by Maggie Cox
In between the huge gulps she was taking, Bastian endeavoured to speak calmly to her, keeping his voice low and reassuring, alternately stroking her damp brow and holding her hand. Whatever happened, he vowed to stay with her and watch their baby being born. He was determined that his watchful presence would help Lily and the baby survive, whatever hurdles should face them, no matter how precarious and challenging they might be.
At last the doctor told them that the baby’s birth was imminent. Bastian all but held his breath, but he never gave up praying that all would go well. The knowledge that his mother had lost her life in just such a scenario continued to haunt him.
Then, remembering what his father had advised earlier, he knew he had to stay strong. He’d sworn to himself that he wouldn’t let Lily down. They were in this together.
‘Hold on, my darling,’ he told his wife now. ‘You’re nearly there...the baby is coming.’
He had just seen the baby’s head emerging, followed by a sudden rush of arms, torso and legs, and at first sight everything seemed to be in the right place.
When the midwife announced, ‘It’s a boy, Signora Carrera—you and your husband have a beautiful son!’ the infant started to wail loudly and Bastian wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.
Turning to Lily and raining kisses all over her face, he felt beyond elated at the news.
* * *
The Carreras had had many discussions around Alberto’s kitchen table on naming the new addition to the family, but as yet hadn’t decided what that name would be.
Bastian and Lily were the proud and happy parents of a beautiful dark-haired baby boy, and as soon as his wife was up to receiving them there would be a steady line of enthusiastic visitors calling to the house to convey their congratulations. The nursery was all but overflowing with gifts and cards, and Dolores had her work cut out in helping to accommodate them.
One afternoon, after lunch at his dad’s place, Bastian stole his wife away from the company for a little while, leaving Alberto and his housekeeper fussing round the infant as he lay in his bassinet. Their son was now three weeks old, and it was seriously bothering him that his first-born was still without a name.
Straight away they went out into the garden, because it seemed a crime to stay inside when it was such a gloriously sunny day. Lily was looking especially beautiful in a pretty blue-and-white dress made from organic cotton. It had a crossover neckline that allowed her to nurse the baby whenever she needed to, and he felt pleased and proud that she wanted to feed the infant herself.
As was often the case, the sight of her immediately drew his thoughts away from everything else and made him focus on her instead...
She’d been so brave having the baby. It hadn’t been an easy birth, by any means, and at one point the baby had turned over. Bastian was sure he had acquired a few grey hairs before the midwife had turned the infant in the right direction again, but once their son was born Lily had recovered much more quickly than they’d hoped. His beautiful wife was a truly amazing woman, and he didn’t care how many times he said so to family, friends and his workers alike.
Catching hold of her slim hands now, he turned up her palms and planted a loving kiss on each one. ‘I needed to have you to myself for a while,’ he confessed huskily. ‘Tomorrow I go back to work, and you will be out of my reach for far too long for my liking.’
‘Hmm... Then now is the perfect time to finally decide what our son will be called, don’t you think?’
Gazing back into her incandescent green eyes, Bastian knew she had already made up her mind about the name and he braced himself. He hoped that whatever she had chosen wouldn’t instigate any disagreement between them. He didn’t much care for some of the more quintessentially English names, considering them a bit too ‘plummy’ for an earthy Italian.
‘I can see that you already have a name in mind...am I right?’
‘I sometimes think you have a direct line to my thoughts that’s almost uncanny...’
‘I do—and I’m glad of it. That aside, you’d better tell me what you’ve chosen.’
‘I thought we could name him after one of the Archangels? Raphael is the saint who looks after children and travellers, and it’s a beautiful, strong name. What do you think?’
Bastian’s lips had already widened into a smile, and this time he kissed Lily full on the mouth to demonstrate his pleasure in her decision. ‘It is perfect. I am only annoyed that I didn’t think of it myself.’
‘But you can live with it? The name, I mean?’
‘Raphael Leo Carrera. It is decided. That’s our son’s name.’
‘Where did Leo come from?’
‘It came out of the blue just now. Isn’t that how we make all our best decisions, tesoro? Spontaneously?’
The fair-haired beauty in front of him grinned unashamedly. She knew immediately what he was referring to.
With his arm firmly around her waist, Bastian led his wife back through the open patio doors. ‘We shouldn’t waste any time before we tell my father and Dolores. Before we know it they’ll be organising the baptism.’
‘Hold on a minute. Can we just stop for a while?’
‘Of course. What is it?’
His wife’s lingering gaze all but ate him up.
‘I just want to remind you of how much I love you. I don’t want you ever to forget that—no matter what challenges we have to face in the future. You and Raphael will be my number one concern—always.’
‘Along with all the other children we will have?’
‘But of course!’
‘On that note...’
Instinctively, he moved her against the wall and hungrily closed in on her, feeling her warm breath drift over him, making him ache to get even closer.
