The Mirror Bride

Astonishment glittered in the cold eyes before being banished so completely that she wondered whether she had seen aright. Oh, he was a brilliant actor! If she didn’t know better, she thought bitterly, she’d believe he hadn’t known of the child he’d fathered the year she was seventeen.

‘Ah,’ he said quietly. ‘No wonder you wanted me married! Not that it would have made any difference.’ His cold gaze wandered her body as he said scathingly, ‘I might have kissed you when you were seventeen, Olivia, and even done a little groping, but I never took you to bed. And nowadays, fortunately for me, I can prove that he’s no child of mine. If you persist with this farrago of lies I’ll have your bastard DNA-tested, and then I’ll prosecute you for attempted extortion.’

‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ she demanded, suddenly imbued with a strength she’d lacked during the past few months. ‘I wouldn’t have slept with you—’

‘You damned near did everything but sit up and beg for it! In the end I had to tell you that I wasn’t interested.’

She said in a quick, unsteady voice, ‘Simon is not my child! You know he’s my half-brother—and you’re his father!’

CHAPTER TWO

A TENSE silence enfolded them both. Stealing a glance at his face, Olivia could read nothing there except a chilly contempt.

‘And how do you know that?’ he asked in a lethal, silky tone.

‘Because my mother said so,’ she retorted, masking the rapid gut-punch of fear with scorn of her own. ‘She also told me that you knew about him, so it’s no use trying to pretend you had no idea of his existence.’

Olivia had been in love with Drake that long-ago summer when Simon was conceived, and even after his cruel rejection of an offer she hadn’t known she’d made she’d carried the memory of his kiss in some hidden, guarded place in her heart. Foolish and naive of her, but then at seventeen surely one was allowed to be foolish and naive about one’s first love?

It had taken the revelation of Simon’s parentage to destroy both. While she had been shyly, secretly falling in love with Drake, while he had been flirting with her, he had been sleeping with her mother.

Perhaps she could have forgiven him that, for Elizabeth had been radiantly beautiful, possessing a charm and sweetness that had drawn people to her all her life. But after that summer affair Drake had left them all to go to hell in their respective ways. His rejection of his son, his desertion of her mother, had set the seal on Olivia’s disillusion.

Even now he was refusing to admit that he had a child. Although his features were clamped into immobility, his eyes frozen beneath half-closed lids, she could feel his rejection like a palpable force in the room.

‘Start at the beginning,’ he said in a voice that made her jump, ‘and tell me exactly what she said.’

She hesitated, because that meant reopening scars she had hoped were healed. However, one glance told her that there was no disobeying the implacable command in his gaze. In a controlled, flat voice she said, ‘Simon was born about seven months after you left Springs Flat.’

‘I see. What makes you think he wasn’t your stepfather’s child? And don’t tell me he couldn’t have children. He had a daughter by his first wife. Ramona Harley left him and took her daughter back to America long before you came on the scene, but I remember her.’

Olivia looked down at her hands. ‘My mother said that she hadn’t slept with him for over a year,’ she said tonelessly.

‘She could have lied.’

Her head moved in sharp denial. ‘No. That’s what they were quarrelling about—he knew Simon wasn’t his.’

For all the interest he showed she might have been reciting her times tables. ‘How did your mother die?’

She turned her head away from those intimidating eyes. ‘She—she fell one night and hit her head on the corner of the table.’

‘So how did that lead to her daughter ending up in a place like this with her half-brother? Your stepfather is still alive, I believe.’

‘Yes.’ Shocked by the whispering feebleness of her reply, she stiffened her spine. Damn him, he had no right to interrogate her as though she were on the witness stand! ‘He—was unkind to Simon, so after my mother was—died—I took Simon away.’

His brows drew together. Astute eyes scanned her face in a merciless, unhurried survey. ‘And he let you go? Just like that? A seventeen—no, you’d have been eighteen—’

‘Does it matter?’ She glowered down at her hands, so tightly clasped that the knuckles were white. Her body language, she thought mordantly, couldn’t have been more explicit. Carefully she loosened her grip. He noticed, of course, those narrowed eyes following the betraying little movement.

Swiftly, defiantly, she said, ‘I was nineteen, actually. But however old I was, Simon is your son! As you’ll discover when you have him DNA-tested.’ She tried to hide the disdain in her tone, but feared she’d made a bad fist of it.

