by Trish Wylie
And yet the look on his face had been so raw, so unguarded, so—real—that it was hard to deny the truth of it. When Rhiannon had always believed—
No—had known. She shook her head. This had to be some kind of game. Something he’d convinced himself of so he could sleep better at night.
Turning away from the door, she jumped when his voice sounded from the hall behind her.
‘Oh, no, you don’t. You and I quite obviously need to have a long talk.’
When she looked over her shoulder he was walking her way with an expression of dark determination that sent her nerve-endings fluttering again.
‘What about the estate agent?’
‘I told them to reschedule. It’ll wait. This won’t.’
She didn’t want to talk to him any more. It was too surreal, too much to take in or understand, and she was suddenly tired beyond the levels of normal exhaustion.
And it wasn’t just a physical exhaustion either. Two of the most stressful things in life were supposed to be moving house and the loss of a loved one—and she’d suffered both in the last couple of months. So, on top of those things, to have to face this now…Well…
‘We’ll go into the sitting room. I’m not standing in a hallway while this is straightened out.’
Now he was directing her around her own home? Was there no end to his ability to rub her up the wrong way?
She lifted her chin and marched past his large body, careful not to brush against him on the way. ‘We’ll go into the stove room; it’s more private in there if I’m going to argue with you again.’
Sound was less likely to carry anywhere from the room at the edge of the basement, with the sturdy stone walls that had belonged to the house when it started life as a fortified farm to act as a sound buffer. Lord alone knew there had been double the visitors she’d been expecting in the last twenty-four hours as it was! The last thing she needed was the part-time housekeeper or a visitor from the estate to pop in and hear all of the dirty laundry from her past aired!
But with the large stove in an archway at one side not having been lit for weeks there was a distinct chill in the room—a blessing on a hot day, few and far between as they could be—but not at a time when Rhiannon could have done with some welcoming warmth from somewhere.
In front of the empty stove she turned to face him, watching with cautious eyes as he closed the low door behind him before throwing an angry glare at her as he walked towards the high-set window that looked upwards on to the garden. He began to pace, anger radiating from every pore of his large body.
Rhiannon watched and waited, her breath held still in her chest as she contemplated what tactic he would try next, while still aware on a subliminal level of the way he moved—with a kind of harnessed inner strength, a presence that demanded attention without any words…
‘Tell me about this supposed letter you sent.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Supposed? That’s a joke, right?’
The pacing stopped and he cocked his head at a sarcastic angle. ‘Do I look like I’m joking?’
Well, no, but…‘You know damn rightly what letter I’m talking about! The issue here, if there is one, is why you never had the basic courtesy to answer it—even if it was to tell me not to have her!’
Kane swore so viciously that Rhiannon baulked, even before she had time to be angry with herself for saying what she just had. She’d long since ceased to care why he’d done what he had and there was no way in hell she would let him think it still mattered.
‘Is that what you honestly thought I’d do?’
‘How did I know what you’d do? It was made plainly obvious to me that I didn’t know you at all!’
And she’d made it sound as if she cared—again!
He looked as if he’d dearly love to hit something but threw another dark scowl at her before he leaned his large hands on the back of the sofa between them. Then he took a deep breath, looking around the room for a moment before he pushed back against his hands and began pacing up and down. And up and down.
One of those same large hands rose to rake long fingers through his thick hair, his head tilting back for a moment as he searched the low vaulted ceiling.
‘And where exactly did you send this letter?’
Not that he deserved an answer, but, ‘In your locker at the University. I pushed it through the top of the door. So the it got lost in the post excuse won’t wash. You had to clear your locker out.’
She took another breath, shaking her head as her shoulders slumped, a bone-tired weariness settling on them like a dead weight. ‘But it’s history. Whatever reasons you had for not wanting to know Lizzie don’t matter any more. What matters is that she doesn’t get hurt in the here and now. That’s all I care about.’
Kane stopped pacing, his brow creasing below the wisps of hair brushing against his forehead. Then, just like that, the frown momentarily disappeared, a far-off look in his eyes as his rumbling voice swiftly followed with an edge of realization.
‘I had someone clear it out for me when I left. I told them there was nothing in there I needed, that they could keep the books they wanted and dump the rest.’
What was he talking about?
Rhiannon tried to focus her exhausted mind. Then her eyes widened in disbelief. ‘You’re seriously trying to tell me now, after ten years, that you never got it? Oh, surely you can do better than that?’
He glared again.
‘That is what you’re saying.’ Full of incredulity, she repeated the words, as if somehow saying them again would make it real for her. Surely he couldn’t be serious? But if he hadn’t got it—no, that wasn’t right. It couldn’t be. She’d always believed—
The letter that she had spent days debating writing; the one that she had carried clenched in her hand while she’d stood in front of the locker, willing herself to put it in. The one he had completely ignored, which had laid the first foundation stones for the resentment and hatred she had carried for more than ten years…and he hadn’t got it?
‘Didn’t it ever occur to you when I didn’t reply that I might not have got it?’
