The Millionaire's Love-Child
Elizabeth Power
It was every mother's worst nightmare.Annie's son had been swapped at birth!But it got worse: her charismatic ex-boss, Brant Cadman, was raising her real son – and she his! Brant made Annie an irresistible proposition – marry him.Annie knew both their sons needed their mom and dad.Plus, she couldn't deny the intense physical attraction between them… because once they'd shared a night of love…
The Millionaire’s Love-Child
Elizabeth Power
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER ONE
‘NO, NO! It’s not true! I don’t believe you!’
Annie swung away, towards the window, her bare shoulders stiffening in rejection of the man’s devastating statement. Beneath the dark strands of her fringe, bewildered brown eyes stared out on the small square of garden that formed the rear of her terraced London flat, at the low boundary wall where the long-haired tabby crouched, poised to eject any other exploring cat from its territory. ‘You’ve got to be joking. Tell me it’s just some cruel joke. That you’re making it up. You are, aren’t you?’
‘I’m sorry, Annie.’ Behind her, those deep masculine tones were soft, yet unrelenting. ‘If I could have found an easier way to tell you, believe me, I would have.’
‘Don’t you think I’d know?’ Her thick layered hair bounced against her shoulders as she pivoted to face the man again, disbelief and confusion stamped on the pale oval of her face.
For a few seconds her eyes read—what? Sympathy, in the green-gold depths of his? Some emotion that softened those angular features with their forceful jaw and that hawk-like nose which, with his sleek black hair and the immaculate tailoring of his dark suit, added up to an almost intimidating presence. ‘Don’t you think I’d have realised if a mistake like that had been made? Do you think I wouldn’t know my own child?’
‘Annie. Annie…’ His hand outstretched, he made a move towards her, but she recoiled from any contact, shivering suddenly beneath her scanty purple sun-top and jeans. ‘You’re in shock.’
‘What do you expect?’ she flung at him, backing away from any further attempt to console her. How could he offer any consolation except to retract what he had just said?
Broad shoulders sagged almost indiscernibly beneath the well-cut jacket, and his breath came heavily as he said, ‘Don’t you think that this has been hard for me?’
She could see the lines now at the corners of those beautiful eyes, and the way his smooth, olive skin seemed stretched across his cheekbones from battle-scarring emotions made him appear even fiercer than when she had known him before. If, of course, she could claim to have known him before. She had, after all, been just a cog in the running of his empire.
Brant Cadman. Thirty-five years old and the driving force behind Cadman Leisure, whose name was synonymous with a whole chain of retail outlets, sports complexes and manufacturers of his own brand of sportswear, including the company where she had worked with Warren. But that was before she had paid the price of trusting someone. Before she had felt the need to leave her job, stung by the shame of everyone knowing. Before she had had her son.
And here Brant was, saying that the child she had raised for the past two years wasn’t her child at all, but his. His and some other woman’s. That the hospital where his own son had been born had found a discrepancy in their records which had only come to light following advisory blood tests after both he and the boy had been exposed to some viral infection during a recent visit to Spain.
Hot tears burned Annie’s eyes now, the long strands of her fringe tangling with her equally long lashes as she shook her head in denial.
‘No, no. It isn’t true! Sean’s mine! He’s always been mine!’ In all her twenty-five years she could never have imagined being dealt a blow like this.
As she swayed she saw Brant glance swiftly around, grab the chair beside the second-hand table where her paints and brushes and the miniature water-colour she was working on lay. He set it down beside her, exerting gentle pressure on her shoulder as he urged, ‘Annie, sit down.’
Like an automaton, she obeyed, too numb to do anything else.
‘When they told me, I didn’t want to believe it either.’ His voice was raw with the intensity of anguish he had obviously suffered—was still suffering—because of it. ‘But as soon as you opened the door to me, there wasn’t any doubt.’
What was he saying? Her face tilted swiftly to his, pain warring with incomprehension. That the child he was raising, whose existence until a few moments ago she had never given more than a passing thought to, somehow resembled her? Was actually hers?
She shook her head again. It wasn’t possible. The child slumbering in the next room, obliviously peaceful in his afternoon nap—he was hers. Sean was her baby.
‘OK. So the baby you thought was yours and your wife’s suddenly isn’t. But what makes you think Sean’s yours?’ Numbness and shock were giving way to a challenging anger. ‘What makes you think you can come here and try to take my baby away? Did the hospital send you? Did they tell you to come here?’
‘No.’ He slipped his hands into his pockets, his pristine white shirt pulled tautly across his chest, as though he’d taken a breath and forgotten to let it out. ‘And the last thing I want to do,’ he said quietly, ‘is take your baby away.’
Annie took a gulp of air. She, too, was finding it difficult to breathe. ‘You can try,’ she dared him vehemently.
He chose to ignore the challenge. ‘The hospital called me in when they found Jack’s blood type didn’t match up with the record they had on computer. They confirmed from their records of Naomi’s blood group and now my own that we couldn’t have produced a child with the same type as Jack’s. There was only one baby born that day two years ago whose details show up as having the correct blood type for any child of ours. Yours Annie. The only conclusion they could come to was that some time before our babies left the hospital, there had been a switch.’
‘No. It’s all a mistake! They had no right to give you my name!’
‘They didn’t,’ he said, looking down at his feet. ‘They said they couldn’t divulge the identity of our son’s—as they called it—“biological mother”.’
Biological mother?
A low moan, that could have come from her own throat rang out from the direction of the garden. An ominous sound presaging a bitter conflict, a struggle from which only the strongest and most determined could emerge unscathed.
‘So what led you here?’ Had he known two years ago that Annie Talbot—poor jilted Annie, his ex-employee—had given birth on the same day as his wife? Because she hadn’t. Not until afterwards. Not until a friend had told her that Naomi Cadman had died within twenty-four hours of producing a son. ‘No one’s contacted me. Wouldn’t they have done if these ludicrous assumptions of yours were true?’
‘They should have. They said they were doing so.’ His hands dropped from his pockets. ‘And they aren’t assumptions, Annie. I wish they were. It’s fact—yet to be confirmed, but from the hospital itself.’
‘But…you said they wouldn’t give out information, that it was against their—’
‘They didn’t. Not knowingly. When they called me in, I was left alone in the office for a short spell. The computer was on. I’d have to be superhuman not to have given in to the need to know.’
‘So you scrolled through the records?’ Eyes accusing, she wanted to rush to the phone. Report him. Tell them he’d picked her name from a whole host of others who could have given birth that day.
‘No, Annie. I merely strode over to look at it from the other side of the desk. Your details were on the screen. I suppose such carelessness is hardly surprising from an establishment that sends parents home with the wrong children.’
The wrong children. His words, and the anger that infiltrated them, was bringing her to the slow and awful realisation that it might possibly be true. That Sean, whom she loved and cherished more than life itself, might not be hers. That she might suddenly find herself in a long, traumatic battle to keep him.
Through the open window came a sudden low chorus of howls.
‘They didn’t have your correct address on record. I only found this place through Katrina King.’ From his rather dubious glance around her modest little flat he didn’t need to tell her what he thought about it. ‘I seem to recall you being close friends when you worked at Cadman Sport.’
So he had remembered that. And he had gone to great lengths to find her, even looking up the only friend and colleague she kept in touch with from her old job.
‘Have you had your son DNA-tested? Or whatever it is they do to ascertain parenthood these days? Is that why you’re so certain your little boy’s been mixed up with mine?’
She couldn’t help the scorn in her voice, betraying the hurt and the anger she was suddenly feeling, not so much with him but with the hospital and those people responsible for placing her—placing all of them—in such a harrowing situation.
