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Ronan sighed deeply, pushing a rough hand through his hair.
‘I knew about Davey’s drinking—no one could miss that. What I wasn’t aware of was that he had a drugs habit as well.’
‘Drugs!’
It was a cry of horror that drew Ronan’s haunted eyes to her face.
‘You didn’t know? But when he was here that time, didn’t you even suspect?’
‘I…’
She hadn’t known, but now that she did it explained so much. Davey’s violent mood swings, the frequent changes from wildly frenetic gaiety to total blank apathy when nothing could rouse him. The dull look in his eyes, the loss of weight—the disappearance of money from her purse.
‘What…?’ Once more she tried to speak, and again her voice failed her. But Ronan interpreted the question she wanted to ask with almost telepathic ease.
‘He started on Ecstasy, but I suspect he tried a bit of everything. By the time I met him he was definitely into heroin.’
‘Oh, Davey!’ How could this have happened to him? To her baby brother?
Unable to stay still a moment longer, she got to her feet and paced restlessly round the room, her hands clenched together before her.
‘I never knew he’d gone so completely off the rails.’ And, blinded by her love for him, the way she’d always cared for him, she hadn’t been able to see it.
Ronan’s silent nod was a sombre acknowledgement of the fact that he believed her.
‘I tried to deal with the problem—to get him into some sort of programme to sort himself out. I promised him I’d help him to a great future if he was clean. I really believed he could have that future, but I’d reckoned without his so-called friends—the members of a band he used to play in.’
His head swung round to her as Lily drew in her breath in a hiss of alarm.
‘Davey was never any good at choosing friends. He wanted so much to be liked and accepted that he’d go along with anything anyone suggested if they’d just be his mates…’
‘His partners in crime,’ Ronan inserted sardonically. ‘They supplied the drink and the drugs and they were totally wrong for him. Lily, your brother had more talent in his little finger than the rest of that crew put together. But under their influence he messed up everything.’
‘He told me.’
Seeing the way that Ronan’s hand was clenched around his coffee cup, and suddenly fearful that the handle might actually snap under the pressure, Lily moved to try and take it from him. Pausing to look deep into his cobalt blue eyes, she added sincerely, ‘He felt very bad about it.’
‘He needed to,’ was the curt response. Ronan’s face was as hard and sculpted as a marble statue. ‘I had thought that tying him into a binding contract would bring him to his senses, force him to face reality and work hard for what I knew he could achieve. When he was thrown out of his flat for not paying the rent, I invited him to stay with me for a while, and that was where he met my sister.’
Pushing the mug at her, he got to his feet and strode to the patio doors that led into the garden. For a long, taut moment he stared out at the rain, rejection stamped into every line of his long body so that Lily was afraid he would turn on her if she so much as touched him.
‘Rosalie arrived while I was out. By the time I got back it was obvious that Davey had already charmed his way into her heart. He’s a good-looking lad, your brother, and when he sets his mind to something there are few people who can resist him.’
Unseen behind that straight, proud back, Lily couldn’t suppress a wry smile. She could think of another male who fitted that description only too well.
‘But you warned your sister off.’
It was the only thing he could have done. Loving Rosalie as he did, he wouldn’t have wanted her to get mixed up with the sort of loser her brother had become.
‘What the hell else do you think I did?’
Ronan swung round to face her again, making her heart clench at the realisation that he had taken her comment totally the wrong way, seeing in it a criticism where none had been intended.
‘I wanted her to give me time to get him sorted out, back on the straight and narrow, but she saw my actions as the heavy-handed tyranny of an older brother. Told me I knew nothing about love. I think she saw herself as Juliet and Davey as her Romeo. Certainly, the end result was much the same.’
He pushed both hands through his hair and Lily was upset to see how they shook, revealing the strength of emotion that was otherwise only displayed in the shocking bleakness of his eyes. She longed to go to him, to hold him and comfort him, but knew intuitively that he would reject any such gesture on her part.
‘What happened?’
‘On her eighteenth birthday Davey took her to a club to celebrate. It was a place he’d been to frequently, somewhere where he knew he could get a fix any time he wanted.’
