by Lynne Graham
‘I believe every child deserves two parents,’ she responded awkwardly. ‘Two parents on the spot.’
‘That’s impossible.’
‘I was brought up by my father, and there wasn’t a day I didn’t long for my mother.’
‘This child may be a boy.’
‘I don’t think that makes any difference. Because of my own experiences, I couldn’t face being parted from my child. Whatever it takes, I need to be there for my baby and do the very best I can to be a good mother.’ Polly was very tense as she struggled to verbalise her own deepest feelings. ‘And, yes, it is a very great pity that I didn’t work that out before I signed that contract... but my only excuse is that I honestly didn’t even begin to understand how I would feel once I was actually pregnant.’
‘That’s in the past now. We need to concentrate on the present.’ With that rather deflating assurance, Raul flung back his darkly handsome head, his dark eyes formidable in their penetration. ‘If you really mean what you say when you protest that you intend to be the very best mother you can be...then you must move to Venezuela.’
‘Venezuela?’ Polly exclaimed, wildly disconcerted at having that stunning suggestion flung at her in cool challenge.
‘I will set you up in a house there. You will have every comfort and convenience, and your child as well.’
Polly blinked, still attempting to absorb a staggering proposition that entailed moving to the other side of the world. ‘I couldn’t—’
‘Por Dios...ask yourself if you are being fair. If the child needs his mother, then he also needs his father. And that child will inherit everything I possess.’ Raul spelt out that reminder with imperious pride and impatience.
‘Money isn’t everything, Raul—’
‘Don’t be facile. I’m talking about a way of life that you have not the slightest conception of,’ Raul returned very drily, watching her flush. ‘At least be practical, Polly. My child needs to know that Venezuelan heritage, the language, the people, the culture. If you won’t come to Venezuela, what am I to do? With the claims on my time, I can’t possibly visit the UK often enough to form a close relationship with my child.’
Polly tried to picture living in Venezuela, with Raul picking up all her bills, walking in and out of her life with one blonde babe girlfriend after another and eventually taking a wife. No matter how he might feel now, she was convinced that he would succumb to matrimony sooner or later. In such a situation she would always be an outsider, an interloper, neither family nor friend, and a lot of people would simply assume that she was his discarded mistress. She knew she would never be able to cope with such a dependent, humiliating existence on the fringe of Raul’s world. She needed to get on with her own life. It was time to be honest about that reality.
‘Raul...I want to stay in the UK with my baby. I don’t want to live in Venezuela, having you oversee every move I make,’ Polly admitted, watching him bridle in apparent disbelief at that statement. ‘You have the right to be involved in your child’s future...but what you seem to forget is that that future is my life as well! Anyway, you may not think it now, but some day you’ll get married, have other children—’
Raul released his breath in a charged hiss of frustration. ‘I would sooner be dead than married!’
‘But you see...I don’t feel the same way,’ Polly shared with rueful honesty. ‘I would like to think that even as an unmarried mum I will get married eventually.’
‘Saying that to me is the equivalent of blackmail, Polly,’ Raul condemned, pale with anger beneath his golden skin, eyes hot as sunlight in that lean, dark, devastating face. ‘I do not want any other man involved in my child’s upbringing! ’
Temper stirred in Polly, and the more she thought about that blunt and unashamed declaration the angrier she became. Did Raul really believe that he had the right to demand that she live like a nun for the next twenty years? Lonely, unloved, celibate. She stared at him. Yes, that was what he believed and what he wanted, if he was not to have sole custody of their child.
Raising herself out of the armchair, Polly straightened her slight shoulders and stood up. ‘You are so incredibly selfish and spoilt!’ she accused fiercely.
Astonished by that sudden indictment, Raul strode across the room, closing the distance between them. ‘I can’t believe that you can dare to say that to me—’
‘I expect not...as you’ve already told me, you’re accustomed to people who want to please you, who are eager to tell you only what you want to hear!’ Polly shot back with unconcealed scorn. ‘Well, I’m not one of those people!’