‘No, I haven’t.’ He looked down at his sleek black polished shoes again. ‘Yet.’
‘Why not?’ The question seemed torn from her, but then she read the answer in those green-gold eyes. He wanted to know. Of course he did. But likewise, he didn’t want to know. And it struck her then, in startling clarity, the implications that such a test could lead to. Because if his boy wasn’t the baby that Naomi had given birth to…
She froze, staring at the table with her palette and her paints and all the colourful trappings that made up her world and provided her with an income and stability. She’d want to know, and yet would balk from the truth just as Brant was doing. She couldn’t bear ever to know for certain that Sean wasn’t her son.
A small sound from the adjoining room had her jumping up instinctively. Their voices—or the cat’s howls—had woken him. But not for long. He was quiet again, still sleeping as she opened the brightly painted door to peer through the crack, then closed it again.
‘Can I see him?’
She swung round, gasping at finding Brant standing right behind her. At five feet four she suddenly felt dwarfed by his six-foot-plus frame.
‘No!’ Her arms flew out across the door-well, and above her panicked response she heard a sudden skirmish outside. Bouncer defending his territory, protecting all he valued, all that was his. ‘No, not now,’ she enlarged in what she hoped was a more conciliatory tone.
The light from the window struck fire from the man’s hair as he dipped his head. ‘I understand.’
Did he? From the taut lines of that fiercely chiselled face she understood herself that he was exercising a formidable restraint. This close to him, she caught the elusive scent of the cologne he must have used that morning; could almost feel the tangible warmth emanating from his hard body. And rising through the trauma of the moment was the shocking recognition of his flagrant sexuality, the memory of how once, too inexperienced to resist it, she had made a total fool of herself with this man.
But that was ten lifetimes ago, she told herself. Before he had relinquished his glorious bachelordom and married the sophisticated Naomi Fox.
She wondered if he was remembering it too, or even if—heaven forbid!—he was aware of her raging emotions, before he took a couple of steps back, giving her space: cool, remote, detached. When he had telephoned earlier he had warned her that this wasn’t exactly a social call, the simple statement assuring her, as it was probably meant to, that whatever had happened between them in the past was just that—in the past.
‘I can get you counselling,’ he said. ‘It was offered to me.’
But you refused it. Of course you did, she thought, certain that no one could direct or analyse the thoughts and feelings of Brant Cadman better than Brant Cadman himself.
She lifted her hands, palms upwards, as though she was fending off something threatening, saying disjointedly, ‘I…don’t need counselling. I just…want you to go.’
‘I don’t think you should be left alone.’ His face was grim with concern.
‘I’m not alone. I’ve got Sean.’ Her chin lifted with determined ferocity. ‘I don’t care if it’s true—what you say. I won’t be giving him up.’
He seemed about to say something else, perhaps to contest her remark, but then his lips compressed on whatever it was, and he said, ‘I want what’s best for Jack—as I’m sure you do for Sean. I appreciate that this has been a terrible shock and that you need time for it to sink in. But there are things we have to discuss. Work out. I’d like to come back tomorrow.’
She knew she couldn’t deny him that if what he was saying was true. Nevertheless, a deep, resisting fear showed in her velvet-brown eyes.
‘It’s all right, Annie.’ His gaze raked over the anxious lines of her face with its pert nose, softly defined mouth and the gentle curvature of her jaw. Briefly his eyes shaped the long line of her throat and the smooth slope of her shoulders, gently tanned from minutes snatched in the early-June sun, and, lifting his gaze back to hers, he said softly, ‘Are you going to be all right?’
She nodded, but thought, What does he care? He’s only interested in his son. Or who he thinks is his son.
Panic brought her into the bedroom after she had shown him out.
In his little bed, Sean was stirring, wisps of nut-brown hair highlighted against the white pillow. The cats might have disturbed him earlier, but everything was quiet now. Through the little lace curtain she could see Bouncer preening himself further along the wall, smug in his obvious victory.
She wondered what her parents would think if they had been here today. But they were twelve thousand miles away in New Zealand.
Over three years ago, when her architect father had taken early retirement and he and his wife had decided to emigrate, they had wanted Annie to go with them. At the time, however, she had just fallen madly in love with Warren Maddox. It had been a whirlwind romance. A time of foolish dreams, planning for a wedding that was to take place only six months after their first meeting. When he had jilted her for Caroline Fenn, an up-and-coming model he’d met on one of the firm’s promotional assignments only two weeks before the wedding, Jane and Simon Talbot had begged Annie to join them, but determinedly she had declined. She was fine, she had told them, wanting to carry on with her life, pretend nothing had happened. In truth, she had been dealt such a blow that she had just wanted to remain alone to lick her wounds.
When she had had Sean, however, against her protests, her mother had made the long journey to be with her, over-protective, fussing in her well-meaning way, so that it was with mixed emotions, two weeks later, that Annie had seen her off on her journey home. Six months later she had taken Sean and flown over to spend Christmas in Auckland with them, returning after a month. That was nearly eighteen months ago.
Now Annie had to quell the strongest urge to ring her parents, hear her father’s understanding tones, but it would be the middle of the night in New Zealand and she had never been one to run for help at the first sign of trouble.
As Sean’s hazel eyes opened and he gave her a wide grin, adoringly Annie picked him up. He felt cuddly and warm in his soft pyjamas.
Everything would be sorted out, she tried convincing herself. He had her father’s ears, didn’t he? And everyone said he had her cheeky smile and her colouring.
But as she looked at the child in her arms, reminding herself of all these things, all she could see was the strong, daunting features of Brant Cadman.
The letter came from the hospital the following morning. It told Annie to contact them as soon as possible.
When she rang they said they wanted to send someone out to see her. Perhaps the following day? But Annie insisted that if they had something to tell her, she was coming up to town herself. Today.
She didn’t tell them that she knew what it concerned. Or anything about Brant Cadman. Ridiculously, she was nursing the hope that if she didn’t bring his name into it, this whole harrowing nightmare might not be true.
For what other reason the hospital might be writing to her, she didn’t stop to imagine. The fact that Brant had said he would be calling round again today was very real and she was keen to get out of the flat before he arrived. She didn’t think she could face him until someone told her for certain that there had been a mix-up. Until then, he presented a dark threat to everything she cherished.
‘I take it you know Brant Cadman was here,’ Katrina King told her as soon as Annie rang to ask her friend if she would have Sean for a couple of hours. A year older than Annie, the woman worked from home as a freelance sportswear designer. She loved children and had volunteered to entertain Sean if ever Annie needed a babysitter. ‘You did get my email, didn’t you?’
She hadn’t. She’d been too worried and overtaken by the man’s visit to even remember to check her emails.
‘When did he call?’ was all Annie could respond with.
‘About coffee-time yesterday. Still looking like every woman’s darkest fantasy. What did he want?’ Katrina asked, sounding suspicious.
‘Just to see me,’ Annie returned, thinking how pretentious that sounded, but at that moment she couldn’t begin to tell her friend the nature of Brant’s visit.
‘I’ll bet!’ Katrina’s words held a mixture of caution and envy, but Annie ignored them.
‘See you later,’ she said quickly, ringing off.
She didn’t want to let Sean out of her sight, but decided it would be best if he was with Katrina. Her friend only lived a short drive away, and fifteen minutes later, with Sean safely delivered into the woman’s care, Annie was driving back through the suburbs only to realise that, with all the trauma of what was happening, she had forgotten both the letter from the hospital and the name of the person she was supposed to see.
