CHAPTER TEN

‘MAXINE and I will wait for you at our flat,’ James told Zack softly before leaving.

Holly turned from staring at her mother to look at Zack. ‘I—You knew she was going to be here?’

He nodded. ‘I invited her.’

‘Why?’ she choked.

‘Holly—’

‘This is our wedding day, Zack,’ she cried. ‘You promised me you would only ever try to make me happy.’

‘I will—’

‘By inviting my mother here?’ There were tears in her eyes. ‘How could you do this to me, Zack?’

‘Darling—’

‘Holly,’ a quietly firm voice broke into their heated conversation, her mother having approached them without either of them being aware of it. ‘Zack invited me to your wedding because I asked him to.’

Holly turned to look at her mother, seeing the pain etched beside the violet eyes, the once beautiful face shadowed in sadness. And Holly knew she had been the one to put the pain and sadness there.

‘Let’s get out of here and go somewhere more private,’ rasped Zack, the only one conscious that they weren’t alone.

‘I’d rather not,’ Holly said stiffly.

His mouth firmed tautly. ‘You just promised to obey me, Holly,’ he reminded her abruptly. ‘Are you breaking that vow already?’

She was very pale, still suffering from the shock of her mother being here. ‘You know I’m not,’ she had chosen to keep obey in their wedding ceremony. ‘But—’

‘Then trust me,’ he prompted softly. ‘Just trust me in this.’

She gave another reluctant glance at her mother, seeing only gentle understanding in her face. ‘I trust you with my life, Zack, you know that—’

‘Then trust me with your happiness too,’ he said grimly.

She allowed herself to be led from the building and out to James’s car that he had left for them in the car park, almost numb as Zack helped her mother into the back seat before opening Holly’s door. She was so tense on the drive to their apartment that she felt almost as if she might break in two, her thoughts all running into each other, and none of them making sense.

Zack ignored the champagne they had left waiting for them, pouring three glasses of brandy instead, and drinking his own down in one swallow. Holly ignored her own glass, although she noticed her mother took several reviving sips of hers. She didn’t know what her mother had to feel nervous about. Unless Zack had forced her to come here, although they had both denied that.

‘Right,’ Zack said briskly. ‘I’m going to tell you why I invited your mother to our wedding, Holly, and then I’m going to leave the two of you alone to talk.’

‘No—’

‘Please, Holly,’ her mother softly interrupted her forceful refusal. ‘We do need to talk.’

‘What about?’ she snapped.

Her mother flinched. ‘So many things, so many misunderstandings.’

Holly turned away. ‘I can’t imagine what, I’m sure we’ve always understood each other perfectly!’

‘Holly,’ Zack reprimanded gently. ‘Your mother didn’t reject you five years ago.’

‘Then she gave a very good impression of it!’

He sighed. ‘Will you just stop being on the defensive and listen for a few minutes—’

‘It’s all right, Zack,’ surprisingly it was her mother who once again cut into the conversation. ‘Could you just leave us alone together for a while?’

He looked undecided for a few moments, and then he nodded, coming over to kiss Holly on her stiff lips. ‘I’d never hurt you, Holly,’ he told her huskily. ‘And I would never let anyone else hurt you either. Please, just listen to your mother, give her a chance to explain.’

Holly stared coldly at her mother once they were alone. The older woman possessed a fragile beauty that hadn’t been there five years ago, as if she had suffered greatly during those years. ‘If you’ve come to ruin my marriage as I once ruined yours then I think I should tell you you’ve succeeded. I’ll never forgive Zack for this,’ she said dully.

‘Oh, Holly!’ her mother’s face crumpled emotionally. ‘Did we do this to you?’

‘Not “we”, Mother, just you.’

‘But I never realised, Holly, don’t you know that?’

Her mouth twisted derisively. ‘You rejected me from your life and now claim you didn’t know how hurt and bewildered I’d been? Really, Mother, that’s expecting too much!’

‘I didn’t reject you,’ her mother told her heatedly. ‘I never rejected you!’

‘How long is it since I last saw you, Mother?’ Holly asked pointedly.

The violet eyes so like her own flashed with a temper similar to hers too. ‘And whose decision has that been?’ she demanded to know.

Holly’s eyes widened. ‘You surely aren’t blaming me for that?’ she gasped.

‘Who else? I wrote to you, Holly, time and time again, until in the end you used to send the letters back to me unopened.’

Holly turned away. ‘We had nothing to say to each other then, and we haven’t now either.’

‘Holly—’

‘I don’t know why Zack got in touch with you,’ she said flatly. ‘But I know exactly why you came today, although I never thought of you as vindictive. This should have been the most beautiful day of my entire life, instead it’s turned out to be a nightmare.’

‘Zack came to see me because he was concerned for you, because he loves you.’

‘He has a strange way of showing it!’ Pain twisting her heart until it was all she could feel.

‘Holly,’ her mother’s voice was edged with her own pain, ‘have you always been this bitter?’

‘Only since my mother believed it when she was told I was a whore!’ rasped Holly.

All colour seemed to fade from her mother’s face, leaving her ghostly pale. ‘I never believed that of you,’ she said quietly. ‘Alex raped you, I knew that.’

Holly’s eyes widened disbelievingly. ‘You knew?’ she gasped.

Her mother nodded. ‘I should have seen it coming, I suppose,’ she spoke softly, almost to herself. ‘You were together such a lot, and Alex had always been wild—’

‘Wild?’ Holly blinked her puzzlement at the description. ‘He never seemed that way to me.’

