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‘Of course. He caught a train from New York. I think he can manage a ten-minute cab ride.’
Her mother’s face cleared. ‘In that case I’m going to nip across to Sarah’s to borrow her square tin. Then I can make the cake and you can ice it.’
Two hours later, Daisy was sitting at the table in her parents’ backyard, trying to ice a message onto the top of her brother’s favourite triple-layered chocolate-mousse cake.
He wasn’t due home for at least an hour. Which was lucky, she thought seconds later as, glancing down, she saw that she’d made the letters far too big, so there was only room to fit ‘Welcome Ho’ across the top of the cake.
She sighed. Why was she doing the icing anyway? Her skill set in the kitchen was pretty much limited to peeling and slicing.
Dropping the icing bag, she looked up towards the kitchen window. ‘Mom! Mom!’ she yelled. ‘I think you should do this. Otherwise it’s just going to be a mess!’
From somewhere inside the house, she heard the doorbell ring and, rolling her eyes, she cursed softly. Great! It was probably Sarah. Now her mom would chat for hours and then it would be all Daisy’s fault when the cake looked as if it had been iced by a hyperactive five-year-old.
Except it wasn’t a woman speaking. It was a man. Her body stilled. And, judging by the excitement in her mother’s voice, it was not just any man. It was her brother. Damn, David! It was so typical of him to arrive early.
But suddenly she was grinning, her face splitting from ear to ear, and, jumping to her feet, she ran up the steps towards the house.
And stopped.
It wasn’t David walking slowly across the deck.
It was Rollo.
Time had numbed her pain. But now it returned, more acute and intense than ever, together with a panic that seeped over her like melted tar, gluing her body to the spot.
‘Hi.’
At the sound of his voice her skin seemed to shrivel over her bones. It was the voice she heard at night when she slept, and in daytime whenever her mind was idle.
It was a voice she’d learnt to love. A voice that made her want to run and never stop running.
‘How did you find out where I lived?’
Her heart was turning over and over in her chest like one of those mechanical toy monkeys. She wanted to touch him so badly it hurt. To reach out and caress that beautiful face. To hold him close and listen to him breathe. Only she couldn’t. He wasn’t hers to touch or caress or hold. He never had been.
‘I asked David.’
His eyes were fixed on hers, and the expression on his face was nothing like his usual cool self-assurance. He looked hesitant, uncertain, like a man dying of thirst who thought he was seeing water for the first time in days.
She shook her head in shock. ‘I don’t believe you.’ The thought of David betraying her hurt almost as much as Rollo’s sudden reappearance in her life. ‘He wouldn’t do that.’
‘I didn’t give him a choice.’
Anger surged through, washing away the hurt and fear. She stepped towards him, fists curling. ‘What did you do? Did you threaten him?’
‘No. Of course not.’
‘Why “of course”? That’s what you do, isn’t it?’
He ran a hand over his face and for the first time she noticed the dark shadows under his eyes, the slight hollowness in his cheeks. But she stonewalled the flicker of concern, watching in silence as he struggled for control.
‘I just told him I needed to see you,’ he said finally.
She stared at him, eyes widening with disbelief. ‘You’re joking, right? He knows what you did. He knows you blackmailed and humiliated and abandoned me. He wouldn’t want you anywhere near me.’
Tears filled her throat and for a moment she couldn’t speak, couldn’t even look at him. But, no matter how hurt she was inside, she wasn’t going to let herself fall apart in front of Rollo Fleming.
‘Get out of this yard and stay away from me. And stay away from my family.’
