‘Hush, darling. Shh, little man, we’re on our way to the doctor and you’ll soon feel much, much better…’
She’d almost reached the bottom of the staircase when the couple turned from their admiration of the panelled reception area. Unwillingly she glanced up. Her astounded gaze clashed with brilliant blue eyes in a dark, arrogantly aristocratic face—eyes that blazed with incredulous disbelief across the distance between them.
Not Mark, she thought sickly. Marc.
Marc Corbett.
‘Paige!’
Irrational panic kicking her in the stomach, she missed the last step and pitched forwards. Hampered by the child in her arms, she instinctively twisted to protect him from the marble floor.
Cruelly strong hands bit into her waist, hauling her up against a lean, hard body, supporting her until she could gasp, ‘I’m all right!’
Brodie’s high-pitched wail cut through Marc Corbett’s reply, but she could hear his deep voice reverberate through his chest, and for a moment—a brief, shocked second—she remembered what it had been like to be held in those arms as music swirled around them on the dance floor…
He let her go and demanded harshly, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
Brodie stiffened and shrieked again, the sound abruptly cutting off as though someone had clamped a hand across his mouth. His little body jerked, arms and legs thrashing wildly.
‘What’s the matter with that child?’ Marc’s voice cracked liked a whip.
Terror squeezing her heart, Paige scanned Brodie’s unconscious face; his eyes were closed and his lips had turned an ominous purple.
‘Oh, God, he’s so sick,’ she whispered, touching his forehead. The fine, soft skin burned the back of her hand. Terrified, she tightened her arms around him and swivelled, heading as fast as she could for the doors.
The woman with Marc said on a concerned note, ‘I think it’s having a convulsion.’
‘Where’s the nearest doctor?’ Marc gripped Paige by the elbow, ignoring her mute resistance as he steered her up the street. ‘Get into the car.’
He indicated a large BMW a few metres along the pavement, as timelessly elegant as the surrounding buildings. Paige bolted into the front passenger seat and gabbled directions at Marc, barely registering the woman who climbed into the back.
Marc glanced once over his shoulder before forcing his way into the stream of traffic, judging the narrow gap to a nicety. Heart hammering, Paige felt Brodie’s small body relax. Oh, God, she thought feverishly, please, no. Please, no!
Almost sagging with relief, she saw his eyelids twitch; seconds later his lips gained a little healthy colour. He blinked a couple of times before giving a pathetic little wail.
In a voice she didn’t recognise, she said, ‘He looks better,’ and tucked the shawl carefully around the little body.
Marc Corbett didn’t take his eyes from the road. ‘How’s his breathing?’
Unevenly she said, ‘Regular.’ And, indeed, Brodie seemed to have slipped into a deep, natural sleep that was immensely reassuring.
‘His colour?’
‘Normal.’
She sneaked a rapid sideways glance. Bad move.
An ache rasped her throat and she turned her face resolutely to the front. Not fair, she thought fiercely. It simply wasn’t fair that Marc Corbett should turn up when her life seemed to have crumbled into dust around her. It was a wonder he hadn’t arrived in a clap of thunder, with lighting effects and a sinister laugh.
She knew that handsome face—the strong jaw and high cheekbones—as well as her own. Six years hadn’t dimmed the brilliance of his eyes—a blue so intense they blazed with the colour and fire of sapphires. Looking into Marc Corbett’s eyes was like being spun into the heart of an electrical storm.
How many times had she caught a glimpse of a tall dark man and suffered this passionate, shameful excitement? Too many to count…
But until now it had never been the man she’d unconsciously been looking for; just as well, because six years previously he had married her childhood friend Juliette.
And two years ago Juliette had died in a tragic, senseless road accident. Paige’s throat closed as she remembered the girl who’d been a charming substitute older sister to her.
The woman in the back seat leaned forward to say, ‘Poor little boy! What is the matter with him? Do you know?’
She sounded so genuinely worried that Paige almost forgave her the sly comment about her being a horrible example.
Unevenly she answered, ‘He’s feverish and he has a rash; I think he might have chickenpox.’
