by Lucy Gordon;Sarah Morgan;Robyn Donald;Lucy Monroe;Lee Wilkinson;Kate Walker
‘What does that mean?’ His eyes were hooded in his expressionless face.
She said shortly, ‘It means a father—not live-in, but there for it. If you don’t want that, then you can stay completely out of its life.’
Tension weighted the moment before he spoke. ‘I want very much to be a part of my child’s life, so I suggest we go back to New Zealand and get married.’
‘Married?’ The word sounded stupid, heavy. ‘No!’
She must have gone pale because he walked across to the kitchen and poured a glass of water, bringing it to her. Their fingers touched, and the familiar desire scorched through her. She jerked away.
‘Stop being coy. Touching me won’t poison you,’ he said caustically, and held the glass out with a rock-steady hand.
Carefully avoiding his fingers, she grasped the tumbler and lifted it to her mouth, hiding behind it while the cool water slid down her throat and her pulses throbbed erratically.
Keir said dispassionately, ‘I know that nowadays it’s almost normal to bear children in happy unwedlock, but marriage will give our baby a legal relationship with me.’
A nameless emotion ached through her. ‘It’s not necessary. It will complicate—’
‘It will also give you a legal claim on me,’ he broke in, his level, inflexible voice silencing her.
‘I don’t need that.’ She drained the water. The roaring in her head had faded, but she could feel his implacable will beating at her.
Broad shoulders lifted in a shrug. Although he was wearing well-cut trousers and a fine cotton shirt, for a second she saw him as he’d been the night of the storm, perhaps the very night the baby was conceived, magnificent in his nudity, tanned skin gleaming in the stormlight. Her heart jumped and heat roiled inside her, tugging at her nerves, clouding her mind with fumes of remembered sensuality.
As calmly as though they were discussing a business deal, he said, ‘I think you do. Can you say you trust me?’ He waited while she looked away, thoughts churning fruitlessly, and smiled unpleasantly. ‘No, I didn’t think so. Marrying me will give you something legal to cling to. And I don’t want our child to think its parents didn’t care enough about it to formalise its relationship with both of them.’
Hope could feel him willing her to look up, but she kept her eyes on the ray of sunlight trapped and focused by the glass in her hand. ‘I am not going to marry you,’ she said thinly.
On a note of controlled impatience he said, ‘There’s also the gossip factor; because of what I am, who I am, journalists will nose around. Our names—and the child’s—will be bandied around in the sort of headlines we’ve seen too often.’
Appalled, Hope clenched her hand on the glass. ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ she admitted, trying to marshal her thoughts into order. The infuriating, debilitating weariness weighed her down, slowing her responses—except, she thought irritably, the purely physical! She rallied enough to say firmly, ‘We don’t need to get married because your name will be on the birth certificate. That will give you a formal relationship to the baby. As for the gossip—who cares?’
Keir said uncompromisingly, ‘You’ll care when you can’t go anywhere without having a camera poked in your face, when photographs of the child appear in the gutter press every time my name comes up in a business deal. If we’re married you’ll be sheltered from the worst of that.’
She felt her face settle into obstinate lines, and he added coolly, ‘And having my name on the birth certificate is not enough.’
‘I won’t live a lie, play happy families,’ she said with rapid, painful passion. ‘Not even for the baby. My mother did that for my sake.’ It took all of her strength to say bleakly and firmly, ‘Stop harassing me, Keir. I’m not going to marry you.’
He didn’t hesitate. ‘Like you, I want what’s best for our child. We’re two adults—I’m sure we can come up with some sort of arrangement that will suit us both and make a happy life for the baby.’
When she refused to look at him his voice hardened. ‘If you’re afraid that I’ll expect you to sleep with me, forget it. It’s more than obvious that you don’t want me to touch you.’
Of course a pregnant woman wasn’t sexy—very poor lover or mistress material.
But she still wanted him; her body still sang when he touched her, her mind still turned to jelly. How could she keep her independence intact if she married him?
He said forcefully, ‘This is not about sex, Hope. It’s not about dominance, either. I’m not going to turn into another James Sanderson the minute I put a wedding ring on your finger.’