‘How long before we can...?’ Uncharacteristically, he flushed hotly.
‘Make love?’
‘Si...’
‘The general advice is to wait until six weeks have passed and the woman has had a chance to heal.’
Bastian huffed out a frustrated breath. ‘That means three more weeks, then. I suspect it might be the biggest test of my life!’
‘Hmm, but surely it will be worth the wait, my love?’
As she tenderly brushed her lips against his unshaven cheek Lily’s smile was unreservedly happy and contented. At last she had found the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, and also the place where she wanted to live, with her hopefully growing family, and it was far, far better than any idyllic fantasy she could have imagined.
* * * * *
If you enjoyed CLAIMING HIS PREGNANT INNOCENT why not explore these other stories by Maggie Cox?
THE SHEIKH’S SECRET SON
REQUIRED TO WEAR THE TYCOON’S RING
A TASTE OF SIN
A RULE WORTH BREAKING
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Keep reading for an excerpt from DA ROCHA’S CONVENIENT HEIR by Lynne Graham.
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Da Rocha’s Convenient Heir
by Lynne Graham
CHAPTER ONE
ZAC DA ROCHA, the Brazilian billionaire, powered towards his father’s office on long muscular legs. He was in a rare state of surprise because his stuffy, rigidly formal half-brother, Vitale, the Crown Prince of Lerovia, had just matched the facetious bet Zac had made him earlier that morning. Zac enjoyed yanking Vitale’s chain but he had not expected a retaliation. He raked his hand impatiently through the long, luxuriant dark hair falling onto his broad shoulders and grinned with sudden appreciation, flashing perfect white teeth in the process. Maybe Vitale wasn’t such a narrow-minded bore after all. Maybe he had more in common with his half-sibling than he had assumed.
As quickly as that idea occurred to him, Zac suppressed it again because he wasn’t looking for a family connection. He had never had a family. He had looked up his long-lost father, Charles Russell, out of pure curiosity and had lingered on the edge of the family circle out of pure badness, thoroughly entertained by the immediate animosity of his two half-brothers, Vitale and Angel. The emergence of a third son had shocked and unsettled them and Zac had made little effort to foster a sibling relationship. But then what the hell did he know about blood ties? He had never had a brother or a sister and, what was more, he had had a mother he had seen only once a year if he was lucky, a stepfather who hated him and a birth father whose identity he had only discovered the year before when his mother had finally told him the truth she had long withheld because she was dying.
Yet when it came to his birth father, for once in his life he had landed lucky, Zac conceded grudgingly, because he actually liked Charles Russell. Zac was more accustomed to people who tried to use him and he trusted very few people. His light grey-blue eyes hardened. Fabulously rich from birth and raised like a little prince, surrounded by fawning servants, Zac was very cynical about human nature. But from their first meeting, Charles had taken a genuine interest in his third and youngest adult son, despite the fact that, at twenty-eight and six feet four inches tall, that son was already a man grown.
After only a few hours in the older man’s radius, Zac had realised how much better he would have done had his mother, Antonella, chosen to stay with Charles rather than choosing to marry the playboy fortune hunter, Afonso Oliveira, the love of his mother’s life. Unhappily, while being engaged to Antonella, Afonso had got cold feet and dumped her for several weeks. Heartbroken, Antonella had succumbed to a rebound affair with Charles, then in the process of divorcing a wife who had been cheating on him throughout their marriage with another woman. But then, Afonso had returned to Antonella to ask for her forgiveness and Antonella had followed her heart. When soon after the wedding she had realised she was pregnant, she had fervently hoped that she carried Afonso’s child and had refused to acknowledge that Zac might not be her husband’s son. Sadly, for all of them, Zac’s very rare blood group had become a ticking time bomb in his mother’s marriage.
As Zac strode into his father’s office he was rewarded by an immediate smile of warm welcome and acceptance. He might be a tattooed guy clad in jeans and biker boots with diamond studs in his ear but Charles, the grey-haired older man who greeted him in an immaculate business suit, treated him the exact same as his other sons.
‘I did think of putting on a suit to surprise the brothers,’ Zac murmured deadpan, his strikingly light eyes glittering with self-mockery against his bronzed skin. ‘But I didn’t want them to think I was conforming to expectations or competing.’
‘No fear of that, I think.’ Charles laughed, wrapping his arms round his very tall and vociferously different son in a whole-hearted embrace before stepping back. ‘Any news yet from your lawyers about your chances of breaking the trust?’
The internationally renowned Quintal da Rocha diamond mines had been locked into a trust by Zac’s great-great-grandfather to protect the family heritage. Since his mother’s death, Zac had been in possession of the income from the mines but he would not have the right to control the extensive Da Rocha business empire until he produced an heir of his own. It was an iniquitous arrangement, which had sentenced previous generations to a deeply dysfunctional family life, and Zac had long been determined to break the cycle. Sadly, the answer his legal team had given him was not the one he had sought.
