Lost in her thoughts, the smile still on her lips, she walked into Nate’s gigantic living room and stopped dead as she saw both Nate and Victor standing around the work that was still spread out all over Nate’s dining room table.
Nate’s head jerked around when he saw her enter the room. He was holding a file open, the papers arched for him to read and his face had been blank. The minute his saw her, though, his lips curved into one of his breathtaking smiles that a lone gymnast in her belly liked especially and therefore executed a perfect back hand-spring at the sight.
Lily’s ignored the gymnast and her antics and her eyes flicked to Victor. He was smiling at her too, his far more tentative. She didn’t know what to make of that so she nodded to him silently.
Nate was approaching her, his long legs eating the distance swiftly and she tilted her head back because, within seconds, he was at her side.
“Good morning,” she said as she gazed up at him.
“Morning.” His low voice rumbled and his head came down to give her a brief but hard kiss. His strong hand settled at her waist and flexed there and her hand went up to flatten on his shoulder to push back, not wishing to engage in a Nate-style public display of affection in front of his father.
His head came up and he completely ignored the pressure of her hand.
“How are you feeling this morning?” he asked.
“Better.” She watched his black eyes flare and instantly took his meaning. “Good,” she whispered for his ears only and felt the blush creep up her cheeks just like she was a twenty-two year old virgin and not the mother of a seven year old girl.
“Good?” His voice had a faint teasing tone that the lone gymnast also liked, very much, and the corners of his lips tipped up in a lazy grin.
She leaned into him conspiratorially, her eyes shifting around his shoulder to Victor then back to him.
“Your father,” she said,
sotto
voce
, reminding him they had company.
For some reason, this made him snatch her into his arms and he buried his face in her hair as he chuckled against her neck.
And somehow, making him chuckle, Lily felt that she’d just reached the top of Mount Everest even to the point of having trouble breathing as she’d reach such altitude.
He let her go, though she felt it was somehow with reluctance, when the mobile phone on the dining room table started ringing. Nate strode back to the table and she watched him go, thinking he had such a powerful gait that it was beautiful, like the trained power of an athlete.
Then her eyes fell on Victor.
She felt funny around Victor. He’d hurt her in more ways than putting his hands on her in violence to the point of bruising her. He’d broken her trust by doing it.
She thought of him, when she first met him, as a kind of father-figure in absence of Will. Now Will was gone and both Tash and Lily were left with Victor and Lily didn’t know what to think of that.
He’d done what he’d done out of love and loyalty for Nate but it still didn’t change the fact that he’d lost his temper to the point of manhandling her.
“Lily,” Victor greeted softly as she walked toward him cautiously. Her eyes moved to Nate who had answered his phone. He was talking on the mobile but also watching her, watching
them
, and not missing a thing. He was not, this time, inspecting a bug under a microscope. Nate’s dark eyes were active, engaged and
aware
.
“Do you want some coffee?” Victor pointed to a silver service and Lily nodded.
“I’d kill for some coffee,” she answered and Victor moved to get her a cup. “Two sugars and milk,” she told him.
“I’m not surprised you like it sweet,” Victor mumbled to himself as he poured her a cup. “Laura made it, so you don’t have to worry, it tastes good. You just missed her. She left not five minutes ago.”
He offered her the cup and Lily took it.
“Please thank her for me, for what she did yesterday, for the clothes.” She put her arm out to show him her outfit. “If she gets me the receipts, I’ll pay –”
“Rubbish,” he snapped and she tensed immediately, her eyes flying to Nate who, she noted, regardless that he was on the phone, was watching her so closely she couldn’t imagine he heard a word that was said by the person on the line.
She moved her gaze back to Victor and she just stopped herself from taking a step back at the intensity she saw in his eyes.
“We owe you more than a pretty skirt,” he was saying.
“I’m sorry?”
“Jeff, Danielle… me. We owe you more than some bits of fabric.” Lily held her breath at his words and he lifted his hands in a gesture of agitated frustration then he spoke with surprising bluntness. “How do you go about paying a girl back for eight years of her life, marking her with bruises?” He was still intense but seemed, underneath it, lost and uncertain.
She was shocked at his honesty, shocked and touched.
“Victor…” She moved toward him, responding to the “lost and uncertain” bit and without taking a sip, she set her coffee back on the table.
She was only feet away from him when Victor announced, “I disowned them.”
At these words, Lily froze. Then she breathed, “What?”
“Jeff and Danielle, cut them off without a penny. The wills are already changed, Nate, you and Natasha inherit everything.”
Lily blinked. “But they’re your children,” she protested, forgetting, for that moment, how truly hideous they both had acted, taking her note, not telling Nate her parents had died, telling Lily Nate was dead. This was not the behaviour of kind, good people.
But disowning them?
Sarah had always threatened to disown Lily or Becky or Will, depending on who angered her but it was always an empty threat and she didn’t have much to give anyway, not like the Roberts did.
But to go so far as do it?
“Yes,” Victor replied firmly, “they are my children and for that reason they have whatever’s left in their trust funds and I’ve left them to their lives each with a good education to make something of themselves, finally.”
Lily took another step forward. “I hope you left the door open, just a crack, in case they’re sorry and they come back,” she said softly and hesitantly she put her hand lightly on his arm.
He looked at his arm where her hand rested and then at her. The intensity drained from his eyes and the Victor she knew replaced it.
“You have a kind heart, Lily,” he told her quietly. “I’ll take them back only if they convince you and Nathaniel to forgive them. Not before and if you don’t, not ever.”
