Not a Marrying Man (18 page)

‘I can’t believe it.’ And he couldn’t: his heart was pounding and his head was spinning.

‘I have to admit that I was surprised after the family history you gave me. I can only think that perhaps the man you thought was your father is not really your biological father. Such things do happen, you know. In any case, it’s good news, isn’t it?’

‘Very good news. Thank you so much for calling me.’

‘My pleasure.’

The professor hung up and Warwick turned his eyes to look at Amber.

‘I still can’t believe it,’ he said, only just managing to hold on to his emotions.

‘What is it?’ Amber asked. ‘What’s happened?’

‘That was Professor Jenkins, from the laboratory where I had my gene test done. The result was negative.’

‘Oh, my God! Oh, Warwick. Is he sure? They couldn’t have made a mistake, could they?’

‘That’s the first thing I asked him. But no, he said he double checked everything and he’s quite sure.’

‘Oh, Warwick, oh, dear, I know I’m going to cry again.’

‘That’s perfectly all right, my darling,’ Warwick choked out as he pulled her into his arms. ‘I think I’ll join you.’

By the time Max returned downstairs, all weeping had stopped and two joyous faces turned to meet his enquiring eyes.

‘Clearly she said yes,’ Max said to Warwick.

‘Yes,’ Warwick replied, smiling.

‘Sounds like a good excuse to break out a bottle of my best champagne.’

‘Before you do that I have some other good news,’ Warwick said.

‘Really? What?’

‘The results of my gene test came back negative.’

‘You’re kidding me. Wow. This is truly great news. I’ll have to go tell Tara straight away. Tara?’ he called out as he raced back into the house. ‘Guess what?’

‘You do realise what my negative result means, Amber,’ Warwick said whilst waiting for their friends to reappear.

‘Not really. What do you mean? ‘

‘The professor suggested it’s highly likely that the
man I thought was my father is
not
my father. That’s got me thinking. Under the circumstances, I feel I should go to London and ask my long-lost mother a few questions. I know she lives there somewhere. Would you like to come with me?’

‘Just try and stop me.’

‘And whilst we’re in London, I’ll make enquiries about who’s the best man for the job of reversing my vasectomy. I know it’s possible because the doctor who did my original operation thought I might change my mind at some stage so he made sure that it could be reversed.’

‘In that case, why can’t
that
doctor do the reversal?’

‘Darling, that was twenty years ago. He’s probably an old dodderer by now with shaking hands and bad eyesight. No, I’ll find a younger man, an expert in the field. We don’t want anything getting between you and your babies, do we?’

Till the day he died, Warwick would always remember the look on her face at that moment.

L
ESS
than a week later, Amber and Warwick were standing on the doorstep of his mother’s very smart town house in Kensington, waiting for someone to answer the doorbell. They had telephoned beforehand, having received the address and phone number from the private investigator Warwick had hired a week earlier. His mother had sounded agitated at the prospect of her long-estranged son visiting her, but had agreed in the end when he’d said it was a matter of some importance, though he hadn’t elaborated further.

‘How old would she be now?’ Amber whispered to him as they waited, hand in hand.

‘Sixty,’ he replied. ‘She was twenty when I was born. Twenty-one when my father divorced her.’

Amber frowned. ‘Goodness. That was very young to be married and divorced.’

The woman who answered the door didn’t look sixty. She didn’t even look fifty: she could have easily passed for forty-five, her handsome face unlined, her figure superb, her obviously dyed red hair exquisitely groomed. But, despite her striking looks, Gloria Madison had never made it big in the acting world, her career having been relegated to minor roles in lesser movies. Nowadays, she rarely got a part at all.

For a long moment she just stared at Warwick.

‘My goodness,’ she said, a red-nailed hand lifting to rest at the base of her throat. ‘You’re the spitting image of him.’

‘Of whom?’ Warwick returned coldly.

Gloria blinked, her gaze shifting abruptly to Amber before returning to Warwick.

‘Your father, of course,’ she said somewhat brusquely.

‘And who, exactly, was my father?’ he shot back.

‘What? What kind of strange question is that? You know very well who your father was!’

‘I know who I
thought
he was.’

