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‘I know Rachel is planning to see you and your mother off to Bangkok tomorrow evening, and I thought that you might allow me to take all three of you out to lunch and then run you over to the airport in my father’s limousine.’
‘Matt—’
‘You mean a proper black limo with a chauffeur—a stretch?’ The young girl cut eagerly across Rachel’s faint protest.
‘With a TV, video and computer in the back,’ Matthew confirmed. ‘You can e-mail your friends goodbye on the way to the airport.’
Bethany’s eyes gleamed. ‘We’ve got hu-mung-ous amounts of luggage!’ she warned. ‘We’re taking everything.’
‘Then I guess we’ll make that two limos—one for us and one for your luggage.’
Bethany giggled and flushed shyly. ‘Are you serious?’ He nodded, and she instantly beamed again. ‘That would be fabulous, wouldn’t it, Rachel? Some of the gang are coming to see me off—imagine their faces when I swan up in a limo! Does Mum know? Let me tell her!’
She bounced out of the room, only to pop her head back around the door and say mischievously, ‘I guess this means you’ve changed your mind about him being a slimy, scum-sucking slug, huh, Rachel?’
He stroked his lean jaw, studying her discomfiture. ‘A slug?’
‘It seemed apposite at the time,’ said Rachel stoutly. ‘About tomorrow—I don’t think—’
‘Come off it, Rachel, you know you aren’t going to disappoint her. This way you all get to have a good time instead of moping around here prolonging your goodbyes. And Robyn won’t have to worry about you being left on your own.’ He glanced towards the door
. ‘Bethany’s a very pretty girl.’
Rachel just stopped herself from saying thank you. ‘Yes, yes, she is.’
‘She’s the spitting image of you—same eyes, same shape of face, same challenging heft of the chin when she takes on a dare…She’s probably going to be as tall as you are, too,’ he said in idle speculation.
‘Yes…’
‘In fact she looks far more like you than she does Robyn—’ He stopped as he saw her face, and she hurriedly bent to put the empty teacups back onto the wooden tray.
‘Rachel?’
She didn’t answer him, and when she looked again he was standing by the window, looking at the little clutch of photographs on the side table, seeing the progression of Rachel from freckle-faced child stiffly posed between dour-faced parents to the laughing woman at David’s side. And looking at the photos of Robyn, Bethany and Simon.
‘Rachel?’ He looked across at her, the knowledge dawning in his brown eyes, his expression deeply shaken. ‘Bethany is your child, isn’t she, not Robyn’s?’
She nodded jerkily and he crossed the room, his voice low as he checked towards the door. ‘Does she know?’
‘Of course she does,’ said Rachel fiercely. ‘Robyn and Simon have always been honest with her about her adoption. She knows they can’t conceive a baby themselves and that I—I couldn’t look after the one that I’d conceived…’
His eyes darkened with turbulent emotion. ‘But, my God, you must have been only—’
‘Fifteen,’ she said, to save him the calculation. ‘The same age that Bethany is now…’
A freckle-faced half-child, half-woman, as delicate and fresh as a half-unfurled bud, thought Matthew.
To Rachel’s shock he didn’t ask about Bethany’s father, or the circumstances of her birth. Instead he touched a gentle finger to her pale lips in a gentle salute.
‘Congratulations on your wonderful daughter…and on the courage and strength it must have taken you to bring her into the world…’
Her eyes stung as he replaced his finger with a gossamer-light touch of his lips and an admiring whisper.
‘Until tomorrow, my brave lioness…’
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘WHAT in the hell is going on?’
