For several timeless moments, Kerry could only stare at the older man with straining blue eyes and a frown lodged between her brows. ‘Sorry…what did you say?’
‘I should have told you years ago,’ Harold Linwood continued unpleasantly, ‘but I didn’t really suspect the truth until you were fifteen and by then I’d accepted you as mine and it would have been bloody embarrassing to say otherwise!’
Her legs were starting to shake and with an effort she forced them still again. ‘Why are you telling me this now?’
‘I don’t see why I should pretend any more. Your stepmother and I once hoped to have children together. That was when I found out I was sterile and unlikely ever to father a child,’ he admitted flatly. ‘When you went into hospital to have your tonsils out, a blood sample was taken—’
‘Was it?’ Kerry frowned, unable to think straight but then recalling that a sample had been taken prior to surgery in case she later required a blood transfusion.
‘Well, I had testing done on that sample. It confirmed that your slut of a mother was sleeping around even in the first year of our marriage and that there was no way that you could be my daughter!’
Kerry still could not absorb what she was being told, for she was in a stupor of disbelief. ‘But if you’re not my father, who is?’
‘Carrie went with any man who took her fancy,’ Harold Linwood sneered. ‘It might have been a barman at the golf club, some tradesman who worked here, even one of our neighbours…anybody; she wasn’t fussy!’
At that point, Kerry spun round and walked out of the room. Crossing the hall, she opened the front door for herself and kept on walking, down the drive, along the road, back in the direction of the train station. It was a long walk but she didn’t care. Her mobile phone kept on ringing and she ignored it. Eventually she took it out of her bag and switched it off.
So, she wasn’t a Linwood. It was not the end of the world, she tried to tell herself, but just then she felt as though the ground had fallen away beneath her feet. She reminded herself that Misty and Ione had also had to come to terms with having been fathered by one of Carrie’s lovers. But then at least her sisters knew who that lover had been, whereas there was very little likelihood of Kerry ever finding out that same information. Would she even want to know?
It had been a day which more than any other day had made Kerry feel very alone and very foolish. First she had learned that Luciano had spent months cold-bloodedly planning and executing a devastating revenge on the Linwoods wine-store chain. Next she had been forced to accept that the sisters she trusted had kept their knowledge of Luciano’s unscrupulous activities to themselves rather than interfere. And finally, she had discovered that the man she had believed to be her father was not her father. Indeed, she had had that painful revelation thrown in her face!
No doubt Luciano would believe that she had received her just deserts for rushing to offer Harold Linwood her sympathy! Indeed, he would probably see it as yet another instance of disloyalty on her part. But then, Luciano had never understood why she had persisted in trying to build a family relationship with a man who made little attempt to conceal his uninterest in her. But, having been deserted by her mother as a young child, Kerry had found it almost impossible to accept that her father should reject her as well and she had made endless excuses for the older man. Now there were no more excuses to be made, she conceded.
Too upset to face returning to the townhouse, she resolved to stay out until she had come to terms with what she had learned. Certainly, she had no intention of confiding in Luciano. At least she could conserve a little pride by staying silent about her visit to Heathlands that afternoon and her subsequent humiliation at Harold Linwood’s hands…
Luciano’s day had been no more satisfying than Kerry’s.
An hour after Kerry had left the building, he had decided to go home b
ut Kerry had not been there. Irate at that discovery, he had returned to the office, only to find it impossible to settle back into work. Prolonged self-examination of the type he most disliked had eventually led to the grudging acknowledgement that he had been unreasonable, possibly even very unreasonable. Once he had become seriously involved with Kerry again, he should have reconsidered his goal of putting Linwoods out of business.
Harold Linwood was an unpleasant man but he was Kerry’s father and Luciano saw that he should have demonstrated some sensitivity on that score. Instead he had been guilty of wanting to have his cake and eat it too. It ought to have dawned on him that he could hardly bankrupt his father-in-law without causing his wife some distress. That that very elementary fact had not once occurred to Luciano shocked him in retrospect. He finally recognised that he had always been challenged to think of Kerry as a Linwood and had speedily consigned all recollection of her unfortunate connection to the family to the back of his mind, rather than allow that blood tie to interfere with his objectives.
