Sharon Kendrick Collection. Sharon Kendrick

‘Are you going to let me tell you my story?’ he queried silkily.

      The trouble was that she was dying to hear it—and, what was more, Geraint knew it, too! ‘I can’t very well stop you, can I?’ she snapped.

      He hesitated, as if searching for the most diplomatic way of saying it, and that brief temporising was enough to make Lola sit up. Literally. She stared at him, sensing that something momentous was about to happen.

      ‘Please tell me.’

      ‘Peter Featherstone was your father,’ he told her gently.

      Her denial was instant and furious—what an absolutely absurd thing to say! Her father had died when she was eleven—he was lying!

      ‘No! He was not my father!’ She was on him in seconds, pummelling her fists hard against his chest, raining blows on him which would have winded a lesser man, but he did not move out of her line of fire, not once; he just let her get her anger out of her system.

      ‘You’re lying, Geraint Howell-Williams!’ she gasped. ‘You’re lying to me!’

      And then, quite suddenly, all the fight went out of her. She stopped hitting him and slumped back against the bench, like a puppet whose strings had just been cut off.

      He spoke calmly, with the solicitude of a doctor breaking bad news. ‘I’m not lying, Lola,’ he said, very quietly. ‘But you know that in your heart. Don’t you?’

      She buried her face in her hands and rocked backwards and forwards. She did not make a single sound, but when she looked up her cheeks were pale and tear-stained, and pain darkened Geraint’s grey eyes as he registered her shock.

      ‘Don’t you?’ he repeated.

      She nodded. ‘There’s no reason for you to lie, Geraint. I believe you.’ Strangely enough, she would have believed him anyway—simply on account of the truthful intensity which burned in his eyes—but there was no need for him to know that.

      Not yet, anyway.

      ‘How—did you find out?’ she asked eventually.

      ‘I went to see your mother.’

      ‘You’ve seen my mother?’ she asked him in disbelief. ‘Where? When?’

      ‘Yesterday. I went to Cornwall.’

      ‘But how on earth did you know where she lived?’

      ‘You told me. When we were in Rome. Remember?’

      Yes, come to mention it she did recollect mentioning the name of the small village in passing. Fancy him remembering that! Lola lifted her head slowly. ‘But why did my mother tell you?’ she whispered. ‘And why now?’

      He looked at her steadily. ‘I think that the burden of the secret she’s been carrying for all these years finally became too onerous for her to bear any longer—’

      ‘But why tell you, Geraint?’ she asked him again. ‘A man who is a total stranger to her?’

      He gave her a soft smile. ‘Maybe your mother has more perceptiveness than you give her credit for,’ he answered obscurely. ‘But perhaps you should ask her for yourself, Lola.’

      Lola screwed her face up. ‘What? You mean go down to Cornwall? To see her?’

      He smiled. ‘See her, certainly. But there isn’t any need to go down to Cornwall. Why don’t you try next door?’

      ‘Next door?’

      ‘Uh-huh. I brought your mother back with me. She’s at Dominic’s. And she’s waiting for you, Lola.’

       CHAPTER NINE

      DOMINIC DASHWOOD’S house, although about four times the size of Marchwood, was nothing like Lola had imagined it would be.

      Because he was so rich—richer by reputation than anyone else she knew—she had been convinced that the place would be filled with costly antiques. But it wasn’t. It was a minimalist’s heaven, with its streamlined, carefully chosen pieces of furniture and its pale, polished wooden floors, occasionally strewn with silk rugs far too beautiful to walk on.

      And in the midst of all this understated wealth sat Lola’s mother, June Hennessy, desperately trying not to look nervous and failing spectacularly.

      She was a woman whose youthful prettiness had survived, to give her face something approaching a serene kind of beauty in her forties. Her ash-blonde hair was still glossy and her beautiful pale blue eyes owed much to her Austrian parentage.

      Sitting opposite her now, Lola was taken aback by how different she and her mother looked—and how she had always subconsciously pushed those differences to the back of her mind. She was also still reeling from the fact that Geraint had managed to get her mother up from Cornwall at such short notice, and seemingly without any trouble at all—the man must have hidden strengths!

      ‘Will you tell me the whole story, Mum?’ she asked as she sat down on a squashy white sofa, her hands locked tightly together in her lap. ‘Every bit of it, please. Don’t spare me details just because they might hurt me—I need to know, you see.’

      ‘Yes, I realise that now,’ said her mother slowly. ‘Geraint made me realise that.’

      Geraint? Why on earth had her mother’s voice softened to speak of Geraint in an almost awe-filled way?

      But that was not important now. She had come to talk about her father, and Geraint could wait. Lola lifted her chin expectantly.

      ‘Tell me, Mum.’

      ‘It’s a story as old as time itself,’ her mother began quietly. ‘I was just eighteen when I met Peter Featherstone—I was working as a barmaid at the local yacht club and he was taking an extended sailing holiday after pulling off the biggest merger of his career.’

      Her smile was tinged with nostalgia as she looked across the room at her daughter. ‘He was just over twenty years older than me—but he certainly didn’t look it. Or act it! He was a devastatingly handsome man—with dark, curly hair and bright blue eyes just like yours! And he was quite unlike anyone I had ever met before—funny, good-looking, rich and confident. I fell madly in love with him, and, being thoroughly inexperienced, made no attempt whatsoever to hide it. He didn’t want to have anything to do with me, of course, not in that way.’

      ‘He—didn’t?’ asked Lola in surprise.

      Her mother shook her ash-blonde head. ‘Of course he didn’t! I was too young. Much too young. And gauche. Naive, too. I was looking for Mr Right, and he certainly didn’t fit the bill—or so he told me!’

      ‘He told you that?’ asked Lola breathlessly.

      ‘Yes, he did. Peter had never married because he recognised the limitations of marriage—for him, anyway. He told me all this quite honestly—and although it was not what I wanted to hear—I always respected him for his openness.’

      ‘But you had his baby, Mum?’ said Lola, her brow furrowed with confusion. ‘How—if he was so against it? What made him change his mind?’

      Her mother threw her an odd look. ‘This part of the story, too, lacks originality. That’s one of the things you discover as you grow older, Lola—that patterns of behaviour carry on repeating themselves, no matter how often they fly in the face of experience—’

      ‘Mum, please.’

      June Hennessy smiled. ‘It was the night of the yacht club ball—a very prestigious affair—and I was to be Peter’s partner.’

      ‘How come?’

      ‘Oh, I had dropped so many hints I think he was too much of a gentleman to say no! And he was planning to leave the following day. I think he thought that no harm could