The Secret Sanchez Heir

by Cathy Williams

‘You need time to process...’

  ‘Spare me your pop psychology! You tell me that you have a child...’

  ‘We have a child. A son.’

  Their eyes tangled. A son. There was no way that Leandro was going to cave in and believe her but...fatherhood. It was something he had never considered. Never wanted! He’d seen from his own unstable childhood that the production of children was something that could go horribly wrong. He’d not only learned from his own experience but he’d learned from his sister’s. He’d never wished to reproduce and take a chance on being a father. It wasn’t in his make-up.

  What if she was telling the truth? Faced with that possibility, Leandro suddenly knew what it felt like for one’s world to fall apart. He’d sought order all his life, to combat the lack of order that had marked his formative years, and there could be nothing more disastrous and explosive when it came to destroying all that hard-fought-for order than the arrival of a child.

  But, no, he wasn’t going to think like that.

  He was a cool, rational man. He forced his thoughts away from possibilities. Possibilities counted for nothing.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You tell me that I’m a father. Then let me see my son.’

  ‘Leandro...’

  ‘This isn’t going to play out the way you had in mind, Abigail. You don’t get to spring something like this on me and then walk into the blue yonder. So you tell me that I have a son? Fine. Let’s go and have a little meet and greet, shall we?’

  He was clinging to this whole nonsense being a lie, but why would she lie about this? As fast as he tried to reason away the horror of what had been placed at his door, the counter-arguments piled up.

  ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘No!’ His voice cracked like a whip and she flinched and looked around her, but the street was quite empty of people. ‘This situation is no longer within your control! You opened a door and now you can reap the consequences.’

  Abigail stared at him, her eyes huge with dismay.

  ‘Where do you live? And no beating about the bush, Abby. We go there and we go there right now, whether you like it or not.’

  His car had been waiting on the other side of the road and Leandro hustled her towards it.

  If his driver was in any way curious about the little sketch unfolding, he revealed nothing as he drove the ten minutes it took to get her to her house, a tiny rented place in a row of similar terraced houses.

  Of course Claire would be agog. She had no idea that Sam’s father was back on the scene because Abigail hadn’t told her. But everything was happening so swiftly that this wasn’t the time to launch into explanations.

  But, as she hugged her friend and gently told her that of course everything was fine, she could practically inhale the scent of Claire’s curiosity.

  ‘Sam’s asleep,’ was the first thing she told Leandro, spinning round to look at him as soon as the front door was shut.

  The house felt ridiculously tiny and his large, looming, threatening presence ate up the oxygen, making her light-headed with foreboding.

  ‘I want to see him.’

  ‘Do you still think I’m lying?’

  ‘So, you have a son.’ Leandro looked at her with flinty eyes. ‘Who’s to say that I am the father?’

  ‘I would never lie to you about something like that.’ She looked away because she didn’t want to get into a squabble about the past and the lies he felt he had been told. Also, it hurt. It shouldn’t, because he thought nothing of her now, but it still did. She blinked away an urge to cry. ‘Follow me.’ She spun round and he followed her as she made her way up the stairs to the little landing and to her bedroom, where Sam’s cot was pushed up against the wall. It wasn’t an ideal set up, but rents were high in London, and it was the best she could afford.

  She always kept the side light by her bed switched on. It was dim and it ensured that she didn’t risk waking him up when she retired to bed for the night. The light was on now because the curtains had been drawn to block out the watery early-afternoon light.

  It cast a mellow glow through the bedroom, which was as neat as a pin and done up in calm, neutral colours.

  She stood back and Leandro walked towards the cot. He looked down.

  He was so tall, so stunningly gorgeous, and she felt the sharp, piercing stab of real guilt that she had kept his son from him. Seeing him there, looking down into Samuel’s cot, deprived her of all excuse for what she had done. A father looking down at his baby son. Sam was sleeping on his back, his short, chubby legs bent like a frog’s at the knees, his arms raised on either side of his head.

  Even in the dull, grey light the mop of dark hair and the faint olive of his skin was dramatic proof of paternity.

  Staring into the cot, Leandro had no idea how much time passed by because it seemed to stand still. He’d looked out for his sister but he couldn’t remember the time when she’d been as small as this.

  Something filled him and he didn’t know what it was. A vague, aching discomfort that was a nasty hollow in the pit of his stomach. The little boy had very dark hair like him, and he was olive-skinned, also like him. Clinging to the notion that he wasn’t a father felt like a fantasy.

  But he knew that he had to cling to it for a while longer. He would take nothing for granted. That just wasn’t his nature and so he would not take this for granted even though somewhere deep inside he knew that the child was his.

  And Abigail had kept him from him, would have carried on keeping him from him, had fate not forced their paths to cross.

  Leandro had never thought about having children but now he was filled with the slow, steady pulse of rage that he’d been kept in the dark about the biggest thing that was possible to happen in anyone’s life.

  He turned away from the cot and looked at her, his face all angles and shadows. Then he moved towards her.

