by Trish Morey; Day Leclaire; Natalie Anderson; Brenda Jackson; Ann Voss Peterson
‘What is it you actually do?’ she asked when the report had finished and he’d turned the volume down again, the city closer now, the buildings in the distance ahead growing taller.
‘The simple version? I invest.’
‘What does that mean, exactly?’
‘I play the share market. I buy shares low and sell them higher.’
She thought about it for a moment. ‘So you don’t actually make anything.’
‘I make money and I use it to buy other things. Office blocks. Shopping centres.’
‘I get it.’ She wasn’t sure why but the discussion seemed significant in getting a handle on how this man ticked. ‘So you don’t actually produce anything, then. Anything real, I mean. At the end of the day, what do you have to show for your efforts?’
‘More money.’
Alongside him, she sighed, a strange little sigh of satisfaction, and he didn’t like it. Not one bit. ‘Do you have a problem with that?’
‘Absolutely not.’ She swept an appreciative hand along the designer dashboard, fiddled a bit with the buttons on the console. ‘Clearly you must be awfully good at it.’ He almost growled. He got the distinct impression her words had not been intended as a compliment.
His fingers tightened around the steering wheel. What was her problem? He’d dragged himself up from nothing. He’d turned himself into a billionaire, had half a dozen cars and a helicopter at his disposal and here she was saying he didn’t make anything?
‘I suppose you’d prefer it if I worked at a factory like your philandering husband.’
He caught the look in her eyes, shock giving way to a look of pain, as if she’d been deeply wounded, before she turned her head away.
And someone who wasn’t used to apologising for anything or to anyone but who’d done their fair share lately suddenly felt like a heel again.
He might be ruthless in business, but that didn’t mean he could go around kicking someone when she was down, even if she did provoke him. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’
‘No. It’s okay,’ she said, now studying the hands knotted in her lap. ‘I guess I asked for it. I’m sorry.’
‘Do you miss him?’
Her head swung around—’Shayne? ‘—before setting into a shake. ‘I think I actually miss the car more. The last few months have been… difficult. I guess if I’d had my eyes open, I might have seen it coming but the IVF treatment kind of takes your focus.’
Didn’t he know it? ‘There are always things we should have seen coming and yet somehow we miss them until it’s too late.’
And he felt her cool blue eyes on him, felt their questions and their wondering. He kept his own eyes firmly fixed on the traffic.
In his peripheral vision he picked up her shrug. ‘Anyway, I’m glad it’s not Shayne’s baby. I don’t think I could have coped with learning about the affair while thinking I was carrying his child.’
Did she realise how wrong she was? This was a woman who’d been abandoned because she’d stood up to her husband and refused to abort a baby that wasn’t even hers, a woman who was somehow planning to struggle through that pregnancy alone to give birth to a baby she didn’t even plan on keeping. This was a woman who could pack an overnight bag in ninety seconds flat when most women he knew couldn’t do it in under ninety minutes.
Sure, the woman might look like a mouse but she had a spine made of steel. It had taken courage to call him and even more courage to agree to meet him after that angry first phone call. And she’d been afraid—so afraid and so unsure and so quick to cower down as if she wished she could disappear. But, in spite of her fear, in spite of a sickness that left her weak and pale, she had turned up, only to have to defend herself against his accusations.
He glanced down at his watch before turning on the radio for another market update.
‘Believe me,’ he said gruffly, genuinely surprised to find a germ of respect for her in his thoughts, ‘you would have coped.’
She didn’t get a chance to ask him what he meant. He kept the radio on, absorbing a never ending stream of information. She tried to make sense of it. Minings. Industrials. NASDAQ. All Ords. But there was nothing she could relate to, nothing to anchor it to her life, and eventually she gave up and simply enjoyed the journey and the growing sense of anticipation welling up inside.