‘Giles had a lot of trouble with him after his mother died, although he seemed to settle down a little once he went to college. I mistakenly thought his innocent friendship with you was a good sign,’ she sighed.

‘But the night—that night,’ Holly bit out tautly. ‘You never said a word, you just believed what Alex said about me.’

Her mother shook her head. ‘I didn’t speak because I knew the truth and I thought you’d been through enough for one night. After you’d gone to bed that night I told Giles that either Alex went out of our lives or I divorced him. I never knew that you thought I believed you guilty all this time,’ she said in an anguished voice. ‘I thought you blamed me for letting it happen, I thought that was why you returned my letters, why you disappeared so completely once you left school.’

‘Why should I blame you?’ Holly asked dazedly. ‘What could you have done about it?’

‘I don’t know, but I’ve always felt responsible. Until Zack came to see me I truly believed you wanted nothing to do with me because you blamed me for what Alex did to you.’

Holly felt stunned, hardly able to believe her mother was telling the truth even now. ‘You could have visited me at the school, Mother,’ she returned flatly. ‘Could have made me listen.’

‘Miss Oakridge advised me not to force you to see me, she said you still weren’t ready for that, and that if I did visit you I could make things worse.’

‘Miss Oakridge knew about—about Alex?’ Her former headmistress had never given any indication that she did.

‘Yes,’ her mother confirmed. ‘When the doctor told me he thought it best if you went back to school, away from where it had happened, I had to tell your headmistress so that she could keep an eye on you. If you knew how much it hurt me to send you away like that!’ Tears glistened in her eyes. ‘I needed you then as much as you say you needed me, but in the circumstances, Alex being your stepbrother, the doctor felt it best that you went away. As I went ahead with the divorce proceedings I knew he’d been right. Giles was angry, I was bitter, the whole thing turned into an ugly fight.’

‘And yet you still stayed close to Bobbie—Roberta.’ That was another pain Holly had never got over, her mother choosing the other girl over her own daughter.

‘Bobbie had no idea what had happened between you and Alex,’ her mother reasoned. ‘And I’d been the only mother she’d known for two years. Both Giles and I agreed that she should remain innocent of the facts, that she should stay out of our battle.’

‘Is that why you were coming to collect her from school and not me?’

‘I was coming for you both, as you would have known if you hadn’t kept returning my letters. In the end I gave up writing, hoping to put things right between us when you came home. Do you know how hurt I was that you chose to go to friends or stay at school during the holidays?’

Holly was confused, not knowing what to believe any more. For five years she had thought her mother blamed her for the break-up of her marriage, had blamed herself for it, and all the time she had been wrong about how her mother felt. ‘Mother, I— How do you feel about me now?’

‘The same as I always have,’ her mother answered quietly. ‘I love you. You’re my daughter.’

Holly moistened her dry lips. ‘And does Zack—does he know all this already?’

‘Yes. You don’t seriously think he would let me anywhere near you if he thought I would hurt you in any way?’ her mother chided. ‘Zack loves you, Holly, he only wants your happiness. I believe he thought that I was a shadow in your life that would always be painful for you. But I can see he was wrong. Whatever misunderstandings we had in the past it’s too late to undo them now.’ She turned to leave.

‘No!’ Holly cried desperately. ‘No, don’t go,’ she asked as her mother turned back to her. ‘Zack was right,’ she said haltingly. ‘I’ve let what happened shape my life. I—I’d like to get to know you again, Mother.’ She looked at her with pleading eyes.

Suddenly they were in each other’s arms, crying and laughing at the same time, both talking at once.

‘Holly …?’ Zack burst in from the kitchen, his eyes opening wide as he saw the two women hugging each other, relief flooding through him as he saw the elation in Holly’s face. ‘I thought the two of you had come to blows,’ he admitted ruefully.

‘Come and join us, darling.’ Holly held her arms out to him. ‘I want to introduce you to my mother.’ As she watched the pride in his eyes as he approached them she knew that in that moment his love for her had grown. Maybe because she had finally grown, at last.

* * *

‘Did I remember to thank you?’

Zack looked up at her sleepily as the two of them lay in bed together later that night. Their honeymoon was being spent in romantic Paris, in a house Zack had loaned from a friend. ‘For what?’ he asked indulgently.

‘For giving me back my mother.’ The three of them had finally joined Maxine and James for lunch, and she had later parted from her mother with a promise to see her as soon as they returned from their honeymoon. ‘Are you going to give all my life that “happy-ever-after” touch?’ she teased.

‘I’m going to try,’ he promised.

‘How did you know, Zack?’ She lay against his chest during this needed respite from their tempestuous lovemaking. ‘What made you realise I’d been wrong about my mother?’

‘I didn’t.’ He idly played with the hair at her nape. ‘I just wondered if she might be interested in the fact that we were getting married. She was. She went on to tell me her side of things, and I thought the two of you should meet. I tried to tell you before the wedding, but then I thought perhaps you wouldn’t marry me. I daren’t risk that, not after losing you once already.’

‘I love you more than ever for giving me back my mother.’

‘Only for that?’

Her hands roamed caressingly down his body. ‘Well, maybe for one or two other reasons too.’

‘I should think so,’ he growled.

‘Isn’t it time you “worshipped me with your body” again?’ She looked at him with innocent eyes.

Zack smiled. ‘I thought you were never going to ask!’

* * * * *