Unguarded Moment (22 page)

'Debbie!' her father appealed, his face disturbed.

'Don't say any more. Let your mother and me speak to Alix—later, when all this is over.'

'You tell her?' Debbie sneered. 'Just like you've told her all these years, I suppose. You never had any intention of telling her the truth. You and Mum were quite happy to go on letting her think she was your child, when really she was that slut's bastard—and she couldn't even be bothered to bring her up!' Her voice rose almost hysterically.

Alix could feel all the blood draining out of her face. It was a curious sensation, and she wondered quite objectively if she was going to faint.

She said, 'I don't understand—Debbie, what are you saying?'

'Oh, do let me explain, as Mum explained to me.' Debbie's tone was savage. 'She'd been having an affair, your beautiful mother, with a drunken actor in some film she was in, and she was pregnant. These days it wouldn't matter a damn, but it mattered then. It would have affected her career, the type of casting she got. Bianca Layton was aiming for the top, and a fatherless child was going to be a drag all the way. So she persuaded her only sister who'd been wanting a baby, but hadn't had any luck yet—' she almost spat the words, '—to go abroad with her to stay with her, and eventually to pretend that the baby, when it was born, was hers. -And Mum agreed. With the money Bianca gave her, she and Dad moved here, so that their old neighbours wouldn't gossip over this sudden miraculous pregnancy.'

Alix said very quietly, 'No—oh, no.'

'She had you, and she gave you away, but she wouldn't let Mum and Dad adopt you. She was too selfish for that. She just promised that she would stay away, but in the end she didn't even keep her word about that. She was rich and famous, and she came and took you away, just to slap Mum and Dad in the face, and make them see that in spite of everything they'd done for you, you were still her child at heart, with an eye to the main chance just like her!'

Alix's hand swung out and hit Debbie hard across her cheek. She heard the younger girl's squeal of outrage, but ignored it, turning to Philip Coulter.

She said between rigid lips, 'I don't have to ask if this is true. A lot of things make sense to me now.'

'Get out!' Debbie cried. 'Get out now. We don't want you here any more. You're her child. Go back to her— to your loving mother. All these years I've had to share everything with you—had to look up to you because you were the oldest. You cheated me, Alix, you took my birthright, the love that should only have been mine, and I never want to see you again. Paul, get her out of here!'

Paul, clearly wishing he was dead, took a reluctant step forward. Liam interposed himself in front of Alix. He said pleasantly, 'Touch her and I'll make you wish you hadn't.'

He was at least a head taller than Paul, who hesitated, casting an appealing look at Debbie.

'I'm not having this,' Philip Coulter said with sudden energy. 'Debbie, I never thought I would ever feel ashamed that you were my daughter, hut I am—bitterly ashamed. Alix, my dear child—we've got to talk.'

Liam said coldly, 'Isn't it a little late for that?'

Philip looked wretched. 'We discussed telling her a hundred times, but it never seemed appropriate, and besides, we'd given our word.'

'How very noble!' Liam's voice bit. 'So, having decided it was all going to be your little secret, what a pity you didn't keep it a little more closely guarded, or did you imagine a sealed envelope would be proof against your—daughter's curiosity?'

Philip shrugged helplessly. 'I think Margaret had forgotten it was there. It never occurred to us that Debbie had any cause to go searching among the family papers. We didn't even realise she knew where they were kept.'

He looked miserably at the floor. 'Anyway, now you have the whole story.'

'Yes,' Liam said softly, 'I have the whole story.'

Alix stared at him, her eyes widening in a kind of horror.

Philip shook his head as if he had been mesmerised, and was slowly coming round. 'I don't think we've been introduced.' He held out his hand. 'Clearly you're a friend of Alix's, and I'm sure she'll have mentioned your name, but…'

'I've never mentioned his name,' Alix said. 'And he's no friend of mine. As a matter of fact, he's a writer, and at the moment he's trying to collect enough material for a biography about—about Bianca. I think we've provided him with more than enough.'

She turned, wrenching at the front door, and ran down the path, gulping in fresh air, fighting off the nausea that threatened. Liam caught up with her at the gate, swinging her round to face him, his fingers digging cruelly into her flesh.

'Where do you think you're going?'

'Anywhere—as long as it's away from you,' she said wildly.

His grip tightened, and she gave a little cry of pain. 'Don't be a fool!'

'Oh, I've been a fool—I admit that, but it's over now. I thought you were being kind, bringing me here, but it wasn't anything to do with kindness. You knew what was going to happen, didn't you, and that's why you came here. You're a hunter, Liam, and you smelled blood and wanted to be in at the kill.'

'I didn't know what was going to happen here—how could I?' he said roughly. 'But I admit I suspected that you and Bianca enjoyed a closer relationship than she was prepared to admit. That first time I saw you on the stairs—God, you were so like her—the pictures I'd seen of her when she was your age. And then the next time I saw you, you were unrecognisable, like a flame that had been dowsed, in that disguise she made you wear. She was terrified that people would see the resemblance.'

'Poor Bianca,' Alix said tightly. 'She didn't allow for your persistence, did she, Liam? I hope your publishers appreciate just how far you carried your researches, and reward you adequately. Thirty pieces of silver used to be the going rate, I believe.'