But she couldn’t banish the terrifying word meningitis from her mind.
She’d expected to have to repeat the directions to the surgery, but Marc Corbett didn’t need his mind refreshed. As the building came into view, she said woodenly, ‘You can stop here—pull left.’
‘I know I am in New Zealand.’ A faint, alien inflection to his intonation betrayed the influence of his French mother.
Without thinking, Paige turned her head. A royal blue gaze seared across her face before returning to the road.
Very appropriate! Royal blue eyes for a man who owned and ruled a commercial empire. Nerves wound tight in unbearable tension, Paige swallowed. Meeting Marc again had been a hideous, meaningless coincidence. He’d drop her off here and disappear from her life.
Which was exactly what she wanted.
The luxurious car drew into a miraculously empty length of kerbside. Anxiously searching Brodie’s face, Paige wondered if Marc had ever had to search for a parking space like ordinary people. Probably not; his combination of ruthless determination and compelling charisma seemed to magic obstacles away.
‘Thanks very much,’ she said awkwardly, releasing herself from the seatbelt to scrabble for the door handle.
‘Wait there.’
But as he strode around the front of the car she fumbled the door open. From the back came the woman’s voice, amused yet chiding.
‘It’s best to do what he says. He’s a very—dominant—man.’
She invested that word dominant with a lingering amusement that made Paige feel sick. If this was Lauren Porter, she was obviously still very much in Marc’s life.
Why not? A man who’d maintained a mistress during the four short years of his marriage wasn’t likely to let his wife’s death break up the relationship.
When he opened the door Paige attempted to scramble out, but worry and shock made her awkward, and after a moment Marc plucked her and Brodie from the car with a leashed violence that destroyed the last pathetic shreds of her composure.
Once he was sure she was steady on her feet, he dropped his hands as though she’d contaminated them. ‘Are you all right?’
His voice was cold and hard as iron, and as smoothly disciplined. Sensation flayed her with a diabolical combination of stimulation and fear—and, stronger than both, a weird, unnerving sensation of relief, as though she’d been lost and was now found again.
Clutching the baby, Paige stepped back and said tonelessly, ‘Fine, thank you,’ before racing into the sanctuary of the surgery.
While the woman at the counter pulled Brodie’s records from the computer she turned her head and watched Marc’s companion—slender, dressed in the signature good taste of a fashionable designer—ease gracefully into the front seat of the car with a flirtatious hint of long, superb legs. As soon as the door closed the vehicle pulled smoothly from the kerb and merged into the flow of traffic, disappearing almost immediately.
No doubt he was as glad to get rid of her as she was to see him go. A sour jab of disillusionment, goaded by that acute, painfully physical awareness, propelled Paige across to the waiting area.
She sat down in a chair apparently chosen for its lack of comfort and rocked a now wakeful—and very fretful—Brodie. Marc’s companion fitted the description Juliette had given of a height to match Marc’s six foot three or so. Even their colouring matched. Her black hair
was cut into a style that suited her fine features. And Juliette had admired her eyes—‘Grey as an English dawn,’ she’d said.
The accent fitted too.
‘She is English and clever—an executive in Marc’s organisation. Marc says she is brilliant,’ Juliette had told her, modern technology delivering the catch in her voice perfectly across the twelve thousand miles that had separated her from Paige. ‘At least he doesn’t shame me with his choice of a mistress; she is lovely and wears clothes like a Frenchwoman.’
Paige’s knuckles gleamed white on the receiver. ‘You might be getting it all wrong, you know. Unless—has he admitted it?’
‘Oh, no.’ Juliette sounded shocked. ‘I am not going to ask him—I don’t need to. I have seen them together, and that is enough. They are very discreet, but there is a connection between them that is impossible to miss.’
‘What do you mean? Surely they don’t—?’
‘Flirt?’ Juliette had sighed. ‘Marc would never humiliate me like that. I can’t describe the link between them except to say that it is there, like an invisible chain binding them together.’
