A Sudden Engagement by Penny Jordan

Author:Penny Jordan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Literature/Poetry
Published: 2012-03-22T20:59:40+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

THE fine weather continued as Drew drove them towards York. He had picked Kirsty up just before eleven. She had been ready and waiting for him, choosing, on some impulse she couldn't quite define herself, to wear an expensive, fine tweed suit Chelsea had given her when she left college. The plums and greys were a perfect foil for her own dark colouring, and with it she wore a plain grey silk blouse she had bought in Harrods sale.

If she had expected Drew to be impressed by the care she had taken with her appearance she was disappointed. He murmured only a brief greeting and then escorted her to the waiting car, opening the door for her and seeing her safely inside before driving off.

As she glanced surreptitiously at him it came to Kirsty how little she knew about him, and yet here they were practically on the verge of getting engaged, albeit temporarily. Did he have a family, close friends who might be expected to want to know about their supposed 'engagement'? It was Yard for her to imagine him in a family setting, for some reason he struck her quite forcibly as a loner, but somewhere he must have parents; perhaps other relatives . . .

'You're looking worried-what's the matter this time?'

Kirsty hadn't realized he had switched his glance from the road to her, and caught unawares by the steely perception of his eyes she blurted out unthinkingly, 'I was just wondering about your family-what they might think about . . .'

'I have no family.' His voice was clipped, his face shuttered and repressive.

'No . . . but . . .'

'Oh, I had parents once-if you could call them that. A mother who cheated on her marriage and then when she found herself pregnant by her lover deserted the child she bore, while her lover disappeared, somewhere in the Australian out- back. They're both dead now,' he told Kirsty coldly, 'and if it wasn't for the compassion of my mother's husband, I doubt if I'd know even today who my parents actually were.'

The brooding quality of the words struck Kirsty to the heart. Surrounded all her life by her parents' almost doting affection, she found it hard to accept that any parents could simply abandon their child as Drew was suggesting.

'What's the matter?' he demanded sardonically. 'Don't you believe me? Or is it simply that you want to hear all the unpleasant details?'

When she made a brief sound of denial in her throat, he grimaced. 'Perhaps it's just as well this engagement isn't real, otherwise you might legitimately question who you were marrying. It's a terrible thing to deprive a child of all knowledge of its parents; it creates a vacuum that no one who hasn't experienced it can understand; a sense of being set apart from the rest of society and oneself; a loss of identity that lurks in the shadows like a childhood nightmare.'

Listening to him, Kirsty remembered what Helen had told her on the night of her party.

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