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‘You still haven’t told me where we’re going,’ Grace reminded him.
‘Italy...I have a house there. It’s very private,’ Leo murmured huskily, running a finger across the tender skin of her inner wrist where a blue vein pulsed below her fine white skin, sending a current of awareness snaking through her veins. ‘Perfect for a honeymoon.’
They boarded Leo’s private jet. The cabin crew greeted her. Grace studied the opulent leather seating and stylish fixtures with wide eyes before she took a seat. She glanced down at the ring gleaming on her wedding finger and breathed in deep and slow. She was Leo’s wife now but only because she was pregnant, she reminded herself staunchly as the jet took off. It didn’t do to forget that salient fact.
A moment later, she was very much taken by surprise when Leo settled the file about her background down on the table in front of her. ‘I’m sorry my investigation into your background distressed you but you should know what’s in it and I’d like to get it out of the way now.’
Grace paled, tense as a bowstring. She had planned to work up the courage to ask him for the file and she was relieved he had not pushed her to that point. Flipping it open, she began to read. It very quickly became clear that when she was a child she had only been told one side of her parents’ story—her mother’s. And her father’s side of the story was strikingly different.
‘Were you aware that your mother was an addict?’ Leo asked curiously.
‘Yes, of course, but I was told to never mention it again once I moved in with my uncle and aunt. They were ashamed of it,’ Grace confided ruefully. ‘Mum got into drugs when I was a baby but I didn’t know that she’d gone into rehab before I was a year old.’
‘Your father got her onto a drug rehabilitation programme but it didn’t work.’
No, indeed it hadn’t, Grace recalled, her disturbing memories of her late mother including many of her lying comatose or doing inappropriate things because she was out of her head on drugs.
‘It must’ve been challenging for him as a doctor to live with an addict, who was the mother of his child.’
‘Yes, and of course he inevitably met someone more suitable, another doctor he worked with, and deserted us.’
‘But he did take your mother to court first in an effort to gain custody of you...’
That fact was news to Grace. The story she had grown up with had ended with her father Tony’s departure from their lives and his marriage to another woman. Now she bent her head over the file and learned that her father had failed to win custody of her from her mother because Keira Donovan had impressed her social worker with her apparent desire to turn her life around. Although her father had been granted access visits to his daughter, there had been continual cancellations and arguments, which had prevented his visits from taking place. By that stage her father had got married and Grace reckoned that her mother’s bitterness over that reality would have known no bounds. In an obvious effort to stop the visits, Keira had accused Grace’s father of assault and that accusation had plunged Tony into a damaging slew of investigations by the police, the social services and even the General Medical Council. During that period Keira had disappeared and changed her name to ensure that she couldn’t be tracked down.
Having failed to trace Keira and their daughter, her father had eventually given up the search. By then he had become a father for the second time and had had a new family to focus on.
‘Your mother took you to live in a commune in Wales,’ Leo remarked. ‘What was that like for you?’
‘Ironically it was better than living alone with my mother,’ Grace admitted a shade guiltily. ‘There were other people around to look out for me and make sure I went to school and had regular meals.’
‘You had it tough.’
‘I wish my father had found me. I wish he hadn’t stopped looking but he was probably afraid that Mum would make more allegations against him and that that might wreck his career.’ Grace sighed as she finished reading up to the point where her uncle and aunt had given her a home after her mother’s death from an overdose. ‘I can’t really blame him. Mum was incredibly difficult. She hated him with a passion and she was very bitter.’