She frowned at the question, the chill in the room seeping into her already tired bones, forcing her to shake inwardly. She sat down on the large stuffed chair closest to the wood-burning stove and tangled her cold fingers together on her lap.
Reluctantly she admitted the truth. ‘Maybe for a very brief moment, but after the way you just disappeared off the face of the earth—’
‘You figured that you’d made enough of an effort and to hell with me?’
‘No!’ She stared into his angry eyes, not prepared to even contemplate the notion that she might have been at fault during a time when she’d had so many important decisions to make—alone. ‘You were the one who had an overnight personality transplant and then left! Do you think that at eighteen, with no well paid career in my near future, that I was ready to face having a baby on my own? Get real.’
‘But you still had her.’
She wasn’t even going to grace that with a comeback. It had never occurred to her for a single second not to—no matter how terrified she had been at the time. And it wasn’t because she’d wanted a part of Kane or to remain tied to him in some way. They hadn’t been together long enough for her to form that kind of attachment, had they?
No, from the moment the test had turned blue Lizzie had been hers—a part of her. And she had done her best to forget where the other part of her beautiful child came from.
‘You’d already made it plain that you didn’t want to be tied down, by anyone or anything. When you didn’t respond to the letter I assumed you wanted nothing to do with the responsibility of a baby. You can’t be that surprised that I’d make that assumption. And I wasn’t going to chase after you to beg for a handout either. I’d made the choice to have her, so caring for her needs was down to me too.’
It was the condensed version and Rhiannon knew it. But none of her explanation seemed to placa
te him any. In fact, if anything, he was looking at her with the same incredulity she’d felt only moments before, as if he couldn’t possibly understand why she’d done what she had.
‘As her father I had certain rights. I still do.’
Her shaking increased. Because she hadn’t paid as much attention to the first part of what he’d said. ‘What do you mean, you still do?’
‘If she’s my child, Rhiannon, then you’ve already had nearly ten years alone with her.’
She couldn’t—he couldn’t just—
When she managed to speak her voice came out smaller than she could ever remember it sounding before. She’d never allowed herself to feel like some helpless waif of a female before. Not once. No matter what life had thrown at her. But he couldn’t—
‘I won’t let you take her from me.’
Because money could buy practically anything as far as some people were concerned, couldn’t it? She’d fight with her dying breath to stop him.
Kane swore again. ‘What the hell kind of man do you take me for? Of course I’m not bloody well going to take her from her mother! But I have a right to spend time with her, to be a part of her life. And you took that right from me. I can’t believe that you thought for one second I wouldn’t be angry about that!’
Rhiannon wrapped her arms around her body, pressing them in tight as if she could somehow force the inner shaking away while she continued to stare up at him. ‘You knew I had a baby. Many things you may have been, but stupid wasn’t one of them. Surely you were able to do the maths?’
His jaw clenched. ‘You married Stephen.’
Rhiannon’s jaw dropped—literally. ‘And you assumed that meant that Lizzie was his?’
‘Apparently I wasn’t the only one making assumptions back then.’
Nice try. They might not have been head over heels in love, but he had automatically assumed she’d jumped straight into bed with someone else the second they had split up or, worse still, might even have been with him at the same time. That told her exactly what he thought of her, didn’t it? He probably even thought that, coming from the background she had, any rich guy would do!
Rhiannon couldn’t bear to be in the same room with him any more. She really couldn’t.
Unfolding her arms, she stood up as tall as her five foot eight would allow. ‘Well, if you’re so certain that’s the kind of person I am, then maybe I am mistaken about who her father is. I’ll have to check through that long list of people I was sleeping with, won’t I?’
He had her lower arm caught in yet another tight grip in the blink of an eye as she tried to leave the room. He tugged, just once, but with the shock of his hot hand on her cold skin it was enough to unbalance her and tip her in against his hard body.
Again.
No matter what she did, she seemed to end up being touched by him or trapped close to his body. Where his very male spiced scent invaded her nostrils so that she could almost taste the cinnamon undertones in the back of her throat and where the blazing heat of him immediately filtered through both layers of clothing to burn her chilled body—like being doused in boiling water after lying in ice.
Rhiannon gasped silently, her eyes focused on the column of his neck as she pushed against the wall of his broad chest with her free hand. But he already had his other hand pressed into the small of her back, his arm holding her still.
‘I need to know if she’s mine.’
Rhiannon swallowed hard while she tried to stay still, to ignore the building heat and the knot in her stomach because it was the way it had always been with them—physical awareness, in its purest form, on its most basic level—instant and powerfully overwhelming. It was exactly this—chemistry—that had drawn them together the first time. But she didn’t want it to be there this time. She was mature enough now to know that there was more to any relationship worth having than just the physical. Even if the physical had given her the one person in her life she could love without reservation.
Slowly her gaze rose, following a ribbed line of dark wool upwards, over the fold of the polo-neck where it met his deeply tanned skin, over the tense line of his mouth, until she was looking into his blue eyes.
