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She heard what he didn’t say. Why do you think you’re better than me? The thing was, she didn’t. He wouldn’t believe that, though. She moistened her lips. ‘I didn’t think I’d be welcome there. I don’t believe Tash thinks well of me.’
He scowled. ‘What on earth—?’
‘A while back I went into the Royal Oak.’ It was the hotel where Tash worked. Nell had been lonely and had wanted to connect with people she’d never been allowed to connect with before. For heaven’s sake, they all lived in the same neighbourhood. They should know each other. She was careful to keep the hurt out of her voice. She’d had a lot of practice at that too.
There you go again, feeling sorry for yourself.
She lifted her chin. ‘I ordered a beer. Tash poured me a lemon squash and made it clear it’d be best for all concerned if I drank it and left.’
Rick stared at her, but his face had lost its frozen closeness. ‘And you took that to mean she didn’t like you?’
She had no facility for making friends and the recent downturn in her circumstances had only served to highlight that. ‘Yes, I did.’
‘Princess, I—’
‘I really wish you wouldn’t call me that.’ She’d never been a princess, regardless of what Rick thought. ‘I much prefer Nell. And there’s absolutely no reason at all why Tash should like me.’ Given the way her parents had ensured that Nell hadn’t associated with the local children, it was no wonder they’d taken against her. Or that those attitudes had travelled with them into adulthood.
He looked as if he wanted to argue so she continued—crisp, impersonal, untouchable. ‘Do you recall the gardener who worked here for many years?’
He leant back, crossed a leg so his ankle rested on his knee. Despite the casual demeanour, she could see him turning something over in his mind. ‘He was the one who chased me away that day?’
That day. She didn’t know how that day could still be so vivid in her mind. ‘Come and play.’ She’d reached out a hand through the eight-foot-high wrought iron fence and Rick had clasped it briefly before John had chased him off. John had told her that Rick wasn’t the kind of little boy she should be playing with. But she’d found an answering loneliness in the ten-year-old Rick’s eyes. It had given her the courage to speak to him in the first place. Funnily enough, even though Rick had only visited twice more, she’d never felt quite so alone again.
That day John had given her her very own garden bed. That had helped too.
But Rick remembered that day as well? Her heart started to pound though she couldn’t have explained why. ‘Yes, John was the one who chased you away.’
‘John Cox. I remember seeing him around the place. He drank at the Crown and Anchor, if memory serves me. Why? What about him?’
‘Did you know him well?’
‘I’m not sure I ever spoke to the man.’
‘Right.’ She frowned. Then this just didn’t make any sense.
‘Why?’ The word barked out of him. ‘What has he been saying?’
‘Nothing.’ She swallowed. ‘He died eight months ago. Lung cancer.’
Rick didn’t say anything and, while he hadn’t moved, she sensed that his every muscle was tense and poised.
‘John and I were...well, friends of a kind, I guess. I liked to garden and he taught me how to grow things and how to keep them healthy.’
‘Cooking and gardening? Are your talents endless, Princess?’
She should’ve become immune to mockery by now, but she hadn’t. She and Rick might’ve shared a moment of kinship fifteen years ago, but they didn’t have anything in common now. That much was obvious. And she’d long given up begging for friends.
She gave a shrug that was designed to rub him up the wrong way, in the same way his ‘Princess’ was designed to needle her. A superior shrug that said I’m better than you. Her mother had been proficient at those.
Rick’s lip curled.
She tossed her hair back over her shoulder. ‘John kept to himself. He didn’t have many friends so I was one of the few people who visited him during his final weeks.’
Rick opened his mouth. She readied herself for something cutting, but he closed it again instead. She let out a breath. Despite what Rick might think of her, she’d cried when John had died. He’d been kind to her and had taken the time to show her how to do things. He’d answered her endless questions. And he’d praised her efforts. The fingers she’d been tapping on her now cold coffee cup stopped.
‘Nell?’
She dragged herself back from those last days in John’s hospice room. ‘If the two of you never spoke, then what I’m about to tell you is rather odd, but...’
