Wanted: A Baby by the Sheikh(21)

“I have feelings all right and don’t you dare claim I haven’t.”

“Where were your feelings when you left Antigua then? When I was away I discovered something new about you. One of the last times you were seen—only two months after you left me—was at a party after which you disappeared into thin air. Did you drink too much? Did you flirt and leave with some man?”

She shook her head as the memory of that night came back to her. “It wasn’t like that.”

“I know men, Taina. I know them. You left the party with someone. And then you disappeared. Off the face of the planet for the rest of the year.”

She shook her head again. He was close. Too close for his own good. She had to divert him, make him angry, make him argue, make him do anything except guess the truth. Because she was scared that if he did that he’d react as he’d done in the past and lash out. Except this time the consequence wouldn’t be simply a telling off by the police—it would mean his ruin.

“You hate it when something happens you can’t control, don’t you?” she said, purposely goading him.

He shook his head, grinding his teeth. “You never used to be so hard, Taina.”

“And who do I have to thank for that? My father and you.”

“You knew what you were getting in to. It was your world.”

“The world I wanted to escape from. My father kept me a virtual prisoner on the island for years after my mother died, taught by a series of tutors. Even when I went to university I was escorted there and back by my father’s secretary. I only left the island when either he allowed me to, or when he was away and I took the boat to the city myself. Like I did when I met you. It was only because he approved of you that I was allowed to see you again and I gained some measure of independence.”

“Is that all I was? An excuse for you to escape? Maybe you changed your mind about being with me when you realized it was a world I didn’t want to escape from?”

“There was so much I didn’t know.”

“How could you live in your family and not know?”

“Because I was bloody naïve. And you and my father took advantage of that. I was stuck on the island while this”—she cast her arms around the studio—“was the only place I ever thought about.”

He frowned. “And yet you didn’t want to come here now. Why?”

She made a mistake then and glanced toward the closed door. He saw the direction of her gaze and walked toward the door.

“Don’t!”

“What?”

Suddenly one of the designers came up the stairs. “You wanted to see the lists and drawings?”

She spread them on the wooden trestle table that had been her mother’s work table. Absently, Taina toed the groove in the wood that the stool had made when her mother sat there in her chosen position at the drawing board.

“Oh, we found a box of your mother’s things. Just bits and pieces when we were clearing it out.”

“Can I see?”

“Sure. We put them somewhere.” He went and looked. “Yes, here they are.”

Daidan and the man looked over the drawings while Taina returned to the window seat with the box. There were the initial drawings for the next range, lists and then, at the very bottom, a small sketch of Taina, knees pulled up to her chin, gazing out from the same window seat upon which she now sat.

She held it to her nose and smelled it, irrationally hoping for a residue of the scent of her mother’s Chanel No 5, but of course there was none. It had been over ten years ago, after all. It was dated on the back—a week before her fourteenth birthday. Of all her birthdays, her fourteenth had been the worst and the one she remembered most clearly. It had been the day her father had told her that he and her mother were separating and that Taina had to choose—choose between living with her alcoholic mother or him. Taina had been in shock, not least because her family never discussed any ‘unpleasantness’, such as finding her mother passed out on the bathroom floor. It had always been dealt with in the same way—by ignoring it. Daidan had always described her as being “aloof” and no wonder—from any early age she’d learned to hide all her thoughts and feelings.

Taina slipped the sketch into her bag and rose. Only then did she see that the doors were opened. Inevitably her eyes were drawn to the hook that still hung there, from which goods had been hoisted in the olden days from the quay into the warehouse. The hook on which she’d found her mother hanging, dead for days.

She stifled a sob and turned and ran down the stairs and out of the building.

She jumped into the car but she wasn’t quick enough and Daidan followed her.