‘I didn’t—I know you wouldn’t,’ she said curtly.
His harsh, unamused laugh brought her head whipping round. He was still smiling, but his eyes were ice-cold as he said sardonically, ‘Don’t lie to me, Hope.’ His face hardened. ‘If we’re going to make shared parenthood work, we need to build some sort of relationship for the sake of the baby—we can do that while we’re waiting for its birth.’
He was right. Eventually this fierce physical hunger must die, and then she’d have some peace, but there would always be their child. Hiding the bitterness of surrender with a poker face, Hope said tonelessly, ‘I am not going to marry you. Don’t take it personally; I don’t ever intend to marry anyone.’
Shivering, she got to her feet and walked over to the window. Beads of sweat popped out across her forehead, over her upper lip, between her breasts. She hugged herself tightly, rubbing her hands up suddenly cold arms. From a distance she heard his voice, harsh and then fading, and she crumpled.
She regained consciousness to hear him talking crisply, his deep voice biting out words she couldn’t discern. She was lying down, and there was something deliciously cold and wet on her forehead.
As she forced her eyelids up he said, ‘All right, I have to go.’
He’d been talking on his mobile telephone. Now he snapped it shut and came across the bedroom, sitting down on the side of the bed. ‘Feeling better?’ he asked quietly.
‘Yes.’
She swallowed, and he lifted her up and held a glass of water for her. After she’d drunk the cool liquid he said, ‘Don’t worry. I didn’t mean to upset you so much. Just relax.’
When his arms came around her she relaxed gratefully against him until common sense drove her to lift her head and pull away. ‘Oh, I hate this,’ she said in a husky voice, avoiding his eyes.
‘Have you seen a doctor?’
‘Yes, today.’ Although her skin still wanted his touch, his closeness, she managed a smile. ‘I told you before, it’s part of the normal process of pregnancy. It should go by the second trimester.’
‘Lie down,’ he commanded, easing her back against the pillow.
For several seconds he looked at her, obviously weighing his next words. His eyes had spokes of darker grey radiating from the pupil; it was these that seemed to refract the light into crystalline splinters, making it impossible to see the man behind the mask of force and power. Sharp, fierce awareness needled through Hope, routing her exhaustion.
‘I won’t harass you any more,’ he said at last. ‘But I have to make sure you’re all right. I’ll hire a house here and we can move into it, at least until you’re over this fainting.’
Closing her eyes, she breathed in and out several times, willing the heady fumes of sexual hunger to dissipate. They didn’t, but she managed to grab the reins of her composure. ‘What about your work?’ she muttered.
Long, ruthless fingers tilted her chin. ‘Look at me,’ he commanded.
Slowly, reluctantly, her lashes lifted.
His eyes were grave, their transparent depths unrelenting as they scanned her face. ‘You need someone to look after you and the baby, and that person should be me—we’re in this together, Hope. If you won’t marry me and come back to New Zealand, then I’ll move here. It’s as simple as that.’
Hope jerked her chin away. Living in the same house as Keir wasn’t going to help her keep this
obsession shackled and harmless, yet she sensed his ruthless determination to take care of her.
He got to his feet. ‘You’re worn out,’ he said roughly. ‘At least stay with me until you’re able to function properly.’
Sighing, she yielded. ‘All right, and I’ll go with you back to New Zealand. It makes no sense for you to rearrange your whole life. But as soon as I feel better I’ll make my own arrangements. I hate feeling like a wimp!’
His smile was ironic and uncompromising. ‘A more stubborn, strong-minded wimp I’ve yet to come across. All right, that’s decided. Let’s get going.’
‘Don’t just charge ahead and expect me to follow meekly!’
He stooped and kissed her, not on the mouth but on the forehead, straightening before she’d had time to register much more than a fleeting masculine scent, and a subtle rearrangement of something deep inside her.
‘I’m not so stupid,’ he said with something that sounded very like mockery in his deep voice.
