saying that.’
‘Why? It’s true.’ It was the low, warning growl of a wounded animal. ‘You believe that people are basically good and that happy endings come to those who wait. You believe in love.’ He spoke the word with cynical emphasis that said everything there was to be said about his own belief system.
This time she did take his hand and held tightly, refusing to let him pull away. ‘We’re talking about you, not me. Tell me why you hate the water.’
The silence stretched for so long she started to think that he was never going to talk.
And then he spoke. ‘There was a lake—’ his voice was hoarse ‘—in the grounds of our house. I grew up in this huge, soulless stately home. Wolfe Manor. A privileged upbringing, or so everyone always told me. It was big. Big enough to play hide and seek and never get found, which was useful because hiding was part of how I lived.’
‘Who were you hiding from, Nathaniel?’
He stared into the darkness, his eyes focused on nothing. ‘The lake was huge. No matter how blue the sky, the water was always dark. Just below the surface you could see the weeds, floating like tentacles ready to grab an ankle. None of us knew how deep it was, but we did know that one of our ancestors had drowned there.’
Katie shivered, although whether it was the words or the tone, she didn’t know. ‘It sounds like a pretty menacing place.’
‘When we were very young we used to believe that a monster lurked in the middle.’
Without thinking, she lifted her hand and smoothed her fingers over his face. Her fingertips registered the roughness of stubble and the perfect symmetry of his jaw. Those smouldering good looks belonged to the man. There was no trace of the boy in his face, but it was surprisingly easy to imagine how he might have been back then, a child, standing by that lake, fascinated and horrified in equal measure, terrified of the monster.
‘What happened?’ She asked the question in the absolute certainty that something had. ‘Nathaniel?’
His blue eyes fixed on hers with a fierce intensity, revealing indecision and a deeply inbred reluctance to share with anyone.
After a moment he stood abruptly and paced to the front of the terrace. His hands curled over the railing, his knuckles white with the force of his grip.
‘It was late evening. Dark. I’d been doing something I shouldn’t—as usual. Messing about. My father picked me up and threw me in that lake.’ His voice shook with repressed emotion. ‘I don’t know whether it was the look on his face just before he hurled me in or the words he spoke, but the shock froze all my reactions. I didn’t even struggle. When I hit the water I thought, This is it, I’m going to drown. I remember wondering how long it would take and whether it was going to hurt. I remember struggling below the surface, trying to get my legs free of the weeds, watching his back as he walked away, thinking, He’ll come back and save me in a minute. He didn’t.’ He kept his back to her, his voice strangely flat as he recounted an incident so sickening that for once Katie found herself without words as she struggled to absorb the full implications of that driven confession.
‘No.’ Her voice trembled with uncertainty. She thought about her own father, of the games they’d played where he’d tumbled her upside down and tossed her in the air. ‘It must have been a joke that went wrong. He must have been playing a game.’
‘He wasn’t playing. Afterwards I tried to rationalise it to myself. I’d been messing around instead of raking the leaves. I’d had it coming to me. I was so young I didn’t really understand.’ He recited the options in a flat tone. ‘I thought it was me. My fault. I thought if I did the right thing, he’d love me. It isn’t easy for a child to absorb the fact that isn’t ever going to happen.’
He’d wanted his daddy’s approval, the way all little boys did.
He’d wanted love. Wasn’t that the minimum any child should expect from a parent?
Katie felt the numbness spread through her body. She’d never felt so inadequate, not even when her father had died and the whole ghastly mess he’d left had come to light. She wanted to say exactly the right thing but how could you say anything right about something so wrong?
Nathaniel turned his head to look at her. His eyes were hard and his mouth slanted into a cynical smile. ‘Poor Katie. Now I’ve destroyed your essential belief that all human beings are good and that life always ends in a happy ever after.’
She roused herself. ‘I don’t think that. I don’t think that all human beings are good, but …’ She drew breath, struggling to imagine how it must feel to have a father that brutal. ‘What about your mother?’
‘Ah, my mother …’ His expression altered. ‘Well, the one thing you need to know about my mother was that she was in love with my father. She only ever wanted one thing and that was for him to love her back. He didn’t, of course. My father didn’t love anyone.’ His tone was derisive and contemptuous, layered with bitterness and years of pain and rejection. ‘He was the wrong guy for someone as sensitive and fragile as my mother. It was like placing Venetian glass under a sledgehammer. He shattered her. She … left.’
Katie winced at the image he drew. ‘So you were left alone with your father?’ The man he’d described was a monster.
‘Not on my own. Some aristocratic English families collect Renaissance art or Louis XV furniture. My father collected women. And those women had children. Children my father was never interested in.’
‘He didn’t want children?’
‘My father was interested only in himself.’
Katie stood and the swing creaked. Her feet silent on the deck, she took two steps and placed her hands on his shoulders. Her fingers encountered knots of tension under hard solid muscle. ‘Who rescued you from the lake that day? How did you survive?’
‘My half-brother Jacob. He was nine years older than me and it wasn’t the first time he’d fished me out of the lake.’ Something flickered in his eyes. ‘His role in the family was to clear up my father’s mess. He hauled me choking out of the water, pumped the water out of my lungs and kept me out of the monster’s way until he’d drunk enough to forget I even existed.’
‘Nathaniel—’
‘It’s all right. You don’t have to try and find the right thing to say. In this case, there really isn’t anything. Even someone with your sweet, sunny nature can’t put a positive spin on a father like mine, although for years I tried to do just that.’
‘Is he still alive?’
‘No. He died when I was nine years old.’ His voice was savage. ‘You think you’ve heard the worst? Ask me how my father died, Katie. Ask me that question.’
The air around them felt thick and heavy. ‘How did he die?’
‘We were all home from boarding school for the holidays. My sister had taken advantage of his absence to sneak out of the house to a party in the village. She wasn’t even fourteen, but she was already stunning and that night she decided to flaunt it. Lipstick, miniskirt—’ He broke off, his face several shades paler than normal. ‘It would have been fine, except that he came back early.’
‘Your father?’
‘He’d seen her flirting in the village and when he arrived home he took a whip to her.’
Katie flinched, her imagination making it all too easy to imagine the cruel bite of the whip. ‘He beat her?’
‘His intention was to make sure no boy would ever look at her again, but he was drunk and out of control and he beat her so brutally that he would have killed her if Jacob hadn’t stopped him. And the whole time I stood there shaking and yelling, “Stop it! Stop it!”’ He stared down at his shaking hands. ‘That night I learned how it felt to be helpless. Powerless.’