All the time knowing that she carried his child…
He scowled. ‘I’m going back downstairs to be with Magdalena. Join us when you’re ready.’ He turned sharply on his heel and strode force fully from the bedroom.
Before he did or said something he would regret. Before he did or said something they would both regret!
Caro felt numbed as she watched Jake leave the bedroom, her memories of the past having opened up wounds that hadn’t even begun to heal, but which she had forced to the back of her mind in an effort to not let them hurt her any more.
She’d had no idea how long Jake had been involved with the other woman—long enough, it seemed, for him to have decided to purchase a house in which she could live, where Jake might visit her in complete privacy.
This house!
The more Caro thought about it the more convinced she became that she was right. Jake had brought her to the house he had initially bought for his mistress. Worse, he had brought Magdalena to the house in which his mistress had lived for the duration of their affair!
How could he?
How dared he?
* * *
WHATEVER HAD UPSET Caro about their conversation earlier, Jake could see by the determined sparkle of her eyes when she rejoined him and Magdalena in the sitting room an hour or so later, to find him holding the baby while he finished decorating the tree, that she was completely over it.
Caro’s hair had been freshly washed and dried to become a wild cascade of red-gold curls down the length of her spine. She had added only a peach lipgloss to the glowing beauty of her face, and her lashes were naturally long and dark against the bright blue of her eyes. Black jeans now fitted snugly to Caro’s lean hips and legs, and the blue of her sweater was an exact match for the colour of her eyes.
She looked utterly, absolutely beautiful—and hardly old enough to be mother to a six-month-old baby.
Jake felt a now familiar clenching in his gut as he looked across the room. Anger and desire warred inside him. Anger because Caro had not only left him, but had also denied him knowledge of Magdalena until today. Desire because Jake only had to look at her to want to make love with her.
This last agonising year of complete silence from Caro should have cured him of the desire he had once felt for her. It should have. But Jake knew only too well that it hadn’t. That he wanted her still.
‘Better late than never, I suppose,’ he said pointedly as Caro strolled over to join them.
She frowned. ‘I’m sure you and Magdalena have had fun decorating the Christmas tree together.’
‘The first of many such experiences,’ Jake assured her.
Caro eyed him warily as she heard the underlying anger in Jake’s tone. ‘We didn’t see that many Christmas trees in Majorca…’
Jake’s eyes glittered with the hardness of the emeralds they resembled. ‘Magdalena will never be in Majorca for Christmas,’ he stated grimly.
Caro blinked. Magdalena would never be in Majorca for Christmas?
She swallowed hard, her chin rising to meet the challenge in Jake’s eyes. She took the reaching Magdalena into her arms. ‘I realise that we will now have to—to come to some sort of agreement concerning your visiting rights to Magdalena, but I very much doubt it will include her spending all of her Christmases in England with you.’ Caro felt better just to have the warmth, the tangible solidness of Magdalena back in her own arms.
She had delayed coming downstairs for as long as possible, taking her time over her bath and washing her hair, before unpacking her own clothes and Magdalena’s into several of the empty drawers in the dressing table.
That delay hadn’t lessened the obvious strain between herself and Jake by one iota!
Neither had it made her immune to how devastatingly attractive he looked this evening, in tailored black trousers and a dark green cashmere sweater.
‘Oh, you can be sure we’ll be coming to some sort of agreement concerning Magdalena, Caro,’ Jake said.
Caro heard the obvious threat behind his words and she looked up at him searchingly. Jake always had been one of the most arrestingly compelling men she had ever met, but there was an edge of danger to him now that she had never encountered before. Of course Caro had never seen that edge of danger during their marriage—she had never attempted to thwart Jake until this last year!
The day she had left him didn’t count; Jake had been too stunned at the time—and sure that her leaving him was only a brief glitch in their marriage simply because his delay in returning from his business trip on time had caused him to miss their first wedding anniversary—for him to have reacted with anything more than impatient indulgence.