She searched, from one to the other, willing her heartbeat to settle at the sight of the fierce determination there, the need she could see to know the truth. It almost made him look vulnerable. When he was the least vulnerable person she knew.
Whatever it was, it forced the truth from her lips. ‘No matter what you think, there wasn’t anyone else. There’s no question of her not being yours.’
There had never been any question. And, even if there had, the evidence was staring her in the face when she looked at him. It had been the hardest thing about watching Lizzie growing up. Every day she would do something, say something, or simply smile a certain way—and Rhiannon would see Kane in her. And it was only the completely overwhelming love she’d felt from the moment she’d first held her in her arms that had stopped her from hating that those reminders were there.
Kane exhaled, his peppermint-scented breath washing over her face as the hold on her arm loosened a little, his voice still strained. ‘You should have told me.’
‘I thought I had.’
‘No, because if you had I’d have been there.’
‘But you weren’t there.’ Her gaze lowered to his mouth, to the parting in his lips. ‘You’d already gone.’
When he didn’t reply she risked another upward glance to discover he was examining the top of her head with heavy-lidded eyes.
Then, just like that, he let go, stepped back a little, his hands shoving deep into the pockets of his dark jeans. ‘I’m here now. And I’m not going anywhere until I get to know my child.’
She looked back at his neck and watched it convulse as he swallowed, unable to face up to the fact that a part of her—a minuscule part—ached at the possibility that she may have made a mistake by holding a grudge for so long. Had she let pain and confusion cloud her judgement? As an adult, shouldn’t she have been able to see past those things? Had she hidden behind hating him?
No. How had he not known?
He tilted his head closer to warn her in dangerous tones, ‘And there’s not much point in trying to argue about it because I’m not going away this time.’
Rhiannon’s heart thudded painfully against her breastbone, her breathing shallow. ‘I can’t just dump you on her like that—out of nowhere…’
His mouth twisted cruelly. ‘Did you ever plan on telling her?’
‘When she was old enough to decide whether or not she wanted to find you, I’d have told her. It would have been her decision.’
‘But you wouldn’t have encouraged her to ask…’
Maybe not, and it was a moot point now. But Lizzie was bright; already she was asking the odd question about her dad—Father’s Day in particular guaranteeing a natural curiosity over the last few years. She’d even made a card for him when she was six. And it had broken Rhiannon’s heart, for failing to give her the kind of father she deserved.
‘It would have been her decision.’
‘She has as much of a right to know as I did.’
He wasn’t letting go, was he? Was this what he’d have been like if he’d known all that time ago? Was this the proof she needed to accept that he really hadn’t known?
It was, wasn’t it? No matter how much she still wanted to believe that he’d known all along, she couldn’t deny the possibility that he hadn’t any more. It was written all over him. And a very small part of her felt a hole form inside her chest—one that was swiftly beginning to fill with guilt.
Had she maybe known all along that he hadn’t known? Had a part of her wanted to keep Lizzie from him? If that was the case, then why had she been so angry with him for so long?
Kane spread his feet a little wider apart as he stood tall to his full six foot two again, towering over her. ‘It’s like this, Rhiannon—if you don’t tell her who I am, then I will. Or we go the le
gal route. Either way, now that I do know she’s mine, I plan on being part of her life. And there’s nothing you can do to stop that happening. Not this time.’
Even without holding her, with several safer inches separating them, Rhiannon knew he had her trapped. Now that he knew and was determined to be a part of Lizzie’s life, he wouldn’t change his mind, would he? She knew that from the various tales she’d heard over the years—of his determination and single-mindedness in business, his knack of always getting what he wanted in spite of the odds. And, after all, she had been one of those ‘things’ once, hadn’t she?
It wouldn’t matter where she ran to if she left Brookfield. Now that he knew…
What she needed was a way of making this work without causing any more damage. ‘I need some time.’
‘You’ve had ten years.’
‘I’ll tell her.’ She glared up at him, making it crystal clear she wasn’t happy about it. ‘But I’m not going to collect her from school and just announce it. She’s just had to adjust to losing her home, her friends at school, an uncle she adored…I can’t just land a new father on her too.’
His jaw clenched; his large body even rocked forwards a little. And Rhiannon stood taller, prepared for whatever he would throw her way. But he corrected himself, rocking back as his rumbling voice resonated from deep inside his chest.
‘I’ll stay here until she’s more comfortable with me.’
Rhiannon’s eyes widened. ‘You can’t—’
‘Can’t I?’ He quirked a brow again. ‘There are two ways to play this: the easy way and the hard way. You tell me which way you think would be best for her. Because, frankly, right this minute, I don’t give a damn what suits you best.’
Her mind swiftly filled in various versions of the ‘hard way’. If he chose to fight for Lizzie she would put up one hell of a fight. But was that really what was best for Lizzie?
As if somehow seeing into her mind, he forced the point home for good measure. ‘And if it comes down to a legal battle over this then we both know I can afford to fight it for as long as it takes.’