Heat reddened Gloria’s already rouged cheeks. ‘What are you suggesting? If you think I cheated on your father when we were married, then you’d be very wrong indeed. I wouldn’t have dared.’

Warwick’s hand tightened around Amber’s. Suddenly, it worried him that somehow that test result might have been wrong. Mistakes did happen, no matter what the professor said.

‘Can we come inside, Mother? I really don’t want to discuss what is a highly personal situation out in the street.’

‘Oh, very well. But you will have to be quick. I’m expecting a visitor in half an hour.’

A man, no doubt, Amber thought as she looked Warwick’s mother up and down. You didn’t wear an outfit like that for a woman friend.

Gloria led them into an elegantly furnished reception room where she waved them over to the cream sofa that sat beneath an elaborately dressed bay window. She then lowered herself stiffly into a matching armchair
that faced them. Warwick introduced Amber, but Gloria didn’t say anything to her.

Amber could see the woman was very nervous. Why be so, unless she was lying?

‘Warwick wants to have a DNA test done,’ Amber invented suddenly, despite knowing that was impossible, since there was no one on his father’s side left alive to get samples from. ‘That way it can be confirmed that his father really was his father.’

Alarm flashed into the woman’s face. ‘But, why, for heaven’s sake?’

Amber leaned in to Warwick. ‘I think she’s lying about having cheated during her marriage,’ she murmured.

Warwick was beginning to think so too. Maybe if he told her the truth.

‘You probably don’t know this, Mother, but there is a gene in the Kincaid family which produces early onset Alzheimer’s. Dad inherited it. But I don’t think he realised this fact till after I was born. It’s the real reason he committed suicide. The symptoms usually start around fifty.’

‘Good Lord!’ Gloria gasped. ‘Oh, how awful! No, I never knew. Honestly.’ A frown gathered on her high forehead, her blue eyes clouding with real distress. ‘But I … I think you’re wrong about James not knowing this before you were born, Warwick. He must have known. It’s why he did what he did. Why he—’ She broke off, her feelings of being flustered filling her face.

‘What did he do?’ Amber jumped in immediately.

Gloria stared at her before her eyes swung suddenly to Warwick’s. ‘Are you saying you’ve believed all this time that
you’ve
inherited that dreadful disease?’

Warwick’s heart skipped a beat as he heard the
inference behind his mother’s words. ‘Are you admitting that James Kincaid wasn’t my biological father? ‘

‘I … I promised to never say anything,’ Gloria cried. ‘I signed a legally binding contract. James paid me a lot of money to do what he wanted me to do.’

‘And what was that, exactly? ‘

‘To marry him and have you, but then to divorce him and give you up. He said he wanted a child, but not a wife.’

Warwick’s confusion was acute. ‘So James Kincaid
was
my biological father.’

‘No, no, he wasn’t!’ she confessed. ‘I didn’t even meet James till I was four months pregnant with you.’

Amber and Warwick just stared at her.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Gloria blurted out, ‘so terribly terribly sorry. But how was I to know? James never said a word about inheriting Alzheimer’s to me.’

‘I see,’ Warwick bit out as shock over her revelations set in. His hands actually began to shake. ‘Do you think Mother, that I might have a spot of whisky, or brandy? Whatever you have.’

‘Yes, of course.’ And she jumped up.

‘Me too,’ Amber said, her hand tightening around Warwick’s.

His mother returned with two balloons of brandy—very good brandy, actually. Considering the lack of success in her acting career she must have received an extremely generous settlement for giving up her son. Strangely, this thought didn’t upset Warwick. He wasn’t at all bonded with the woman, or the man who’d fathered him.

Though he
was
curious.

‘When you said I was the spitting image of him,’ he
began after swallowing a reviving gulp of brandy, ‘you meant my biological father, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she said with an almost wistful sigh. ‘Though you’re not unlike James. I was always attracted to the tall, dark and handsome type, usually with blue eyes. So when you were born people readily believed you were James’s son.’

‘Who
is
my real father, then?’ Warwick asked.

