Contract Baby

by Lynne Graham

  And even in the state she was in she saw him react in shock to that frightened accusation. Raul turned pale, the fabulous bone structure clenching hard. He gripped her hand, brilliant eyes shimmering. ‘You must trust him. He’s a very fine obstetrician—’

  ‘He’s a friend of yours.’

  ‘Si, pero...yes, but he is also a doctor,’ Raul stressed with highly emotive urgency.

  ‘I don’t want to go to sleep and wake up in Venezuela... Do you think I don’t know what you’re capable of when you’re crossed?’ Polly managed to frame with the last of her energy.

  ‘I’ve never broken the law!’

  ‘You would to get this baby,’ Polly told him.

  The silence smouldered, fireworks blazing under the surface.

  Raul stared down at her, expressive eyes veiled, but she knew she had drawn blood.

  ‘You’re not well, Polly. If you will not believe my assurances that you can trust the staff here, then at least think of the baby’s needs and put those needs first,’ he breathed, not quite levelly.

  A pained look of withdrawal crossed her exhausted face. She gave a jerky nod of assent, but turned her head to the wall. A minute later she felt a slight prick in her arm and she let herself float, and would have done anything to escape that relentless pounding inside her skull and forget that unjust look of cruel reproach she had seen in Raul’s gaze.

  As she drifted like a drowning swimmer, all the worst moments of her life seemed to flash up before her.

  Her earliest memory was of her father shouting at her mother and her mother crying. She had got up one morning at the age of seven to find her mother gone. Her father had flown into a rage when she’d innocently tried to question him. Soon after that she had been sent to stay with her godmother. Nancy Leeward had carefully explained. Her mother, Leah, had done a very silly thing: she had gone away with another man. Her parents were getting a divorce, but some time, hopefully soon, when her father gave permission, her mother might come to visit her.

  Only Leah never had. Polly had got her mothering from her godmother. And she had had to wait until she was twenty years old and clearing out her father’s desk, days after his funeral, to discover the pitiful wad of pleading letters written by the distraught mother who had to all intents and purposes abandoned her.

  Leah had gone to New York and eventually married her lover. She had flown over to England half a dozen times. at an expense she could ill afford, in repeated attempts to see her daughter, but her embittered ex-husband had blocked her every time—not least by putting Polly into boarding school and refusing to say where she was. Polly had been shattered by what she’d uncovered, but also overjoyed to realise that her mother had really loved her, in spite of all her father’s assertions to the contrary.

  In New York, she had had a tearful, wonderful reunion with Leah, whose second husband had died the previous year. Her mother had been weak, breathless, and aged far beyond her years. The gravity of her heart condition had been painfully obvious. She had been living on welfare, what health insurance she had had exhausted. The harassed doctor at the local clinic had reluctantly told Polly under pressure that there was an operation performed by a worldfamous surgeon which might give her mother some hope, but that it would take a lottery win to privately finance such major surgery.

  Up, down—too much down in her life recently, and not enough up, she thought painfully as she wandered through her own memories.

  And then she saw Raul, strolling through the glorious Vermont woods where she had walked every day, escaping from Soledad’s kind but fussing attentions to cry in peace for the mother she had lost. Raul, garbed in faultlessly cut casual clothes, smart enough to take Rodeo Drive by storm and so smooth, so impressively natural in his surprise at stumbling on her that it was a wonder he hadn’t cut himself with his own clever tongue.

  And she had met those extraordinary eyes of amber and bang...crash...pow. She had been heading for a down that would take her all the way to hell, even though she had naively felt she was on an up the instant he angled that first smouldering smile at her.

  Polly woke up the following morning wearing a hideous billowing hospital gown. She had a room to herself with a private bathroom. Her head no longer hurt, but tiredness still filled her with lethargy.

  The nurse who came in response to the bell cheerfully ran through routine checks, efficiently helped her to freshen up and neatly side-stepped most of her anxious questions. She consulted her chart and informed Polly that she was to have complete bedrest. Mr. Bevan would be in around lunchtime, she confided, just as breakfast was delivered.