  ‘Time...to talk.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘I’LL WANT A DNA TEST,’ was the first thing Leandro said the second they were in her kitchen. He hadn’t paid a scrap of attention to his surroundings, but now he did, and he didn’t like what he saw. A small, shabby house hardly big enough to swing a cat in. Fresh paint and cheerful posters couldn’t quite conceal the fact that the place was probably held together by masking tape and glue, and the rage that had swept through him earlier on, after he had looked down at the dark-haired baby in the cot, swept through him once again—a red tide that made him clench his jaw in an effort to exert some control.

  There was still room for doubt.

  Abigail was hardly noted for her fervent adherence to the truth. She’d spent weeks papering over her background and the small matter of the theft hanging over her head. She’d effectively lied to him, and right now he chose to disregard all the reasons she had come up with for her evasions. Right now he could only think that, if that baby upstairs was his, then life as he knew it was about to be turned on its head.

  Abigail paled. ‘You mean you don’t believe me,’ she said flatly.

  ‘You come with a reputation. Taking you at your word would be a ludicrous act of charity on my part.’ He pulled a chair and sat down, pushing it back so that he could extend his long legs. He felt like a giant in a playhouse.

  The thought of any baby of his being raised in this sort of environment set his teeth on edge, and just like that he was shocked that his thoughts were already travelling down that road, already accepting possibilities.

  One step at a time, he reminded himself grimly.

  He would deal with the situation only when full paternity was revealed.

  But the maths made sense...then there was that physical resemblance...and did he truly, in his heart, believe that she was the sort of woman who somehow would have thrown
herself into bed with another man the second they’d parted company?

  Leandro had a moment of complete terror, because suddenly he could see the ordered and well-oiled life he had built for himself falling apart at the seams.

  ‘You’re Sam’s father, Leandro.’ Abigail tilted her chin at a mutinous angle and held her ground but her world was shifting on its axis and she had no idea where it was going to end up. Right now, that look on his face was sending shivers of apprehension up and down her spine.

  He’d wanted her for five minutes, wanted to have her back in his bed to scratch an itch until the itch went away. There had been no lingering affection behind that. Indeed, he had made sure to tell her that, so what on earth would he be thinking now?

  Surely he must realise that a DNA test wasn’t necessary? But then, Leandro’s opinion of her was so low that he might actually believe that she would have disembarked at Heathrow airport over a year ago, broken-hearted, and headed for the nearest bar so that she could pick up a random stranger and drag him off to bed somewhere.

  He loathed her, so where did that leave them? She should have been regretting bitterly the impulse to confess, but she wasn’t. Seeing him standing over the cot and looking down into it had made her realise that she couldn’t keep Sam from him. She had made her decision to say nothing for reasons that had been right for her at the time but, whatever the consequences now, it was right that he knew.

  Which didn’t help when it came to trying to figure out what happened next.

  ‘I’m not asking for anything from you,’ she said quietly. ‘You didn’t ask for this situation and you don’t have to think that your life is going to be messed up because of it.’ She’d sat opposite him and she was very much aware of how tiny the kitchen was because he took up so much space in it. In fact, she was very much aware, ever since he had entered the house, of how confined her surroundings were. Her heart began a slow, scared drum roll inside her chest.

  If she could see the limitations of where she lived, and she’d grown accustomed to it over the months, then what must he be seeing?

  This was a man with a helicopter and flash properties worth millions scattered across the globe. He snapped his fingers and everyone around him jumped to attention. A house wouldn’t be a house for him unless every bedroom came with an en suite bathroom and a separate dressing room.

  He was going to get a stupid DNA test, which would come back positive, and what then? Would he want to rescue his son from these surroundings? He couldn’t. The sensible side of her saw that, because mothers had rights too, but he could provide so much as Sam’s father and he could fight her with all the time and money at his disposal if he felt so inclined.

  It suddenly seemed imperative that she persuade him that having his life remain as it was was what he wanted and needed.

  ‘It was an honest mistake.’ She smiled reassuringly at him. She felt about as sincere as the wicked witch smiling at Hansel and Gretel while she tried to lure them into the gingerbread house. ‘You didn’t ask for a child, Leandro, and I know what your lifestyle’s like. Your feet hardly ever touch the ground! You said yourself that you rarely get to visit your beautiful country house. I’ll bet you’re hardly ever in England at all!’

  She cleared her throat and wished that he would say something. Agree with her, preferably. Or at least give some indication that he was hearing what she was saying. He was looking at her with brooding intensity and it was doing nothing at all for her equilibrium. Or for the sensible, rational part of her that knew he couldn’t sweep in and carry Sam off with him just because he was rich.

  ‘What I’m saying,’ she finished with a lot more bracing confidence than she was feeling, ‘Is that I wouldn’t want you to stop living the life you’re living because of this. I’m perfectly capable of bringing Sam up on my own.’

  ‘I will make arrangements for a paternity test.’

  ‘Is that all you can say, Leandro?’