‘A man called Alistair Johnson. He was an actor … a married actor. I met him when I was only nineteen. He was twenty years older than me and I was crazy about him. When I fell pregnant, I thought I could get him to leave his wife and marry me. When I didn’t go through with the termination he’d arranged, he still refused. Said his wife knew he slept around and didn’t care.’ Remembered distress flickered across her face. ‘I didn’t want to have a baby by myself. It was hard back then, being a single mother. I knew my family wouldn’t help me. I’d run away from home when I was only fourteen to become an actress. They told me to never go back, and they meant it.’

For a long moment, Gloria looked truly sad and regretful. Amber felt a little sorry for her. As much as she had her differences with her own family, she knew they would never do something like that; they would never disown her.

Gloria sighed, then straightened her shoulders in a telling gesture. It reminded Amber of Warwick and the way he straightened his shoulders sometimes.

‘I met James at a party,’ Gloria continued. ‘He seduced me with surprising ease, and it was during the first night we spent together that I confessed my predicament to him. You could have knocked me over with a feather when he said he would marry me and raise my
baby as his own. But only if I took myself totally out of the picture. He said he wanted a legitimate child whom people recognised as his own, but not a wife.’

Amber took another sip of brandy to hide her shock. What kind of man made a proposition like that?

‘He told me that he’d had cancer as a young man, and several bouts of radiation therapy had rendered him sterile,’ Gloria elaborated. ‘Which I totally believed. But now that I know the truth, I suspect James might have already got himself a vasectomy so that he couldn’t have children. The man I married would not have risked passing on that horrible gene you told me about. James was too intelligent to let that happen.’

Warwick could only nod in agreement. It was, after all, what he had done himself.

‘I know you probably both think it was terrible of me to take money to give up my baby, but back then it seemed the best solution. I was only young and silly and, yes, ambitious. If it means anything to you,’ she said, looking directly at Warwick with sad eyes, ‘then I have thought of you often.’

‘And I you,’ he returned, not at all warmly.

‘Oh, dear,’ she said somewhat brokenly. ‘I suppose it’s too late to ask for your forgiveness.’

‘Much too late,’ Warwick bit out.

‘It’s never too late for forgiveness,’ Amber piped up beside him. ‘This is your mother, Warwick. The grandmother of your future children. I refuse to leave this house till you’ve made peace with each other.’

Both of them stared at her, Gloria with surprise and Warwick with irritation. Till he remembered that this was why he’d fallen in love with Amber. Because of her kind heart and warm, loving nature. Not to mention her
stubbornness. Even when she was being stubborn, she was endearing.

His sigh carried resignation. ‘If I must …’

‘You must,’ Amber insisted.

‘All right. I forgive you … Mother.’

Strangely, when he said the words, Warwick felt better. Not that he’d ever been overly bitter about his mother abandoning him. After all, he’d never known her.

Gloria tried not to cry. She’d been trying not to cry ever since she’d opened the door and seen her son for the first time in over thirty-nine years. For most of those years, she’d deeply regretted the deal she’d made with James. The guilt had eaten away at her very soul till she was little more than an empty shell.

No wonder she’d never really made it as an actress. It must have shown up on the screen, the emptiness inside, the lack of love.

Not that she was lacking in love at this moment. It came rushing back, the fierce love that she’d felt for her baby the day he was born, but which she’d quickly buried beneath her selfishness and greed.

‘Thank you,’ she choked out. ‘And thank you,’ she directed at the lovely girl her son had brought with him.

The girl smiled, first at her, then up at Warwick. It was the most beautiful smile Gloria had ever seen: full of love and joy. A smile she hoped to see often in the years to come.

If fate would be that kind …

‘We should go now,’ Warwick said, taking Amber’s arm and standing up. ‘Your visitor will be arriving shortly.’

Gloria stood up, too. ‘There is no visitor. I lied about that.’

Amber swiftly realised that the man Gloria had dressed for had been her son.

‘Why don’t we take Gloria out for lunch, Warwick?’ she suggested. ‘It’s high time we got to know one another. After all, she is going to be my future mother-in-law.’

‘You’re getting married!’ Gloria gushed. ‘How wonderful. But you’re not wearing an engagement ring?’ she directed at Amber.

‘She will be by tonight,’ Warwick said brusquely.

‘So when is the wedding to be?’

‘This summer,’ Warwick replied firmly. ‘On a lovely little beach just north of Sydney.’