SNOWED IN WITH THE BILLIONAIRE (13 page)

He laughed. ‘Not really. I’ve brought a lot in for everyone—I thought we could have a sort of random buffet to welcome everyone back.’

He’d got more, too, in the back of the car, but he’d drop that off later at the refuge, to kick the New Year off.

Pity he couldn’t seem to kick his year off. Off a cliff, maybe.

‘So how was your Christmas?’ he asked belatedly.

She gurgled with laughter. Positively gurgled, and flashed a ring under his nose.

He grabbed her hand and held it still, studying the ring in astonishment. ‘He did it?’

‘He did. In style. Took me to a posh restaurant and went down on one knee and everything.’

He chuckled, and stood up and hugged her. ‘I’m really pleased for you, Tash. That’s great news.’

Her smile faltered and she pulled a face. ‘Yeah. That’s the good news.’

‘And the bad?’ he said, with a sense of impending doom.

‘He’s got a job offer. He’s moving to America for a year—to Chicago—and he wants me to go with him.’

He sat down again, propping his ankle on his knee, his foot jiggling. This was not good news—well, not for him. ‘When?’

‘As soon as you can replace me.’

He shook his head slowly. ‘I’ll never be able to replace you, Tash, but you can go as soon as it’s right for you. I’ll manage.’

‘How?’

He grazed his knuckles lightly over her cheek. ‘You’re not indispensable,’ he said gently. ‘But I will miss you and there’ll always be a place for you here if you want to come back.’

‘Oh, Sebastian, I’ll miss you, too,’ she said, and flung her arms around his neck. ‘I wish you could be happy. I hate it that you’re so sad.’

‘I’m not sad,’ he protested, but she gave him a sceptical look.

‘Yes, you are. You’ve been sad ever since I’ve known you. You don’t even realise it. I don’t know who she was, but I’m guessing you’ve seen her over Christmas, because your eyes look even sadder today.’

He looked away, uncomfortable with her all too accurate analysis.

‘Since when were you a psychotherapist?’ he asked brusquely, but it didn’t put her off. Nothing put Tash off, not when she felt she was on the scent. Maybe it was just as well she was leaving—

‘Is she married?’

He gave up. ‘No. Not any more.’

‘Well, there you are, then. Do you love her? No, don’t answer that, it’s obvious. Does she love you?’

Did she?

‘Yes. But we’re not right for each other. Sometimes love’s just not enough.’

‘Rubbish. It’s always enough. Talk to her, Sebastian. I know you. You never talk about anything that matters to you, not really. The only thing you get really worked up about is the refuge, and you never talk about why.’

‘It’s a good cause.’

She rolled her eyes and pulled the pencil out, shaking her hair down around her shoulders in a shower of shocking pink.

‘Go and see her,’ she said, stabbing him repeatedly in the chest with the end of the pencil to punctuate every word. ‘And talk.
Properly
.’

She dropped the pencil on the desk and swished out of the door. ‘Want a coffee before you go?’ she asked over her shoulder.

Go? ‘Who said anything about going?’ he yelled after her, but she ignored him, so he sat down again and stared out of the window at the river.

It was brown with silt from all the run-off after the thaw, and it looked bleak and uninviting.

Like his house.

Was Tash right? Was he sad all the time?

He swallowed hard. Maybe. He hadn’t always been. Not while he was with Georgie. She’d taken away the ache, made him feel whole again. And this Christmas, with Josh—he’d been happy.

‘Forget the coffee,’ he said, snagging his coat off the hook in Tash’s office on the way past. ‘Don’t forget the food. It’s in the board room. Share it out. And tell Craig he’s a lucky man.’

‘Break a leg,’ she yelled after him, and he gave a little huff of laughter.

He wasn’t really sure what he was doing, and he was far less sure that it would work, but he had to do something, and dithering around for another nine years wasn’t going to achieve anything.

It was time to talk to Georgie. Time to tell her the truth in all its ugly glory.

* * *

He went home first.

Not to his flat, but to the house.

