The Fatherhood Affair

by Emma Darcy

  CHAPTER TWO

  MARRIAGE? To Damien?

  Natalie felt as though she had been pummelled in the solar plexus. Her mind was blown into whirling confusion. She stared incredulously at Damien, struggling to connect what she knew of him to the words he had spoken. He held her gaze, relentlessly reinforcing what he’d said with compelling intensity.

  She supposed she should feel flattered a man of his many attractions wanting her. She wondered what influenced his choice. He hadn’t mentioned love. She wasn’t the first woman he’d wanted, and wouldn’t be the last. So why her?

  Natalie’s shell-shocked mind finally grasped the motive behind Damien’s statement.

  Brett.

  She felt sick.

  And angry.

  She leaned forward, her eyes a golden shower of blistering sparks. ‘Even now, with Brett in the grave, you can’t help competing with him, can you? You can’t let go. You want to take me over to prove to your insatiable ego that you were the better man.’

  He grimaced in frustration. ‘That’s nonsense! Why are you avoiding the obvious?’

  ‘The obvious is that Brett’s still on your mind,’ she retorted. ‘You began and ended your ridiculous claim with Brett. After I’d specifically asked you never to mention him to me again.’

  ‘So it still hurts that much, does it? Goddammit, Natalie, I’ve waited long enough! Will you recognise me for what I am?’

  ‘That’s the problem, Damien. I do recognise you for what you are. You told me straight out that you sold the company because it wasn’t any fun without Brett. It was something you shared. So what’s the new project? Me. Something else you can share with him in some tormented, twisted, perverted way.’

  ‘I’m not sharing you with anyone,’ he declared indignantly. ‘When I saw you today...’

  ‘You thought the fun could begin.’

  From somewhere inside her came a billow of outrage. It activated a burst of adrenalin. She reached down, snatched her shoulder-bag from the floor, opened it, and grabbed her wallet.

  ‘I thought you had finally put your grief behind you,’ Damien continued.

  ‘I will not be beholden to you for anything, Damien.’ She found a twenty-dollar note and slapped it on the table. ‘That will pay for our drinks. I don’t want to eat with you. I don’t want to be with you. I will never, in any circumstance, sleep with you. Do you understand what those words mean?’

  ‘So the brave new front is just a charade,’ he mocked angrily. ‘You can’t face up to a different reality.’

  ‘What’s different?’ She returned her wallet to her bag and stood up, casting him a look of contempt. ‘If you want to prove you’re a better man than Brett, you can run after all the women he had on the side.’

  ‘What?’ He looked astounded, incredulous. ‘You knew?’

  ‘Of course I knew. And your part in it, as well.’

  ‘I played no part in it...’

  ‘Don’t lie to me, Damien. You covered up for Brett. He deceived me. You betrayed me.’

  Disdaining to glance at Damien again, Natalie set off down the length of the dining-room to the exit of the restaurant.

  ‘Natalie...’ It was both a protest and an appeal.

  She ignored it. She heard Damien coming after her, brushing past hovering waiters, but she neither turned her head nor slowed her pace. She felt utterly deflated and cast down. She should never have trusted the feeling that he meant well by her. It was a sham so he could win out in the end. Against a dead man.

  As she stepped into the reception nook outside the restaurant, Damien caught her arm, forcibly halting her. She gave him an intimidating stare of icy rejection.

  ‘What did you want from me that I didn’t give?’ he demanded. ‘Tell me one thing.’

  ‘Approval. As in a-p-p-r-o-v-a-l. APPROVAL as in block letters. Approval as in italics. Simply approval. That’s what I wanted from you, Damien. That’s what you never gave me. Not even today.’

  ‘You’ve always had that, Natalie.’

  ‘Never.’

  He dragged in a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry I was impatient with your grieving for Brett. Terribly sorry.’

  ‘I was grieving for Ryan, not Brett. Brett had whittled away my love for him. There was none left.’