And she was excited, she realised. She’d left her home, the one home she could ever remember living in to go—where, exactly? He’d turned off one highway before reaching the city and onto another major road that seemed to snake its way though tree-lined suburbs that looked more and more wealthy, the houses bigger, the gardens more and more beautiful. Every now and then she’d get a glimpse of harbour and blue water and anticipation bubbled up inside. It was like going on one of those mystery holidays where you didn’t know where you were going until you got to the airport, not that she ever had. But Shayne had used to talk about doing one some time. He might actually do it now with Abigail.
No! She gave herself a mental slap to the head. She refused to waste her time thinking about Shayne. Not now. Not after all the things he’d done. Wherever she was going, it would be much better than anything she could do with Shayne. Dominic Pirelli might be arrogant and controlling and judgemental, but he wasn’t cheap.
Wherever he had in mind for her accommodation for the next however many months, it wouldn’t be substandard. Maybe not because he cared about her, but because he wanted the best for his baby.
Which wouldn’t be so very hard to take, really. It would be like having a holiday at someone else’s expense.
A six-month holiday.
Why shouldn’t she at least try to enjoy it?
The snatches of sea became more frequent and the concept of a holiday more tantalizing and seductive by the minute. They were close to the beach now. She could smell the tang of salt in the air—such a different air to where she’d come from, where the air seemed weighted down with dust and heat and desperation. And then he pulled into a street filled with houses that looked like mansions where the sea lapped practically at their feet.
And, not for the first time today, anticipation changed direction and changed into a spinning ball of nerves. Surely not anywhere this grand? And then he slowed to enter a driveway blocked by a massive set of gates that must have stood at least ten feet tall in order to match the whitewashed walls either side.
‘This is it,’ he said. He turned off the radio and hit a button somewhere and the gates swung slowly open, her jaw also automatically swinging open, though much quicker than the gates.
This wasn’t a house, she could tell as he drove inside and the full splendour of the home was revealed. At least two levels. Probably three, all facing out to sea with what looked like a pool she could glimpse behind a bougainvillea-covered fence and with the sea lapping the rock-strewn shore below.
Definitely not a mere house. It was a mansion. Where was the unit or apartment she’d half expected—the place where he could easily keep an eye on her and monitor his baby’s progress—without her getting in anyone’s way?
‘But surely this is your home.’
‘It is.’ He cast an eye down to her belly. ‘And that’s my child. Where else should it be?’
She swallowed, thinking she might as well have shifted planets rather than suburbs, because to live here, in a place like this, was beyond her wildest imaginings. It was beyond…anything. But when she’d contemplated having this couple’s child, she’d always imagined remaining at arm’s length. She would have the baby and hand it over to its rightful parents after it was born. The last thing she’d expected was to move in with them for the duration. It wasn’t as if she was family, after all…
He opened her door for her and retrieved her bag from the back seat and still she hadn’t moved, but what else was new? Ever since that phone call she’d made yesterday—was it only yesterday?—things had been happening too fast for her to keep up.
‘Are you coming?’ Impatien
ce threaded through his words and she realised he’d spent his entire afternoon chasing after her. No doubt he couldn’t wait to be rid of her and get back to making his millions. She’d probably cost him a fortune already.
‘Look,’ she said, unclicking her seat belt and stepping out reluctantly, but only so he didn’t appear so large beside her and so she didn’t appear like some recalcitrant child throwing a tantrum. What she really needed most was her own space, somewhere she felt comfortable—even if it was only a hovel compared to this palace—not to live cheek by jowl with the parents of her child. But refusing to come out of the car was hardly any way to convince him.
‘I don’t want to appear ungrateful, but I’m not convinced this is a good idea. I mean, how’s it going to look to everyone if you move some random pregnant woman into your family home? People are going to talk. I really think it would be better for everyone if I went somewhere else.’
He stiffened alongside her, the man becoming mountain again, his eyes darkly intense, his jaw as stiff as if it had been chiselled from stone. ‘There’s something you obviously don’t understand about me, Mrs Cameron. I don’t actually give a damn how things look or what people say or think.’