‘But?’
She met his gaze. ‘John charged me with a final favour.’
‘What kind of favour?’
‘He wanted me to deliver a letter.’
Dark brown eyes stared back at her, the same colour as dark chocolate. Eighty per cent cocoa. Bitter chocolate.
‘He wanted me to give that letter to you, Rick.’
‘To me?’
She rose and went to the kitchen drawer where she kept important documents. ‘He asked that I personally place it in your hands.’
And then she held it out to him.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_eeba4f31-b98b-57c4-b2ba-5f5144975aea)
EVERY INSTINCT RICK had urged him to leap up and leave the room, to race out of this house and away from this rotten city and to never return.
He wanted away from Nell and her polished blonde perfection and her effortless nose-in-the-air superiority that was so at odds with the girl he remembered.
Fairy tales, that was what those memories were. He’d teased them out into full-blown fantasies in an effort to dispel some of the grim reality that had surrounded him. He’d known at the time that was what he’d been doing, but he’d wanted to hold up the promise of something better to come—a chance for a better future.
Of course, all of those dreams had shattered the moment he’d set foot inside a prison cell.
Still...
The letter in Nell’s outstretched hand started to shake. ‘Aren’t you going to take it?’
‘I’m not sure.’
She sat.
‘I have no idea what this John Cox could have to say to me.’ Did she know what was in the letter? He deliberately loosened his shoulders, slouched back in his chair and pasted on a smirk. ‘Do you think he’s going to accuse me of stealing the family silver?’
She flinched and just for a moment he remembered wild eyes as she ordered, ‘Run!’
He wanted her to tell him to run now.
‘After all, I didn’t disappoint either his or your father’s expectations.’
Those incredible eyes of hers flashed green fire and he wondered what she’d do next. Would she frogmarch him off the premises with his ear between her thumb and forefinger. And if she tried it would he let her? Or would he kiss her?
He shifted on the chair, ran a hand down his T-shirt. He wasn’t kissing the Princess.
‘If memory serves me correctly—’ she bit each word out ‘—you went to jail on drug charges, not robbery. And if the rumours buzzing about town are anything to go by, those charges are in the process of being dropped and your name cleared.’
Did she think that made up for fifteen months behind bars?
A sudden heaviness threatened to fell him. One stupid party had led to...
He dragged a hand down his face. Cheryl, at seventeen, hadn’t known what she’d been doing, hadn’t known the trouble that the marijuana she’d bought could get her into—could get them all into. She’d been searching for escape—escape from a sexually abusive father. He understood that, sympathised. The fear that had flashed into her eyes, though, when the police had burst in, her desperation—the desperation of someone who’d been betrayed again and again by people who were supposed to love her—it still plagued his nightmares.
His chest cramped. Little Cheryl who he’d known since she’d started kindergarten. Little Cheryl who he’d done his best to protect...and, when that hadn’t been enough, who he’d tried to comfort. He hadn’t known it then, but there wasn’t enough comfort in the world to help heal her. It hadn’t been her fault.
So he’d taken the blame for her. He’d been a much more likely candidate for the drugs anyway. At the age of eighteen he’d gone to jail for fifteen months. He pulled in a breath. In the end, though, none of it had made any difference. That was what really galled him.
Nell thrust out her chin. ‘So drop the attitude and stop playing the criminal with me.’
It snapped him out of his memories and he couldn’t have said why, but he suddenly wanted to smile.
‘The only way to find out what John has to say is to open the letter.’
He folded his arms. ‘What’s it to you, anyway?’
‘I made a promise to a dying man.’
‘And now you’ve kept it.’
She leaned across, picked up his hand and slapped the letter into it. She smelled sweet, like cupcakes. ‘Now I’ve kept it.’
A pulse pounded inside him. Nell moved back. She moved right across to the other side of the kitchen and refilled their mugs from the pot kept warm by the percolator hotplate. But her sugar-sweet scent remained to swirl around him. He swallowed. He blinked until his vision cleared and he could read his name in black-inked capitals on the envelope. For some reason, those capitals struck him as ominous.