He’d dropped off the extravagant goodies at the refuge on the way, and wished them all a happy New Year, and then he drove back up to Suffolk and let himself in.

He needed the files, so he could show her. And the test results. Everything.

And then he just had to convince her parents to give him her address in Huntingdon.

It wasn’t easy. Her mother was like a Rottweiler, and she wasn’t going to give in without a fight.

‘Why do you want to see her?’

‘I need to talk to her. There are things I need to tell her.’

‘You’ve hurt her.’

He opened his mouth to point out that she’d left him, and shut it. ‘I know,’ he said after a pause. ‘But I want to put it right.’

‘How?’

‘That’s between me and Georgie, Mrs Becket. But I don’t want to hurt her, and I especially don’t want to hurt Josh.’

‘But you will. If you go there, you will.’

‘Not if I don’t go when he’s awake.’

She seemed to consider that for a moment, but then her husband appeared behind her shoulder and frowned at him.

‘I don’t know whether to shake your hand for saving their lives or punch your lights out,’ he growled, and Sebastian sighed.

‘Look, this is nothing to do with Christmas. This is about me, and things about me that she doesn’t know. Things I should have told her years ago.’

‘So why didn’t you?’ his mother asked.

He shrugged, swallowing hard. ‘Because it’s not easy.’

She said nothing for a long moment, then gave a shaky sigh.

‘It never is easy, making yourself vulnerable. 42 Wincanton Close.’

‘Thank you.’ He let his breath out slowly, then sucked it in again. ‘Don’t tell her I’m coming. I don’t want her to do anything silly like go out. I’ll ring her when I’m there, tell her I want to talk to her, ask if she’ll see me. I won’t just rock up on the doorstep. Not if she doesn’t want me to.’

Her mother nodded. ‘Good. Don’t hurt her again, Sebastian. Whatever you do, don’t hurt her again.’

‘Don’t worry, Mrs Becket. I won’t hurt her. Not intentionally. I love her. I’ve always loved her.’

‘I know that. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have given you her address.’

And taking him completely by surprise, she leant forwards and kissed his cheek. ‘Good luck.’

He swallowed. ‘Thank you. I have a feeling I’ll need it.’

‘I don’t think so. It’s been too long coming, but she’ll hear you out. She’s always been fair.’

He nodded, shook her father’s proffered hand and got back in the car. On the seat beside him were a handful of Josh’s toys. The car he’d found under the kitchen table. A train carriage, a piece of track, a little wooden tree. And George’s shampoo out of the corner of the shower cubicle in her room.

He’d nearly kept it, just in case she kicked him out, because the smell of it reminded him so much of her.

42 Wincanton Close, Huntingdon. He punched it into the satellite navigation system in the car, reversed carefully off their drive and hit the road.

No rush.

He had well over an hour before Josh was in bed, maybe more. Plenty of time to work out what he was going to say.

He laughed at himself.

He’d had years. Nine, for the worst bits. Thirteen for the rest, all the time he’d known her. If he didn’t know what to say now, he never would.

‘Oh, man up, Corder. She can only kick you out.’

His gut clenched, and he shut his eyes briefly. He didn’t need to think about failure. Not now.

He just needed to see her. Everything else would follow.

CHAPTER TEN

H
E
FOUND
THE
house easily. It was the one with the ‘For Sale’ board outside, and the lights were on.

He slowed down to a crawl with a sigh of relief, and looked around.

She was right, it was in a nice neighbourhood. Tree lined roads, pleasant modern detached houses in different styles each with their own garage, arranged at different angles to soften the lines.

Respectable, decent. Safe.

He was glad she was safe. Safe was important.

He drove past, turned round and pulled up not quite opposite the house, where he could see it and she could see him, and spent a moment gathering his thoughts.

Hell, it was hard. His heart was pounding, his mouth felt dry and his gut was so tight it almost hurt.

It was time.

He pulled the phone out of his pocket and dialled her number.

