The Secret Baby Bargain

by MELANIE MILBURNE

  Melanie Milburne

  THE SECRET BABY BARGAIN

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  CHAPTER ONE

  ASHLEIGH knew something was wrong as soon as she entered her parents’ house on Friday evening after work.

  ‘Mum?’ She dropped her bag to the floor, her gaze sweeping the hall for her three-, nearly four-year-old son before turning back to her mother’s agitated expression. ‘What’s going on? Where’s Lachlan?’

  Gwen Forrester twisted her hands together, her usually cheerful features visibly contorted with strain. ‘Darling…’ She gave a quick nervous swallow. ‘Lachlan is fine… Your father took him fishing a couple of hours ago.’

  Ashleigh’s frown deepened. ‘Then what on earth is the matter? You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost.’

  ‘I don’t quite know how to tell you this…’ Gwen took her daughter’s hands in hers and gave them a gentle squeeze.

  Ashleigh felt her heart begin to thud with alarm. The last time she’d seen her mother this upset had been when she’d returned from London to deliver her bombshell news.

  Her heart gave another sickening thump and her breathing came to a stumbling halt. Surely this wasn’t about Jake Marriott? Not after all this time… It had been years…four and a half years…

  ‘Mum, come on, you’re really freaking me out. Whatever’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Ashleigh…he’s back.’

  Ashleigh felt the cold stream of icy dread begin to flow through her veins, her limbs suddenly freezing and her stomach folding over in panic.

  ‘He called in a short while ago,’ Gwen said, her soft blue eyes communicating her concern.

  ‘What?’ Ashleigh finally found her voice. ‘Here? In person?’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Gwen gave her daughter’s hands another reassuring squeeze. ‘Lachlan had already left with your father. He didn’t see him.’

  ‘But what about the photos?’ Ashleigh’s stomach gave another savage twist when she thought of the virtual gallery of photographs her parents had set up in the lounge room, each and every one of them documenting their young grandson’s life to date. Then, as another thought hit her like a sledgehammer, she gasped, ‘Oh, my God, what about his toys?’

  ‘He didn’t see anything. I didn’t let Jake past the hallway and I’d already done a clean-up after your father left with Lachlan.’

  ‘Thank God…’ She slipped out of her mother’s hold and sank to the telephone table chair, putting her head in her hands in an attempt to collect her spinning thoughts.

  Jake was back!

  Four and a half lonely heartbreaking years and he was back in Australia.

  Here.

  In Sydney.

  She lifted her head from her hands and faced her mother once more. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He wants to see you,’ Gwen said. ‘He wouldn’t take no for an answer.’

  So that much hadn’t changed, she thought cynically. Jake Marriott was a man well used to getting his way and was often unashamedly ruthless in going about it.

  ‘I can’t see him.’ She sprang to her feet in agitation and began to pace the hall. ‘I just can’t.’

  ‘Darling…’ Her mother’s tone held a touch of gentle but unmistakable reproach. ‘You really should have told him about Lachlan by now. He has a right to know he fathered a child.’

  ‘He has no right!’ Ashleigh turned on her mother in sudden anger. ‘He never wanted a child. He made that clear from the word go. No marriage—no kids. That was the deal.’

  ‘All the same, he still should have been informed.’

  Ashleigh drew in a scalding breath as the pain of the past assaulted her afresh. ‘You don’t get it, do you, Mum? Even after all these years you still want to make him out to be the good guy.’ She gave her mother an embittered glance and continued, ‘Well, for your information, if I had told Jake I was pregnant he would’ve steamrollered me into having a termination. I just know he would’ve insisted on it.’

  ‘That choice would have been yours, surely?’ Gwen offered, her expression still clouded with motherly concern. ‘He could hardly have forced you into it.’