Forced to make a detour back to the flat, she was tripping down the steps again to her little purple Ka when she saw the dark blue Mercedes saloon suddenly pulling up in front of her home.
Brant Cadman! She didn’t even need to look at the driver to know it would be him. Not too many cars of that sort parked outside her modest little address!
She felt her whole body tense as he unfolded himself from the big car.
‘Good morning.’
Somehow, Annie found her tongue to acknowledge him and felt his eyes flit over her, noticing, no doubt, the sharp rise and fall of her small breasts in response to seeing him standing there.
‘Are you going out?’
Of course, he would want to know, she thought with her stomach knotting, struck by how devastating he looked in his casual grey polo shirt and pale chinos. But that was what men like Brant Cadman did. Devastate.
‘That letter came today.’ She started towards the Ka. ‘I’m going to the hospital.’ She couldn’t have lied to him even if she had wanted to and was suddenly disconcerted to find his tall, lean frame blocking her path.
‘Then get into the car.’ He was indicating his own plush saloon. ‘We’ll go together.’
‘No!’ Even to her own ears she sounded like a frightened schoolgirl.
‘Annie!’ His sigh was exasperated. ‘The last thing I want to do is hurt you.’
He meant emotionally, she thought, but he had already done that.
‘I just need to do this alone. To be alone.’ It wasn’t meant to, but it came out as a plea.
‘You won’t want to, Annie. Not afterwards,’ he assured her softly.
He had been through it already, she remembered. But just because he had been sent home with the wrong baby, it didn’t mean for certain that she had, did it? So he had got her name off the computer. So she had been in the hospital giving birth at the same time as his wife. But so had a number of other women, probably. And blood tests weren’t a hundred per cent accurate, were they? Sean couldn’t be the only baby that the Cadman boy could have been switched with. Could he?
The anguish that accompanied her silent, tortured questions momentarily disarmed her, leaving her open to his decisive will.
‘Come on. I’ll drive you,’ he stated. And that was that.
Her tension might have got the better of her, holding her rigid as a statue for most of the journey. But Brant kept her talking so that she couldn’t spend the whole of the drive dwelling on the traumatic situation, something deliberately calculated to relax her, she was sure.
Only once did she feel the sickening dread in the pit of her stomach threaten to overwhelm her, and that was at the outset when he asked, ‘Where’s Sean?’
‘I thought it best that he didn’t come.’ Annie’s tone was defensive. ‘He’s at Katrina’s.’
She was expecting some demand from him to see the son he claimed was his, but all he said was, ‘You get on well with her. Where did the two of you meet? At Cadman Sport?’
‘No. We were at art college together. She left before me, then told me about the vacancy in the art department, and so I joined too.’
She was aware of him steering the powerful car through the heavy traffic, of the courtesy he extended to other drivers as he slowed to let someone out of a side-turning.
‘What do you do now?’
‘I sell miniature water-colours to anyone who’ll take them, basically.’ She had a couple of regular outlets. A small gallery in Essex. A tea-shop selling crafts in a smaller village out of town.
‘Is it rewarding?’
She glanced at him, pulling a face. ‘You mean financially?’ That sort of thing, she thought, would probably rank as a priority to a man like him.
But he said, ‘Not necessarily,’ slowing down to stop at a red light.
‘You mean spiritually?’ Annie’s dark lashes shot up under the strands of her fringe. ‘As food for my well-being?’
‘Don’t knock it,’ he said, wise to the hint of surprised cynicism she had directed towards him. ‘Isn’t that the most important form of reward?’
‘Yes, it is,’ she answered, to both his questions, because financially she only just scraped a living at present, and she certainly didn’t intend going back to work for anyone else yet and leaving Sean with strangers. She had decided from the beginning that she would look after her baby herself.
Her baby. And now here was Brant, driving her to an interview that might rob her of the right to call him that forever.
No! Panic brought on that queasy feeling again with sickening intensity, draining the colour from her cheeks.
The sun struck the polished bonnet of the car, hurting her eyes with its remorseless glare. Her head tilted to one side to avoid it, as Brant put the car in motion again, she didn’t even see him glance her way.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked quietly.
Annie shot a look at his harshly defined profile. ‘Sure. I feel great! How do you expect me to feel?’ She felt too hurt, too angry, too everything to avoid making the challenge. For the briefest moment, as he turned his head, she noticed the deep concern in his eyes.
‘’Course.’ His jaw seemed clenched as his attention returned to the road. ‘Stupid question.’
‘I’m sorry.’ It was all she could say to excuse herself. She was too strung up, as well as much too conscious of him sitting beside her: of those long-tapered fingers as they flicked on the indicator, of the latent strength of his hair-furred arm as he turned the wheel.
When he glanced at her again, it was with more than just concern.
‘What?’ Annie prompted, aware.
‘The first time I saw you,’ he responded with a slight smile curving his mouth, ‘you were wearing that colour.’ His gaze fell briefly on the royal-blue top that shaped her upper body, and which clung to her tiny waist above the wide cream belt hugging her hips. ‘You seemed to epitomise everything that was bright and young and vibrant. You were wearing a vivid blue blouse with a tight black skirt and at least four-inch-high heels that made me wonder how you could even stand in them, let alone hold yourself with such alluring dignity.’
He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her, she remembered, shocked even now to recognise the depth of excitement his interest had produced in her. But that was when she had been guileless, unaware of how easily a man could pledge his feelings, and how easily a woman could be snared by her own sexuality. That was when she had still been young enough to take her happiness as read, before Warren had jilted her, before she had reacted to his defection to his lovely model in the most humiliating way.
‘I suppose practice makes perfect,’ she said tartly, and wondered, with a sudden quickening of her pulse, if despite his marriage and all the time that had passed since, he could still be remotely attracted to her.
Then she decided it was just another ploy on his part to take her mind off the main issue when, still thinking about a whole host of things she would have been wise not to remember, she heard him say, ‘Here we are.’
CHAPTER TWO
IF SHE lived to be a hundred and fifty, Annie thought, she wouldn’t have believed it possible to find herself a victim of such a bizarre and cruel coincidence.
Because it was true. At least, that was what they were telling her. There had to be more conclusive tests, of course.
But how could her baby have been switched at birth with someone else’s? she agonised, forcing one foot in front of the other over the last flight of stairs down from the office where they had imparted the dreaded news. And not just someone, but someone she knew. Him!
He had intended to summon the lift, but she had insisted on taking the stairs. After the pain of being told officially that Sean probably wasn’t hers, she had needed to walk, to think, to try to recover some measure of stability.
Now, as Brant swung open the glass door to allow her into the brilliant June sunshine, she noticed the grim set of his jaw and remembered the anger he had unleashed on the two hospital officials to whom they had spoken. ‘If further tests prove conclusive, you will, of course, be instructing solicitors to sort out the custody issue,’ the middle-aged woman had said to Annie, as though she had been able to take it in—take anything in—right then.
‘Lawyers won’t be necessary.’ She had barely heard Brant’s succinct response, her brain still reeling from the cruel reality of it all. ‘We’re going to work it out for ourselves.’
Were they? At that moment, Annie could only let him conduct the interview, take control, even if she felt he was doing so against her paralysed will.
‘There’ll have to be an inquiry into how a thing like this could have happened,’ the woman’s male colleague tagged on, looking worried behind rimless steel glasses, which was when Brant’s temper had seemed to snap.
‘You’re darn right there will! And if you don’t instigate it after we’ve left this office, then I will!’ he had threatened. ‘It might be just a hiccup in the smooth running of your damned hospital, but it’s turned other people’s lives upside down—and someone’s going to have to answer for that!’
