you?’ she whispered.
‘Nine,’ he replied baldly.
She nodded. Almost the same age she had been when Greg McKinnon had left the family home for the final time. She reckoned she and Marcus had more in common than she’d first thought.
‘You stayed here?’ she asked.
‘I was at boarding school most of the time. And holidays were shared between both parents. I felt slightly divorced from the whole thing, to be honest, as if it wasn’t really happening—until I came home for my summer holiday when I was thirteen and there was a new, young, blonde Lady Westerham installed in my father’s suite, wanting me to call her Mummy, and the reality of the whole situation suddenly became very clear.’
‘Ouch,’ she said.
Marcus smiled grimly. ‘You have a gift for coming up with exactly the right word for the occasion, do you know that?’
Faith smiled softly back. ‘Gram says I may not say a lot, but what I do say packs a punch.’
‘Smart lady,’ he said, his mouth stretching into a proper smile this time.
Faith’s heart began to hammer.
She sighed. ‘That wasn’t all, though. But it seems so lame compared to what you’ve just told me.’ She got up, fetched her wallet from her purse and pulled out a crinkled photograph of three women. She pointed to the polished blonde on the right. ‘That’s Hope,’ she said, and then she tapped a blunt fingernail against the girl on the left, her fair hair caught in ponytail. ‘And that’s Grace.’
And there in the middle was Faith. Shorter, darker, not as pretty.
‘I can see the family resemblance,’ he said quietly.
Faith decided not to swallow her next comment, not to let it echo round her head as she usually did. Instead she said it out loud. ‘Between the two of them.’ She pulled in some dusty air and tucked the wallet into her jeans pocket.
The