CHAPTER ONE
‘FLOWERS? FORME? An hour and a half ahead of schedule, Curtis, and you’ve come bearing flowers...heather...narcissi...pussy willow, no less! I had no idea you were so well acquainted with the English winter garden!’
From his towering height of six foot three, Curtis Hamilton looked down on his much more diminutive godfather and grinned.
‘I know absolutely nothing about English winter gardens,’ he drawled, shutting the front door on a snowy February landscape and taking a few seconds to breathe in the familiarity of his godfather’s cottage, with its unique smells of a house lived in by a bookish bachelor with a flair for home cooking. ‘Nor,’ he continued with lazy amusement, as he divested himself of his cashmere coat and handmade Italian loafers, both of which were ridiculously unsuitable for heavy snow in Cambridgeshire but there hadn’t been a flake when he’d left London, ‘do I know a thing about flowers of any description, English or otherwise. Got Julia, my PA, to get them for me. And, just for the record, the flowers aren’t for you, William.’
‘No, I suspected not. Care to divulge, dear boy?’
‘In due course. What can I smell?’ He sniffed the air but his eyes were trained on his godfather, looking for anything that might hint that things weren’t as they should be. From the very moment he had walked through the doors of the foster care home where Curtis had been miserably languishing—an eight-year-old statistic in an uncaring and impersonal machine—he had bought himself all the love and affection Curtis had within him to give.
After his health scare eighteen months previously, William Farrow had retreated into himself, knocked back by a body that had let him down combined with his scheduled retirement from the University of Cambridge, where he had lectured in Classics for decades.
A double whammy.
But, thankfully, right now he looked himself, bustling ahead of Curtis towards the kitchen with the flowers, giving a detailed account of what was on the menu for dinner, from where he’d bought the ingredients to how they had been put to use and leaving nothing out in the telling.
He was a small, round man who always dressed formally. Curtis often teased him that it was on the off-chance royalty might just pop by unannounced for a cup of tea.
Curtis knew that tonight his godfather would have made a special effort and was not surprised to see that he was wearing a snazzy red bow tie with his crisp blue shirt, and someslacks, as he insisted on calling them. Not quite funeral formal but definitely not the sort of casual gear most people might associate with dinner at a kitchen table.
Curtis’s heart swelled with affection. In a life where emotions were never allowed to intrude, his godfather was the only person who could lay claim to his unconditional love. Neither ever spoke of it, but Curtis was very much aware of the fact that William had rescued him from his damaged past and saved him from the unknown horrors of a future that would not have been kind to a child raised by a drug addict and then thrown into foster care when his mother had finally overdosed. There were so many statistics in that setting—children who were lost for ever when they were spat out as young adults—and he could easily have become one of them.
‘I haven’t seen you for over three months. Yes, you managed Christmas Day here, but that was the sum of it.’ William busied himself with a vase but there was intent behind that throwaway observation and Curtis, sitting at the pine kitchen table, breathing in the fragrant aromas of beef and oyster pie, felt a prick of intense guilt.
‘I know and I can only apologise for that. Would you believe me if I told you that I would have visited if I could have?’
‘I would,’ William said wryly, ‘which is the problem. You work too hard, Curtis.’ He stood back to inspect his handiwork with the flowers and then carefully placed the vase on the dresser against the wall before bringing a couple of wine glasses to the table.
‘It’s a blessing and a curse,’ Curtis murmured, mind wandering as the conversation took a familiar turn.
Where was she?
He’d shown up with the flowers which, admittedly, had been a tiny bit bruised because he’d chucked them on the passenger seat of his Range Rover and then inadvertently dumped his computer bag on top, but still perfectly acceptable as a prelude to a favour.
But where had she been? At six o’clock on a Thursday evening in the depths of winter? On the outskirts of Cambridge? With snow falling? Was there anything to actuallydoon the outskirts of Cambridge on a snowy winter’s evening? When he thought about that, his mind hit a road block.
At any rate, she hadn’t been in and he’d been so surprised that he’d waited an inordinately long time in the freezing weather before giving up on the doorbell and making his way over to his godfather, who lived twenty minutes away.
He surfaced to the tail-end of his godfather warning him about blood pressure, stress and all the various ailments that could afflict someone who worked too much.
And thereafter followed a comfortable journey for both of them. Gentle nagging, curiosity about some of the bigger projects Curtis was working on—state-of-the-art buildings that defied laws of gravity, the vast commercial sites which were additions to his multimillion-pound portfolio—and then, over the beef pie and roast potatoes, the inevitable questioning about the future.
A wife...children...all those things which had eluded William Farrow, making it doubly important for his godson to achieve, apparently.
How could anyone know what might be good for someone if they’d never experienced it themselves? His godfather had never been married, had never had children, had never, to Curtis’s knowledge, desired either.
So where was the logic in recommending those very things to him? Certainly, when it came to lessons learned on the journey through life, his were resoundingly clear when it came to love and all the happy-ever-afters it always seemed to preface.
Not for him.
He was no longer a lost child, pouring love into a parent who had no time for him. He knew better than to hand his heart over to anyone. Waiting by a window with no food to eat for a mother who had viewed parenting as something way down the list of priorities had put paid to all his illusions and if that hadn’t been enough, then there had been the shambolic disaster with Caitlin...
He shut the door on that particular memory with a decisive clang.
The subject of a rosy future that wasn’t on the cards for him was adroitly shelved when William asked without preamble, as they sipped coffee after an exemplary pie, ‘So who, dear boy, were the flowers destined for?’
Which focused Curtis instantly on the thorny question he had been asking himself for the past couple of hours.
