PENNY JORDAN - The Perfect Father

‘Well, thank you very much for your advice,’ Samantha snapped furiously at him. ‘But when I want your opinion on what a man finds sexy, Liam, you can be sure I’ll ask you for it. And anyway—’ She stopped abruptly.

‘Anyway what?’ Liam asked her mildly as he bent down again to retrieve a pretty silk wrap which was lying under the suitcase.

Samantha glared at him.

How could she tell him that when you were a woman with breasts as generously rounded and full as hers were, the type of silky clingy unstructured top he was describing was quite simply a “no-no” unless you wanted to stop all the traffic on the freeway.

‘This isn’t for Bobbie,’ he told her positively as he handed her the wrap.

‘What makes you say that?’ Samantha demanded.

‘It’s not her colour,’ he told her simply. ‘Her skin is paler than yours and her eyes lighter. This is your colour, but coffee or caramel would suit you even better.’

‘Thank you so much,’ Samantha gritted acidly as she snatched the wrap from him.

As she bent to try to stuff her possessions back into her suitcase, Liam knelt down beside her.

‘You need another case,’ he told her calmly. ‘This one, if you get it as far as the airport, will probably break the baggage conveyor belt. That’s if it doesn’t burst open again first.

‘You’re wrong, by the way,’ he added mystifyingly as Samantha tried to ignore the reality of what he was telling her.

‘It isn’t only women with tiny breasts who can go braless. You’ve got far too many hang-ups about your body, Samantha, do you know that?’

‘Is that a fact? Well. I’ll thank you to keep your opinions on my hang-ups and my…my breasts…to yourself if you don’t mind,’ Samantha gritted hot-faced at him, wondering how he had followed her embarrassed train of thought.

‘Of course, when it comes to bouncing around the tennis court, I agree that a woman needs a good sports bra,’ Liam was continuing as if she hadn’t spoken.

Samantha shot him a wary look. She played tennis in the residence’s court most mornings with her father and she always wore a sports bra—so what was Liam implying?

‘Look, why don’t I carry this back to your room for you so that you can repack it in two cases,’ Liam was offering.

To Samantha’s chagrin, as he picked up the case she could see that he was able to carry it far more easily than she herself had been able to do—carrying it not downstairs where she had intended to take it, she recognised, but back in the direction she had just come—to her bedroom.

As he elbowed open the door and dumped the heavy case on the floor, Samantha followed Liam into her room.

‘I was taking that downstairs…’ she began to upbraid him and then stopped abruptly.

Standing with his feet apart and his hands on his hips, Liam wasn’t watching her but instead was focusing on the pretty upholstered chair beside the window.

The chair—an antique—had been a gift from her grandmother, a pretty early Victorian rocker which Samantha had had recaned and for which she had made her own hand-stitched sampler cushions. But it wasn’t the chair or the cushions which were holding Liam’s attention—Samantha knew that and she knew too exactly what he was looking at.

‘Mom made me keep him,’ she began defensively, pushing past Liam and rushing over to the chair, protectively picking up the battered and slightly threadbare teddy bear who was seated on it.

‘She says it reminds her of when we were little. It was her bear before us and then Tom had him, too, and…Oh, you don’t understand,’ she breathed crossly. ‘You’re too unemotional. Too cold…’

‘You should run for government office yourself,’ Liam told her sardonically. ‘With your mind-reading talents you’d be a wow.’

‘Mind-reading,’ Samantha breathed heavily. ‘Oh you…’

‘For your information I am neither unemotional nor cold and as for Wilfred…’ Ignoring Samantha he walked up to her and deftly took the bear from her unresisting grasp.

‘I had one very like him when I was young. He came originally from Ireland with my grandfather. He was just a boy then…’

Samantha’s eyes widened. Liam rarely talked about his family—at least not to her. She knew he had no brothers or sisters and that his grandparents, immigrants from Ireland, had built up a very successful haulage business which Liam’s father had continued to run and expand until his death from a heart attack whilst Liam was at college.

Liam had sold the business—very profitably—with his mother’s approval. From a very young age he had known that he wanted to enter politics and both his parents and his grandparents when they had been alive, had fully supported him in this ambition, but it was from her mother that Samantha had gleaned these facts about Liam’s background, not from Liam himself.

‘Why does he never talk to me…treat me as an adult?’ she had once railed at her mother when Liam had pointedly ignored some questions she had been asking him about his grandparents. She had been at college at the time and working on an essay about the difficulties experienced by the country’s immigrants in the earlier part of the century and she had hoped to gain some first-hand knowledge and insights into the subject from Liam’s memories of his grandparents.

‘He’s a very proud man, sweetheart,’ her father had responded, hearing her exasperated question. ‘I guess he kinda feels that he doesn’t want his folks looked down on or…’

‘Looked down on…Why should I do that?’ Samantha had interrupted him indignantly.

‘Well, Liam is very conscious of the fact that his grandparents came to this country with very little in the way of material possessions, just what they could carry with them in fact, whilst…’

‘He thinks that I’d look down on him because your family arrived with Cabots and Adamses and all those other “first families” on the Mayflower who went on to form the backbone of North American early politics, wealth and society,’ Samantha had protested hotly. ‘Is that what he really thinks of me?’

‘Sweetheart, sweetheart,’ her father had protested gently. ‘I’m sure that Liam thinks no such thing. It’s just that he’s as reluctant to have his family background put under the public microscope as your mother would be hers. Not out of any sense of shame—quite the reverse—but out of a very natural desire to protect those he loves.’

‘But Gran is still alive whilst Liam’s grandparents are dead,’ Samantha had objected.

‘The principle is still the same,’ her father had pointed out gently.

Now, some impulse she couldn’t name made Samantha ask Liam softly, ‘Do you still have it…the bear…?’

His austere features suddenly broke into an almost boyish grin and for one breath-stopping moment Samantha actually felt as though something or someone was physically jerking her heartstrings. Impossible, of course, hearts didn’t have strings and if hers had then there was no way that one Liam Connolly could possibly have jerked them. No, it was just the mental image she had had of him as a small boy listening solemnly to his grandfather whilst he related to him tales of his own Irish upbringing.

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll be able to keep it for your children and tell them the stories your grandparents told you,’ Samantha told him impulsively.

Immediately his features changed and became formidably harsh.

‘Don’t you jump on the bandwagon,’ he told her grittily. ‘Everyone seems determined to marry me off. I’ve even had Lee Calder giving interviews stating that a single, childless Governor won’t understand the needs of the state’s parents. My God, when I think of the way he’s been trying to cut down on our education.’