Which was an understatement, Annie thought as the door swung closed behind Brant now. Her world hadn’t just been turned upside down. Yesterday, and then last night when she hadn’t been able to sleep, she had felt as though it were hanging by a thread. Now that thread had snapped and it had come crashing down around her, choking, blinding her to all but its emotional chaos.
‘Come on,’ she heard Brant say gently, and felt a strong hand at her elbow. ‘I’ll take you for a drink.’
The café to which he took her was a small bistro within walking distance of the hospital. It wasn’t yet lunchtime, but the place was still humming with lively chatter.
‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ Annie murmured, after the waiter had served them their drinks at the only small table left for two. She lifted the tall, slim glass to her lips, feeling the bitter-sweet tang of the iced grapefruit juice she had ordered zinging on her tongue, piercing through her numbness. ‘I thought this sort of thing only happened to other people.’
‘We are other people—to everybody else,’ he remarked, his tone phlegmatic, the anger she had witnessed in him back at the hospital banked down now like carefully controlled fire.
Over the rim of her glass, Annie watched him pick up his cup of strong black coffee, her eyes reluctantly drawn to the sinewy strength of his hand. He was a stranger to her and yet she had known the caress of those strong hands, known the excitement of his crushing weight…
Rather unsteadily she returned her glass to its little slate coaster, though not before catching the disconcerting awareness in those all-seeing eyes.
‘Why did you take off the way you did that Saturday morning after that party?’ he was suddenly asking. ‘Without saying a word to anyone?’
She looked at him quickly. Why did he have to mention that?
‘Apart from ringing your boss at home and handing in your notice, no one seemed to know what happened to you—where you went.’
Toying with her glass, Annie felt her heart change rhythm. Had he asked? A slow, insidious heat stole through her veins.
She shrugged, the royal-blue top striking against the shining vitality of her hair.
‘I went to France,’ she told him, meeting his eyes levelly now. ‘Fruit-picking. I needed a change. A break.’ She had needed the time too. Time to recover her pride, and recover from the shame she had left back here in England. ‘When the harvest was over, I spent time backpacking round the south of France.’
‘Sounds idyllic.’
‘Oh, it was!’ It was easy to bluff, to pretend, now that her wounds had healed.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were planning to go away?’
Because she hadn’t planned it. She had simply run. ‘There didn’t seem to be much point.’
‘Not much…’ A spark of something like annoyance lit his eyes. ‘After what we shared?’
She wished he hadn’t reminded her, but since he had, she lifted her small chin in an almost defiant gesture and asked, ‘What did we share, Brant?’
A muscle clenched in his jaw. ‘You even need to ask?’
What was he saying? Why was he even making such an issue of it?
Struggling for equanimity, she said with as much nonchalance as she could muster, ‘I was on the rebound. And you…’ You were in love with Naomi, her brain screamed at him, because you certainly married her soon enough afterwards! Pride hurting, she cringed as she heard herself asking the question burning through her from her bitter calculations. ‘Was she already pregnant when you made love to me?’
He didn’t answer for a moment. How could he? she thought woundedly, watching him pick up his spoon and toy absently with the dark liquid in his cup, though he had taken it without sugar.
‘Our boys were born on the same day.’ He sent a casual glance upwards towards two patrons who were passing their table, his eyes returning to the spoon he let drop into its saucer. ‘How do you answer that one, Annie?’
His tone might have been casual, but the intensity of his gaze impaled her, causing hot colour to flood into her cheeks.
He had been careful, of course. Unerring in his unshakeable responsibility towards her—to himself. Now it was Annie who was lost for words.
She hadn’t known, when Warren had asked her to start taking the contraceptive pill, that a simple dose of antibiotics for a chest infection could render it ineffective. But it had.
Matter-of-factly, Brant stated, ‘You conceived in a relationship that was falling apart.’ And when she didn’t answer, her lashes drooping, concealing the misery of recalling that time, he asked, ‘Did the two of you ever get back together?’
‘Hardly.’
‘But he was aware you had his child?’
‘Warren had his model. What happened to me after that wouldn’t have concerned him.’
‘So you didn’t tell him.’
Why should I have? she thought bitterly, but didn’t say it.
Quickly she lifted her glass again, took another swift draught of her juice. Already the ice was melting and it tasted less sharp, much more watery on her tongue.
‘So there’s no reason then for Maddox to be involved in this affair?’
Annie shook her head, replacing her glass. Across the table the eyes that studied her were like enigmatic pools.
‘The man must have needed his head read,’ he said softly.
Was that a compliment? Annie wondered, blushing as she considered the wild, abandoned way she had given herself to this virtual stranger sitting opposite her; wondered too just how wanton he must have considered her. But that one night of folly with him wasn’t in character with the real Annie Talbot at all. Her parents had always stressed the maxim of one man—one woman—one passion. They had adhered to it themselves and, until Warren’s unfaithfulness, she had thought she could easily follow in their footsteps.
She visualised them miles away in their little colonial-style house, her father quietly impatient, immobilised by a hip operation, her mother fussing over him, over-protective as usual, unaware of the shocking truth that was about to change their lives—all of their lives, she thought, the uncertainty darkening her eyes, puckering her forehead.
‘What are you thinking?’ Brant was setting his empty cup back on the table, eyes keen, senses sharp as a razor.
What she had been thinking during the long hours when she had been tossing and turning last night. ‘I’m wondering what Mum and Dad are going to say.’
‘When they find out that their grandchild’s mine and not Warren Maddox’s?’
For a moment his statement seemed to rock her off her axis.
‘Yours and Naomi’s,’ she enlarged at length.
‘Yes,’ he said, the way his breath seemed to shudder through his lungs leaving her in no doubt of how much he must have loved his wife.
Briefly, her mind wandered back to the woman she had glimpsed once from a distance getting into Brant’s car. Short, chic auburn hair and dark glasses. And that amazing height—only an inch or two shorter than Brant—which Annie, even in the four-inch heels to which he had referred earlier could never aspire to. Naomi Fox, as she had been then. Beautiful, sophisticated and intelligent—if office gossip was anything to go by—she had obviously swept Brant off his feet, then had died from a postpartum haemorrhage almost immediately after being delivered of their baby son.
Annie didn’t want to think about that, or what Brant must have endured because of it. But she couldn’t stop herself, in spite of everything, from considering his plight. Not only losing the woman he loved, but now learning that the child they had produced in their short marriage wasn’t theirs. She wondered how he could even begin to deal with that.
And the child he was raising, this unknown child—if the hospital was to be believed—was hers, the child she had given birth to. The sudden crushing need to see him, know him, almost stole the breath out of her lungs.
‘It isn’t very easy for my mother, either.’
His mother? His surprising statement dragged her back to the present. She hadn’t even considered that he might have parents. A mother. She’d imagined men like Brant merely happened. But naturally there would be other people involved, not just the two of them. Their babies. Her own parents. There would be other confused and anxious relations. Perhaps aunts and uncles. Did Brant have any brothers or sisters? Did Naomi? Suddenly, despite having shared his bed, shamefully she realised just how little she knew about him.
A mobile phone started ringing on another table, a shrill rendition of Greensleeves, intruding on her thoughts.
‘What about Naomi’s? Her parents?’ she asked, irritated by the sound. ‘Do they know?’
Brant turned a grim face from the neighbouring table as the ringing was answered. ‘Naomi was an orphan.’
‘Oh.’ She hadn’t expected that, imagined that anyone just a little older than herself, as Naomi must have been, might be without the parental love she had always taken for granted. But at least that was one less complication to worry about.