He let go of her so suddenly that she staggered and almost fell. His eyes were blazing as he looked at her. 'And what the hell's that supposed to mean?'

The desire to hit back, to salve her own pain by inflicting wounds, was suddenly quenched in Alix. Her shoulders slumped defeatedly. 'It doesn't matter. You've got what you wanted, Liam, and all I hope is that I never have to see you again.'

'Then your hope is destined to remain unfulfilled,' he said between his teeth. 'We're going back to the house now, to get some sleep, because tomorrow we're flying back to Italy.'

'To provide you with some dialogue for the dramatic reunion?' A sob rose in her throat. 'I won't do it.'

'No,' he said. 'To provide you with your real mother, and give you both a chance to care about each other.'

'Care?' she repeated, and gave a little incredulous laugh. 'Oh, she cared. She cared so much, she gave me away to her sister.'

'And then she took you back again. Don't be vindictive, Alix. Just imagine her position. Her career was just taking off, she was in love, and she'd just realised the man she loved was a hopeless alcoholic. If she'd cared as little as you think, she'd have had an abortion. But instead she carried you, and gave birth to you, and then did her best for you by making sure you were brought up in a decent, loving home. Oh, Fin not suggesting her motives were totally altruistic, but what kind of a childhood would you have had if she'd kept you, being dragged round by nannies in Bianca's wake? And she couldn't have known then how quickly the climate of morality was going to change.'

Alix bit her lip. 'I can't wait to read this,' she said. 'There won't be a dry eye in the house. All right, Liam, I'm convinced. Bianca's a saint and I'm the luckiest girl in the world. But I'm not going to Italy or anywhere else with you. I could have warned Bianca about Carlo Veronese and I didn't. When you see her, you can tell her that you could have warned me about this, yet you didn't, so it all cancels out quite neatly. I hope she appreciates the joke.'

'I could have warned you about what? My suspicions? Supposing I'd been wrong.' He shook his head. 'I couldn't risk that. But all the same I had this gut feeling that I ought to stay close to you.'

'Ah, you excelled at that,' she said in bitter mockery. 'How very close you did stay, to be sure. I think I want to be sick.'

His head went back as if she had struck him. 'Say what you want, Alix, but it doesn't change a thing. Only an hour or so ago, you were going crazy in my arms.'

She winced, rejecting the memories he had deliberately evoked.

'Well, I'm sane again now, and I intend to stay that way. You don't have to stand guard over me any longer. Just leave me alone from now on. Go and confront Bianca with what you know. Get some more quotes for the Book of the Year, but didn't expect any help from me.' She gave an unsteady laugh. 'You told me tonight to obey my instincts. Well, I wish to heaven I'd obeyed my earliest one and avoided you like the plague. At least I'd still have my self-respect.'

For a moment Liam looked at her, and she saw a muscle jerk and quiver in his face, then he turned and walked out of the gate. She watched him climb into his car, and heard the engine roar into life. Her hands gripped the garden gate so tightly that her knuckles turned white as she saw the tail-lights disappear down the road.

She thought, 'That's it. Over. All over.' In the space of a few hours, her entire world had been turned upside down. Now she belonged nowhere, and to no one, and standing in the darkness at the gate of the house she had always thought of as her home, Alix felt alone, afraid and very desolate.

'Now,' said Gemma for the umpteenth time, 'are you sure you'll be. all right? There's masses of food in the fridge for supper—that's if I really can't persuade you to go with us.'

Alix smiled at her from the floor cushion she was occupying near the fire. 'You certainly can't. Candlelit suppers are for two, not three.' She raised her eyebrows as David called impatiently from the front door, 'Gemma, are you ever coming?'

'Yes, O master,' Gemma muttered as she hastily shovelled her purse, keys, compact and lipstick from one bag to another, and cast a frantic look round the room as if she was expecting it to collapse in a pile of dust as soon as she turned her back on it.

'Go,' Alix urged, 'or you'll be celebrating a divorce instead of a wedding anniversary!'

'But I feel awful leaving you here by yourself.' Gemma snarled at her reflection in the mirror above the fireplace and tweaked unavailingly at an errant curl. 'Yes, I'm coming,' she shrieked back, as another despairing bellow was heard from the direction of the front door. 'My God, this meal had better be worth all the hassle!'

Alix responded to their last shouted 'goodbyes', then the front door banged, and she was alone.

She grimaced slightly. Alone was a word she had tried to cut out of her vocabulary over the past weeks, and with Gemma and David's help, she had almost succeeded.

After Liam had driven off that night, Philip had come awkwardly down the path and tried to persuade her to go back to the house, but she had refused. She couldn't face Debbie's hostility again so soon.

Instead, she had walked round the corner to Gemma's house, and Gemma had taken one look at her white face and blank tearless eyes and firmly drawn her inside. David, who had been dozing in front of the television, had been dispatched to make coffee, and when Alix had finished hers, she was taken upstairs to the spare bedroom where clean cotton sheets and a hotwater bottle awaited her. Left to herself, she had eventually cried herself into an exhausted sleep. When she had finally presented herself downstairs the following day, Gemma had asked no questions, making it clear that any confidence would have to be volunteered.