Long-Lost Son: Brand-New Family. Lilian Darcy
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but she’s gone now, and I’m wondering if that might make you change your mind. After all, you are the only father he’s got…
Exhausting.
Too hard.
She’d asked someone about Luke, but maybe no one had passed the message on. Or, no, with services in the whole region so strapped, he’d be working around the clock, playing the hero.
He had a nice line in heroic behaviour. People loved the casual humour, the god-like reassurances and the warm fire in his amber-brown eyes, and immediately believed in him. She knew what he was like…or had known once…He wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to show off in all this chaos. Which was good, because she didn’t have the energy for their confrontation just yet.
‘Honey, we might take you back to play with Max, OK?’ she heard Georgie say. ‘Auntie Janey needs to rest for a while now.’
He stood there looking at her for a moment, frowning, giving off that same sense that he was about to speak, that the words were just crammed in his mouth bursting to come out, but as usual he stayed silent.
‘Bye, sweetheart,’ she managed, then the sleepy fog stole over her brain again, and hours passed.
The next time she woke up, her head had cleared, her stomach wanted food, her limbs were ready for a good stretch and altogether she felt about a hundred years better.
Until she became aware of the quiet masculine presence in the chair beside her bed—dark hair, strong shoulders, genuine, implacable fatigue written all over him—and realised it was Luke.
LUKE looked exhausted and stressed.
He had bloodshot eyes, hair yelling for a brush, even a streak of dried mud along his jaw. He looked older. There were some lines around his eyes and mouth. Janey hadn’t seen him in, what, seven years? No, just under six, if you counted photographs.
Alice had sent one from London shortly after Felixx’s birth—a casual shot of both parents and the tiny bundle of baby snuggled between them. Alice had looked tired, but Luke had glowed—the archetypical proud father. Just three months later, their marriage had shattered. Janey still didn’t know the full story, and what she did know had come only from Alice.
So how did you even start in a situation like this?
With ‘hello’ apparently.
Luke said it first, his voice low and tired and husky. Despite the changes in his appearance, he was still the man she remembered, dark and ferociously good-looking, with those trust-me-I’m-a-hero amber-brown eyes and a confident mouth that had rarely bothered to bestow its charming smile on Janey. She’d seen it quirked in annoyance or outright anger far more often.
‘Hello, Luke,’ she answered him. ‘It’s good to see you.’
His smile was strained. Good to see each other? Maybe. And they both looked wrecked. He carried his fatigue well, but she had no illusions about the appearance she must present after two days of unconsciousness in a hospital bed—and she’d never been the pretty one of the two Stafford girls.
‘It’s been a while,’ Luke said.
‘Too long.’
His face changed. The strong jaw suddenly looked harder. No charm in evidence at all. ‘Don’t put that down to me, Janey. Just don’t. I contacted you and your parents over and over, asking you to put me in touch with Alice, and you insisted you didn’t know where she was.’
‘We didn’t, then. She didn’t contact us for a couple of years.’
‘But you do now?’
‘It’s complicated…’
‘Explain, Janey. Pretend I’m completely in the dark, no idea what’s been going on for the past five and a half years with my wife or my son. Just pretend, OK?’ His voice dripped with harsh sarcasm on those last three words.
Oh, lord, their dealings were getting badly strained already, and she had some shattering news to impart!
I won’t do this, she vowed. I won’t make it into a battle or a litany of accusations, no matter how I feel about Luke, or how much truth there might have been in what Alice said! Felixx has endured enough, he doesn’t need his two closest living relatives to be at war with each other.
It wouldn’t have been Alice’s approach, she knew. Alice had loved the high drama of family arguments and taking sides and emotional manipulation. You became drawn into it, inevitably, because—like Luke—she had so much charisma, so much life, so much self-belief. The world always seemed a more interesting and dramatic place when she was around.
Had loved.
Had had.
Had seemed.
Luke must have seen something in her face. ‘I’m sorry. Shall we start again?’ he said.
‘Let’s.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘I can’t do the small talk. Not in a situation like this. There’s only one thing I want to know right now. The child. The boy. He’s around four years old, people are saying. They’ve been calling him Rowdy, but you’ve said his name is Felix. So he’s your son. I had this stupid hope for a while that—’ He broke off.
The look on his face was that of a man still under torture. It shocked her, because she’d never seen him like this before, wouldn’t have said he had the capacity to feel life’s darker emotions so deeply.
He was the sunshine type.
‘Luke…Dear God, I thought you knew,’ Janey blurted out. ‘He is Frankie Jay. He is yours. Of course he is.’
She watched him try to stand then sit back down as if his legs had given out from under him. He looked totally bewildered. ‘But—Felix?’
‘Alice changed his name, and I’ve grown used to it. She changed hers, too, and both their last names. Alanya and Felixx Star. Felixx’s has a double X, which is—’
Ridiculous.
She stopped. Why give this detail now? The double X. Her opinion of it. Her brain still wasn’t working quite right. ‘He’s small for his age,’ she went on. ‘He does look like he could be four.’
Luke put his head in his hands for a long moment, hiding his expression. She wanted to reach out and comfort him with her touch, but didn’t think she had the right or that he’d want her to. The nakedness of his reactions kept surprising her, although she couldn’t have put into words what she’d expected instead.
More of a performance?
‘When they found your ID in A and E on Saturday night, I didn’t know why you’d been on that bus,’ he said eventually. ‘If it was anything to do with me, if it was just one of those bizarre coincidences, or if Alice had put you up to it for some reason…Hell, I can’t call her Alanya! Where is she? Was this her idea? Why bring him here now, after all this time, when she did so much—must have moved heaven and earth—to make sure I could never find either of them?’
‘Never find them? She said you didn’t want him! Or her. That you couldn’t handle father-hood and wanted your bachelor days back. That you were the one who left.’
‘Which you instantly believed, of course.’ Suddenly, they were both gabbling, fast and furious.
‘Yes, because—’ She fought the swimming feeling in her head.
‘When was this?’ he demanded. ‘After my phone calls from London, or before?’
‘You’d said when we were working together—and you said it more than once—that you never wanted kids. And you certainly used to enjoy your freedom. Some men