Least of all her. She knew for a fact he didn’t give a damn what she thought. But that didn’t mean she’d stop trying to make him see sense. ‘I realise you have little reason to care about my needs and wants—you have different priorities—but have you thought for one moment about what your wife might think of this plan? Surely you must realise this arrangement will make things awkward for her?’
He took a deep breath and looked skywards, running one hand through his dark hair before he whipped off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes with the back of the other. With the sun on his face, she could make out the strain lines etched around his eyes and the sudden tight line of his mouth. ‘I assumed you would have known,’ he said, his deep voice coarse like a dry riverbed. ‘It’s not exactly a secret, after all.’
‘Known what?’ she asked, confused, her mind clicking over before seizing on the obvious answer—an answer she should have considered before now, given her own pathetic circumstances. But why should hers be the only marriage to fail? She cursed herself for never considering that very real possibility but instead choosing to believe some kind of fairy tale ending for the child with a mother and a father who both wanted it and would both cherish and love it together. And now she didn’t know if the mother even knew about the baby’s existence. Or was the father, by bringing her to his place, making a de facto claim for custody?
It was all going so wrong! She should have insisted on meeting the mother. She should never have let her fantasies get in the way of reality. She sighed. ‘You’re telling me you’re divorced?’
‘Not divorced!’ His words ground their way through the morass of her mind. ‘My wife is dead.’
CHAPTER SIX
HIS wife was dead? The mother of the baby she was carrying was dead?
Angie was stunned. Sickened beyond belief.
Poor baby, she thought, the palm of one hand instinctively going to her belly. Poor, poor baby to grow up with no mother.
And then right on the heels of that thought, poor Dominic. His wife was dead and then some stranger turns up on his doorstep pregnant with their child. No wonder he’d been so angry when she’d called! No wonder he’d been so quick to judge—so openly resentful—denied his own wife, only for Angie to turn up claiming to be carrying their baby.
Tears pricked her eyes. Tears of sadness. Tears of loss. Tears for a baby that would be born in circumstances surrounded by so much tragedy. It was as if the weight of the world was pressing down on the shoulders of this child and it wasn’t even born.
And she’d been so wrong. All the while she’d imagined he was protecting his wife by not bringing her to their meeting! She’d half resented him for wanting to check her out first, knowing he’d found her wanting, even wondering if he’d even bothered to tell his wife. But how was he supposed to tell his wife? How could he?
Oh, God, what a mess!
She looked up at him now, at this dark mountain of a man, his eyes black with resentment for her, his hands curled into fists by his sides and she wanted to weep for him, weep at the unfairness that had resulted in her being the one to bear his child, weep for the trauma instead of the joy that should have accompanied this child’s existence.
The sting of tears became too much and moisture soon dewed her eyes and spilled over onto her cheeks. She’d been so quick to judge him without knowing all the facts.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, reaching out a hand to his arm.
‘No!’ He yanked his arm away before she’d barely brushed it with her fingertips. ‘I don’t want your pity!’
She reeled away. She should have known he’d take anything she said the wrong way. She seemed to bring out the worst in him. She seemed unable to stop herself. ‘What would you prefer me to admit? That I’m actually relieved to learn you’re not making some kind of underhanded custody bid by locking me away here?’
His eyes narrowed, lit by the kind of heat that had nothing to do with the sun and everything to do with raw anger. ‘You think me capable of that?’
She swallowed, blue eyes meeting black. ‘It did cross my mind.’
‘You think so little of me, I’m surprised you would even trust me with my own child. Does it gall you now to go through with this?’
She turned her head away. ‘That’s not up to me.’
‘No, it’s not. But still you judge. You think I care more for money than I do for this child. I fall short of expectations because I don’t make nuts and bolts. Instead, I make money, which is what every damn person making nuts and bolts is trying to make. And yet somehow my success lowers me in your eyes.’