  ‘How was I to know that? You never gave any indication. I never realised you were disillusioned with your marriage.’

  ‘Who parades private pain in public?’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘How would you have reacted if I’d come running to tell you about Brett’s affairs? You would have hated me for it, Natalie.’

  ‘It would have destroyed your friendship,’ she mocked.

  She wrenched her arm out of his grasp and headed for the staircase. What he said hurt. It bit painfully into her psyche. The deep-seated sense of rejection, the sense of failure, of being a discard, inadequate.

  Damien fell into step beside her. ‘What makes you think I covered up for him?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Give me one example.’

  ‘You slipped up at the funeral.’ She paused at the head of the stairs to face him with bleak derisive eyes. ‘The woman who went on the camp with you and Brett that weekend...it was reported that she was your companion, Damien. She wasn’t.’

  ‘She was,’ he insisted.

  ‘Don’t think I’m ungrateful for your discretion. If the media had latched on to the fact that adultery was mixed up with the death of my son and my husband, they would have had more of a field day than they did.’

  ‘Natalie, I swear before God she was with me. I invited her. I took her there. She shared my tent. Brett had Ryan with him.’

  She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t add up, Damien. She wept copiously at the funeral. You didn’t go near her. Not one word or gesture of comfort.’

  ‘I didn’t leave your side,’ he asserted with passion. ‘She meant nothing to me. She was keen on abseiling. I asked her on the trip to make it a foursome instead of a threesome. I wasn’t to know you were going to be too sick to come. We were already there at the campsite when Brett arrived without you.’

  Was he speaking the truth? Had she misread the situation? ‘How did Ryan get so close to the edge of the cliff? Why wasn’t Brett watching him? Ryan was a sensible little boy. He would have obeyed his father.’

  ‘Natalie, for God’s sake! Accidents can happen so quickly. Don’t torture yourself like this.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ she said dully. ‘Nothing can bring my beautiful little boy back.’

  She started down the staircase. She had to get away from all this. It wasn’t doing her any good, raking over the miseries of the past. She had to look to the future, break with Damien now, start a new life. That was abundantly clear.

  Damien wasn’t a friend. And that hurt, too. In his way, he had acted honourably towards her. Yet she had known he had the same attitude towards challenges as Brett had. They were two of a kind. She simply hadn’t anticipated that he would see her as a challenge.

  He was matching steps with her, still not prepared to let her walk away from him. ‘Why didn’t you leave Brett?’ he asked.

  She didn’t answer. She couldn’t imagine any man would understand. Trapped by a pregnancy...making excuses. Trapped by wanting the best for her baby...making compromises. Hoping things would change. Wanting to believe in renewed promises because the sense of failure was too hard to face.

  Brett wasn’t all bad. Mostly, but not all. She had fallen in love with his joy in living, his wit, his charm, his exuberant personality, the athletic body he made master of any physical challenge, the mind that thrived on solving problems few others could. She had thought herself the luckiest woman in the world that Brett Hayes had fallen in love with her.

  She had never considered herself anyone special. She was averagely pretty, helped along by a better than average figure that had been very firm and trim when she had met Brett. She had been working then as a bush-walking guide, supplementing
an irregular income from the paintings she sold to the tourists who flocked to her hometown. Noosa was a very popular seaside resort on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, and Brett had been one more tourist, indulging his love of the outdoors, and sweeping Natalie into a marriage that had seemed idyllic. At first.

  She had come to realise, painfully, that Brett saw women as a challenge, too. All of them. He couldn’t resist testing himself, over and over again. Natalie he had put in a completely separate category. She was his chosen wife. The mother of his child.

  Ryan...always Ryan stopping her from taking that final step away from Brett. He was indisputably a loving father, proud of his son. Ryan had adored his Daddy. She simply hadn’t been able to bring herself to deprive them of the relationship that was naturally theirs. In the end, it would have saved Ryan’s life—both their lives—if she had. She shook off the torment of ‘if only’s.