‘There’s just my mother and me,’ Brant told her, unwittingly answering the question she had silently posed a few moments before.
‘How is she taking it?’
‘She’s naturally upset. Concerned. You can’t expect anything else. Ever since Jack was born, she’s looked on him as her own flesh and blood. Her own grandchild. She’s helped with his upbringing, looked after him when it’s been difficult for me to be there. She’s begged me not to let him go.’
‘And you?’ Annie asked, the fear and conflict in her eyes all too apparent. If he was prepared to give up the child he had raised, it would mean him having to sue for custody of Sean, because she wouldn’t give him up without a fight.
‘As I said yesterday, I only want what’s best for both boys. Our own emotions and needs shouldn’t even come into it.’
And what did he think was best? To wrench each child from the only home, the only family, it had known for two years so that it could grow up with its biological parent, regardless of how much it hurt—the child as well as its family; regardless of the emotional and psychological cost?
‘I’ve got to pick up Sean.’
She leaped up, not caring how it looked. She only knew she had to get to her baby.
She was out in the street, gasping the polluted air. She had to get him back from Katrina’s now! She needed to cuddle him. Hold him close. Know that he was safe from anything that threatened.
She almost jumped at the strong, warm hand on her shoulder.
‘We’ll pick him up together.’ Through the roar of traffic, the blaring of car horns, Brant’s voice was firm, decisive.
‘No, it’s all right! I can get the tube from here,’ she said shakily, needing to get away from him, to hold him at bay. ‘I left his car seat in my car. I can drive out and get him myself.’ She was gabbling, but she couldn’t help herself. ‘You haven’t got one. It won’t be safe.’
‘You’re darn right it won’t. You aren’t in any fit state to go rushing about on tubes—and certainly not to drive anywhere,’ Brant told her grimly, his self-possession emphasising Annie’s own lack of composure. ‘Jack’s car seat’s in the boot.’ He took her arm, steering her out of the way of someone hurrying by. ‘We’ll go together,’ he reiterated. ‘And that’s final.’
‘Well, you’re certainly full of surprises,’ Katrina called, watching her friend coming down the garden path with Brant. A strawberry-blonde, with a thicket of short, wild curls, she had obviously seen the big car pull up and, unable to contain herself, had hurried out to greet them. Now her big blue eyes turned with reluctant appreciation towards Brant. ‘You found her, then.’ There was a surprising flush beneath the profusion of freckles Annie knew her friend hated.
‘Yes, thank you, Katrina. Your assistance proved very fruitful.’
‘My pleasure…sir,’ she returned with calculated emphasis, while her gaze drifting back to Annie warned, I hope you know what you’re doing, girl!
Quickly, Annie murmured, ‘Katrina, has Sean been OK?’
Her friend’s expression changed to curiosity. ‘Of course. He’s always OK. Why?’
Annie exhaled deeply. Of course. She was just being silly. Over-protective. She couldn’t prevent breaking into a broad smile, however, when she heard the thump of tiny feet and saw the nut-brown head appear from behind Katrina.
Serious-faced, already a real little boy in his blue and red chequered shirt and dungarees, he stopped dead when he saw Brant standing there beside his mother.
‘So you’re Sean,’ he breathed, dropping down to the child’s level.
Annie’s eyes darted from the man to the toddler. Was she imagining it? Or was that likeness between them as strong as the agony of her denial?
Catching the crack in Brant’s voice though as he said something else to the little boy, she could only guess at the tumult of emotion he was doing his best to conceal before the toddler, suddenly shy, clutched at Katrina’s denim-clad leg and disappeared behind it.
The blonde woman laughed.
‘It’s all right, Sean,’ Annie reassured him gently, so that the little boy, deciding it was safe, popped out again, fixing Brant with curious, though steady hazel eyes.
‘Kat! Fish!’ the child exclaimed proudly. ‘Kat! Fish!’
‘Catfish?’ The man’s smile was indulgent, softening the severity of his features. From her vantage point Annie noticed how wide his shoulders were beneath the soft grey polo shirt, how the fabric of his chinos pulled tautly across his thighs.
‘Kat-fish,’ the two-year-old announced, rather impatiently this time, and in spite of the chaos inside her, Annie couldn’t keep from smiling when she realised what he meant.
‘Katrina’s embroidered an octopus on his new bib.’ It was bright yellow on its pale blue background, with disjointed eyes and tentacles. Her friend was always doing things like that. She managed to laugh. ‘It’s gross, Kat!’
‘No, it isn’t.’ Katrina grinned. ‘It’s a friendly little octopus.’ She pretended to be one, sending Sean shrieking down the passageway. ‘It’s only big fish that gobble you up and then spit you out again. Isn’t that right, Seanie?’
It was child’s play, but Annie felt the keen glance Brant sliced her as he got to his feet. Mortified, she caught her breath. They both knew what Katrina meant.
They were silent as Brant drove them back to the flat. Sean had fallen asleep in the back of the car in the little seat Brant had produced from the boot.
‘Sorry about Katrina. She can be a bit direct sometimes.’ She felt she needed to say something because he was just sitting there steering the powerful saloon. Hard lines carved what she had always thought was a rather cruel mouth.
‘What did you tell her about us?’ He was pulling up at a zebra crossing to let a middle-aged woman step on. She beamed at him and he responded with a distracted nod of his head. ‘Everything down to the last graphic detail?’
‘Of course not!’ she snapped, heated colour stealing into her cheeks. ‘She guessed. I think everyone did.’
‘That I bedded a freshly betrayed bride. And then dumped her just as Maddox did.’
No, not as Warren did, she thought as he put the car into motion again. Because Brant Cadman had made her no promises. Offered her nothing but one crazy, glorious night. She’d known the dangerous game she was playing when she had let him take her up to his room; known what she was doing, even though she had had just a little too much to drink that night, too much for her at any rate. It had been he who had suggested calling a halt to their caresses. He who had tried to tell her he didn’t believe in fooling around with women on the rebound, when she had so foolishly begged him not to go.
Her cheeks burned now with the shame of it and way down inside she felt the fierce pang of unwelcome desire undermined by the cutting pain of rejection.
‘Katrina’s my friend,’ she told him, ridiculously emotional. ‘She was only looking out for my interests.’ Suddenly she needed some spur, a point of antagonism to stab at the whole agonising trauma of the day. ‘I suppose in a minute you’ll be telling me you objected to her calling my boy “Seanie”!’ she tossed at him, with an emphasis on the ‘my boy’ that hit its mark if that tightening muscle in his jaw was anything to go by.
She heard him catch his breath and, after a moment, felt him glance her way.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’re both wound up. This has been an ordeal for both of us. Let’s not quarrel to add to it. It will all be sorted out a lot more painlessly if we remain civil.’
She nodded, saying nothing. But at least that seemed to ease some of the tension between them.
Outside her flat, she was first out of the car, reaching into the back to try and free Sean from the unfamiliar seat.
‘Here, let me,’ Brant advised.
Leaning across the seat, he had released him in a second. Head lolling to one side, Sean was still sleeping soundly.
‘May I?’ Brant whispered.
Annie swallowed, nodded. Well he had to some time, didn’t he?
As he picked up the sleeping child, his features were marked with raw emotion and Annie felt the almost painful constriction of her throat.
What was he thinking, looking for, as those dark, searching eyes roamed over the infant? Some resemblance to the woman he’d loved? Had he already wondered, just as she had, if that distinctive little nose could be his? That the sun-streaked, tawny hair could be a feature of his wife’s and not hers—hers and Warren’s—as he could easily have supposed?