And let’s not go there now, Paige thought wearily, rocking the whimpering baby. Just concentrate on getting Brodie to the doctor, and working out how you can make your pathetic savings last until you get another job.
Half an hour later, when she walked out into the bright winter sunshine and heard a deep voice say her name, she wasn’t surprised, although her heart contracted into a tight, hard lump in her chest. She’d known he’d be waiting for her.
‘Did the doctor agree with your diagnosis of chicken pox?’ he asked in a hard voice with a disturbingly abrasive undernote.
Warily she thrust the prescription into her jeans pocket as Brodie snuffled beneath the shawl. Although bright sunlight gilded the city, a sharp wind blustering in from the sea promised a cold night.
Marc was alone, she realised with humiliating relief. Not breaking stride, she returned in a tone as chilly as the air, ‘Yes, she did. I’m sorry, I haven’t time to talk. I need to fill a prescription and then take Brodie home.’
Marc fell in beside her, saying inflexibly, ‘I’ll drive you there.’
To a grotty little flat down an alleyway behind a hamburger joint? Never. She said quickly, ‘It’s all right; it’s not far.’
‘It’s not all right. The child is ill.’
‘The doctor was certain that it’s the first stage of chicken pox, which is not a serious illness.’ She paused, then said with a touch of malice, ‘I hope you’ve had it. Chickenpox is very infectious.’
‘I believe I had all the childhood diseases.’ His hard, handsome face revealed nothing. ‘Have you had it?’
‘Juliette and I had it together,’ she said stonily. ‘I gave it to her, I believe.’
A rapid glance took in the symmetry of angles and planes in the outrageously good-looking face that radiated formidable, uncompromising power. His dead wife’s name brought no flicker of remorse or sorrow.
She dragged her eyes away, but it was too late; he’d seen her survey him and something kindled in the depths of his striking eyes. His voice, however, was all controlled assurance. ‘Nevertheless, I’ll take you home. Give me the prescription form and you can wait in the car with the child.’
No doubt his formidable brain was slotting her involuntary response into a mental file. Marc Corbett hadn’t turned a large family fortune into a stupendous one by the age of thirty-two without an incisive, analytical intelligence backed by relentless determination. He’d used his father’s legacy to become a player on the world stage.
And he knew women.
Masking her jumping nerves with a frozen façade, she said crisply, ‘Thank you, but you don’t need to go to the trouble.’
The door to the pharmacy beckoned; she turned abruptly, feeling him follow her, noiseless and purposeful as a predator.
Which, she reminded herself, was exactly what he was. His father had been called the Robber Baron in the business press; no one dared whisper that about Marc, but she’d read enough to know that his name inspired respect mingled with fear.
Brodie began to cry again, his head turning restlessly inside the shawl. ‘Hush, darling.’ Paige juggled him as she fumbled in her jeans pocket. Her voice softened into a murmur. ‘It’s all right, sweetheart, you’ll feel better once we get some of this stuff inside you.’
‘Give him to me,’ Marc commanded.
Shock whipped her head up; she looked directly into his autocratic face, its bold, chiselled features set in a mask of impatience.
‘He doesn’t like strangers,’ she said raggedly.
One black, ironic brow shot up, and memories squeezed her heart painfully.
Marc said crisply, ‘Then give me the prescription form.’
‘I can manage.’ But Brodie chose that moment to stiffen alarmingly.
Fortunately it didn’t turn into another convulsion—it was only the prelude to a shriek. While she was hushing the baby, Marc gave her a glittering glance in which irritation and concern were blended, and before she had time to object his fingers had invaded her pocket and hauled out the piece of paper.
‘Wait here,’ he commanded, and strode up to the pharmacy counter.
Where, of course, he got instant service. Body throbbing at his unexpected touch, Paige’s gaze followed him as she rocked the baby, trying to soothe him with softly spoken nonsense. Marc’s overwhelming physical presence owed something to wide shoulders and lean hips and long athlete’s legs, but more to an intangible aura of power and effortless authority that had cut a path through the other customers. Sensation twisted inside her, paradoxically sharp and smouldering.