  A couple of hours later Raul’s chauffeur arrived, like an advance party before him. He settled down a suitcase that Polly recognised because it was her own. The case bulged with what struck her as very probably every possession she had last seen in her room at the Greys’. A maid in an overall came in and helped her change into one of her own nighties. Polly then retrieved a creased brown envelope from the jumble of items in the foot of her case. It was time to confront Raul with the worst of the deceptions practised on her.

  By the time mid-morning arrived, Polly was sitting bolt upright with wide, angrily impatient eyes and, had she but known it, the first healthy colour in her cheeks for weeks. She raked restive fingers through the silky mahogany hair tumbling round her shoulders and focused on the door expectantly, like someone not only preparing to face Armageddon but overwhelmingly eager to meet it.

  The ajar door finally spread wide, framing Raul.

  Her breath caught in her throat.

  Sleek and powerful, in a summerweight double-breasted beige business suit, he looked sensationally attractive, supremely poised and shockingly self-assured. Polly lost her animated colour, ashamed of that helpless flare of physical response to those dark good looks and that lithe, lean, muscular physique. He was a ruthless and unashamed manipulator.

  Black eyes raked over her, black eyes without any shade of warm gold. Emotionless, businesslike, not even a comforting hint of uncertainty about his stance. ‘You look better already,’ he remarked levelly.

  ‘I feel better,’ Polly was generous enough to admit. ‘But I can’t stay here—’

  ‘Of course you can. Where else could you be so well cared for?’

  ‘I’ve got something here I want you to explain,’ Polly delivered tautly.

  His attention dropped to the envelope clutched between her tense fingers. ‘What is it?’

  A shaky little laugh escaped Polly. ‘Oh, it’s not real proof of the manipulative lies I was fed...you needn’t worry about that! Your lawyer was far too clever to allow me to retain any original documents, but I took photocopies—’

  Raul frowned at her. ‘Dios mio, cut to the base line and tell me what you’re talking about,’ he incised impatiently. ‘You were told no lies at any time!’

  ‘Off the record lies,’ Polly extended tightly. ‘It was very clever to give me the impression that I was being allowed a reassuring glimpse at highly confidential information.’

  Raul angled back his imperious dark head. ‘Explain yourself.’

  Polly tossed the envelope to the foot of the bed. ‘How you can look me in the face and say that I will never know.’

  Raul swept up the envelope with an undaunted flourish. ‘And don’t try to pretend you didn’t know about it. When I was asked to sign that contract, I said I couldn’t sign until I was given some assurances about the couple who wanted me to act as surrogate for them.’

  The...couple?’ Raul queried flatly, ebony brows drawing together as he extracted the folded pages from the envelope.

  ‘Your lawyer said that wasn’t possible. His clients wanted complete anonymity. So I left. Forty-eight hours later, I got a phone call. I met up in a café with a young bright spark from your lawyer’s office. He said he was a clerk,’ Polly related jerkily, her resentment and distaste blatant in her strained face as she recalled how easily she had been fooled. ‘He said he understood my concern abo
ut the people who would be adopting my child, and that he was risking his job in allowing me even a glance at such confidential documents—’

  ‘Which confidential documents?’ Raul cut in grittily.

  ‘He handed me a profile of that supposed couple from an accredited adoption agency. There were no names, no details which might have identified them...’ Tears stung Polly’s eyes then, her voice beginning to shake with the strength of her feelings. ‘And I was really moved by what I read, by their own personal statements, their complete honesty, their deep longing to have a family. They struck me as wonderful people, and they’d had a h-heartbreaking time struggling to have a child of their own...’

  ‘Madre mía...’ Raul ground out, half under his breath, scorching golden eyes pinned to her distraught face with mesmeric force.