Fear rose in her again, the feeling that she was in danger of losing the only thing that really mattered to her—her baby—and immediately they were inside the flat she retrieved him from Brant.
When he was tucked up in bed for his afternoon nap she fed Bouncer, who was mewing around her ankles in the kitchen, and went back to join Brant in the sitting room.
He was looking at her paintings, particularly the miniature of a mistle thrush she was still working on. There were landscapes too. A sunset over a shadowy headland and a steam train, its plume of blue smoke like a heralding flag above the cutting of a distant hill.
‘These are good. They’re very good,’ he complimented.
At any other time she would have derived great pleasure from his saying so. Now, though, in view of everything, all she felt was a mild satisfaction that her labours were appreciated.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘We’re going to have to arrange for you to see Jack.’ He had straightened again, dominating the small room with his sheer presence. ‘Maybe tomorrow I can—’
‘No!’ Her panicked response put a query in his eyes. Hers were darkened almost to black. ‘I can’t—yet.’ She could feel herself trembling. Even her voice shook. ‘I’m not ready,’ she uttered, trying to make him understand.
She hankered after knowing what her birth child—if he was her child—was like. She also knew any meeting with him would be all too traumatic at present.
Suddenly she looked very pale and weary, a small, vulnerable figure in her clinging top and cropped trousers, shoulders slumping with emotional fatigue.
A couple of strides brought him over to her and somehow, she didn’t quite know how, she was standing in the circle of his arms with her cheek against the hard, warm wall of his chest.
In the silence of the room, she could hear the heavy rhythm of his heart, then from the kitchen the swift, dull clack of the cat-flap.
She raised her head, lifting her face to his, the need in those green-gold eyes meeting an answering need in Annie.
His lips were gentle on hers, a light, tentative touch meant only to console, an offer of solace from one troubled human being to another.
Annie groaned from deep in her throat, and, unable to stop herself, let her arms slide up around his neck.
His breathing quickened in response, and he caught her to him, his arms tightening around her yielding softness, drawing her hard against him.
His kiss had deepened into something more sensual and demanding, and Annie returned it with a fervour she hadn’t known she was still capable of, needing his strength, to be engulfed by the powerful aura of his sexuality and his hard-edged masculinity that was suddenly as familiar to her as her own name.
She wasn’t sure at what point she felt him withdraw. She only knew he had and she uttered a small protest when he unclasped her hands from behind his head and dragged them down, leaving her silently pleading, cast adrift, humiliated.
‘No, Annie. This will just complicate things,’ he stressed, but the raw intensity in his voice and his laboured breathing assured her that he was just as affected as she was. ‘I think it would be best if I left you for the time being. We’re both frayed by what has happened. Today hasn’t been easy—for either of us, but I think particularly for you. You need time to adjust to things. We both do. May I?’ He was indicating Sean’s bedroom door.
How could she stop him? she wondered achingly.
When she nodded he pushed the door quietly open, and just stood there in the doorway, gazing across at the sleeping infant.
After a few moments he moved back out again, and gently closed the door.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ he told her, his voice thick with restrained emotion. ‘In the meantime I think you should telephone your parents. They’re really going to have to know.’
When he had gone, Annie sank down into a chair.
How could she? she thought, ashamed of the way she had behaved with him. How could she have been so stupid? Hadn’t she learned by now that caresses and tender kisses meant very little to a man? That they could demonstrate one thing and mean entirely another? Hadn’t she grasped that yet? Not only with him, but before with Warren, with every man she’d given more than a passing glance to?
It was her behaviour with Brant that she least wanted to remember. But her actions today had only served to bring it all back.
She had been ensnared from the moment she had first laid eyes on Brant Cadman, a reluctant victim of his dark, enslaving sexuality. She had denied it, of course, betrothed as she was to another man. But the fact that he had noticed her, too, had been doubly disturbing.
She had been working in the art and design department of Cadman Sport for just a few weeks when she had met Warren Maddox. A young, thrusting executive in the sales and marketing side of the company that came under the massive umbrella of Cadman Leisure, Warren had swept Annie off her feet. With her parents embarking on their dream to emigrate to New Zealand, change and excitement seemed to encompass them all when, within a month of their departure, Warren had asked her to marry him and they had become engaged.
He was never madly passionate, but he was kind and caring—or so she had thought. He was also clever, perhaps a little calculating where his clients were concerned, and he was humorous. Sometimes a bit too flippant, Annie had felt occasionally, but that had merely seemed to add to making him fun to be with.
It was at a seminar they had both attended in Birmingham that she had seen Brant for the first time.
‘I’ve got to get to talk to him,’ Warren told her after the talks were over, and skittered across the room, pulling Annie in tow, determined as he was to get himself noticed by Brant Cadman.
Clean-cut, impeccably dressed in a tailored dark suit and tie, his hard-headed brilliance and formidable authority was a mixture that would have arrested attention even without the smoky sexuality that transcended all these other attributes. He looked fierce, Annie recalled. Fierce and terrifyingly attractive and he scared her half to death. And she’d never been so drawn to any man in her life!
She couldn’t even remember what had been said. Only the way Brant looked at her while he was talking to them both, indulging them, she decided, because Warren’s eagerness to ingratiate himself with the big boss was embarrassingly obvious. But she felt the man’s gaze on her afterwards wherever she was in the room, discreet yet unmistakably appraising. She wasn’t even sure she liked him, but she was shockingly aroused by his interest nevertheless. That shamed and disturbed her, because she had thought herself head over heels in love with Warren. Brant, too, was obviously involved with someone else—it was afterwards, outside the hotel, that she saw his chic, tall companion climbing into his car. Someone—she couldn’t remember who now—told her the woman’s name. Naomi Fox. It suited her, Annie thought, telling herself she had imagined those glances from him. Telling herself that her reaction to them was only from the mere excitement of being noticed by a man way out of her league, that she was engaged to be married, eager to settle down and be happy.
Yet alone in bed that night, trying to concentrate on her fiancé and her forthcoming wedding, it was Brant’s dark features that kept rising before her eyes and which troubled her dreams so that she awoke agitated and feverish and disliking him even more.
It wore off, of course. The reality of a looming wedding with all its attendant concerns kept her occupied and focused on her main aim in life—that of becoming Mrs Warren Maddox. But two weeks before the due date he told her that he couldn’t go through with it; that he had met someone else and that he was sorry, but he was calling it off.
Annie was devastated. Hurt and shell-shocked, with everyone at Cadman’s aware that they had split up, it was trial enough seeing Warren in the office when he wasn’t off finding potential clients. But having to attend that party two weeks later to celebrate the opening of a new hotel and sports complex was the most humiliating of all.
Her boss insisted she go and she didn’t want to let him down. Besides, she thought, even if she was feeble enough to ring in sick, everyone would guess the reason why. Everyone, that was, who made up not only the art and design department, but Sales and Marketing too. Which meant that Warren would be going and, as partners were invited, most certainly his new girlfriend, and there was no way, she decided, that she would give either of them the satisfaction of seeing her buckle, let them—let anyone—guess at the agonies she was suffering from his cruel betrayal. What she didn’t anticipate, however, was that Brant Cadman would be attending too, that he’d be staying at the hotel that night.
Glass in hand, a daringly low-cut black dress emphasising her slim figure, she was chatting rather over-brightly to Katrina and her boss, trying to look cheerful, pretending that the sight of her ex-fiancé and his new blonde bombshell, wrapped up in each other not six feet away, didn’t matter to her at all, when she saw him standing, tall and erect, at the bar.