  ‘Brett felt inadequate,’ Damien declared. ‘He...’

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ Natalie answered coldly.

  Brett was the most gifted, talented individual she had met in her life. A bright golden god among other men. Brett made other people feel inadequate. People like Damien. People like herself.

  Damien touched her arm to try to draw her attention back to him. ‘If you knew about his infidelities, why didn’t you divorce him? What stopped you?’ he asked, exasperation creeping into his voice.

  They had reached the foyer. It didn’t really matter what she said to Damien. Whether he comprehended it or not was irrelevant. She was not going to see him again. She glanced at him with determined finality and gave him the one reason that had kept her with Brett.

  ‘He was the father of my child.’

  She didn’t pause to gauge his reaction to that bare statement. She had no intention of explaining or embellishing it. She took a direct line towards the doors that led out of the hotel. This meeting with Damien had been a disaster from start to finish. She was ashamed of having been deluded into thinking he actually cared about her as a person.

  Of course, she had realised that to Damien she was an extension of Brett, but there had been thoughtful gestures from him which she had believed were for her sake alone. She had thought he cared about her interests, suggesting ways of developing and extending her creative talent. She had no idea he was so...well, almost deranged...in his obsession about Brett.

  Tears blurred her eyes. She had looked forward to telling Damien about the commission to illustrate a children’s book. Damien had taught her creative graphic design. She had imagined him being pleased for her. She had actively gone after the job and got it, an achievement she was sure would earn his approval. Finally.

  She had tried so hard to get her life moving again in order to please him. She was proud of her efforts over the past two months. She had wanted Damien to be proud of her.

  Disappointment wrenched her heart. This was her second bad mistake, letting another man like Brett get close to her. At least Damien wasn’t pressing any more questions on her. She was grateful for his silence as he accompanied her out to the covered driveway that serviced the hotel. As far as she was concerned, there was nothing more to say. Except goodbye. Forever.

  ‘Taxi?’ the doorman asked.

  ‘Please,’ Natalie answered.

  ‘We need to talk this through, Natalie,’ Damien murmured as the doorman moved forward to summon the first cab from the rank in the street below.

  ‘No point,’ she demurred.

  ‘You have some serious misconceptions...’

  ‘Mine have already been sorted out. Yours haven’t.’

  ‘Look at me!’ he commanded in exasperation.

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  She kept her gaze steadfastly locked on the taxi turning slowly up the duel driveway, taking the lane closest to the hotel entrance. She couldn’t bear to see that blaze of desire in Damien’s eyes again. It reduced her to nothing but another potential conquest.

  ‘I’ve a lot to say to you,’ he burst out.

  ‘I’ve heard enough.’

  ‘You can’t dismiss five years in five minutes and reduce it to nothing, Natalie.’

  ‘Watch me.’

  ‘Give me the chance to explain. You owe me that.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you for anything, Damien. You gave it.’

  ‘You accepted it.’

  ‘Call me stupid. I didn’t understand what my role was,’ she said bitterly. ‘I didn’t realise I was supposed to become another bed partner.’

  ‘You’re the woman I want in my life.’

  ‘For the present.’

  ‘Give it a chance.’

  ‘So you can play and lay while I have your children?’ She turned derisive eyes to his as the taxi halted in front of her. ‘No, thanks, Damien. I’ve been through that once. Perhaps the next woman you feed that line to will be more accommodating. Goodbye and good luck to you.’

  The passenger door of the taxi was held open for her by the hotel employee. She stepped forward and swung herself into the back seat.

  ‘Natalie...’

  She ignored the urgency in Damien’s voice, but she couldn’t ignore the strong bulk of his body.

  ‘I’m coming with you.’ His powerfully muscled thigh pressed against hers.

  She hastily scrambled to the other side of the seat. ‘No, you’re not,’ she protested.

  ‘Otherwise we will never see each other again.’

  ‘That’s what I want.’