Although his eyes rested on her face with insulting indifference, she was sure that she could hear the smooth meshing of gears as his brain sorted out the information he needed. When he spoke she almost jumped again.

‘Tell me why you left your stepfather. And this time no rubbish about him not liking the child. I want the truth.’

Every muscle in her body tensed, but because she had rehearsed the answer the words came easily. ‘He resented Simon. I was afraid he’d hurt him.’

She held her breath, letting it out in a small huff of surprise when he demanded no further explanations. ‘All right,’ he said slowly. ‘Why have you waited until now to contact me?’

‘You made it very obvious you didn’t want anything to do with either my mother or your son. Anyway, I didn’t know where you were. After your accident you dropped out of sight completely.’

‘So how did you find out where I was?’

She set her teeth. ‘I saw your photo in the paper.’

‘And you thought, Aha, here’s a pigeon ripe for the plucking—’

‘No! Simon has glue ear, damn you. Do you know what that means? He’s going deaf, and he can’t hear the teacher—can’t understand what she’s telling him, or the sounds she’s trying to teach him in reading. He needs grommets put into his eardrums to drain the ears and every day he waits he drops a little further behind at school.

‘They didn’t pick it up until he’d been at school for a year, so he’s already lost a lot of ground. His behaviour is getting worse too. He used to love school, but now he hates it because the other kids say he’s stupid and call him a dummy. He gets into fights and is disruptive, simply because he can’t hear and can’t keep up. The waiting list to have grommets put in is over a year, and I can’t afford to get it done privately.’

She knew she should tone her aggression down, sound moderate and demure and appealing, but when she thought of Simon’s bewildered suffering during the past year it was all she could do not to swear and shout and throw a tantrum.

‘Your devotion to the child is exemplary.’ He was watching her, his hard mouth compressed into a straight line, grey-green eyes opaque and unmoved. When he continued it was with unnerving precision. ‘But you’ve chosen the wrong man, Olivia. I’m not so conveniently weak I’d let you foist your child on me.’

‘He is not my child.’ Taking in a deep breath, she unclenched her tight jaw and said pleadingly, ‘Drake, please. You can’t turn away from your own son!’

‘You’re right,’ he agreed calmly. ‘I wouldn’t turn away from my own son. It was a nice try, Olivia, but you went about it the wrong way. If you’d written the usual begging letter I might have helped for old times’ sake.’ His eyes wandered openly down her body, returned with cool, speculative contempt to her pale face. ‘I don’t blackmail easily.’

Desperation drove her to say fiercely, ‘If you won’t help him I’ll go to the newspapers and tell them—’

His hands snaked out, catching her wrists in a grip so strong that she winced and cried out. Long fingers relaxing slightly, he said with a soft sibilance that was infinitely more frightening than a loud bluster could ever have been, ‘Stop right now.’

The tumultuous words died on her tongue. She dragged in a shaky breath, suddenly aware that she didn’t really know this man, that they were alone and she was weakened by illness.

Gripped by a sickening fear that she might have done something so irrevocable that all their lives would be marked by it, Olivia’s senses were on full alert; the skin across the back of her neck prickled and tightened, made preternaturally sensitive by her acute awareness of Drake Arundell’s fingers around her wrists. Shocked, she realised that she could smell him—a faint, infinitely troubling scent that set her nerve ends tingling.

Fight or flee, she thought, trying to calm the violent beating of her heart. She couldn’t flee, and intuition warned her that she risked more than she understood if she fought; no wonder tension iced her stomach and clouded her brain.

And then she heard Simon’s voice. ‘Liv!’ he shouted, clattering up the outside staircase. ‘Hey, Liv, guess what? There’s a cool Jag outside! I wonder...’

No! I’m not ready for this! Olivia thought feverishly, wrenching her hands free. Bending so that her face couldn’t be seen, she pretended to pick up a piece of thread from the floor, only straightening when Simon came tearing into the room, honey-gold hair tossing in the wind of his progress, golden-brown eyes sparkling with unaccustomed vitality.

‘...whose it is!’ he finished, skidding to a halt as he took in the tableau in front of him.

‘What are you doing home?’ she asked too sharply. ‘School hasn’t finished yet.’

‘Yes, it has so.’ He flushed, jutting his bottom lip.