He had been talking to various people until then, employees and clients alike, desperate to make his acquaintance. But now he was alone, and he was looking straight at her.
Annie’s heart seemed to stop and then start again, beating slightly faster than before. She lifted her chin in a somewhat challenging gesture, not sure how to respond to his blatant interest.
He smiled then, a lazy, sensuous, cognizant smile that would have shattered any woman’s immunity.
She smiled back.
‘Wow!’ she heard Katrina exclaim.
Emboldened by a couple of glasses of wine, Annie excused herself from her little group and, with what she considered afterwards could only have been subconscious intent, moved over to the bar. At the time it felt as though those beautiful eyes alone were drawing her to him.
‘Hello,’ was all he said, but his deep voice oozed a lethal charm that didn’t altogether fool her. Behind the smooth urbanity was an even more lethal brain.
She responded, flashed him a brilliant smile.
‘What happened to your…friend?’ He didn’t look in Warren’s direction, but he had to be aware of the situation. Instead his glance touched on the ringless finger curled around her wine glass.
‘Friends fall out.’
‘And lovers?’
She took a breath, swallowed. God! What was she doing? She stole a covert glance in Warren’s direction. He was looking at her—at them both, displaying a shock that matched Katrina’s moments before when she had realised where her friend was headed. She flashed Brant another smile, and in a voice as silvery as the threads running through her clinging black dress, murmured, ‘And you, Mr Cadman…’
‘Brant.’
‘Are you…involved?’
He seemed to consider her question, before lifting his hands. They were long and well-tapered. ‘I’m as you see me. I’m not, however, quite so sure about you.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
His eyes strayed to Warren and the blonde, who were now dancing to a slow, sultry blues number.
‘She’s welcome to him.’ She tried desperately for nonchalance, her lashes veiling the dark anguish in her eyes. ‘She’ll find out he’s a louse.’
‘And you think I’m not?’
She lifted her chin, her lips a scarlet invitation to him, though she was dying inside. ‘Are you?’
‘Do you know what I think?’ he said.
‘What?’
He reached to take the glass out of her hand, put it on the bar.
‘I think you’ve had too much to drink.’
‘No, I haven’t.’ In truth, she had had barely two glasses, but on an empty stomach, having eaten very frugally for days because of her misery and then her apprehension over having to facing Warren with Caroline, it had obviously been too much.
‘OK, so you haven’t,’ he accepted, humouring her. ‘So tell me about Annie Talbot.’
She had been surprised that he remembered her name. When Warren had introduced her to him at that seminar two months before, he had been distracted by someone leaning over to say something to him, and she’d thought he hadn’t even heard. But obviously the man was as astute as he was dangerous, she thought with an unexpected little shiver, wondering why her brain should conjure up such a profound adjective in connection with him.
Wrinkling her nose, however, she murmured, ‘Far too boring. I’d rather talk about you.’
‘Would you?’ He made it sound like a reprimand so that at first she thought he wasn’t going to comply. But then he shrugged and said, ‘I’m thirty-two years old. Six feet two inches tall. Difficult to live with and have been chastised for more than just having a bad temper in my time. I also never make a habit of seducing young women on the rebound.’
‘Very commendable,’ Annie purred. Her legs felt like two tubs of lead and her face was aching from the need to keep on smiling.
‘Shall we dance?’ he suggested, and when she nodded led her towards the small polished circle where Warren and his lovely model swayed with eyes only for each other.
‘What would you like me to do?’ Brant enquired as he took Annie in his arms. ‘Punch him on the nose?’
Was her misery that obvious? she thought, and made a special effort to laugh.
‘Now, why would I want that?’ she breathed, her devil-may-care attitude bringing her hands across the wide sweep of his shoulders. ‘It really isn’t that important,’ she said, then gasped as his arm tightened like a steel bar against the small of her back, drawing her against his hard body.
She trembled in his arms and her mouth went dry. She felt slightly giddy from the heady musk of his cologne. Suddenly she realised what a dangerous game she was playing, that she was way, way out of her league. What did it matter though, she thought, if she could keep everyone from guessing how she was really feeling? Salve her pride and her dignity and her self-respect?
But the effort of pretending she didn’t care was wearing her out. Her head was aching now and her energy seemed to have deserted her. Also, behind them, Warren and the model were entwined in an intimate clinch, mouths devouring each other in a way that was overtly sexual.
Annie tried not to notice, but she couldn’t avoid it. Almost inaudibly she groaned, dipped her head, and felt the soft wool of Brant’s jacket against her forehead.
It was a far too intimate action, but one she could no more have avoided making than waking in the morning. As she swayed, she heard Brant say gently, ‘Come on.’
She hadn’t intended to wind up in his room. Any more than he, she felt, had intended they should wind up in bed. Not together anyway. He had simply been intending she should rest, she was certain, when he had carried her, like a rag doll, into his bedroom and laid her down on the cool, sensuous cotton of the duvet. Her head burned and she was racked by a tense excitement she had never known before. She watched him discard his jacket and tie before he came back and sat down beside her, asked if she was all right.
It was that one light kiss that had done it, that gentle probing of her lips before he made to move away that had her clutching at his shirt like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood. ‘Stay with me,’ foolishly she had murmured.
By the time she had realised the implications of what she was saying—doing—she was in the grip of a subjugating passion she had no will or desire to control. She had used him to blot out her misery, and didn’t expect after one mind-blowing climax in Brant’s bed that Warren Maddox would blur into insignificance, that in the morning her overriding emotion would be raw shame. Because how strong must her feelings for her fiancé have been in the first place, she wondered, if she could be reduced to such a wanton, sobbing creature, craving fulfilment by a man she’d merely seduced while on the rebound?
Rising before he was even awake, she raced home to pack, rang her boss to quit her job, then fled to Provence and anonymity.
It was when she had returned from France two months later that Katrina had told her Brant was married. Annie hadn’t seen him again until he had turned up at the flat the previous afternoon. Warren, as far as she had been aware, had moved in with his precious model. And, of course, when she had returned to England she had been in the early stages of pregnancy with Sean.
Brant had driven the pain of Warren’s betrayal away, only to replace it with a shaming humiliation. And with what skill and expertise! she thought now, trying not to dwell too deeply on the devastating few hours she had spent in his arms, telling herself again that she would be a fool to throw herself back into them, no matter how dangerously her hormones reacted to him. He had simply taken what she had had to offer at the time and then gone off and married Naomi Fox, and she had no one to blame but herself.
But one thing he wasn’t going to do was take Sean away! she determined, forcing herself up out of the chair and throwing herself into unnecessary household chores to try and keep her raging anxieties at bay.
And later, as soon as it was a respectable time to do so, unable to wait a minute longer, she did as he had advised, picked up the phone and tapped out the international dialling code for New Zealand.
CHAPTER THREE
ANNIE tried to concentrate on the little miniature painting, but nothing was working. Neither her brain, nor her fingers, nor her brush. Even the paint she was using for her foreground on the smooth translucent surface had blended with her horizon to create an unwanted, indistinct blur.
Like her life, Annie thought. Or at least how it had become since Brant had turned up there five days ago, threatening everything she valued, loved.
He was coming round at twelve to take her back to his home so that she could meet the little boy the hospital claimed was hers.
Annie’s hands trembled as she discarded the painting she had started earlier in the hope of losing herself in something useful, because as much as she was longing for this meeting, now that the time was almost upon her she was afraid, too.
