Hot Island Nights

“Elizabeth. Slow down.”

He caught her elbow. She spun on him, pulling her arm free.

“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down or that this doesn’t matter, Martin. Don’t you dare.”

Her chest was heaving with the intensity of her emotions and he took a step away, clearly taken aback by her ferocity.

“If I could have told you without breaking your grandfather’s confidence, I would have. Believe me.” He was deeply sincere, his eyes worried.

“You’re my fiancе, Martin. Don’t you think you owe your loyalty to me before my grandfather?”

He ran a hand through his hair. “Under ordinary circumstances, yes, but your grandfather and I have a professional relationship as well as a personal one.”

“I see.” And she did. Martin was hoping to be made partner at the firm this year. The last thing he wanted was to rock the boat.

He reached out and took her hand, his thumb brushing reassuringly across her knuckles. “Elizabeth, if we could go somewhere private and talk this through, I’m sure you’ll understand that everything was done with your best interests at heart.”

Her incredulous laughter sounded loud in the hall.

“My best interests? How on earth would you know what my best interests are, Martin? You’re so busy telling me what’s good for me, you have no idea who I am or what I really want. It’s like those bloody awful Waterford champagne flutes. No one cares what I think, and I’m such a pathetic coward I swallow it and swallow it and swallow it, even while I tell myself it’s because I want to do the right thing and not upset the applecart.”

Martin frowned. “Champagne flutes? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She knew he didn’t, but it was all inextricably entwined in her head: her anger at her grandparents and Martin for this huge betrayal of her trust, her feelings of frustration and panic over the wedding, the suffocated feeling she got every time her grandparents made a decision for her or Martin spoke to her in that soothing tone and treated her as though she were made of fine porcelain.

“I can’t do this,” she said, more to herself than him. “This is a mistake.”

It was suddenly very clear to her.

Martin slid his arm around her shoulders, trying to draw her into a hug. “Elizabeth, you’re getting yourself upset.”

The feeling of his arms closing so carefully around her was the last straw. She braced her hands against his chest and pushed free from his embrace.

“I want to call off the wedding.”

Martin blinked, then reached for her again. “You don’t mean that. You’re upset.”

She held him off. “Violet has been saying for months that I should stop and think about what I’m doing, and she’s right. I don’t want this, Martin. I feel like I’m suffocating.”

“Violet. I might have known she’d have something to do with this. What rubbish has she been filling your head with now? The joys of being a free and easy slapper in West London? Or maybe how to get a head start on cirrhosis?”

He’d never liked Violet, which was only fair, since her best friend had taken a violent aversion to him from the moment they’d first met.

“No, actually. She pointed out that I was going to be thirty this year and that if I didn’t wake up and smell the coffee I’d be fifty and still living the life my grandparents chose for me.”

“What a load of rubbish.”

She looked at him, standing there in his Savile Row suit, his bespoke shirt pristine-white. He didn’t understand. Maybe he couldn’t.

She knew about his childhood, about the poverty and the sacrifices his working-class single mom had made to send him to university. Elizabeth’s life—the life they were supposed to have together once they were married—was the fulfillment of all his aspirations. The high-paying partnership with the long-established law firm, the well-bred wife to come home to, the holidays on the French or Italian Riviera, membership at all the right men’s clubs.

“We can’t get married, Martin. You don’t know who I am,” she said quietly. “How could you? I don’t even know who I am.”

She turned and walked up the hallway.

“Elizabeth. Can we at least talk about this?”

She kept walking. Her grandparents were going to be upset when they heard she’d called off the wedding. It wouldn’t simply be a case of her grandmother having a headache—this would instigate full-scale damage control. They’d use every trick in the book to try to make her see sense. They’d make her feel guilty and stupid and wrong without actually accusing her of being any of those things. And she was so used to not rocking the boat, to toeing the line and doing the right thing that she was terribly afraid that she might listen to them and wind up married to Martin and unpacking all those expensive Harrods housewares in her marital home.

She needed some time to herself. To think. To work things out. Somewhere private and quiet. She thought of Violet’s apartment above her shop and quickly discarded it. Even if it wasn’t only a one bedroom, she wouldn’t find much peace and quiet in Violet’s hectic world. Plus it would be the first place her grandparents would look for her. Then she remembered what she’d said to Martin—I don’t even know who I am—and the answer came to her.