  He closed the door. The inside of the car suddenly seemed filled with his presence. It pulsed with an energy that clutched at her heart and caused her senses to sharpen alarmingly.

  ‘It’s over!’ she cried, feverishly desperate in her need to convince him.

  ‘It never started,’ he replied, a rough edge of passion in his voice.

  ‘It wasn’t meant to be.’

  He turned to her, his face stripped of any civilised veneer. Raw, jungle hunger leapt from his eyes and impaled her.

  ‘I won’t accept you judging me by your experience with Brett.’

  Her mind swam with the realisation that she had underestimated Damien. She shouldn’t have likened him to Brett. He was as dark in nature as Brett was bright. Dark and deep and intense, and with all his unleashed energy, indefinably dangerous.

  For years she had wondered what went on inside him. What restraints he had...and, if all his secret longings were bared, what would a woman experience? The thought had intrigued her. She was getting more than a glimpse of the answer now, and it both fascinated and frightened her. She saw a primitive male hunter, relentless in his determination to track down his quarry, unstoppable.

  She shivered. ‘I don’t want you, Damien. I don’t want you.’ She heard the wary, almost excited note in her voice, and didn’t care as long as he got the message.

  ‘What would happen if I took you in my arms, Natalie?’ His eyes burned down to the agitated rise and fall of her breasts as she took quick breaths to calm her pulse-rate. ‘If I were to kiss and caress you...’

  ‘Stop it! I won’t listen! Go away!’

  But the images evoked did have an insidiously seductive power. Damien might be the hunter, but as a woman she knew if she tossed over the traces, threw everything upon the wind...anything and everything was possible. There had been solitary, vulnerable moments when she had fantasised... Damien wild, irrepressible, adoring her, approving of her, being proud of her. They had been some kind of solace at the time when Brett was entertaining himself with some other woman.

  She had sternly repressed such wicked thoughts. That they should focus on her husband’s best friend made them even more reprehensible. They were not fitting for a married woman who considered herself moral and decent. It dragged her down to Brett’s level. Natalie had been ashamed of herself that they had occurred at all.

  Now Damien wanted to do what she had forbidden herself to think about. More. Natalie felt there was some key to her mind and heart and body, and if some man was to unl
atch the lock... Brett had had the key for a while but he had thrown it away.

  Damien probably had the key, too, but it would not last. The experience would be wild and wonderful and dangerous, and in the end, as with Brett, would cost her too much. She had to stop this now, not let Damien tempt her into something she knew would lead to more hurt and disillusionment. Men didn’t seem to understand how it was for a woman: the giving of more than her body.

  She felt for the handle of the passenger door on her side. If Damien wouldn’t get out of the taxi...

  ‘You’ve always avoided touching me, Natalie,’ he said softly, suggestively.

  ‘You avoided it, too,’ she flung at him.

  ‘We didn’t dare touch one another for fear of what would follow,’ he taunted her.

  ‘I feel the same way now.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  There was too much truth in what Damien was suggesting. Natalie felt an urgent need to escape from it. She found the handle, lifted it, and flung the door open. Before Damien could stop her she leapt out of the taxi, plunging away from him.

  She heard the shout, ignored it. The screech of tyres gripping the road surface in protest she didn’t ignore. She didn’t see the car in the other lane. She didn’t feel it hit her, and she didn’t feel any pain. Violet, purple and red colours merged momentarily on her retina. She felt an impact. Then nothing, nothing at all.

  CHAPTER THREE

  NATALIE’S mind was definitely fuzzy. She had the sense of being disembodied. She was in a bed. It wasn’t her own bed. How she knew she wasn’t quite sure, but she knew.

  She tried to reason out where she was and why. Nothing surfaced. Her memory seemed to have disintegrated into a jigsaw where the pieces needed to be sorted out. She gave up the effort. The thought came to her she should open her eyes and look.

  She did so with some trepidation. It was a hospital bed. Tubes looped to her arm. She shut her eyes again. She’d seen enough to identify where she was. It was an intensive care unit.