She didn’t answer the first time he rang, so he rang again. He knew it was her phone number, because he’d found her phone lying around and she’d got the number stored under ‘me’.

He smiled. Predictable George, to keep the same number. All she had to do was pick up.

She didn’t, so he sent her a text, and sat and waited.

The text just said, ‘Call me’ and gave his number, just in case her phone didn’t come up with it. Unlikely, but he wasn’t giving her any excuses. Not at this point. There was too much riding on it.

And then she rang him, just when he thought she wouldn’t.

‘Sebastian? What is it? I’ve had two missed calls from you and a text. What’s going on?’

‘I need to see you. We need to talk.’ He paused, then went on, his voice gruff. ‘There are things you should know. Things I should have told you years ago. Well, one thing, really, the only one that really matters.’

There was a second of shocked silence. ‘Can you wait an hour? Just until I’ve fed Josh and got him to bed? We’ve been out and I’m on the drag.’

He nodded, although she couldn’t see him. ‘It’s kept for thirteen years. It’ll keep another hour.’

‘I’ll call you.’

‘Don’t bother. I’m outside, in the car. Just flash the porch lights and I’ll come over.’

He saw the curtain twitch, and heard her swift intake of breath. ‘OK. I’ll see you later.’

* * *

He was here.

She couldn’t believe it. Her heart was thrashing, and yet there was something dawning that could have been hope.

‘Josh, do you really want any more of that?’ she asked, and he pushed the plate away and shook his head.

‘Can I play trains?’

‘No. You can have a bath, and I’ll read you a story and you can go to sleep. You’ve got nursery in the morning and it’s late.’

‘Want trains,’ he said, but he trailed upstairs anyway and sat on the loo on his toddler seat while she ran the bath.

She washed his hair because he’d managed to get ketchup in it, and then she dried him and dressed him in his night nappy and pyjamas, curled up with him on the chair in his room and read him a story, and then snuggled him into his cot.

His eyes were wilting, and before she was out of the door he was asleep.

She gave it five minutes, though, because she didn’t want him waking up and interrupting what she instinctively knew was probably the most pivotal conversation of her life.

Cripes.

She went into her bedroom, turned on the bathroom light and studied her face.

She’d been out, and she’d put on a light touch of make-up. Nothing fancy, nothing elaborate, just a touch of eyeshadow and a flick of mascara.

She combed her hair, though, wrestling out the tangles, and eyed her clothes critically. Jeans, a nice jumper, socks.

Hardly dressed to kill, but if he’d wanted that he would have given her notice. And it really, really didn’t matter. Not now. There were far bigger fish to fry.

Her heart in her mouth, she went downstairs and flashed the porch light.

* * *

Game on.

He got out of the car, ran a finger round his collar and crossed the road, locking the car as he walked.

The door swung open, and he stopped on the step.

‘Are you OK with this?’

She searched his eyes, and nodded. ‘Come in. Just don’t talk too loudly. He’s only just gone down.’

Talk too loudly? Now he was here, he didn’t want to talk at all, but that had always been his problem.

She led him into the sitting room, closing the door behind them, and he looked around.

‘Nice house.’

‘Thank you. Can I get you a drink?’

He was dying of thirst. His mouth felt like the desert. ‘Mineral water?’

She nodded and went out, returning a moment later with a bottle and two glasses. She set them down on the coffee table, filled the glasses and then perched on the edge of the sofa, waving her hand at the other end of it.

‘Sit down, Sebastian. You’re cluttering the place up.’

He sat, clearing his throat, sipping the water.

Wondering where to start...

* * *

He’s nervous,
she realised. It surprised her, and it was somehow comforting. Working on the principle that nature abhorred a vacuum, she didn’t speak, supressing the urge to fill the silence in the hope that he would.

He did. He gave a short and utterly humourless laugh, and lifted his head.

‘I don’t know where to start.’

She shifted closer and took his hand, squeezing it gently, her heart pounding. ‘So why don’t you start with saying it straight out, whatever it is, like, I’m gay, or I’ve got cancer, or whatever? And then explain.’

