There was a moment’s stunned silence-and then everyone laughed.
It was a good moment. The tension dissipated. Riley’s hands unclenched on the steering-wheel and the thing was settled.
Lucy and Adam were to have the honeymoon suite. Riley only had Amy and baby Riley to contend with.
And Pippa.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THEY dropped Lucy and Adam at the hotel with promises to check on them later, then took Amy to the house. They settled Baby Riley in her carry cocoon by the window, showed her the view.
Baby Riley didn’t seem impressed by the view but she seemed to soak up the late afternoon rays. ‘They’ll help cure her,’ Riley said. He turned on the heater so the baby could stay in a nappy only, and he tucked the nappy right down so almost all her body was exposed. ‘Mother Nature’s cure-no medicine needed.’
‘It’s awesome,’ Amy said, gazing around the house in wonder. But Amy was used to living in a corrugated-iron lean-to. Pippa was less impressed.
‘How long have you lived here?’ she demanded as Amy disappeared for a sleep.
‘Six years.’
‘Not a picture on the wall?’
‘There’s a view.’
There was. A veranda ran all around the house but she didn’t have to go outside to see the view. The sea was practically in the house. But still…
‘No blinds. Bare boards. And this furniture… it’s hospital stuff,’ she said. ‘Even the beds… Single, cast-iron, a couple of them are even rusty. How can you live like this?’
‘It does me,’ he said stiffly, and Pippa shook her head in disbelief.
‘If I’m to live here, we need rugs. Curtains. Pictures.’
‘You’re not living here.’
She stilled. ‘I thought I was.’
‘I don’t think that’s wise. After last night.’
‘I can hardly go back to the hotel,’ she retorted. ‘I’ve promised Amy.’
‘Amy’s only staying until the jaundice settles.’
‘Then you want me out?’
‘I’m not saying that,’ he said wearily, raking his hair in a gesture she was starting to know. ‘Pippa, this whole situation… Lucy and Adam…’
‘You think they’ll want to stay here?’
‘No!’ The word was an explosion.
‘No?’
‘They’ll want a place of their own.’
‘They won’t be able to organise that any time soon. They’re your family, Riley.’
‘I don’t do family.’
‘You don’t have a choice.’ She might as well say it, she thought. It was the simple truth. ‘Your daughter’s eighteen and she’s about to deliver your grandchild. Adam seems even more terrified than she is. They need you, Riley.’
‘They wanted to go to your hotel.’
‘Of course they did. A nice, impersonal hotel where they can cling to each other without the world intruding-or a single bed and a stretcher with a guy they hardly know.’
‘That’s what I mean. They don’t know me.’
‘They don’t know you but they need you. They’re terrified kids. What was Lucy’s mother thinking, to let them go?’
‘She’ll have orchestrated the whole thing,’ he said, anger rising. He dug his hands deep in his pockets and she saw his hands clench within the denim. ‘She and her parents. Lucy said she wanted her to get rid of it. When that didn’t happen, faced with a granddaughter, a child of Eurasian descent… She’ll have shipped her off to me. Of all the…’
His face was etched with pain, and she felt ill. For all of them. ‘You must have been a baby yourself when Lucy was born,’ she whispered, half-scared to probe.
‘Nineteen.’ He wasn’t seeing her now, she thought. He was staring out at the sea, at the past, at nothing. ‘A raw kid. I knew nothing.’
‘Enough to conceive a child,’ she said, and he gave a raw, half-laugh.
‘Yeah. Med student. I couldn’t even stop that.’
‘It takes two to make a baby.’
For a while she thought he wasn’t going to answer. But finally… ‘It does,’ he said at last. ‘I had a… well, dysfunctional family doesn’t begin to cut it. Home was never home as anyone else knew it. My mother went from one low-life boyfriend to another, but she liked the sea and there was always a school library at every place we went to, so study and surfing were constants. Finally I got lucky, found some decent foster-parents, got some help. I got into medicine at sixteen. Child prodigy, they said, but obsessive study produces the same effect. Then a scholarship to London. Off I went, delighted to be shot of the mess that family wasn’t.’
‘Oh, Riley…’
He didn’t hear. He was talking to the sea, to something out there that had no connection to anything.
‘Marguerite was beautiful, loving, warm, and it blew me away that she wanted me. It was only later that I figured it out. I was straight from the surf. I was big and bronzed and I was Australian. Her friends thought I was cool and her parents thought I was appalling. It was the combination she wanted. I did know she was in full rebellion mode, but I didn’t figure it. That I was simply part of that rebellion. Maybe she sabotaged the condoms, I don’t know. All I knew was that at the end of summer she wanted nothing more to do with me. She’ll have got pregnant for her own reasons. She never told me.’ He closed his eyes. ‘To have had a daughter for eighteen years and not know…’
‘Oh, Riley…’
‘Dumb,’ he said. ‘I even thought I was in love.’ He turned to face her then, and his face was as bleak as death. ‘Last night…’
‘I’m on the Pill. And I’m not Marguerite.’
‘I don’t do family,’ he said. ‘I never have.’
‘You don’t or you haven’t? It seems to me that family’s found you. Your daughter…’
‘She’s my daughter in name only.’
‘No, in need. It’s not Lucy’s fault,’ she said, striving to keep her voice even. ‘How she was conceived.’
‘You think I don’t know that?’
‘So you found out…’
‘Three months ago. An email, nothing more.’
‘Then you must have responded magnificently,’ she said, quietly but firmly, ‘for her to come. You must have told her you care. Three months ago she’ll have been five, six months pregnant and terrified. She’ll have contacted you looking for options and you’ve responded with concern. That’s what she needs right now. Caring. Family.’
‘I’m not family.’
‘You are,’ she said, and she took his hands in hers and tugged until she had his full attention.
This was important, she thought, for her, suddenly, as well as for him. Her parents had been cold and distant. Riley’s had hardly been parents at all. For Riley to be a dad seemed huge. Bigger than both of them.
It was so important she had to fight for it.
‘Riley, both our parents messed things up for us,’ she said, and she knew she was going where she had no right, but she had no choice. There was something about this big, solitary man that touched a chord.
He’d travelled a harder road than she had, she thought, and he’d come out more scarred. Scars couldn’t disappear completely but he could move beyond them. He must.