For heaven’s sake, just open the damn thing and be done with it. It’d just be one more righteous citizen telling him the exact moment he’d gone off the rails, listing a litany of perceived injuries received—both imagined and in some cases real—and then a biting critique of what the rest of his life would hold if he didn’t mend his ways.
The entire thing would take him less than a minute to read and then he could draw a line under this whole stupid episode. With a half-smothered curse he made deliberately unintelligible in honour of the Princess’s upper class ears, he tore open the envelope.
Heaving out a breath, he unfolded the enclosed sheet of paper. The letter wasn’t long. At least he wouldn’t have to endure a detailed rant. He registered when Nell placed another mug of coffee in front of him that she even added milk and sugar to it.
He opened his mouth to thank her, but...
The words on the page were in the same odd style of all capitals as the envelope. All in the same black ink. He read the words but couldn’t make sense of them to begin with.
They began to dance on the page and then each word rose up and hit him with the force of a sledgehammer. He flinched. He clenched the letter so hard it tore. He swore—loud and rude and blue—as black dots danced before his eyes.
Nell jumped. He expected her to run away. He told himself he hoped she would.
‘Rick!’ Her voice and its shrillness dive-bombed him like a magpie hostile with nesting instinct. ‘Stick your head between your knees. Now!’
And then she was there, pushing his head between his knees and ordering him to breathe, telling him how to do it. He followed her instructions—pulling air into his lungs, holding it there and releasing it—but as soon as the dizziness left him he surged upright again.
He spun to her and waved the balled-up letter beneath her nose. ‘Do you know what this says? Do you know what the—’
He pulled back the ugly language that clawed at his throat. ‘Do you know what this says?’ he repeated.
She shook her head. ‘I wasn’t there when he wrote it. It was already sealed when he gave it to me. He never confided in me about its contents and I never asked.’ She gave one of those shrugs. ‘I’ll admit to a passing curiosity.’ She drew herself up, all haughty blonde sleekness in her crazy, beautiful Hawaiian dress. ‘But I would never open someone else’s mail. So, no, I haven’t read its contents.’
He wasn’t sure he believed her.
She moved back around the table, sat and brought her mug to her lips. It was so normal it eased some of the raging beast inside him.
She glanced up, her eyes clouded. ‘I do hope he hasn’t accused you of something ridiculous like stealing my grandmother’s pearls.’
He sat too. ‘It’s nothing like that.’
‘Good, because I know for a fact that was my father.’
He choked. Father. The word echoed through his mind. Father. Father. Father. In ugly black capitals.
‘And I’m sorry I’ve not tracked you down sooner to give that letter to you, but John died and then my father’s business fell apart and...and I wasn’t sure where to look for you.’
He could see now that she hadn’t wanted to approach Tash to ask how she might find him.
He wasn’t sorry. Not one little bit.
‘But when I heard you were home...’
He dragged a hand down his face before gulping half his coffee in one go. ‘Did he say anything else to you when he gave you this?’ The letter was still balled in his hand.
She reached out as if to swipe her finger through the frosting of one of the cupcakes, but she pulled her hand back at the last moment. ‘He said you might have some questions you’d like to ask me and that he’d appreciate it if I did my best to answer them.’
He coughed back a hysterical laugh. Some questions? All he had were questions.
Her forehead creased. ‘This isn’t about that nonsense when we were ten-year-olds, is it?’
He didn’t understand why she twisted her hands together. She wasn’t the one who’d been hauled to the police station.
‘I tried to tell my parents and the police that I gave the locket to you of my own free will and that you hadn’t taken it. That I gave it to you as a present.’
She stared down into her coffee and something in her face twisted his gut.
‘I thought it was mine to give.’ She said the words so softly he had to strain to catch them. He thought about how she’d handed her apartment, her car and her trust fund all over to her father without a murmur. So why refuse to hand over Whittaker House?
She straightened and tossed back her hair. ‘That was the moment when I realised my possessions weren’t my own.’
But for some reason she felt that Whittaker House was hers?