He gave a hollow laugh and his fingers tightened in hers. ‘OK. Well, for a start I’m definitely not gay, and as far as I know I don’t have cancer. I just—I don’t know who I am.’

‘What?’ She searched his eyes, trying to read them, but they were bleak and empty. Lost. And that scared her. She gripped his hand tighter. ‘Sebastian, talk to me.’

He hesitated, then sucked in a breath and said the words that had been dammed up inside him for so long.

‘I’m adopted.’

She stared at him. ‘You’re
what?
When did you find out?’

‘When I was seventeen, nearly eighteen. I had no idea until I wanted to get a driving license. We’d never been abroad, I’d never needed a passport, but I wanted to learn to drive, and my parents procrastinated, and then they had to tell me, because I needed my birth certificate and—well, basically it’s a fabrication.’

She frowned. ‘A fabrication? How?’

He let out a shaky sigh, and his fingers tightened on hers, as if this was the hard bit. ‘Because nobody knew anything about me. I was found,’ he said carefully. ‘In a cubicle, of all places, in the Ladies’ room in a department store.’

‘Oh, Sebastian! That’s so sad. Did they never find your mother? Had she given birth to you in the loos?’

‘No, she hadn’t just given birth to me. I wasn’t a baby. And I was with my mother. She was dead,’ he said, his voice hollow. ‘Dead, and pregnant, and she’d been beaten up. The cleaner found us in the morning, when the department store opened.’

She pressed a hand to her mouth, the shock rippling through her like an explosion. ‘You’d been there
all night
?’

He swallowed, looked away, then looked back at her, and she could see an echo of the horror lurking in the back of his eyes.

He nodded. ‘I must have been. I was two, or thereabouts.’

‘Josh’s age,’ she whispered, feeling sick.

He nodded again. ‘They didn’t know exactly, of course, but they gave me a birth date based on my calculated developmental age, and the place of birth is the town where I was found. They never managed to identify my mother. No woman answering her description was ever reported missing, and nobody’s looked for her since. She had no ID of any sort on her, no handbag, no wallet. Nothing.’

She didn’t know what to say. Shock held her rigid, and it was long seconds before she started to breathe again, short, shaky breaths of horror. She rested her head on his shoulder, and his other hand came up and cradled it tight. She could feel the tremors running through him, the shaking of his hand, the jerky breaths.

What on earth had he gone through in those long, dark hours? She thought of her baby, her precious, darling baby, trapped alone with her dead body in a public toilet cubicle, and silent tears cascaded down her cheeks. She lifted her free hand and found his jaw, cradled it in her palm, turned her head and kissed him.

His tears mingled with hers, and for a long time they sat there holding each other, cheek to cheek, just letting the shockwaves die away. Then he eased away from her and scrubbed his face with his hands, swiping away the tears and sucking in much-needed air.

‘My parents didn’t tell me that all at once. They just told me I was adopted, that I’d been found and nobody knew who my mother was. I assumed she’d abandoned me, so I spent three years hating her, and three years hating my parents for not telling me, for letting me think I was theirs. And then I found out the truth. The whole, ugly, sordid truth, and other things started to make sense. The dreams I’d had all my life. The claustrophobia, the fear of being in a tight space in the dark.’

‘Which is why you freaked out when you were in the attic with Josh.’

He nodded. ‘I heard your footsteps coming, and I said to Josh, “Shh, don’t make a sound,” and we held our breath, and suddenly I had this rush of—I don’t know. Memory? Or just an overworked imagination? But it suddenly seemed so real, as if I recognised the words. And I hear it in my dreams, someone telling me to hush, and the footsteps, and hidden in there with his tiny body next to mine—I just had to get the hell out. Was he all right?’

‘Yes, he was fine, but I wondered what on earth had happened. I knew about your claustrophobia, but it looked—I don’t know. Worse. You looked awful, but you wouldn’t talk to me.’