And forbidden.
She noted with a pang of fear that inexplicable feeling of rightness, as though the past six years had been a nightmare and she’d just woken to a new dawn. Don’t be so ridiculous, she told herself staunchly. He’s just like Dad. Marriage vows mean nothing.
Subsiding into whimpers, the baby stuffed a tiny fist into his mouth and sucked noisily until he realised he wasn’t going to get nourishment from there. His desperate roars once more filled the pharmacy when Marc arrived back with the medication in one lean hand.
‘Let’s go before he eats that hand,’ he said, turning with his other hand on her elbow, steering her out onto the footpath.
Paige didn’t fool herself that she had any choices; for some reason Marc Corbett had decided he was going to take her home, and those fingers resting so casually on her arm would clamp if she tried to run. Although she hated to surrender, it meant nothing against the need to get the medicine and some liquid into Brodie immediately—and to ring Sherry, his mother, as soon as she could to reassure her that Brodie only had chickenpox.
Back in the car, with the lingering perfume of his previous passenger floating around her, Paige gave directions in a flat, remote voice. Sexy and modern, the scent breathed money and leisure and privilege, taunting her with its lazy exclusiveness.
She stiffened her shoulders and stared through the windscreen. It was difficult to find a dreary part of Napier, but today she saw her street with fresh eyes—the eyes of a man accustomed to the best. Subdued, out at the elbows, the collection of small shops and houses was only redeemed by bright flowers and shrubs.
‘Number twenty-three,’ she told Marc, the taste of defeat bitter on her tongue.
He turned down the drive between the fast food bar and an electrical goods shop that had seen better days.
‘It’s the second unit,’ Paige said reluctantly.
The car drove down the row of cheaply built units; an elderly, failed motel had been turned into cramped apartments. Parking in the space allotted to her unit, Marc killed the engine.
Without taking his hands from the wheel, he surveyed the red-brick building with its aluminium ranch-slider windows and small concrete terraces separated by flower boxes. Most were desolate except for a few rugged weeds scraping an existence in dusty earth.
Only the one outside Paige’s unit radiated colour—brazen marigolds, their gold and lemon and rich mahogany defying the general hopelessness.
‘Thank you,’ she said levelly as Brodie, soothed into sleep by the motion of the car, woke with another weary little whimper. She wanted Marc out of there, safely banished to his world of luxury where the last thing he’d have to worry about was the state of his bank balance.
‘Give the baby to me,’ he ordered.
Startled, she said, ‘I can manage.’
His beautiful mouth compressed into a thin line. ‘It will be easier for you to get out if I have him.’
She hesitated.
‘What are you afraid of?’ he asked softly, blue eyes sardonic. ‘That I’ll kidnap him?’
‘Of course not.’
‘I won’t drop him either.’ His tone mocked her.
Flushing, she handed over the baby and leapt out of the car, only to see Marc emerge too, Brodie held with firm confidence in his arms. No stumbling or hesitation either, she noted; his distinctive ease and power made every movement graceful in a very masculine way.
‘I’ll bring him in,’ he said, when she came towards him. ‘You’ll manage your keys more quickly if you aren’t carrying him.’
Thus neatly forestalling her plans of taking the child and walking away, leaving him with no option but to drive off.
Not that he would have. Seething at her helplessness, Paige swung on her heel and walked across the bare concrete to insert the key with a vicious twist.
When she turned Marc was just behind her, and as she pushed the door back he walked in, dark head a few centimetres below the lintel, with Brodie traitorously silent in his arms.
Marc stopped in the middle of the threadbare carpet in all shades of mud, dwarfing the shabby, nondescript room. Paige burned with futile resentment as his narrowed, bright gaze checked out the elderly sofa, the table with two chairs—its scratched top covered by a sewing machine draped in a swathe of gleaming fabric—and the tiny kitchen overlooking a wall and a clothesline.
In spite of her efforts to cheer it up, she knew the room reeked with defeat. Not even the pots on the sill, fragrant with growing herbs, made any difference.
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