She squeezed his arm and moved into him another several inches. “Laura?”
Victor put his hand over hers on his arm. “She agrees.”
Lily closed her eyes as the pain of another mother ran through her.
She opened them again and said, “It had to cost her.”
Then he said something strange, something that made Lily immensely curious, scared her out of her wits and, most importantly, it rocked her to her core. He said it in a low, quiet voice that was meant not to be heard outside their tête-à-tête.
“Nathaniel had suffered enough in his life. He didn’t need to suffer the last eight years. Laura knew that and I know it too. He’s our son, they hurt him, what were we meant to do?”
For the briefest second she thought it was a statement in the guise of a question but then she realised he expected her to answer. To tell him she approved, to give him other guidance or show him another way.
She shook her head and because her answer was unworthy, she turned into him and closed her arms around his shoulders, enfolding him in a hug.
She closed her eyes tightly and whispered in his ear, “I don’t know what to say.”
His arms came around to embrace her and there was violence in it, an affection so strong, it took her breath away.
An affection and intensity that was just like her father’s.
“Just be happy,” he mumbled into her ear, his voice shaking with emotion and at the sound of it, the feel of his embrace, she burst out crying. She wished she hadn’t but it was all too much, she couldn’t help herself.
So lost was she in her emotion, she barely registered it when Victor turned her into Nate’s arms and she cried into the hard wall of his chest. Cried for her gullibility, cried that she’d believed Jeff and Danielle, cried for what they all lost, including Laura and Victor, cried for what it cost them and cried for, well, everything.
Finally, when she’d spent her tears, she arched back against Nate’s arm and she saw him take something from Victor and then he handed her a handkerchief. She wiped her eyes but he still lifted a hand to slide his thumb along her cheekbone.
“All right now?” he asked in a gentle voice and she nodded.
After nodding, she contradictorily shook her head and his dark eyes flickered with worry.
“I’m hungry,” she admitted on a trembling smile.
She watched as he grinned, the concern in his eyes fled and he bent his head and brushed his beautiful, smiling lips against hers.
“I’ll take you to get something to eat and then to the neurologist,” he told her and broke away.
“Let me fix my face.” She began to turn from them but stopped, hesitated and then leaned in to kiss Victor on the cheek. This startled a smile from the older man and it was not in any way tentative.
Lily felt, inexplicably, like an important piece of her life, thought lost and left gaping, had been put back, snug and comforting, into place.
Then she hurried from the room as she heard Nate ask, “Are you okay here?”
Victor replied, “Yes.”
“You know what to do?”
And then Lily was out of earshot, but she wasn’t listening anyway.
The words,
Nathaniel had suffered enough,
were ringing in her ears.
* * * * *
“Do you still have a motorcycle?” Lily asked.
“Yes,” Nate answered.
“Then I have another condition.”
Lily watched Nate smile.
They were in his Aston Martin, headed back to Somerset. It was after their delicious brunch at a posh patisserie in Kensington, her neurologist’s appointment (complete with an unnecessary and costly MRI) and the GP appointment (she was now in possession of birth control pills but, as it took a month for them to be fully effective, she was also fitted with a diaphragm). After all of this, she hoped she didn’t have to see another doctor for at least twenty years.
Although she had to admit to one highlight of her medical experience.
Upon leaving the GP’s examination room, she saw Nate sitting and waiting for her. The ankle of one of his long legs resting atop the knee of the other, his dark, handsome head bent to study a pile of papers in his lap. He was completely oblivious to every single woman in the room staring at him with longing, surreptitious glances.
And then, as if sensing she was there, his head came up and he watched her coming toward him, his eyes moving lazily from the top of her hair to the tips of her toes. His face registered a sort of triumphant satisfaction, communicated such a smug possession that she could swear that
he
, rich, powerful, tall, lean, urbane, gorgeous Nathaniel McAllister was proud to be with
her
, sheltered, plain, naive, Indiana-girl Lily Jacobs. The very thought of it made her nearly trip on her fancy high-heeled sandals and fall flat on her face.
Luckily she did not for that would have ruined the moment and he rose when she came closer. Again, as was becoming his custom, his hand moved to rest on her waist, his fingers pressing into her there as if he wished to brand her.
“All set?” he murmured, his eyes and voice warm.
She nodded and, she couldn’t help herself, she did it happily.
She could also swear, as they left, Nate’s hand at the small of her back, guiding her through the waiting room, that she saw one mother of a sick, snot-nosed child lean to another sitting beside her, jerk her head frustratedly in their direction and mutter, “Figures.”
They’d gone to the car and started straight away to Clevedon.
Lily had been surprised at this and wanted to go back to the penthouse to get her things but Nate assured her it was “being seen to”.
“What’s your condition?” Nate asked pulling her out of her reverie and her reaction to his smile.
“If you take Tash on the cycle, you can’t drive it the way you drove it when we were together. You have to be more careful,” she told him.
“Agreed,” he replied instantly then went on, “but what about when I take
you
on the bike?”
“Oh, I’m too old for bikes,” Lily responded airily, her body thrilling a little bit at the thought of being on a motorcycle again, especially with Nate. This thrill she tamped down with firm resolution.
At her words, he let out a sharp bark of laughter that filled the car and she smiled to herself at the sound of it.
“You already broke your own condition anyway.” She was letting their easy banter relax her even further. She hadn’t felt this carefree in, well, since she last was with Nate.