‘I couldn’t. I’m sorry. I find it really hard to talk about. And I couldn’t talk then, apparently. I didn’t talk until I was nearly three—or what they’d decided was nearly three, although apparently I might have been younger. They kept a growth chart and you’re supposed to be half your adult height at two, and I wasn’t half my current height until I was supposedly two and five months, so I was probably younger than they thought when I was found.’

‘So maybe not even talking at that point.’

‘No. But I was silent, George. It wasn’t just that I didn’t talk, I didn’t cry, or laugh, or babble. I didn’t make a sound—and telling Josh to shush—did she tell me not to make a sound? My mother? Probably, because shut in there with Josh it all felt terrifyingly familiar, so maybe I was just too afraid to speak in case something else bad happened.’

Poor, poor little boy. She shook her head slowly, rubbing the back of his hand with her thumb, slowly, rhythmically, her heart aching for him. Oh, Sebastian...

‘So what happened to you, after you were found? Where did you go?’

‘My parents fostered me. I was put with them straight away, and they moved heaven and earth to adopt me, and gradually I grew more confident and turned into a normal, healthy child, but they never told me. All those years I thought I was theirs, all those birthday parties that weren’t my birthday at all, and then this huge hole opened up underneath me, this void where I’d had security and certainty and a sense of history, of belonging. And it was all a lie. It was only later I learned there had been even more lies, covering up the bits of the truth that even then they didn’t feel they could tell me.’

Her fingers tightened on his. ‘They weren’t lying to you, Sebastian. They were protecting you. Doing what they felt was best.’

‘I know. I know that, and I know they love me, and don’t get me wrong, I love them, too, and I’m deeply grateful for everything they’ve done for me, but—I’m not theirs, and I thought I was, and that really hurts. If they’d told me the truth, right from the beginning, that my mother was dead and that they didn’t know who she was, then it wouldn’t have been such a shock when I heard it.’

‘So when did you find out about your mother? Was that when you changed, when you went so funny on me? You said three years after you first realised you were adopted, so you would have been—what? Twenty? Nearly twenty-one?’

He nodded. ‘Yes. And I just retreated into myself.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asked, desolate now that he’d carried this all alone for so long. ‘Oh, Sebastian, why didn’t you tell me? You should have trusted me. I would have understood.’

‘Because I didn’t want anything to change. I felt that you were the only person who loved me for myself. You weren’t hiding a guilty secret from me, you had no obligation to me, and I was afraid to tell you in case it changed things. That’s why I bought the house, because the time I spent there with you was the happiest time of my life.’

He looked down at her, his eyes tender. ‘I fell in love with you there, on our first date, when you took me there and showed it to me.’

‘That wasn’t a date!’

‘Yes, it was. I knew Jack wasn’t going to be around, and you’d always been friendly towards me. I’d just found out I was adopted, and I needed to get out, give myself time for it all to sink in. And there you were, in a skimpy little top and shorts, your skin kissed by the sun, and when you suggested we went out for the bike ride I thought all my Christmases had come at once.’

‘It
was
just a bike ride.’

‘No. It was you showing me your secret hideaway, letting me into your dreams, sharing your fantasies, and we made fantasies of our own. I was still reeling from the news that I was adopted, and it was an escape from it, a different reality. In the next few weeks it became our own world, somewhere safe that I could go. And suddenly it all seemed plausible. If I could get rich enough, so I could afford it, we could buy the house and live there and found our dynasty, yours and mine, and I would have a real family, my own flesh and blood.’

She touched his cheek, wiping away the last trace of their tears. ‘You should have told me, Sebastian.’

He looked away, his face bleak, and she let her hand fall.

‘I know, but I didn’t want to change things. You knew who you were. You look like your parents. You’re part of them, they’re part of you. And I don’t have that. My brothers do—they aren’t adopted. Nature seemed to have sorted itself out for my parents by that point, and there’s no question that Matt and Andy are theirs, but not me. For me, my identity, my origins, even my nationality will always be a mystery. I’m a cuckoo in the nest, Georgie, and I never forget how much I owe them, but they should have told me.’