She shook her head. ‘And you don’t think you judge me? You haven’t stopped judging me since the moment we met. Judging me and damning me and now locking me away in some gilded bloody cage.’
‘It’s hardly a cage!’
‘And you don’t consider my feelings. I’m not sure I should stay here. Not under the circumstances. Not with your wife gone. It doesn’t feel right.’
‘What?’ He slammed one hand down on the car roof alongside her, sending her skywards. ‘First you didn’t want to stay here because my wife might object. Now you won’t stay because she can’t. What are you really worried about, Mrs Cameron—that I might try to jump your skinny bones while you’re under my roof?’
‘No!’ Her face was burning up with indignation. Burning up with the stinging barb contained within his words. Jump her skinny bones? No way in the world. ‘You think I’d let you if you tried?’
‘Or that after a taste of the high life, you won’t want to go home?’ His skin was drawn tight, tendons cording in his neck while a savage pulse beat at his temple.
‘Fat chance. A person would have to be some kind of masochist to want to stay with you. I promise you, if I stay—and that’s a big if—it’s only until this child is born, and then you won’t see me for dust.’
‘Good.’ He sniffed and pushed himself away from the car. ‘So we understand each other perfectly, then. You have my assurance I won’t be tempted to take advantage of you and I have your assurance we’re not going to have separation issues in six months’ time. Seems we have the perfect arrangement.’
Perfect arrangement?
Or perfect hell?
And suddenly six months under the same roof with this man didn’t sound like any sort of holiday at all. And still they remained there, glaring at each other, and there was no way she was going to break eye contact first lest he took that as some sort of victory.
‘Dominic, you’re here.’ The quietly spoken voice came from behind. He broke eye contact first and Angie rubbed her arms, grateful for the interruption. She turned to see an older woman, slim and smartly dressed. She smiled. ‘And you must be Angelina Cameron. Such a pretty name,’ the woman said, taking both her hands in her own,
her smile wide though her eyes looked troubled as they flicked from one arrival to the other. ‘Come in, dear. I’ve been expecting you.’
‘Angelina, this is Rosa, my housekeeper,’ said Dominic coarsely, performing the formalities. ‘Although, as you will no doubt learn, she is much more than a mere housekeeper.’
Rosa’s smile widened at that, her eyes creasing with love that still held more than a hint of concern. Angie followed stiffly as Rosa led them along a covered walkway leading to the house, wondering how long it was since she’d been called by her full name. Probably the last time she’d renewed her driver’s licence. She decided she liked Rosa. Her welcome had been genuine, her warm hands squeezing hers almost as if saying I understand. She liked the way her name had sounded on Dominic’s lips even more. What was it about the way his deep voice could sound her name?
Rosa glanced over her shoulder, smiling as she caught Angie’s eyes. What had Dominic told her? Did she know why she was here? Or was she merely in the habit of welcoming Dominic’s women? She didn’t know the circumstances of his wife’s death or how long ago it had occurred, but she couldn’t imagine a man like him staying single for long.
It simply wasn’t possible. He was much too good-looking. Entirely too masculine. Power radiated from him, almost a tangible thing, or was that just his heat she could feel as he walked at her shoulder? She glanced back, pretending to take in the view. No, she thought. Not just heat, but power oozed from him.
With all he had going for him—his looks, his wealth, his beautiful home—he no doubt had women lining up to become the next Mrs Pirelli. With a small baby to look after, he’d be utterly irresistible.
If you were into the kind of man who judged a woman by her looks and where she came from.
And then Rosa led them beyond the manicured gardens and into the house proper and Angie momentarily forgot about the man beside her. For if the outside of the house was palatial, the inside beggared belief. To the right of the entrance hallway one massive room ran along the length of the house, arched windows over the French windows leading onto a terrace overlooking the sea with glittering chandeliers hanging from the impossibly high ceiling. She gaped. This was like something from a fairy tale. Cinderella had probably danced here.