Desire: Love and Passion - By Lesia Reid Page 0,32

preferred to work into the early hours of the morning, he preferred going to bed at a reasonable hour. He preferred getting up early in the morning. She preferred getting up when the sun was closer to noon. Even though she had Henry, who prepared exquisite high end delicacies, Willow still relied heavily on a salad after work.

“James,” she said on Sunday morning after they finished making love, “I want to tell you something about me?”

“What is it?” he asked.

“My name was not always Willow Barnes,” she said. “I was born Claudia Harper.”

The name had a ring of familiarity about it, but he could not quite place it at the moment.

“Okay,” he said slowly reaching into his mind for a memory.

“My parents were anthropologists,” she continued. “Doctors Akyini and Jeffrey Harper.”

Now the memory came to him. They were once Britain’s best known anthropologists. They died tragically in Central America years ago. Their daughter, Claudia, had been presumed dead or kidnapped.

“Wow,” he said. “You’re like an open cold case.”

“Something like that,” she admitted. “I wasn’t missing or kidnapped, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. John was my godfather and at the time, I wanted nothing to do with my father’s family. My mother was an only child and her parents died a few years before the accident which meant my other relatives were all Harpers. John helped me change my name and I stayed in France until the whole thing died down.”

“You didn’t like your father’s family?”

“I loved them. For you to understand the state of my mind, I have to go back a little further. My father bought me my first camera when I was four or maybe five. I absolutely adored it. I took it everywhere I went. I had an unlimited supply of camera equipment. My father even taught me how to develop photographs by the time I was seven. My parents were also madly in love with each other and that’s where John came in. I was young, vulnerable to suggestions and he planted it in my mind that my father gave me all this photography stuff so I would stay out of his hair. Then the accident happened and everything got jumbled and messed up.”

“You were with them that day?”

“Yes. In the morning we all went to the site together because my parents had found what they believed was a secret antechamber. It turned out that the chamber was below and what was above was a very delicate bubble. They didn’t know. I mean they measured parts of it and the walls were a foot thick, but then they climbed up and the top was only inches thick. It happened quickly, the ground gave out under my mother and my father reached out and snatched her out of the air, just like that. He was holding on to column he’d just planted. The column could not hold both their weights. My mother told him to him to let her go. She was crying, he was crying and I was crying.

“She kept whispering that she loved us and that my father needed to let go to save himself. He just kept trying to get a good grip. It seemed like forever. The whole thing started falling away and my father looked at me and said, ‘Claudia, I love you but I cannot live knowing. I hope one day you will forgive me’. Then he swung her so high I thought that was it, they would make it, but the column broke away and he hugged her. They didn’t scream, just whispers in the wind, then a soft thud.

“I called John. I told him what happened. I could never forget my father’s words. And John said my father chose to die rather than live for me. At nine, it seemed plausible. It seemed right and I hated all things Daddy. And Daddy was a Harper, so I hated that, too. I didn’t figure out what my father meant for years, not until I was twenty one or twenty two and I was telling Michel about it one night. And then I understood. If my father had not caught my mother, it would have been okay. He would have lived and probably moved on, but the minute he caught her, he couldn’t let go. It was not about loving me less, it was living with the guilt of knowing he had her in his grasp and let go.

“John and I sort of had a falling