The Secret Daughter

“Of course. Is there anything I can get for you? An aspirin, perhaps?”

“No, thank you. I have special migraine medication to take when this happens. Molly will help me.”

The visit was clearly at an end. Collecting her things, Imogen prepared to leave. “Then I’ll let myself out and call you tomorrow, if I may?”

“Of course.”

Imogen hesitated, again tempted to embrace her mother. But when Suzanne got up from the sofa, she swayed on her feet, and it was obvious she really was in pain. Imogen touched her gently on the hand and said, “I’m sorry if my coming here has brought on this attack, Mother.”

“I’ve brought it on myself, I’m afraid” She twisted the rings on her fingers and knit her finely arched brows as though wrestling with a dilemma. At length, she let out a long, defeated sigh, lifted her head and said in a low voice, “Won’t you stay here while you’re in town, Imogen? I’d really like it very much if you would. I’ve...missed having a daughter all these years.”

It was the last admission Imogen had expected to hear. She could not believe how it moved her, or how, with so few words, so much healing could begin. Overwhelmed, she said, “I don’t want to put you out, and the Briarwood is very comfortable.”

“But it’s not your home, and if we are to find our way back to each other, surely the place to start is here under this roof where things went so terribly wrong to begin with.”

It was so much what she had hoped for that Imogen’s throat ached. “Yes,” she whispered, overcome. “Thank you, Mother.”

She was smiling as she drove from the house and humming by the time she drew up outside the hotel. “I’m checking out,” she told the young man at the front desk. “Please have my bill ready and send someone for my luggage in half an hour.”

The clerk looked anxious. “Nothing’s wrong, I hope, madam? No problem with our service?”

“No,” she said, still all smiles. “Things couldn’t be better.”

But they could deteriorate rapidly, she soon discovered. When a knock came at her door some twenty minutes later, she opened it, expecting it to be the bellhop arriving early. Instead, Joe Donnelly stood there, the light of battle sparking in his eyes.

“I’d invite me in, if I were you,” he said, when she made no move to let him inside the room. “I don’t think you’re going to want the entire floor to know why I’m here.”

If she hadn’t been taken so completely by surprise, Imogen would have told him she wasn’t interested in finding out the reason for his unannounced visit, either, and shut the door in his face. Common sense demanded that, at the very least, she tell him to wait for her downstairs in one of the public rooms. Sheer self-preservation told her to refuse to see him at all. And ordinarily, Imogen listened to her instincts. But one look at Joe’s face told her this was no ordinary occasion.

Last night, dusk had hidden what the clear light of day revealed. He had lost his old devil-may-care expression a long time ago. Any vestige of softness his mouth might once have shown was gone. His eyes, though as vividly blue as ever, possessed a wariness Joe Donnelly at twenty-three hadn’t known.

He had always been ready to take on the world, secure in the belief that he was invincible, but the arrogance of youth had given way to a cynicism ready to flare into anger at the slightest provocation. And somehow, she had provoked him to anger now.

“What do you want?” she asked, backing away from him, allowing him into the room.

He followed, closing the door behind him. “Looks as if I got here just in time,” he said, ignoring her question and jerking his head at the suitcase lying open on the bed. “I see you’re getting set to run away again.”

“I’m not running anywhere, Joe Donnelly. I’m staying with my mother for the rest of the time I’m here—not that I owe you any explanations.”

“Oh, but you do, Imogen,” he said, stalking her across the room until the backs of her knees hit the edge of the bed and made further retreat impossible. “And you can start by telling me why you skipped town so hurriedly just weeks after we had sex, the year you graduated from high school.”

We had sex. Even though she’d flung the same callous words at him the night before, having them hurled back at her now stung worse than salt in a newly opened wound. On the other hand, given his present mood, what else did she expect? That he’d couch his anger in euphemisms?

“I’m waiting,” he said, looming over her. “Why the rapid exit from Rosemont, Imogen?”

“That’s none of your business.”

He folded his arms across his chest and planted his feet more firmly on the carpet, a statement that he’d allow nothing to deflect his purpose. “As of right now, I’m making it my business.”

She didn’t like the way he seemed to suck the oxygen out of the air. Even less did she like the way he intimidated her. There was something almost sinister in his velvet tone of voice, so at odds with the hard line of his mouth and the absolute coldness in his eyes.

“I’m waiting,” he said, still with chilling softness.

She swallowed, scrambling to find an answer that would satisfy him and put an end to the inquisition. “I went to Switzerland for a year,” she said, stretching the truth by a few months. “To school.”

He moved suddenly, circling her wrists with his long, strong fingers and hauling her to her feet. “Liar! You had a baby. My baby.”

The blood drained from her face, leaving her lightheaded with shock. The Joe Donnelly she’d known and worshipped would never have cornered her so mercilessly, but this man was a stranger.

“Didn’t you?” Imprisoning both her wrists in one hand, he grasped her chin in the other and forced her to meet his scrutiny.

Mutely, she stared at him, her silence an admission of guilt. There was a time she’d have welcomed being held by him, so close she could see the faint stippling of new beard growth on his jaw. But not like this, with his eyesblazing in his face and his mouth twisted with rage. As if his rights as a human being, as a man, had been violated.

Not as if, her conscience scolded. His rights have been violated, pure and simple. He learned from someone else a truth he should have heard from you years ago.

It was true, and looked at from his point of view, she knew her omission was inexcusable. “How did you find out?” she croaked, too dismayed to consider prevaricating-

“By accident.”

“I’m sorry.” She sounded as feebleminded as she felt.

“For what?” he bellowed. “For the way I found out I’d fathered a child, or that I found out at all? And don’t try telling me it’s none of my business then try to shoo me away, because it isn’t going to happen, Imogen.”

How he must despise her! “I’m sorry you had to find out like this,” she mumbled.

“You could have prevented it. You could have told me yourself, at the time.”

“I—”

“Let me guess why you didn’t.” The contempt in his tone seared her. “Donnelly genes didn’t measure up to what it takes to be a Palmer heir. It was easier to write the whole thing off as an accident. Erase the mistake before anyone found out about it. How am I doing so far, princess? Batting a hundred?”

Too floored to refute such a ludicrous allegation, she stared at him. She’d opened her Pandora’s box so carefully. How had this secret escaped? Who could have told him, when the only people in town who knew were her mother and the family doctor?

“I always thought your mother was a bitch,” he said savagely, “but I never wanted to believe you were cut from the same cloth. I never thought you capable of cold-blooded murder.”

“Stop it!” She choked the words out, stirred by the unfairness of his accusation and his unjustified attack on Suzanne.

“What else would you call abortion? You curled your aristocratic lip last night when you realized Sean and Liz had to get married, as you so prettily phrased it, but at least they didn’t take the easy way out and flush a child, rather than have it screw up their long-term plans.”

“I didn’t, either!” she cried, hurt beyond measure that he’d leap to such a conclusion. But the ugly fact was, he’d made love to a stranger out of pity. He knew of her—that she belonged to the richest family in town, that she vacationed in the Alps and on the Riviera, had servants to cater to her needs and rode around town in the back of a chauffeur-driven limousine. But he’d never known her, the person she was inside. How could he be expected to understand what her reaction to the pregnancy might have been? “I didn’t have an abortion,” she said quietly. “I never even considered it.”

It was his turn to be rendered speechless. Eventually, after a silence that thrummed with tension, he said, “Then what the hell happened to my child?”

“She died, Joe.” The words fell into the room like marbles hitting glass. Their echo seemed to hang in the air forever.

“What?” His horrified gaze burned holes in her. “How?”

“She was stillborn.”