His eyes blazed. ‘I have bent over backwards to be fair—’
‘At what personal sacrifice and inconvenience?’ Polly slung back, trembling with rage. ‘You are a playboy with a reputation as a womaniser. You enjoy your freedom, don’t you?’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Raul was unmoved by that angle of attack. ‘I don’t lie to the women who pass through my life. I don’t promise true love or permanency—’
‘Because you’ve never had to, have you? You know, listening to you, Raul...I despise my own sex. But I despise you most of all,’ Polly confessed, with hands knotting into furious fists by her side. ‘It’s one rule for you and another for me—a hypocritical sexist double standard the belongs in the Prehistoric ages with Neanderthals like you! You say you want this child, but you didn’t want a child badly enough to make a commitment like other men, did you? And what do you offer me—?’
‘The only two possible remedies to the mess we’re now in. I’m not about to apologise because you do not like the imperfect sound of reality,’ Raul delivered with slashing bite.
‘Reality? You call it “reality” to offer me a choice between giving up my child almost completely...and living like a nun in Venezuela?’
Raul flicked her a grimly amused glance. ‘You want the licence to sleep around?’
‘You know very well that’s not what I’m trying to say!’
‘But you wouldn’t want me to share your bed without all that idealistic love, commitment and permanency jazz... would you, querida?’ Raul breathed with sizzling golden eyes, watching her freeze in shock at that plunge into the more intimate and personal. ‘You see, what you want and what I want we can’t have, because we both want something different!’
Every scrap of colour drained from Polly’s face. ‘I don’t want you...like that,’ she framed jerkily.
Raul cast her a glittering appraisal that was all male and all-knowing. ‘Oh, yes, you do...that sexual hunger has been there between us from the moment we met.’
Polly backed away from him. She could not cope with having his knowledge of her attraction to him thrown in her teeth. ‘No—’
‘I didn’t take advantage of you because I knew it would end in your tears.’
‘Don’t kid yourself...I might’ve ditched you first!’ Polly told him with very real loathing, her pride so wounded she wanted to kill him. ‘And let me tell you something else too, I put a much higher price on myself than your interchangeable blonde babes do.’
‘I admire that...I really do,’ Raul incised with complete cool, his temper back under wraps again at disorientating, galling speed. ‘You have such rigid moral values, gatita. Well, warned in advance, I was careful to keep my distance in Vermont.’
Polly shuddered with a rage that was out of control, a rage that had its roots in pain and violent resentment. She was shattered by the sudden ripping down of the careful barriers that had made it possible for them to skim along the surface of their complex relationship. Without those barriers, and shorn by Raul of all face-saving defences, she was flailing wildly.
A look of positive loathing written in her furious eyes, she snapped, ‘Then you’ll have no problem understanding that the only way you’ll ever get me to Venezuela...the only way you’ll ever achieve full custody of your child...is to marry me, Raul!’
A silence fell between them like a giant black hole, waiting to entrap the
unwary.
Raul was now formidably still, brilliant dark eyes icy with incredulity. That’s not funny, Polly. Take it back.’
‘Why? Do you want me to lie to you? Say I didn’t mean it?’ Polly demanded rawly as she tipped her head back, mahogany hair rippling back from her furiously flushed face. ‘I’m being honest with you. If I stay here in the UK, I will get on with my life and you will not interfere with that life! I am not prepared to go to Venezuela as anything other than a wife!’
Raul sent her a derisive look that said he was unimpressed. ‘You are not serious.’
Polly studied him with so much bitterness inside her she marvelled she didn’t explode like a destructive weapon. ‘I am. Let’s see how good you are at making sacrifices when you expect me to sacrifice everything! Why? Because I’m not rich and powerful like you? Or because I’m going to be the mother of your child and you have this weird idea that a decent mother has no entitlement to any life of her own?’
Raul jerked as if she had struck him, a feverish flush slowly darkening his hard cheekbones.
This time the silence that fell screamed with menace.