She would go to her father. Wherever he might be. She would find him, and she would go to him, and she would start working out who Elizabeth Jane Mason really was, and what she really wanted.

FOUR DAYS LATER, ELIZABETH OPENED her rental car window and sucked in big lungfuls of fresh air. Her eyes were gritty with fatigue and she opened them wide, willing herself to wakefulness. She’d been traveling for nearly thirty hours to reach the other side of the world and now the foreign, somberhued scrub of rural Australia was rushing past as she drove southwest from Melbourne toward Phillip Island, a small dot on the map nestled in the mouth of Westernport Bay.

She’d spent the past few days holed up in a hotel room in Soho while Violet leaned on her police-officer cousin to use his contacts to locate Elizabeth’s father. The moment she’d learned that Sam Blackwell’s last known place of residence was Phillip Island in Victoria, Australia, Elizabeth had booked a room at a local hotel and jumped on a plane.

She hadn’t spoken to her grandparents beyond assuring them she was fine and perfectly sane and determined to stand by her decision to cancel the wedding. Her grandfather had tried to talk her out of it over the phone, of course, but she’d cut the conversation short.

Whatever happened next in her life was going to be her decision and no one else’s.

The San Remo bridge appeared in front of her and she drove over a long stretch of water. Then she was on the island and the thought of meeting her father, actually looking into his face and perhaps seeing an echo of her own nose or eyes or cheekbones, chased the weariness away.

She had no idea what to expect from this meeting. She wasn’t even sure what she wanted from it. A sense of connection? Information about where she came from? A replacement for the parents she’d lost when she was only seven years old?

The truth was, she could hardly remember her mother and father—or the man she knew as her father. There were snatches of memory—her mother laughing, the smell of her stepfather’s pipe tobacco, moments from a family holiday—but precious little else. Her mother was always slightly sad in her few clear memories, her stepfather distant. Despite her lack of recall—or, perhaps, because of it—she’d always felt as though something profound was missing in her life. Her grandparents had been kind and loving in their own way, but their careful guardianship had not filled the gap the loss of her parents had left in her heart.

A gap she’d never fully acknowledged until right this minute. It was only now that she was on the verge of meeting her biological father for the first time that she understood how much she’d always craved the wordless, instinctive connection between parent and child, how she’d envied her friends their relationships with their parents.

Her hands tightened on the steering wheel and she gave herself a mental pep talk as she drove into the tree-lined main street of the township of Cowes, the most densely populated township on the island. It was highly likely that her father didn’t even know she existed. Arriving on his doorstep full of expectations was the best way to start off on the wrong foot. She needed to be realistic and patient. They were strangers. There was no reason to think that they would feel any special connection with each other, despite the fact that they shared DNA.

And yet her stomach still lurched with nervousness as she turned the corner onto her father’s street and stopped out the front of a cream and Brunswick-green house that had all the architectural appeal of a shoe box. Clad in vertical aluminum siding, it featured a flat roof, a deep overhang over a concrete porch, sliding metal windows and a patchy, brown front lawn.

A far cry from the elegant, historically listed homes of Mayfair. She wiped her suddenly sweaty hands on the thighs of her trousers.

She had no idea what kind of man her father was. What sort of life he’d led. How he might react to his long-lost daughter appearing on his doorstep.

She’d had a lot of time to think about what might have happened between her mother and father all those years ago. In between dodging phone calls from Martin and reassuring her grandparents, she’d made some inquiries. She’d discovered that John Mason and her mother had married in January 1982 when Elizabeth was seventeen months old—further proof, if she’d been looking for it, that the birth certificate was accurate and John was not her father.

What the marriage record couldn’t tell her was when her stepfather and mother had met or how long they’d dated before they got married or if there had been another man on the scene at the time. Her father, for example.

Her grandfather clearly didn’t have a great opinion of Sam Blackwell. She wondered what her father had done to earn his condemnation. She’d been tempted to confront her grandfather again before she departed and insist he tell her everything he knew, but after a great deal of debating she’d decided not to. She was going to meet her father and talk to him and hear his story and form her own opinion about him.

But before she did any of that, she needed to get her backside out of the car and across the lawn to her father’s front door.

She didn’t move.

Come on, Elizabeth. You didn’t fly all this way to sit in a hire car out the front of your father’s house like some sort of deranged stalker.