Learning that Caro had kept her pregnancy and Magdalena’s birth from him had changed that indulgence to a cold fury.
A cold fury that was a little scary to say the least!
‘I don’t think now is the right time for us to discuss this, do you?’ Caro murmured quietly as Mrs Weaver appeared in the doorway to tell them that dinner was ready to be served.
‘We’ll find a right time later,’ he agreed as they walked through to the dining room.
The menace behind Jake’s words was enough to rob Caro of any appetite she might have had, and she picked listlessly at the delicious food Mrs Weaver had prepared for their dinner. The fact that Magdalena sat at the table with them, chewing on a teething ring, should have eased the tension slightly, but Caro was too aware of Jake as he sat broodingly, darkly silent across the table from her to be able to relax her guard for a moment.
This was all so different from what Caro had imagined when she had agreed to spend Christmas in England with Gavin. So different that Caro could feel slight hysteria building inside her as the meal progressed. Hysteria that was sure to increase even further once Magdalena had gone to bed for the night, leaving the two of them alone together…
* * *
‘BRANDY?’ JAKE OFFERED tersely, once he and Caro had returned to the drawing room after putting Magdalena into her cot for the night.
The baby had fallen asleep almost instantly, looking incredibly angelic as she lay there with her red-gold curls framing the smooth beauty of her face, dark lashes resting on cheeks that were rosily healthy.
His daughter.
That realisation still almost brought Jake to his knees!
Caro stood hesitantly just inside the doorway of the drawing room. ‘I think I might just go up to bed my self—’
‘I think not, Caro,’ Jake said, strolling across the room to thrust a brandy glass into her hand. ‘Drink that. It might help settle your nerves,’ he added.
‘I’m not nervous,’ she denied, even as her fingers curled firmly about the glass.
‘Then perhaps you should be,’ he advised softly.
Caro’s eyes were deep blue pools of uncertainty as she looked up at him. ‘Stop trying to bully me, Jake,’ she said.
‘I hope I’m succeeding rather than just trying!’ he said cruelly. ‘Do you have any idea of the sheer effort of will I’ve been exerting all day, just in an effort not to reach out and strangle you?’
The throat he was threatening to throttle moved convulsively, but to Caro’s credit she stood her ground. ‘Am I supposed to feel grateful for your self-control?’ she snapped.
Jake’s mouth curved into a humourless smile. ‘Gratitude might be a start.’ He took a much needed swallow of his own brandy, welcoming the burning feel of the alcohol as it slid down his throat.
Caro frowned. ‘I doubt that your getting drunk is going to help the situation!’
‘I very much doubt that anything is going to help your present situation,’ Jake snarled.
‘My situation?’
‘Tell me why you did it, Caro,’ he demanded. ‘Tell me with what right, what justification, you denied me knowledge of my own daughter!’
The conversation they had been skirting around all day had finally arrived, Caro realised heavily. Along with a deepening of that danger Caro had sens
ed in Jake earlier.
She took an involuntary step back from him before answering. ‘Our marriage was over.’
‘By whose definition?’
‘By our definition!’ she cried. ‘Jake, please don’t bring all of this up again now,’ she added pleadingly. ‘It’s too late. Can’t you see that?’ Her voice broke emotionally.
Jake looked grim. ‘The only thing I can see at the moment is my daughter. The daughter who is as much mine as she is yours. The daughter you chose to deny me!’
‘At the time I didn’t feel I had any choice at all other than to do what I did.’
‘What did I ever do to you, Caro?’ Jake asked. ‘What could I possibly have done to make you behave so—so cruelly? Damn it, Caro, talk to me!’ he demanded fiercely as she continued to stare at him. ‘Explain it to me so that I can at least understand, if not forgive, why you felt justified in doing something so calculating and callous?’
Jake had been battling with this dilemma all day. He simply couldn’t believe that the Caro he had thought he knew, the loving and passionate Caro who had been his wife for a year, the same passionate Caro who had responded when he’d held her in his arms earlier today, was capable of doing something so heartless. And yet the evidence—Magdalena’s existence, the fact that she was undoubtedly his daughter—proved otherwise.