Three hours later Hope stood at the window of the huge sitting room high in one of the hotels that bordered the beach. ‘I am impressed,’ she said lightly, ‘with such forceful efficiency. From hovel to luxury in a few short hours.’
‘Money helps,’ he told her with cool pragmatism.
She looked down across the shaded sand and the broad turquoise expanse of the Coral Sea. Apprehension gripped her; the time spent in Keir’s house would change her in ways she couldn’t foresee.
Oh, grow up, she thought impatiently. Motherhood alters everything—that’s why Keir’s with you, why you’re in his suite being pampered by a personal maid and butler, why you’re flying to New Zealand tomorrow!
‘Don’t start worrying,’ he said, reading her with the uncanny perceptiveness she resented. He crossed the ceramictiled floor and took her hand, holding it loosely yet firmly in his. ‘We’ll work things out.’
Why couldn’t she be one of those women who bloomed when they were pregnant, whose minds stayed clear and alert? ‘It’s such a huge step,’ she said, her voice charged with sombre resignation.
‘Would you feel more secure if I got my solicitor to draw up an agreement, setting out exactly what I’ll do for you and the child?’
A blunt refusal hovered on the tip of her tongue, but because her emotions were no longer trustworthy she made herself consider the idea. In spite of that cynical remark about his money, he was completely competent and organised; he’d made it so simple for her to pack up and leave with him.
Just occasionally, she thought grimly, it was nice to be coddled.
That was her hormones speaking—it had to be, because she’d never wanted anyone to care for her, never wanted to be caught in that trap.
‘Perhaps an agreement would be a good idea,’ she said. Driven by an old distrust, she added, ‘And as the whole idea is to give the baby a stable background, we’ll need to think carefully about how we’re going to organise our lives around it.’
For a moment she thought she saw a look of cold determination in his face, but a second glance told her she’d been mistaken. His features were austere and expressionless.
‘Have you had any thoughts on the terms of custody?’
‘Shared,’ she said instantly.
He gave her a keen look, then gave her a twisted smile. ‘Thank you. You don’t trust me to be a good husband, but you think I’ll make a reasonable father.’
Although his words chilled her, that smile sank into her like a shaft of sunlight, warming some frozen part of her, sending her pulse-rate into the stratosphere. By a perverse trick of fate an image of Aline popped into her brain—elegant, sophisticated, eminently suitable. Rapidly, almost angrily, she said, ‘They’re not the same thing.’
Crystalline eyes probing and intent, he said in an unsettling tone, ‘I’m glad you think so.’
A pink biplane chugged past, giving some fortunate tourists a slow view of the beach and the city centre, of the canals behind, of holidaymakers and residents and the steep-sided, blue-grey plateaux of the hinterland.
Keir asked in an equivocal tone, ‘Why did you decide to sleep with me in Noosa?’
Startled and shocked, she firmed her mouth and met his level, measuring gaze with straight brows and an angled chin. After a second of cowardly hesitation, she decided to stick with honesty, and to hell with his ego.
Making her tone rueful, her smile direct and a little mocking, she said, ‘At eighteen, Keir, I put you on a pedestal along with Lancelot and Keanu Reeves. Unfortunately, I didn’t grow out of it. When we met again I realised I was stuck in a time warp, forever a teenager yearning for a man she couldn’t have. I wanted freedom, and it looked as though the only way I was going to get it was to give in to that obsession.’
As a cure it had been a conspicuous failure; she was still violently susceptible to his powerful masculine charisma, the exciting contrast of tanned skin and crystalline eyes and black hair, the way her hormones surged into overdrive when her gaze tangled with his.
‘I see.’
She stayed where she was, praying that he wouldn’t notice that her skin was on fire, that she had to clench her hands to stop them shaking, hold her shoulders and back straight.
‘So you used me to scratch an itch.’ His words burned, yet the tone was ice. ‘What would you think of a man who did that to a woman, Hope? You’d say he exploited her.’