He could not be truly independent or free until he had met the terms of the trust one way or another. Hedged by restrictions throughout childhood and adolescence, he had railed against the trust when he had finally understood how it would limit him. He was the last da Rocha and he enjoyed enormous wealth but until he fulfilled the conditions imposed by that trust he had no more rights than a child to control the diamond mines and the vast business empire built on the back of their profits. He felt sidelined, powerless and dispossessed by his current weak position and there was little he would not have given to be free of it.
‘My lawyers tell me that if I marry and fail over time to produce a child they think there would be little problem breaking the trust,’ Zac revealed grimly, his chiselled cheekbones taut. ‘But that would take years and I’m not prepared to wait for years to run what is mine by right of blood.’
Charles expelled his breath in a slow hiss. ‘So, you’re going to get married,’ he assumed.
Zac frowned. ‘I don’t need to get married,’ he countered. ‘Any heir will meet the terms of the trust, boy or girl, legitimate or otherwise.’
‘Legitimate would be better,’ Charles protested quietly.
‘But the ensuing divorce settlement would cost me a fortune,’ Zac responded with resounding practicality. ‘Why marry when I don’t have to?’
‘For the child’s sake,’ Charles supplied with a grimace. ‘To protect the child from growing up as both you and your mother did, isolated from normal life.’
Zac parted his lips as though he was about to say something and then thought better of it, swinging restively away. His grandfather had found himself married to a barren wife. He had then impregnated a maid in the household, who had given birth to Zac’s mixed-race mother. Antonella had been whisked away to be raised at a remote ranch, separated from her mother and never acknowledged by her aristocratic father once her arrival had refuelled his wealthy lifestyle. She had been an heiress but one from the kind of humble background the rich and sophisticated delighted in despising.
Initially, Zac’s stepfather, Afonso, had assumed that Zac was his child and he had married Antonella, willing to turn a blind eye to her embarrassing background if he could share her riches. When Zac was three years old, however, his need for a blood transfusion after an accident had roused Afonso’s suspicions about his parentage and the truth had emerged. Zac still remembered Afonso screaming at him that he was not his child and that he was ‘a dirty, filthy half-breed’. After that fallout, Zac had been transported to the ranch to be raised by staff, out of sight and out of mind while Antonella worked on repairing the marriage that meant so much to her.
‘He’s my husband and he comes first. He has to come first,’ Antonella had told Zac when he’d asked to go home with her after one of her fleeting visits to see him.
‘I love him. You can’t come to Rio. It will only put Afonso in a bad mood,’ she had argued vehemently years later with tears in her beautiful eyes.
Yet Afonso had enjoyed countless affairs during his marriage while Antonella struggled to gi
ve him a child of his own, suffering innumerable miscarriages and finally the premature birth that had claimed her life when she was already well beyond the age when child bearing was considered safe. Afonso had not even come to the funeral and Zac had buried his weak-willed but lovely mother with a stone where his heart should’ve been and the inner conviction that he would never ever marry or fall in love, because love had only taught his mother to reject and neglect her only child.
‘I married two very beautiful women, neither of whom was the least maternal,’ his father, Charles, told him heavily, pulling Zac suddenly back into the present. ‘Angel and Vitale paid the price with unhappy home lives. Right now you’re at a crossroads and you have a choice, Zac. Give marriage a chance. Choose a woman who at least wants a child and give her the opportunity, with your support, to be a normal mother to that child. Children need two parents because bringing up a child is tough. I did the best I could after the divorces but I wasn’t around enough to make a big difference in my sons’ lives.’
It was quite a speech and it came from the heart; Zac almost groaned out loud because he could see where his father was coming from. Although marrying would cost him millions when it inevitably broke down, that legal framework would provide a certain stability for the child. It would be a stability that he had never enjoyed but then, unlike his grandfather, he had always planned to be involved in his child’s life, hadn’t he? Even so, if he wasn’t married to the mother of his child, his freedom to be involved would be dictated by her. He already knew those facts, had worked through all possible options with his legal team and preferred not to think about those facts because they only depressed him. After all, the odds of him having a good relationship with his child’s mother were slim, he reflected impatiently.
Women always wanted more from Zac than he was prepared to give...more time, more money, more attention. But all he had ever wanted from a woman was sex and once that was over, he was done. He was an unashamed player, who had never been in a real relationship, who had never pledged fidelity and who could not bear the sensation of being caged by anyone or anything. In many ways, he had been caged most of his life, raised on a remote ranch before being placed in a stiflingly strict boarding school run by the clergy and forced to follow endless rules. He hadn’t known a moment of true freedom until he reached university and it was hardly surprising that he had then gone off the rails for a while. In fact, it had been a few years before he got back on track and completed his business degree.