Caro had known earlier today that this conversation was inevitable—as soon as Jake and not Gavin had been the one to meet her at Heathrow Airport. As inevitable as it was painful.
She couldn’t even feel angry with Gavin any more for being the absent-minded instigator of this confrontation with Jake. She knew it would have eventually happened at some time, so why not now? She certainly couldn’t have kept Magdalena’s existence a secret from Jake for ever. Especially not once Magdalena herself became old enough to ask the inevitable questions about her father’s identity…
Better that it should happen now, while Magdalena was still too young to be seriously affected by the changes that were sure to occur in her life once Caro and Jake had sorted out some sort of visiting rights.
Caro gave a heavy sigh. ‘Let’s sit down, Jake.’
‘I’d rather stand, thanks,’ he came back stiffly.
Caro sat down anyway—mainly because she wasn’t absolutely sure her legs would continue to support her when this promised to be the most difficult conversation of her life.
‘I never meant to be callous or cruel, Jake.’ She took a shuddering breath. ‘And my actions certainly weren’t calculated, either. At the time I felt my decisions were limited—’
‘Limited by what?’ he ex claimed.
Even thinking about Jake’s affair with another woman was enough to bring the tears to Caro’s eyes. She had loved him so much, so completely, that learning how he had betrayed her—in the same way her father had betrayed her mother, time and time again—had literally broken Caro’s heart into little pieces. Pieces that loving Magdalena had partially healed, but had never completely fused back together. Perhaps they never would…
‘I’m going quietly insane here, Caro,’ Jake said tautly.
‘I’m trying, Jake,’ she assured him shakily.
‘Try harder,’ he pressed.
‘It isn’t that easy…’
‘I’m not asking for easy, Caro—I just want the truth, damn it!’ He glared across the room at her.
Caro could see Jake’s tension in the dark frown between the hard green eyes, the lines that had deepened beside his nose and mouth and the clenched line of his jaw. But the discovery of his affair had shocked her so deeply that she hadn’t even been able to confront Jake with it—and doing so now was proving harder than she could ever have imagined. As if talking about it, putting it into actual words, would make it even more real than it already was.
As if it would shatter her heart all over again…
She stared down at the swirling pattern on the gold-coloured carpet and moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue, still not knowing quite where to begin.
Jake’s gaze was hungry as it followed the provocative movement of Caro’s tongue across her lips. His thighs hardened in immediate response as he imagined that tongue sweeping moistly over a certain part of his anatomy.
Hell, even in the midst of this mess, and feeling this frustrated anger towards her, his body still betrayed the desire for her that was never far beneath the surface of his emotions.
‘You may as well just spit it out, Caro,’ he rasped, his anger all the more harsh because of that desire. ‘I assure you, nothing you have to say now can hurt me any more than you have already!’
‘I hurt you?’ She looked slightly bewildered by the accusation.
Jake scowled darkly. ‘What did you imagine, Caro? That I didn’t have any feelings that could be hurt?’
That was exactly what Caro had thought!
And so far today that belief had proved true. Jake had been angry when he’d met her at the airport, coldly so, and nothing he had said or done since that time had shown her that he felt anything but anger towards her.
A nagging little voice spoke inside her head. Except the desire she had sensed when he’d kissed her earlier. A desire Caro had more than reciprocated!
That didn’t mean anything, she assured herself firmly. It had simply been the last remnants of the desire they had felt for each other during the year of their marriage.
‘Jake—’ Caro broke off abruptly, her expression panicked as the sound of Magdalena screaming could clearly be heard over the intercom.
Caro didn’t hesitate—didn’t even spare Jake a second glance as she ran from the room and up the stairs to her daughter’s bedroom.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘WHAT’S WRONG WITH HER?’ Jake couldn’t keep the anxiety out of his voice as he hovered over Caro in the semi-darkened bedroom.