Soon after he had reached those conclusions, Luciano tried to call Kerry on her mobile and he left a message. By five that afternoon, he had left four messages and he was becoming concerned. By six, he was back at the townhouse and he succumbed to the temptation of calling Misty to casually enquire if Kerry was with her.
‘She must be stuck in the traffic somewhere,’ he said dismissively when her sister gave him a negative answer and sounded audibly concerned.
By seven, Luciano had phoned Ballybawn to check that Kerry had not flown back to Ireland, called Ione and contacted Freddy in Quamar. Although he had told Kerry that he did not want her confiding in her siblings, by nine that evening he would have been happy if she had. He just wanted some proof that nothing had happened to her. In fact he was fighting off panic when he finally heard the front door open.
‘I hope you didn’t wait dinner for me,’ Kerry muttered evasively, ducking past his tall, stilled figure to head straight for the stairs.
He wanted to know where she had been for so many hours. He wanted to shout because she hadn’t returned one of his calls. But she looked so fragile, her face pinched with strain, her eyes dull, that he said nothing. After making a couple of necessary discreet phone calls to soothe the worries that his concern had roused he found her in the bedroom, and he plunged straight into speech, for he was suffering from an overriding compulsion to make things right between them again.
‘I want you to try and understand that I planned my revenge against Linwoods a long time ago and nothing short of a loaded gun could have turned me from that goal,’ Luciano breathed fiercely. ‘I didn’t think about hurting you. I didn’t even consider you as being involved! It may sound crazy but it’s been a lot of weeks since I’ve been able to think of you as a Linwood.’
An odd little laugh escaped Kerry before she twisted her head away again and kicked off her shoes. She had walked miles round the shops, seeing nothing, buying nothing, and her feet were very sore.
‘I didn’t want to hurt you…I never meant to hurt you,’ Luciano vowed with roughened emphasis. ‘I kept Salut and Linwoods in one compartment and you in another. But it’s over and done with now.’
‘Yes…’ Kerry supposed it was and he had triumphed. Whether she approved or otherwise, he had brought down Linwoods by legitimate business methods. He had been right too: on some level she had hoped that as time went on hostilities would fade and everyone would shake hands and be civil with each other.
Needing some time alone, she went into the luxurious bathroom and filled the jacuzzi bath. Lying back being buffeted by the jets, she could feel the stress seeping out of her again. She was the same person she had been when she’d woken up that morning, she reminded herself. Shouldn’t she be celebrating the fact that a man who had never shown the smallest warmth towards her was not her real father? But a painful hole had still been torn in the fabric of her life. When the wound felt a little less raw, she would tell Luciano that he need never again offend his own sensibilities by regarding her as a Linwood.
Not that that would make much difference to him. She knew that he didn’t love her. Had he ever loved her? Weeks ago, Luciano had assured her that he had been crazy about her when they had been engaged but it might have been very naive of her to interpret ‘crazy’ as being what she understood as love. ‘Do you love me?’ she had once asked before she broke off their engagement.
He had flinched as though she had said something horribly embarrassing and then he had shrugged, grimaced, studied the ground and said uneasily, ‘What do you think?’ Well, she hadn’t had the nerve to tell him what she thought. If he had loved her, he presumably would have said so. Unable to comprehend what attracted him to her, she had asked no more awkward questions.
But after living with Luciano, Kerry was no longer as innocent as she had once been. Ignorance had made her blind but she now finally understood the power of sex, the sheer, terrifying power of sex over a male as passionate and physical as Luciano. A male who thought nothing of making love five times or more in a day had to rate sexual desire and satisfaction as being of overwhelming importance in a relationship. When he had quipped that she was ‘the one who had got away’ he had come closest to hitting on the secret of her enduring attraction for him.