  ‘And you see,’ Polly framed jaggedly, ‘I really liked that couple. I felt for them, thought they would make terrific parents, would give any child a really loving home...’ As a strangled sob swallowed her voice, she crammed a mortified hand against her wobbling mouth and stared in tormented accusation at Raul through swimming blue eyes. ‘How could you sink that low?’ she condemned strickenly.

  Raul gazed back at her, strikingly pale now below his olive skin, so still he might have been a stone statue, a stunned light in his piercing dark eyes.

  With the greatest difficulty, Polly cleared her throat and breathed unevenly. ‘I asked the clerk to let me have an hour reading over that profile and I photocopied it without telling him. That afternoon, I went in and signed the contract. I thought I was doing a really good thing. I thought I would make that couple so happy... I was inexcusably dumb and shortsighted!’

  The heavy silence stretched like a rubber band pulled too taut. And then Raul unfroze. In an almost violent gesture, he shook open the pages he still held. He strode over to the window, his broad back turned to her, his tension so pronounced it hummed like a force field in a room that now felt suffocatingly airless.

  Polly sank wearily back against the pillows and fought to get a grip on the tears still clogging her aching throat.

  Timeless minutes later, Raul swung back, his darkly handsome features grim and forbidding. ‘This abhorrent deception was not instigated by me,’ he declared, visibly struggling to contain the outrage blazing in his eyes, the revealing rawness to that harshened plea in his own defence. ‘I had no knowledge of your request for further information or of your initial reluctance to sign that contract.’

  ‘How am I supposed to believe anything you say?’

  ‘Because the guilty party will be called to account,’ Raul asserted with wrathful bite. ‘At no stage did I give any instruction which might have implied that I would countenance such a deception. There was no need for me to stoop to lies and manipulation. There were other far less scrupulous applicants available—’

  ‘Were there?’ Polly breathed, not best pleased to realise that she had featured as one of many.

  He was shocked and furious, so furious there was a slight tremor in his fingers as he refolded the pages she had given him. His sincerity was fiercely convincing.

  ‘So now I know why you have no faith in my word. It wasn’t only my decision to conceal my identity as the father of your child in Vermont that made you change your mind about fulfilling the contract.’

  It was an unfortunate reminder. He only had to mention that cruel masquerade to fill Polly with savage pain and resentment. She surveyed him with angry, bitter eyes. ‘I would never, ever have agreed to a single male parent for my child, and when I found out who you really were, I was genuinely appalled—’

  Raul skimmed a startled glance at her. ‘Dios mio... “appalled”? What an exaggeration—’

  ‘No exaggeration. I wouldn’t give a man with your reputation a pet rabbit to keep, never mind an innocent, helpless baby!’ Polly fired back at him.

  Raul gazed back at her with complete incredulity. ‘What is wrong with my reputation?’

  ‘Read your own publicity,’ Polly advised with unconcealed distaste, thinking about the endless string of glamorous women who had been associated with him. There was nothing stable or respectable about Raul’s lifestyle.

  Outrage sizzled round Raul Zaforteza like an intimidating aura. He snatched in a deep shuddering breath of restraint. ‘What right do you have to stand in judgement over me? So subterfuge was employed to persuade you into conceiving my child—I deeply regret that reality, but nothing will alter the situation we’re in now. That child you carry is still my child!’

  Polly turned her head away. ‘And mine.’

  ‘The Judgement of Solomon. Are you about to suggest that we divide him or her into two equal halves? Let me tell you now that I will fight to the end to prevent that obnoxious little nerd I met last night raising my child!’ Raul delivered with sudden explosive aggression.

  Polly blinked. ‘What little nerd?’

  ‘Henry Grey informed me that you’re engaged to him,’ Raul imparted with a feral flash of white teeth. ‘And you may believe that that is your business, but anything that affects my child’s welfare is also very much my business now!’

  Stunned to realise that Henry should have claimed to be engaged to her, Polly surveyed the volatile male striding up and down the room, like a prowling tiger lashing his tail at the confines of a cage. Why did she want to hold Raul in her arms and soothe him? she asked herself with a sinking heart.

