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Sir Frank frowned. ‘There’s no need to shout, lad, we’re not deaf.’
‘Sorry, but I thought Regan was hard of hearing.’ Ryan’s eyes were owlishly innocent behind his wire glasses.
The wretch! Regan gave him a speaking look which he returned with a pious grin as he stuffed another pancake in his mouth.
‘Why on earth should you think that?’ asked Hazel.
Ryan moved his thin shoulders up and down, pointing to his bulging cheeks to explain why he couldn’t answer.
‘He must have misunderstood something I said,’ Regan supplied hurriedly, ‘We were bird-watching, so we were whispering—’
‘Bird-watching?’ Joshua’s eyebrows shot up. He looked sceptically at the young man munching innocently at his side. ‘Since when have you taken up such a tame hobby, Ryan? I thought Cyberspace ruled your life. Although I suppose staring at native flora and fauna could be considered an advance on staring at a computer screen all day. At least it gets you out in the fresh air.’
‘Nothing’s tame to a young, enquiring mind,’ Regan objected at his disparaging sarcasm. If he was going to be a father he needed to buck his ideas up. ‘I think children should always be encouraged to find everything interesting and not be stuck with labels that inhibit them from wanting to learn…’
Ryan gulped down his pancake to protest. ‘I’m not a child.’
‘I was speaking generally. Whether you’re five, fifteen or fifty, you’re still someone’s child,’ she countered, dipping her spoon into her fruit.
‘Yes, but not a child. A child is someone between the ages of birth and puberty,’ he argued.
She recalled his water-dripping-on-stone technique of wearing her down from the previous day.
‘According to the dictionary, a child is also a human offspring—’ she persisted.
‘But not in the first meaning of the word,’ he interrupted stubbornly. ‘I bet if you looked it up you’d find my meaning listed before yours.’
‘Don’t take that bet,’ came Joshua’s dry advice.
‘I wasn’t going to,’ dismissed Regan. ‘OK,’ she told Ryan, finding it amazingly easy to sink to his level, ‘you win—you’re far too boringly pedantic to be a mere child. You have to be at least ninety before you get to drive other people crazy by arguing endlessly over such irritating trivia with such single-minded intensity.’ She smiled at him sweetly. ‘I guess that puts you somewhere in your second childhood.’
Ryan thought about that for a moment, his eyes narrowing behind the round rims of his glasses in a way that struck a faint chord of uncomfortable resonance in Regan’s brain.
‘You kept arguing, too…’
‘That’s because I was right, but I showed my maturity by letting you win in deference to your mental age. When I was a child, I was taught to respect my elders…’
She tilted up her nose at him and he grinned, attacking his pancakes again. ‘You didn’t let me win.’
‘If you say so, dear,’ she said, in the indulgent, forgiving tone that she knew men—both young and old—hated to hear.
Ryan opened his mouth.
‘Give it up, Son. Women are genetically programmed to have the last word. They can never bear to allow a man to feel that he’s won an argument.’
‘But, Dad…you told me never to give up on a fight when I believe I’m in the right!’
Son? Dad?
Regan’s spoon clattered to her plate, splattering fruitjuice and yoghurt over the pale yellow tablecloth.
‘He—You—You’re father and son?’ she said stupidly, dabbing at the tablecloth with her napkin in order to disguise her shaking hands.
Her eyes darted from face to face, suddenly seeing the echo of the boy in the man and the foreshadowing of the man in the boy…the similar angle of their cheekbones, the narrow, intelligent temples, the strong line of their noses.
Joshua’s eyes narrowed, exactly as his son’s had a few moments earlier. She must have been blind not to have seen it before!
‘I thought you said that you and Ryan had talked?’