  ‘I was barely twenty years old!’ Ashleigh said, perilously close to tears. ‘I was living overseas with a man nine years older than me, for whom I would have done anything. If he had told me to jump off the Tower of London I probably would have done it.’ She let out a ragged breath. ‘I loved him so much…’

  Gwen sighed as she took her daughter in her arms, one of her hands stroking the silky ash-blonde head as she had done for almost all of Ashleigh’s twenty-four years.

  ‘Oh, Mum…’ Ashleigh choked on a sob as she lifted her head. ‘What am I going to do?’

  Gwen put her from her gently but firmly, her inbuilt pragmatism yet again coming to the fore. ‘You will see him because, if nothing else, you owe him that. He mentioned his father has recently passed away. I suppose that’s why he’s returned to Sydney, to put his father’s affairs in order.’

  Ashleigh’s brow creased in a puzzled little frown as she followed her mother into the kitchen. When she’d asked Jake about his family in the past he’d told her that both his parents were dead. During the time they’d been together he had rarely spoken of his childhood and had deliberately shied away from the topic whenever she’d probed him. She’d put it down to the grief he must have felt at losing both his parents so young.

  Why had he lied to her?

  ‘Did he say where he was staying?’ she asked as she dragged out one of the breakfast bar stools in the kitchen and sat down.

  Gwen busied herself with filling the kettle as she answered. ‘At a hotel at the moment, but I got the impression he was moving somewhere here on the North Shore.’

  She stared at her mother in shock. ‘That close?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ Gwen said. ‘You’re going to have a hard time keeping Lachlan’s existence a secret if he ends up living in a neighbouring suburb.’

  Ashleigh didn’t answer but her expression communicated her worry.

  ‘You really have no choice but to see him and get it over with,’ Gwen said as she handed her a cup. ‘Anyway, for all you know he might have changed.’

  Ashleigh bit back a snort of cynicism. ‘I don’t think people like Jake Marriott ever change. It’s not in their nature.’

  ‘You know you can be pretty stubborn yourself at times, Ashleigh,’ her mother chided. ‘I know you’ve needed to be strong to be a single mother, but sometimes I think you chop off your nose to spite your face. You should have been well and truly married by now. I don’t know why poor Howard puts up with it, really I don’t.’

  Ashleigh rolled her eyes, gearing herself up for one of her mother’s lectures on why she should push the wedding forward a few months. Howard Caule had made it more than clear that he wanted to bring up Lachlan as his own, but every time he’d tried to set a closer date for their wedding she’d baulked. She still wasn’t entirely sure why.

  ‘You do love him, don’t you, Ashleigh?’

  ‘Who?’ She looked at her mother blankly.

  ‘Howard,’ Gwen said, her expression shadowed with a little frown. ‘Who else?’

  Ashleigh wasn’t sure how to answer.

  She cared for Howard, very deeply, in fact. He’d been a wonderful friend to her—standing by her while she got back on her f
eet, offering her a part-time position as a buyer for his small chain of antique stores. But as for love… Well, she didn’t really trust such volatile feelings any more. It was much safer for her to care for people in an affectionate, friendly but slightly distant manner.

  ‘Howard understands I’m not quite ready for marriage,’ she said. ‘Anyway, he knows I want to wait until Lachlan settles into his first year at school before I disrupt his life with any further changes to his routine.’

  ‘Are you sleeping with him?’

  ‘Mum!’ Ashleigh’s face flamed with heated colour.

  Gwen folded her arms across her chest. ‘You’ve known Howard for over three years. How long did you know Jake before you went to bed with him?’

  Ashleigh refused to answer; instead she sent her mother a glowering look.

  ‘Three days, wasn’t it?’ Gwen asked, ignoring her daughter’s fiery glare.

  ‘I’ve learnt my lesson since then,’ Ashleigh bit out.

  ‘Darling, I’m not lecturing you on what’s right and wrong.’ She gave a deep and expressive sigh. ‘I just think you might be better able to handle seeing Jake again if things were a little more permanent in your relationship with Howard. I don’t want to see you hurt all over again.’

