‘I still have to edit a few but some are all right.’ She held the camera so he could see the screen and began to click through the hundreds of photos taken that day.
‘You’ve really captured some interesting angles in those shots,’ Jack said, leaning closer, the fragrance of her hair teasing his nostrils.
‘This is my favourite.’ She clicked through until she came to one of him sitting with Marli.
Even Jack was surprised at the candid shot of himself cradling Marli. The love the image captured in that seemingly unobserved moment was enough to melt any hardened heart. He wondered if his own father had felt the same level of devotion towards him when he was a young baby. Or had the pressure of work and then the slow but steady creep of his father’s illness stolen the early joy and turned it into bitter disappointment instead?
‘Why are you frowning?’ Harper suddenly asked.
Jack quickly rearranged his features into a relaxed smile but he could feel the tug of uneasiness deep inside, a question that needed answering. A problem that needed to be addressed. He had never really questioned whether his father loved him, but neither had he ever felt particularly close to him. The early memories of his childhood were overshadowed by the way his father had changed with his illness, becoming more and more distant and difficult and demanding.
‘Sorry. I was just thinking about my own relationship with my father.’ He let out a long sigh. ‘I’m not sure he was as attached to me as I am to Marli, but then it was a different generation. Men were certainly encouraged to be more involved with their kids but my father was not the sort of man who enjoyed being around little kids all that much. And then, by the time I was a little older, he became unwell. Plus, I went to boarding school pretty young.’
Harper placed a gentle hand on his arm, her touch sending instant warmth through his body. ‘How old were you?’
‘Six.’
A frown pulled at her forehead, a look of shock in her gaze.‘Six?’
Jack shrugged one shoulder in a dismissive, it-didn’t-do-me-any-harm manner. ‘I coped.’
‘But you were so terribly young. Were you homesick? Lonely? Did you find it hard settling in and making friends?’
Jack had more or less blocked out those early memories. He was a put-it-behind-you-and-move-on-with-your-life sort of person. He didn’t ruminate over things that couldn’t be changed. But Harper’s concerned questions tapped at the locked and bolted door he had stored those memories behind. Memories of acute sadness, despair and loneliness. A sense of having to grow up way too fast but doing it anyway. A gnawing sense that he was a disappointment to his father, that he wasn’t loveable, that he had been sent away so his father could get on with work without the distraction of his presence. He suspected his mother had agreed to it to keep him safe from his father’s occasional outbursts of temper. Jack had suppressed his emotions so deep down inside himself he was uncertain he could access them now even if he wanted to. As for feeling them...well, he refused to feel them. Feeling them made them real again, painfully real.
‘I settled in relatively quickly,’ Jack said. ‘I made friends, some of whom are still friends to this day.’
Harper studied him for a long moment, her expression still showing shadows of concern. ‘But it must have affected you, being away from home for so long. Didn’t you miss your mum?’
Jack gave a lopsided smile. ‘I did for a bit but I didn’t let her know it. She would have told my father and it wouldn’t have gone down well with him. He had gone to the same boarding school, and so had his father, my grandfather.’ He gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze with his hand that was resting near her along the back of the sofa. ‘Now, enough about my childhood. Show me some more of your photos.’
Harper lifted her camera back up and clicked through some more shots, but every time he glanced at her she was still frowning. Was she thinking of her own childhood? How different and even more difficult than his? At least he had had a father. Harper’s had refused to have anything to do with her. Was she worried he would abandon Marli in a similar way? He could not think of a single set of circumstances that would ever see him walk away from his baby girl. He was even finding it difficult to think of walking away from Harper. In the past, he was the one who’dalwayswalked away. He never looked back, only forward. But he knew in his bones if he walked away from Harper or she walked away from him, something in him would die, or if not die, be stunted.
But why would she walk away? He had given her everything money could buy and he had promised to protect her and their child going forward. The love thing was something she kept referring to but love hadn’t been what they started with, only lust. They both loved their little girl, so what else did they need? Nothing he was prepared to give in any case.
Jack took the camera from her and set it aside. He took one of her hands in his, the other he lifted to her face to smooth away the frown between her eyes. ‘Stop worrying about my privileged childhood. It hardly compares to what you’ve been through.’
‘I guess...’ Her eyes fell away from his to look at her hand encased in his. Then she lifted her gaze once more. ‘We’ve had such different upbringings. How are we going to be the best parents we can possibly be when there are so many things we don’t know about each other?’
‘We’ll get to know each other once we’re married,’ Jack said. ‘Which reminds me, now that your photo shoot is over, let’s decide on a wedding date. That was the deal, remember?’
Harper pulled her hands out of his and stood, her expression clouding over like a brooding sky. ‘I need more time before I make such an important decision.’
Jack rose from the sofa, a sense of things slipping out of his control tightening something in his stomach. ‘There isn’t a whole lot of time. Marli is already five weeks old. Before we know it she’ll be a toddler and—’
‘And what if you can’t handle being around a toddler?’
He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Kids are hard work.’
‘I know that, but we’ll have the resources to get help if we need it.’
‘I told you, I don’t want a nanny.’
Jack scraped a hand through his hair. ‘My mother is willing and able to help out and would get a lot of joy out of doing it.’
‘And we both know how well your mother and I get on,’ Harper snapped back. ‘Marli is going to see it and wonder. And then one day she’ll be old enough to ask her own questions, like why doesn’t her father love her mother like other parents love each other?’