‘Oh, no…’ Lily whispered, knowing with a terrible sense of inevitability what was coming.
‘Oh, yes!’ Ronan snarled viciously. ‘He fed her Ecstasy. One single bloody tablet…’
The curses he spat out were savage, darkly eloquent of a pain he wouldn’t let his face express. It was as if he had kept the agony inside all this time, where it had festered, growing every day, eating away at him.
‘One tablet! It killed her. She was on a life-support system for a few days, but deep down we all knew there was no hope.’
Slowly Lily turned back to the coffee table, looking down at the photograph of Rosalie Ronan had left lying there. Tears burned in her eyes at the thought of that lovely, laughing creature lying still and cold, the vivid blue eyes closed, all the vibrant life snuffed out. Recalling how desolate she had felt when her parents had died too early, she felt she could share some of the shock and anguish Ronan had endured with that terrible loss.
‘Ronan, I’m so sorry…’
But he hadn’t heard her. He was heading out of the room, almost through the door before she realised.
‘Ronan!’
Stunned and confused, she stumbled after him, catching him up in the hall.
‘Ronan, wait!’
The look he turned on her was like a blow to her face. It was the sort of feeling one might experience after tracking down a wounded leopard, only to have it turn and face its hunter with vicious, snarling defiance. And the fact that she had expected his rejection made it no easier to bear.
‘That’s not all, is it?’
‘Isn’t it enough?’
More than enough. More than she could bear. But no matter how much she dreaded it, she had to know the full truth.
Ronan was moving again, getting away from her. She had to force her legs to carry her as she followed him down the hall and out on to the drive. The rain had ceased now, the only sound the slow drip of water from the leaves to the ground.
The scene reminded her agonisingly of that first day after their wedding, when she had trailed after him in much the same way. Then, as now, she had needed an explanation he wasn’t prepared to give her.
‘Ronan, tell me!’
He came to such an abrupt halt that she almost cannoned into him from behind. But when she moved in front of him to see his face her heart quailed at the sight of his ashen pallor, the way it made his eyes look like deep, haunted pools.
‘Tell me!’ she insisted.
His sigh seemed to come from the depths of his soul, and for the space of five uncertain seconds she thought that he would shake his head and refuse to tell her. But then he squared his shoulders, as if accepting the inevitable. His hands were clenched at his sides, revealing the brutal control he was exerting to hold himself still, the effort it took to bring himself to speak.
‘My father had to make the decision to have Rosalie’s life-support system switched off. It destroyed him. No parent expects to outlive their child. He went into the garage, fed a hosepipe from the exhaust into the car and turned on the engine. I was the one who found him.’
The horror of that moment was gouged into his face, etched in lines so deep that she doubted if anything could ever erase them.
‘Was he…?’ She couldn’t bring herself to complete the question.
‘No, thank God. I got to him just in time, but it was touch and go for a while.’
Cold, dark eyes looked into her shocked face with something close to grim satisfaction.
‘Well, you asked,’ he said with bitter flippancy.
‘Yes, I asked.’
And now she knew. Deep inside she felt as if she was breaking apart, as if she would never, ever be whole again.
‘And your mother?’
‘My mother? She survived—just. She couldn’t go under because of my father’s despair. He needed her like never before.’
‘You told me you had no family.’
‘I lied.’ It was cold, and final as a knife. ‘Well, no, it wasn’t exactly a lie. Perhaps I should have told you I had no family who would want to come to the wedding.’
‘And of course neither your mother nor your father would fit into that category.’
And now, too, she saw how careful he had been. His wedding guests had not been his family but associates from work, little more than acquaintances, who wouldn’t know or talk about his private life. Except for his best man, whose attitude had disturbed her at the time.
‘Precisely. After all, I could hardly say, Mum, Dad, I’m marrying the sister of the guy who fed Rosalie the tablet that killed her—want to come?’ The black humour burned into Lily’s vulnerable heart with the bite of concentrated acid. ‘I think they might have been a little reluctant to turn up.’