  ‘I think you should leave, Raul.’ As that dry voice of reproof cut through the electric atmosphere, Polly tore her mesmerised attention from Raul. In turn, Raul swung round. They both focused in astonishment on the consultant lodged in the doorway.

  ‘Leave?’ Raul stressed in unconcealed disbelief.

  ‘Only quiet visitors are welcome here,’ Rodney Bevan spelt out gravely.

  Dressed in an Indian cotton dress the same rich blue as her eyes, Polly turned her face up into the sun and basked, welded to the comfy cushioning on the lounger. The courtyard garden at the centre of the clinic was an enchanting spot on a summer day. Even Henry’s unwelcome visit couldn’t detract from her pleasure at being surrounded by greenery again.

  Henry gave her an accusing look. ‘Anybody would think you were enjoying yourself here!’

  ‘It’s very restful.’

  Until Polly had escaped Henry and his mother for three days, she hadn’t appreciated just how wearing their constant badgering had become. She was tired of being pressurised and pushed in a direction she didn’t want to go. Now that Raul had found her, she was no longer in hiding. After she had sorted out things with Raul, she would be able to take control of her own life again.

  ‘Mother thinks you should come home,’ Henry told her with stiff disapproval.

  ‘You still haven’t explained why you told Raul we were engaged.’

  Henry frowned. ‘I should’ve thought that was obvious. I hoped he’d go away and leave us alone. What’s the point of him showing up now? He’s just complicating things, swanning up in his flash car and acting like he owns you!’

  Strange how even a male as insensitive as Henry had recognised that Raul behaved as if he owned her. Only it wasn’t her, it was the baby he believed he owned. Dear heaven, what a mess she was in, Polly conceded worriedly. There was no going back, no way of changing anything. Her baby was also Raul’s baby and always would be.

  ‘It was kind of you to call in, Henry,’ she murmured quietly. ‘Tell your mother that I really appreciate all her kindness, but that I won’t be coming back to stay with you—’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Henry had gone all red in the face.

  ‘I just don’t want to marry you...I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’ll visit later in the week, when you’re feeling more yourself.’

  As Henry departed, Polly reflected that she was actually feeling more herself than she had in many weeks. Stepping off the treadmill of exhaustion had given her space to think.

  As she slowly, awkwardly raised herself,
Raul appeared through a door on the far side of the courtyard. He angled a slashing, searching glance over the little clusters of patients taking the fresh air nearby. Screened by the shrubbery, Polly made no attempt to attract his attention.

  His suit was palest grey. He exuded designer chic. In the sunlight, his luxuriant hair gleamed blue-black. His lean, strong face possessed such breathtaking sexy symmetry that her breathing quickened and her sluggish pulses raced. Raul radiated raw sexuality in virile waves. The media said that men thought about sex at least once a minute. One look at Raul was enough to convince her.

  But a feeling of stark inadequacy and rejection now threatened her in Raul’s radius. How the heck had she ever believed that a male that gorgeous was interested in her? How wilfully blind she had been in Vermont! If a woman excited Raul, he probably pounced on the first date, or maybe he got pounced on, but he had never made a pass at her, or even tried to kiss her. At first he had made her as nervous as a cat on hot bricks. But before very long his exquisite manners and flattering interest in her had soothed her inexperienced squirmings in his presence and given her entirely the wrong impression.

  Incredibly, she had believed that one of the world’s most notorious womanisers was actually a cautious and decent guy, mature enough to want to get to know a woman as a friend before trying to take the relationship any further. Remembering that fact now made Polly feel positively queasy. She had thought Raul was perfect; she had thought he was wonderful; she had thought he was really attracted to her because he continued to seek out her company...

  Far from impervious to Raul’s cool exasperation when he finally espied her, lurking behind the shrubbery, Polly dropped her head, her shining fall of mahogany hair concealing her taut profile.

  ‘What are you doing out of bed?’ Raul demanded the instant he got within hailing distance. ‘I’ll take you back up to your room.’