  ‘I won’t allow Jake to hurt me again,’ Ashleigh said with much more confidence than she had any hope of feeling. ‘I will see him but that’s all. I can’t possibly tell him about Lachlan.’

  ‘But surely Lachlan has the right to meet his father at some point? If Jake stays in Sydney for any length of time you will have no choice but to tell him of his son’s existence. Imagine what he would think if he were to find out some other way.’

  ‘I hate to disillusion you, Mum, but this is one thing Jake will never budge on. He would be absolutely furious to find out he had a son. I just know it. It was one of the things we argued about the most.’ She bit her lip as the memory of their bitter parting scored her brutally, before she continued. ‘He would be so angry…so terribly angry…’

  Gwen reached into her pocket and handed Ashleigh a card. ‘He left this card so you can contact him. He’s staying at a hotel in the city. He apparently wants some work done on his father’s house before he moves in. I think it would be wise to see him on neutral territory.’

  Ashleigh looked down at the card in her hand, her stomach clenching painfully as she saw his name printed there in silver writing.

  Jake Marriott CEO Marriott Architecture.

  She lifted her gaze back to her mother, resignation heavy in her tone. ‘Will you and Dad be all right with minding Lachlan if I go now?’

  Gwen gave her a soft smile. ‘That’s my girl. Go and get it over with, then you can get on with your life knowing you did the right thing in the end.’

  Ashleigh stood outside the plush city hotel half an hour later and wondered if she was even in her right mind, let alone doing the right thing. She hadn’t rung the mobile number printed on Jake’s business card to inform him of her intention to see him. She told herself it was because she didn’t want him to have the advantage of preparing himself for her arrival, but deep down she knew it had more to do with her own cowardice.

  In the end she had to wait for him, because the reception desk attendant refused to give Jake’s room number without authorisation from him first.

  She decided against sitting on one of the comfortable-looking leather sofas in the piano lounge area and took a stool at the bar instead, perching on the edge of it with a glass of soda water in her hand, which she knew she’d never be able to swallow past the lump of dread blocking her throat.

  As if she could sense his arrival, she found her gaze tracking towards the bank of lifts, his tall unmistakable figure stepping out of the far right one, every scrap of air going out of her lungs as he came into full view.

  She knew she was staring at him but just couldn’t help it. In four and a half years he had not changed other than to look even more devastatingly handsome.

  His imposing height gave him a proud, almost aristocratic bearing and his long lean limbs displayed the physical evidence of his continued passion for endurance sports. His clothes hung on his frame with lazy grace; he had never been the designer type but whatever he wore managed to look top of the range regardless. His wavy black hair was neither long nor short but brushed back in a careless manner which could have indicated the recent use of a hairbrush; however she thought it was more likely to have been the rake of his long tanned fingers that had achieved that just-out-of-bed look.

  She was surprised at how painful it was to look at him again.

  She’d known every nuance of his face, her fingers had traced over every hard contour of his body, her gentle touch lingering over the inch-long scar above his right eyebrow, her lips kissing him in every intimate place, and yet as he strode towards her she felt as if she had never known him at all.

  He had simply not allowed her to.

  ‘Hello, Ashleigh.’

  Ashleigh had trouble disguising her reaction to his deep voice, the smooth velvet tones with just a hint of an English accent woven through it. How she had longed to hear it over the years!

  ‘Hello.’ She met his dark eyes briefly, hoping he wouldn’t see the guilt reflected in hers at the thought of what she had kept hidden from him for all this time.

  ‘You’re looking well,’ Jake said, his gaze running over her in a sweeping but all-encompassing glance. ‘Have you put on weight?’

  Ashleigh pursed her lips for a moment before responding with a touch of tartness. ‘I see your idea of what constitutes a compliment is still rather twisted.’

