Lily dug her teeth down hard into her bottom lip, refusing to let the tears fall until Ronan was out of sight.
It was twelve o’clock. At this time yesterday she had stood on the steps of the church, smiling and happy, her brand-new husband at her side. She had been his wife for just twenty-four hours and now it was all over.
High above her head, the sun was shining in the clear blue sky. It was a perfect spring day. A perfect day on which to start what should have been a perfect married life. Instead it was the day that marked the end of her marriage before it had even begun.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘ASK your brother…ask your brother…’
Ronan’s parting shot became a nagging refrain in Lily’s thoughts over the next four days.
‘That question…is only one small part of things. If you want to know the whole story then you really should ask your brother—if he’ll tell you.’
She would if she could. But she had no idea where Davey was, or even if he was still in the country.
When she and Ronan had set the date for their ill-fated wedding, she had done everything she could to track down her missing brother, but with no success. All leads had turned into dead-ends, and his former friends were as much in the dark as to his whereabouts as she was. It was as if Davey had vanished off the face of the earth.
The absence of her brother from her life had been a source of distress to Lily for over three years now. Ever since the day of his seventeenth birthday, when she had returned home to find his room uncharacteristically neat and tidy, his wardrobe empty of the jeans and tee shirts that were the only clothes he wore. But it had been when she had discovered that his guitar had gone that she knew things were serious.
Davey’s beloved Gibson Les Paul, paid for with the earnings from many hours of paper rounds, Saturday jobs and, in the last year, lessons that he had given to other young aspiring musicians, was like a part of him. If he had it with him, then it meant he wasn’t coming back in the near future.
And if she had had any doubts or hopes left, then the note she found on her own pillow had dispelled them all: “Gone to make my name and fortune. Look out for me on the telly very soon!”
And he had signed it, as he now signed everything, scorning the family name he thought too childish for a would-be rock star, with the single initial ‘D’.
Second only to her parents’ untimely deaths, Davey’s desertion had hit her hard. With time, the pain of his abrupt departure had only faded into an aching sense of loss, not vanished altogether, and she lived with the feeling of there being a gap in her life that no one else could fill.
And Ronan had known that. Known it and yet kept his thoughts on the matter to himself.
Because now, with one of those bitter ironies that haunted her thoughts by day and kept her from sleep by night, it seemed that Ronan was the one person who had had any contact with her brother in the time since he had left home.
‘If you want to know the whole story then you really should ask your brother…’
It could mean only one thing. Davey, wild, foolish Davey, had done something to bring down Ronan’s fury on his head, spark off this burning need to hurt and destroy. But what could be so bad that it had resulted in such a terrible revenge?
Just what had Davey done?
She would have to start her investigations all over again. Go back and check every lead, every contact, however vague. Once more she would have to try and find her errant brother, but this time her search would be so much more important. It would be given that added edge by the devouring need to find out just how he had become involved with Ronan and what had happened as a result.
But first there was something else she had to do, something she dreaded but knew she couldn’t avoid. She couldn’t hide away here in this house for the rest of her life. Sooner or later the news would leak out that her marriage had failed before it had even begun, and she could just imagine what sort of stories would be concocted to explain her personal tragedy.
The longer she waited before showing her face, the worse it would become, and she had always believed that if she had something unpleasant to do it was best to get it over and done with.
She gave herself the week of what should have been her honeymoon to hide away in the lovely house. To lick her wounds and weep the tears she vowed she would never show in public. And when that week was up she gathered together the shattered remnants of her self-control, cobbling them together into the closest she could come to a sort of armour to put around herself, and prepared to face the world again.
But she wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t felt the need for some support, a back-up team to help her over the worst. And so, acting quickly before her nerve failed her completely, she dialled her best friend’s number first.
‘Hannah? It’s Lily. I’m afraid I’ve got some really bad news…’
She could only hope that the story would be a nine-day wonder.
That hope was not to be fulfilled. Four weeks after her return to work, the small town was still buzzing with the story of the marriage that had never been.
‘It’s not fair!’ Lily complained to Hannah, when her friend called at the shop on her way home from the school where she taught History. ‘You’d think something else would have happened by now to take the heat off me.’
‘But that’s just the point,’ her friend commiserated dryly. ‘Nothing does happen here, so your misfortune was God’s gift to the local gossips. And really you can hardly blame them. After all, Edgerton had never seen such excitement as there was over your wedding. You’ve got to admit that Ronan isn’t exactly typical of the sort of man we see around here.’
‘You can say that again.’ Lily sighed despondently, recalling the way she had felt when she had first set eyes on his tall, lean frame, the stunning bone structure of his face, the striking steel blue of his eyes under the burnished colour of his hair.
‘And as something of a local entrepreneur yourself…’
‘Entrepreneur! Oh, come on!’ Lily scoffed, rather more emphatically than she’d actually meant because she was trying to distract her thoughts from the painful path they were following.
She didn’t want to think about Ronan. Didn’t want to recall how he had affected her right from the start, the forceful impact of his potent masculinity going straight to her heart like an arrow speeding to the gold on a target.
‘And how many other local women do you know who have set themselves up in business on one small market stall and within six years earned a reputation as the best flower arranger—sorry, floral designer—in the county?’ Hannah enquired reprovingly.
That was how she’d first met Ronan, Lily recalled miserably. She had been asked to do the flowers at the wedding of the only daughter of a wealthy local industrialist. As a business associate of Frank Hodgson, Ronan had been amongst the guests. They had been introduced by the bride’s mother, he had asked her to dance, and the rest, with a sort of inevitability, had been history.
‘I’ve been lucky.’
‘Lucky!’ her friend snorted. ‘Lily, luck had nothing to do with it. Talent and sheer determined hard work is more like it. You pulled yourself up again after a loss that would have floored most people—particularly considering you weren’t even out of your teens when it happened—and you’ve gone on to make a real success of your life. And you brought up Davey too, while you did so. If anyone deserves some happiness now, it’s you. I thought you had found it with Ronan.’
Hannah’s face changed, her normally smiling expression becoming hard and hostile.
‘If I could get my hands on him…’
‘Hannah, please!’ Lily put in hastily.
They had been over and over the story of Ronan’s desertion until she was sick to death of it, and they were no nearer an answer than they had ever been.
At least in the past few weeks she had learned if not to adjust then to find a way of living with what had happened. The wounds Ronan had inflicted on her were too deep, too agonising to be anywhere close to healing, but by throwing herself into her work she had found a way of distracting herself from the pain.
‘I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t even want to think…’
Luckily, at that moment they were interrupted by the sound of a knock, and Heather, her junior assistant, put her head round the door.
‘A visitor for you, Lily. Personal, he said.’
‘Personal, he said.’ Lily’s heart leapt so painfully that her breath tangled in her throat. Could it be? Was it possible?
She didn’t know whether she was hopeful or fearful, how she would feel or what she could say if it did turn out to be Ronan. But she was still struggling for some degree of composure when her already shaky mental state was knocked even further off balance as her visitor appeared in the doorway.
Not Ronan. This man had hair as fair as her own, but with a silvery cast where hers was pure gold, falling to his shoulders in a long, straggly tangle. Eyes a darker brown than her amber, looking even more so in contrast to the unhealthy pallor of thin cheeks that were all planes and shadows. A tall, gangling frame just emerging into full manhood from adolescence, but so painfully thin that her heart clenched in distress at the sight.