Caro sat down on the bed to cradle the obviously distressed Magdalena against her. Jake’s heart had literally stopped when he’d heard Magdalena scream, and he had only been one step behind Caro as they both ran up the stairs, Caro reaching the cot first, to snatch their red-faced daughter up into her arms.
‘More teeth on the way, probably,’ she answered distractedly, even as she put a hand against Magdalena’s obviously heated brow. ‘I have some gel to rub on her gums—if you wouldn’t mind getting it from the changing-bag for me?’ She nodded in the direction of the temporary changing area she had set up earlier on the dressing table.
Jake located the gel easily, his gaze still fixed on Magdalena as he handed the tube to Caro after removing the top. The baby was very red in the face. Her cheeks were wet with tears, and her eyes—the same green as his own—had darkened with distress or pain. Jake couldn’t decide which. Whichever it was, he knew couldn’t bear to see Magdalena this way.
‘Should we call a doctor?’ he prompted gruffly, even as he reached out compulsively to touch the dampness of his baby daughter’s curls.
Caro shook her head. ‘Let’s see if the gel does any good first.’
‘But—’
Caro’s expression was sympathetic as she looked up at him. ‘I know just how useless you feel, seeing her like this, Jake,’ she assured him gently. ‘But just give it a minute or so, hmm?’
This last desolate year aside, that ‘minute or so’ had to be the longest Jake had ever suffered through, as he sat down abruptly beside Caro on the bed and anxiously watched Magdalena’s face for any sign of improvement.
The changes were subtle at first. A slight lessening in the baby’s hiccupping sobs. An easing of the shuddering of her tiny body. A little less redness to her cheeks. Until finally her eyelids began to droop tiredly and her head dropped down onto Caro’s shoulder. She fell back to sleep as if the last ten minutes of trauma had never happened.
Madonna and child…
Jake wasn’t even sure where that unbidden thought had come from. Maybe because tomorrow was Christmas Eve? All he knew was that as he looked at Caro and Magdalena together the anger he h
ad been feeling towards Caro all day died as suddenly as it had flared into life, and he knew that the two of them were as precious to him as that other mother and child had been to the world two thousand years ago.
Caro was his Madonna.
Magdalena his child.
They both belonged to him. Belonged with him. Whether Caro accepted that yet or not.
It was up to Jake to ensure that she did…
* * *
CARO STRAIGHTENED slowly from carefully placing the sleeping Magdalena back in her cot, aware that there had been a sudden shift of emotions in the last few minutes as she and Jake sat together in silence and waited to see if the gel on the baby’s gums would have the desired effect.
Their relief had been tangible as, obviously no longer in pain, Magdalena had begun to fall back to sleep.
And not just their relief, Caro acknowledged with an increase of the fluttering sensation in the pit of her stomach as she turned slowly to look at Jake and found his darkened gaze fixed on her hungrily. But also the same hunger that had been building inside her for the last few minutes!
Jake gave a rueful shake of his head. ‘Was it like this when her first two teeth came through?’
‘Worse,’ Caro admitted with a smile. ‘I had no idea what was happening the first time, and I’m afraid I panicked completely. I drove hell-for-leather to the doctor’s clinic in the next village.’ She laughed quietly at the memory. ‘I felt a little foolish once he had made his diagnosis.’
Jake sighed. ‘I would have done exactly the same.’
She blinked. ‘You would?’
He nodded, his expression pained. ‘It’s hard to see her like that, isn’t it?’
Caro drew in a ragged breath. ‘You love Magdalena already, don’t you?’
‘From the moment I first set eyes on her,’ Jake confirmed without the slightest hesitation, that dark gaze never leaving her face.
Caro felt her heart sink at the stark honesty of Jake’s admission. They had never discussed having children during their brief year of marriage, and Caro’s pregnancy had been completely unplanned. But she had always wanted to have children with Jake some day, and that desire had become increasingly more apparent to her as their marriage had progressed. However, she had been concerned that Jake would only care for any children they had in the same offhand manner with which he’d cared for her.
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