  One eyebrow rose and his mouth lifted in a small mocking smile. ‘I see you’re still as touchy as ever.’ His eyes dipped to her breasts for a moment before returning slowly to hers. ‘I think it suits you. You were always so bone-thin.’

  ‘It must have been the stress of living with you,’ she shot back before she could stop herself, reaching for her drink with an unsteady hand.

  A tight little silence fell in the space between them.

  Ashleigh felt like kicking herself for betraying her bitterness so unguardedly. She stared at a floating ice cube in her glass, wishing she was able to see Jake without it doing permanent damage to her emotional well-being.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Jake said, a tiny frown settling between his brows and, as he took the stool beside her, lifted his hand to get the barman’s attention.

  Ashleigh swivelled on her stool to stare at him. Was that regret she could hear in his tone?

  She waited until he’d given the barman his order and his drink had arrived before speaking again.

  ‘My mother told me why you’re here.’

  His gaze met hers but he didn’t answer. Something indefinable flickered in the depths of his coal-black eyes before he turned back to his drink and took a deep draught.

  Ashleigh watched the up and down movement of his throat as he swallowed. He was sitting so close she could touch him but it felt as if there was an invisible wall around him.

  ‘Why did you tell me when we met that both your parents were dead?’ she asked when she could stand the silence no longer.

  ‘It seemed the easiest thing to say at the time.’

  ‘Yes, well, lying was always something that came very naturally to you,’ she bit out resentfully.

  He turned to look at her, his darker-than-night eyes holding hers. ‘It might surprise you to hear this, but I didn’t like lying to you, Ashleigh. I just thought it was less complicated than explaining everything.’

  Ashleigh stared at him as he took another sip of his drink, her heart feeling too tight, as if the space allocated for it had suddenly been drastically reduced. What did he mean—‘explain everything’?

  She let another silence pass before she asked, ‘When did you arrive?’

  ‘A couple of weeks ago. I thought I’d wait until after the funeral to see if he left me anything in his will.’ He drained his glass and set it bac
k down with a nerve-jangling crack on the bar in front of him.

  There was a trace of something in his voice that suggested he hadn’t been all that certain of his father’s intentions regarding his estate. Ashleigh was surprised at how tempted she was to reach out and touch him, to offer him some sort of comfort for what he was going through. She had to hold on to her glass with both hands to stop herself from doing so, knowing he wouldn’t welcome it in the bitter context of their past relationship.

  ‘And did he?’ She met his eyes once more. ‘Leave you anything?’

  A cynical half smile twisted his mouth as his eyes meshed with hers. ‘He left me everything he didn’t want for himself.’

  She had to look away from the burning heat of his eyes. She stared down at the slice of lemon in her glass. ‘It must be very hard for you…just now.’

  Jake gave an inward grimace as he watched her toy with her straw, her small neat fingers demonstrating her unease in his company.

  The hardest thing he’d ever had to do was to look her up that afternoon. His pride, his damned pride, had insisted he was a fool for doing so, but in the end he’d overridden it for just one look at her.

  When he’d seen her mother at the house he’d considered waiting for however long it took for Ashleigh to return, but sensing Mrs Forrester’s discomfiture had reluctantly left. He hadn’t been entirely sure she would have even told Ashleigh of his call. He could hardly blame her, of course. No doubt Ashleigh had told her family what a pig-headed selfish bastard he’d been to her all the time they’d been together.

  But he had to see her.

  He had to see her to remind himself of what he’d thrown away.

  ‘Yes…it’s not been easy,’ he admitted, staring into his empty glass.

  He felt her shift beside him and had to stop himself from turning to her and hauling her into his arms.

  She looked fantastic.

  She’d grown into her body in a way few women these days did. Her figure had pleased him no end in the past, but now it was riper, more womanly, her softer curves making him ache to mould her to him as he had done in the past.

  If only they had just met now, without the spectre of their previous relationship dividing them. But it wasn’t their past that had divided them—it had been his. And it was only now that he was finally coming to terms with it.