A tiny pulse flickered at the whitened edge of his fiercely compressed mouth. His hands had closed into fists, betraying his struggle for self-command. But, most frightening of all for Polly, for the very first time Raul stared back at her with very real hatred. Cold, hard, deadly loathing. And, in shock, Polly fell silent, mind turning blank, all the fight and anger draining from her, leaving only fear in their place.
‘I’ll take you back to the clinic,’ Raul drawled with raw finality. ‘There is no point in allowing this offensive dialogue to continue.’
CHAPTER FOUR
TWO days later, Polly was still recovering from the effects of that catastrophic lunch out.
But her mind was briefly removed from her own problems when she picked up a magazine dated from the previous month and learnt that her childhood friend, Maxie Kendall, had got married, indeed had already been mamed for several weeks. Maxie and her husband, Angelos Petronides, had kept their marriage a secret until they were ready to make a public announcement. Polly read the article and scrutinised the photos with great interest, and a pleased smile on Maxie’s behalf.
She had last met Maxie at the reading of Nancy Leeward’s will. Her godmother had actually had three goddaughters, Polly and Maxie and Darcy. Although the girls had been close friends well into their teens, their adult lives had taken them in very different directions.
Maxie had become a famous model, with a tangled love life in London. Darcy had been a single parent, who rarely left her home in Cornwall. Polly had tried to keep in touch with both women but regular contact had gradually lapsed, not least because Darcy and Maxie were no longer friends.
‘Isn’t she gorgeous?’ one of the nurses groaned in admiration, looking over her shoulder at the main picture of Maxie on the catwalk. ‘I would give my eye teeth to look like that!’
‘Who wouldn’t?’ Polly’s smile of amused agreement slid away as she found herself reflecting that Maxie closely resembled what appeared to be Raul’s ideal of a sexually attractive woman. Tall, blonde and stunning. And here she was, a five-foot-one-inch-tall, slightly built brunette, who had never looked glamorous in her life.
She grimaced, still angry and bitter about the options Raul had laid before her with a cruel air of understanding generosity. If she lived until she was ninety she would not forget her crushing sense of humiliation when Raul had dragged her attraction to him out into the open and squashed her already battered pride.
In Vermont, Raul had evidently seen her susceptibility and quite deliberately steered clear of encouraging her. That awareness now made her feel about a foot high. She had honestly believed that she hadn’t betrayed herself, had fondly imagined that she had managed to match his cool and casual manner. She had deliberately avoided every temptation to do otherwise, biting her tongue many, many times in his presence.
She had always left it to him to say when or if he was coming again, had never once complained when he didn’t show up, had never attempted to pry into his private life. And, boy, had she been wasting her time in trying to play it cool, she thought now in severe mortification. Raul had been ahead of her. ‘Sexual hunger’, he had called it! How gallant of him to pretend that he had been tempted too, because she didn’t believe that—indeed, not for one second could she believe that!
And now she blamed Raul even more bitterly for her own painful misconceptions during that time. Why hadn’t he mentioned the existence of other women in his life? Even the most casual reference to another relationship would have put her on her guard. But, no, Raul had been content to allow her to imagine whatever she liked. That had been safer than an honesty that might have made her question his true motive for seeking out her company.
So Raul needn’t think that she was going to apologise for telling him that a wedding ring was the only thing likely to persuade her to move to Venezuela. It had been the honest truth. She hadn’t expected him to like that truth, or even pause for a second to consider marriage as a possible option to their problem, but she had wanted to shock him just as he had shocked her, she conceded uncomfortably.
Yet the raw hostility and dislike she had aroused had not been a welcome result. In fact, his reaction had terrified her, and in retrospect even that annoyed her and filled her with shame. She had to learn to deal with Raul on an impersonal basis.
Raul arrived that evening while she was lying on the sofa watching the film Pretty Woman. He strode in at the bit where the heroine was fanning out a selection of condoms for the hero’s benefit. Shooting the screen a darkling glance, he said with icy derision, ‘I’ve never understood how a whore could figure as a romantic lead!’