  ‘What would you like me to say?’ His voice was deathly quiet. ‘That if you’re right, and he’s my son, that I’ll oblige you by disappearing because it was all an honest mistake?’ He stood up and looked down at her. ‘I have no intention of taking your word for anything,’ he said calmly. ‘I’m a very rich man and whether I believe what you’re telling me or not makes no difference. I am an easy target for gold-diggers.’

  ‘I’m not a gold-digger, Leandro, and you should know that.’

  Leandro’s heart clenched at the genuine hurt in her face but he wasn’t going to retract a word of what he’d said. He’d been invigorated by the thought of pursuing her to take her to his bed so that he could finish something that had been started, something that needed a proper conclusion so that he could get on with his life, but now things had changed. Very, very dramatically.

  ‘What will the procedure be?’ she asked, defeated. ‘Will Sam have to go to a hospital for the test?’

  ‘It will be handled discreetly. You will hear from me tomorrow about arrangements for the test and once the results are known...’ He looked at her narrowly and thought about the small, softly breathing shape in the cot. Something threatened to engulf him, a depth charge as powerful as an earthquake. ‘We will take it from there.’

  ‘Leandro...’ She stepped towards him then hesitated and remained where she was, hovering and uncertain.

  ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  * * *

  He didn’t get in touch, but by lunchtime the following day she was contacted by a consultant employed by him to perform the test, and by six that evening the technician had come and gone and she had received a call from Leandro informing her that he, too, had been tested in accordance with the paternity-test requirements.

  If Abigail had been hoping for some kind of clue as to what he was thinking underneath the clipped voice and the curt words, then she’d been barking up the wrong tree. The conversation, the first she’d had with him since he’d left her house, lasted ten seconds.

  But the DNA test results would take at least a week, when you factored in overworked and underpaid health service workers who couldn’t jump to attention and put their particular kit to the top of the queue. A week of breathing space. It would give her time to plan ahead for all possible eventualities.

  She hadn’t been expecting to see Leandro three days after he had left her house, and she certainly hadn’t been expecting him to show up at the shop in all his dark, avenging glory.

  About to leave for the day, Abigail looked up and there he was, standing in the doorway, a tall, commanding presence that made her breath hitch in her throat and set up a nervous drum beat in her chest.

  Everyone in the shop instantly stopped what they’d been doing. Two customers fell silent and stared. Brian, who worked alongside her, gaped. A woman, who looked no older than twenty-one and was dripping in jewellery, started breathing far more quickly than could be deemed healthy. Leandro ignored them all. He strolled towards her, face cool, expression unreadable.

  Like a rabbit caught in the headlights, Abigail was finding it a challenge to move a muscle. In fact, she was finding it a challenge to breathe as he continued to close the distance between them.

  ‘The results are back.’

  She blinked and unfroze. ‘I... I thought you said that you were going to call me.’

  ‘I thought that breaking the news face to face would be a far better idea. We need to talk, Abigail, and unless you want us to have this conversation here then you’re going to make your excuses and leave.’

  ‘But I’m not due to finish for another two hours!’

  ‘I don’t care if you’ve just stepped through the door to start your day.’ He looked around him, caught Brian’s eye and turned back to her. ‘That the guy in charge?’

  ‘Give me five minutes... And, please, could you wait outside?’

  ‘I’m very comf
ortable here.’

  Abigail glared but had a hurried, low-key conversation with Brian and within minutes they were outside, back in the freezing February cold.

  ‘My car is over there.’ Leandro nodded towards the black chauffeur-driven car. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go to my apartment—which is twenty minutes away—we are going to have a civilised conversation, and then we are going to go and get my son from whatever day-care place you’ve stuck him in.’

  ‘You can’t order me around.’ But Abigail heard the weakness in her voice that signalled capitulation.

  ‘You should be glad I’ve decided to go down the civilised route, Abigail. Because, right now, the last thing I feel is civilised.’

  ‘Look...’ She turned to him as the car into which she had been channelled like a kidnap victim pulled away, ‘I can understand that you might be a little...annoyed...’

  ‘A little annoyed?’ Leandro looked at her with scathing disbelief. She was wearing practically the same drab outfit she’d been wearing when she had crash-landed back into his life days before. Her hair was tightly pulled back and her face was bare of all but minimal make-up. She looked like a mid-level career woman. Neither in her demeanour nor in her svelte shape did she betray any signs of being a mother. There was no way he could ever have guessed that she was, and again it hit him like a sledgehammer that she had kept his son from him.

  She’d given him a way out with her speech about not wanting anything from him and, although he had never contemplated fatherhood, that ‘way out’ had struck him as offensive and insulting. His reaction had surprised him in its ferocity, as had the surge of primitive emotion that had gripped him when he had slit open that hand-delivered report to discover what he had known all along: the chances of him being Sam’s father were ninety-nine per cent.

  ‘What gave you the right to withhold my son from me?’ Leandro gritted. ‘Did you think that because we had broken up I was no longer due the decency of being told that I had fathered a child?’

  Abigail flushed. For a man who was so good at keeping his emotions in check, those few words were incendiary.