‘Did you get in touch with her?’
‘I wanted to. I wanted to talk to someone who’d known my father so I went to the house, hoping to see her. They were just going out...’ He shook his head. ‘Rumour always has a grain of truth. She might have tried something desperate and she didn’t need me descending like a black crow in the midst of her lovely family, raking up the past.’
Tash felt tears sting the back of her eyes and the lump in her throat was so big that she couldn’t say anything. Instead, she squeezed his hand.
He glanced at her. ‘Is that approval? I got something right?’
‘Absolutely.’ She slid her arm around his waist and he put his arm around her shoulders so that her head was resting against his shoulder. ‘What happened to your parents?’ Something bad must have happened or he wouldn’t have been living with his grandparents.
‘When I was a few months old, Soraya’s mother became desperately ill and she had to go home. She left me with my father, which seems a little odd, but they weren’t married and maybe she was afraid to tell her family that she was living with a married man. That they had a child.’
‘I think I’d find that pretty difficult, to be honest.’
‘It seems they already knew. Two days after she left, my father received a message from her father. He wanted to bring his family to Europe and, to get exit visas, they needed money to bribe officials. A lot of money. The bottom line was that if he wanted to see Soraya again he would have to pay.’
‘But...that’s appalling!’
‘My father, beside himself, went to my grandfather, begged him for help and the old bastard gave it to him, but at a price.’
‘You...’ She’d known there was something, but could never have guessed anything so desperate. So cruel.
‘He’d lost his heir. His son was unfit in his eyes. I wasn’t the golden child of the perfect marriage, but I was all he had left.’
‘You were the price he had to pay to rescue your mother.’
‘Ramsey drew up a legally binding document surrendering all parental rights to them. I was to live with my grandparents, they would have full control of my education and upbringing and I would be my grandfather’s heir on the condition that my parents understood that they would be dead to me. And my father signed it.’
‘Of course he signed. How could he do anything else? He loved your mother, Darius; he couldn’t abandon her.’
‘No. I was safe and she needed him.’
A kingfisher flashed from a post into the water. A duck rounded up her fluffy brood. Somewhere along the riverbank a child shrieked with excitement. All bright, wonderful things, but what had been a charmed day now had a dark edge to it.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘My grandfather handed over the cash, my father left for the airport and that’s the last anyone ever heard of him or my mother. Not that anyone was looking.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘When he died, I insisted that Ramsey carry out a proper search for them before the house was put on the market. If either of them were alive this belonged to them.’
‘Was there nothing in the house you could sell?’