Polly almost fell on the coffee table in her eagerness to grab up the remote control and switch the television off. Hot-cheeked, she looked at him then. He had never seemed more remote: fabulous bone structure taut, lean features cool, his dark and formal business suit somehow increasing his aspect of chilling detachment.
Eyes as black and wintry as a stormy night assailed hers. ‘I’ve applied for a special licence. We’ll get married here in forty-eight hours.’
In the act of lifting herself from the sofa, Polly’s arms lost their strength and crumpled at the elbows. She toppled back onto the sofa again, a look of complete astonishment fixed to her startled face. ‘Say that again—’
‘You have made it clear that you will not accept any other option,’ Raul drawled flatly.
‘But I never expected.... I mean, f-for goodness’ sake, Raul,’ Polly stammered in severe shock. ‘We can’t just—’
‘Can’t we? Are you about to change your mind? Are you now prepared to consider allowing me to take my child back home with me?’ Raul shot at her.
‘No!’ she gasped.
‘Are you willing to try living in Venezuela on any other terms?’
‘No, but—’
‘Then don’t waste my time with empty protests. You have, after all, just got exactly what you wanted,’ Raul informed her icily.
‘Not if you feel like this about it,’ Polly protested unevenly. ‘And it isn’t what I precisely wanted—’
‘Isn’t it? Are you now telling me that you don’t want me?’
Polly flushed to the roots of her hair, still very sensitive on that subject. ‘I... I—’
‘If I were you, I wouldn’t argue on that point,’ Raul warned, a current of threatening steel in his rich, accented drawl. ‘In the space of one minute, I could make you eat your words!’
Already in shock, as she was, that level of blunt assurance reduced Polly to writhing discomfiture, but she still said, ‘When I mentioned marriage, I didn’t mean it as a serious possibility—’
‘No, you laid it out as the ultimate price, the ultimate sacrifice.’ Raul’s hard sensual mouth twisted. ‘And I’ll get used to the idea. It will be a marriage of convenience, nothing more. I won’t allow my child to grow up
without me. I also hope I’m not so prejudiced that I can’t concede that having both a mother and a father may well be better for the child.’
In a daze of conflicting feelings, Polly muttered, ‘But what about...us?’
‘That baby is the only thing that should matter to either of us. Why should he or she pay the price for this fiasco?’
That was a telling point for Polly. She bowed her head, guilty conscience now in full sway. Only she still couldn’t prevent herself from muttering, ‘I expected to many someone who loved me—’
‘I didn’t expect to marry at all,’ Raul traded, without an ounce of sympathy.
‘I’ll have to think this over—’
‘No, you won’t. You’ll give me your answer now. I’m not in the mood for prima donna tactics!’
Polly experienced a powerful urge to tell him to get lost. And then she thought about being married to Raul, and other, infinitely stronger emotions swamped her. Over time they could work at building up a reasonable relationship, she told herself. They would have the baby to share. Surely their child would help to bring them together? And, all false pride laid aside, Polly was suddenly agonisingly conscious that she would do just about anything to at least have that chance with Raul. If she didn’t make that leap of faith now, there would be no second opportunity.
‘I’ll marry you,’ she murmured tautly.
‘Muy bien.’ Raul consulted his watch with disturbing cool. ‘I’m afraid I can’t stay. I have a dinner engagement’
‘Raul....?’
He turned back from the door.
Polly swallowed hard. ‘You can live with this option?’ she prompted anxiously.
His sudden blazing smile took her completely by surprise, and yet inexplicably left her feeling more chilled than reassured. ‘Of course.... I only hope you’re equally adaptable.’
Two days later, Polly, clad in a simple white cotton dress, waited in her room for Raul to arrive.
Rod Bevan had told her that he had suggested the courtyard garden for the wedding ceremony, but Raul had apparently wanted a more private setting. Something quick that wouldn’t interfere with his busy schedule too much or attract the attention of others, Polly had gathered rather sourly. It was hard to believe that this was her wedding day. No flowers, no guests, nothing that might be construed as an attempt to celebrate the event. Had she been out of her mind to agree to marry Raul?