He was right. She swung around, her head high, her eyes glittering in her pale face. ‘Any scruples I might have felt were shattered four years ago when I heard you agree to deal with my father. And you did cut a deal, didn’t you, Keir? What did he offer—my sexual services in return for his security and the appearance of power? He’d have hated giving up control, but he must have accepted that you’d won—otherwise he wouldn’t have suggested such a bargain.’ She paused, scanning the dark, forbidding face. Deliberately she finished, ‘How exasperating for you and unfortunate for him that my mother got me away before either of you could collect!’
Chapter Nine
IT GAVE Hope a tormented satisfaction to watch his expression freeze, his heavy lashes half hide those icy eyes, his mouth tighten into a thin line.
‘Surely you remember?’ she asked, driving home the point. ‘The night before you left for America—the last time I saw you before I left New Zealand? I was on the balcony and I overheard most of the very interesting conversation you had with my father.’
A muscle flicking in his jaw, Keir demanded, ‘What the hell were you doing out there?’
Her lips stretched in a painful, meaningless smile. ‘I wanted to say goodbye because you were leaving early the next morning, but my father came in with you. When I heard him I panicked and scrambled through the French windows.’
The little tourist aeroplane chugged by again, but the room was filled with silence.
Harshly Keir broke it. ‘How much did you hear?’
‘I clapped my hands over my ears when you agreed to bargain with him.’ She waited, then added, ‘Just after you’d told him that you had only to whistle and I’d leap into your bed.’
Keir said something succinct and brutal under his breath.
In spite of the humiliation that crawled through her, Hope managed a shrug. ‘It was a bit shattering, although I wasn’t exactly surprised. I had spent quite a lot of time wondering why you courted me so assiduously.’
‘Not, I assure you, so that I could seduce your father’s ramshackle empire from him,’ he said scathingly. He sat back and crossed his legs at the ankles, his half-closed eyes calculating. ‘I’m sorry you overheard, but even sorrier you stopped listening right there. If you’d hung in any longer you’d have heard me threaten your father with immediate bankruptcy if I ever heard anything like that from him again.’
Hope was appalled at how much she wanted to believe him. But, starkly convincing, the scorn in his voice as he’d said he could have her any time he cared to snap his fingers rang down through the years.
Tension tighten
ed every sinew, throbbed behind Hope’s eyes. Flattening her tone in an effort to hide her pain, she retorted scornfully, ‘You said, “What’s in it for me?”’ She drew in a ragged breath. ‘And you said, “Let’s deal.” It certainly didn’t sound as though you were upset—or even surprised—by his suggestion.’
‘I was sickened that a man could be so depraved.’ His voice was deep and inflexible, his expression uncompromising. ‘I did not agree to his terms.’ After a knife-blade glance at her strained face, he said bitingly, ‘So when we met again you saw a perfect chance for revenge?’
She muttered in a tissue-thin voice, ‘It wasn’t revenge.’ But had there been an element of paying him back in her decision?
‘Then what was it? And don’t give me any more rubbish about time warps or pedestals. You set out to make me suffer for what you saw as a betrayal.’
Goaded, she snapped, ‘I set out to get you out of my system!’
‘Did you indeed?’ he said in a voice that chilled every cell in her body. ‘Did it work?’
Hope’s head jerked as though she’d been hit on the chin. He waited with intimidating courtesy, and when she refused to answer he finally said, ‘When we met in Noosa, why didn’t you ask me to explain what you’d overheard?’
She was surprised into a harsh laugh. ‘I heard you, Keir, dealing with my father, bargaining, beating him down from marriage until he offered me as a mistress. What is there to explain?’
Anger clamped his features into a mask. ‘I overreacted stupidly and arrogantly to a suggestion I found utterly distasteful. I tried to shame him into realising that he was acting as a pimp, trying to sell me a wife in part-payment of a debt.’
When she didn’t reply he said in a voice honed to a sharp edge of contempt, ‘You thought you were in love with me, yet you believed that I’d bargain for you, trade you like a parcel of shares? I don’t call that love! I was so angry I had to stop myself from hitting him.’
‘I wish you had,’ she returned cordially, hoping her tone didn’t reveal how carefully she was choosing her words. ‘But if you were so disgusted, why did you suggest a deal?’