How would she react when she came face to face with the toddler? This child to whom she was supposed to have given birth? Would she feel any maternal bond? Anything? Would she recognise him? Would there be some instinctive feeling in him towards her? And if there was, what would she do then? Because she couldn’t—wouldn’t—give up Sean.
‘He’s ours, Annie. Of course he is!’ She remembered Jane Talbot’s words coming shrilly across miles of ocean the evening she had rung her parents. ‘It doesn’t matter how many tests they say they have to do. They’ll only show up that he’s ours. Oh, my goodness! I want to come over,’ the woman had raced on. ‘I wish I could come right away, but I can’t leave your father. He needs me too much at the moment. Whatever am I going to do?’
Annie had been grateful that she had spoken to her father first; that he had been nearest the phone to pick it up when she had rung, because she hadn’t been able to stop herself breaking down, let alone cope with her mother’s hysterics as well. Though he had been naturally shocked and unhappy when she had told him that the grandson they adored might not be their grandson at all, Simon Talbot had taken it as he took everything life threw at him, good or bad. In his quiet, rational and unruffled way.
‘Annie. Annie,’ he’d soothed, hiding his own distress in an attempt to console his daughter. ‘This man Cadman and his wife…they’re going to feel the same way as you do. Of course they are. They won’t want to give up the child they’ve been bringing up as their own. They might want visitation rights to what might be their natural child—just as you might—but they—’
‘No, Dad. You don’t understand.’ She hadn’t made it clear, she had realised then. ‘Brant’s lost his wife. Therefore he’s got even more reason to want to take my baby away—because he’s part of her. Part of what he’s lost. Don’t you see…?’
From the silence that came across the miles, Annie had realised that he did. She could visualize his dear, familiar face, those character lines deepening beneath the black and grey peppered hair, his lean frame partially immobilised as he lounged, frustrated at having to relinquish his golf and his sailing, but most of all his staunch independence, to the ministrations of his easily overwrought wife.
‘If he’s a reasonable man, he wouldn’t hurt you like that, Annie. He’ll see it your way as well.’
But would he? Annie thought now, remembering her father’s words, as well as how exhausted she had been after she had come off the phone.
Traumatised as she had been herself, trying to console her mother had drained her, along with trying to convince Jane Talbot that she couldn’t possibly think about leaving her husband, so she shouldn’t worry. Annie had Katrina, didn’t she, who was a good friend. So she wasn’t entirely alone.
Tidying her paints, and pushing back her magnifier on the anglepoise lamp, she took the brush in its jar out to the kitchen sink, rinsing them both under the tap. She felt awful for thinking it, but much as she needed a shoulder to lean on, she was aware of a measure of relief that her mother couldn’t come. She didn’t think she could have stood Jane Talbot’s fussing on top of everything else.
It had been agreed that Annie would meet Jack before introducing Sean to any other members of Brant’s household. It being Saturday, Katrina had taken him off to the bouncy castle in the local park, where Annie always took him as a special treat.
‘I don’t have to tell you to be careful, do I?’ her friend had warned her knowingly as Annie was gathering up Sean’s little cap and cuddly lion for him to take. ‘All that stupendous arrogance and dynamism! Unless you’re less vulnerable than you were—what was it? Three years ago?’
‘Not quite,’ Annie had corrected. ‘And it isn’t what you’re imagining, Katrina.’ Unable to keep it to herself any longer, she had told her friend the truth.
The woman had been shocked, then sympathetic, her arms going around Annie in such a caring hug she’d felt tears bite behind her eyes.
‘Ten times more vulnerable,’ the woman had cautioned, so that now as she went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, Annie felt an ominous little shiver run along her spine.
Forty minutes later, the purr of a car engine had her rushing to the bedroom window. She reached it just in time to see Brant stepping out of the Mercedes in the tree-lined street.
Her gaze locked on him, following his long, lithe physique, impeccably encased in a dark business suit, until his glance up at the window made her pull away, wondering if he had noticed her reluctant interest.
‘Are you ready?’ At the door, his eyes made a swift survey of her mock-suede lilac jacket and the low-slung trousers she had teamed with a cream silk camisole.
She nodded, and saw his brow furrow as he studied her pale, tense features.
‘How do you feel?’
Annie inhaled deeply. ‘Terrified,’ she admitted.
His mouth pulled down on one side. ‘Is that why you pretended not to see me just now? Are you terrified of me, too?’
She was. Of those energies and that forceful determination that had brought him from a working-class background to millionaire status in just a few short years, if what she had heard about him was right. Of his charisma and charm and that intensely masculine attraction that had once swept the very ground from under her, and still had the power to do it again if she let it. But above all, of what he might come to represent.
‘Of course not,’ she lied, and, unable to stand the waiting any longer, murmured, ‘Can we go?’
His home was a huge Georgian house in one of the most sought-after suburbs of the city. A place that intimidated her on her first impression with its august formality, with its myriad windows that looked out on to extensive, perfectly maintained grounds.
‘Mother lived in Shropshire—in a busy little town she didn’t really want to leave—and where we both came from originally,’ he explained as they got out of the car, which was as much as he was going to tell her then, she realised, about his more humble beginnings. ‘When…Jack came on the scene, she moved down here to help out so that Jack wouldn’t be with total strangers whenever I went away. And then, so it doesn’t get too much for her, we have Elise.’
Annie glanced up at him, curious, as he was locking the car, but he didn’t enlarge.
Now, as she entered the formal drawing room with the tall man at her side, she felt the unsettling interest of the slim, subtly-blonde woman who was moving towards them with an elegance befitting her surroundings, and guessed that this could only be Brant’s mother.
‘I see what you mean,’ was the woman’s first remark with a startled glance up at Brant, so that Annie, catching his almost indiscernible nod, wondered what he had been saying about her.
‘I’m sorry.’ Her hostess smiled and, quickly recovering herself, extended a hand, her manners as polished as her pale-tipped fingers. ‘I’m Felicity Cadman, and you’re Annie, aren’t you? The other devastated party in all this. You must feel dreadful, my dear—as in limbo as we all are. I don’t know about Brant, but for me, it hasn’t really sunk in.’
‘Nor for me,’ Annie murmured, able, through her own chaotic emotions, to sympathise with Brant’s mother.
She could feel the woman’s quiet assessment of her, discreet yet curious glances that conveyed what she must have been thinking since Annie had walked in. Is this really the mother of the grandson I’ve helped raise?
‘I take it Jack’s in the nursery?’
Of course. They would have a nursery, Annie thought as Brant’s mother nodded. Living in such refinement, if Sean really were his, his and Naomi’s, then wouldn’t he want to make sure his son was part of it?
Everything inside her rebelled against such thinking as Brant started to lead her away, just as the phone pinged on a table close by, doing nothing for her edginess and her racing heart.
Brant snatched it up from the mirror-polished surface, grunted something about being tied up to whoever was on the line. But they must have told him it was urgent, because after his curt, ‘Excuse me,’ to Annie, he turned away, to take the call.
Probably some vital decision that needed his sanction, she thought, staring at the sculpted white marble of the fire surround, an exquisitely glazed vase sitting on top, aware of his deep voice ushering orders with that authority that made him a force to be reckoned with, yet respected and admired too, she remembered, among his competitors and his employees.
Conscious of Felicity watching her, Annie dragged her gaze away from the vase.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she uttered with an awkward smile and for something to say, only fully alive to her queasy anticipation and the impatience in the deep voice on the other side of the room.
‘Yes.’ Brant’s mother inhaled sharply. This whole situation was a strain for her also. ‘Yes, it was my…daughter-in-law’s choice.’
Tensely, Annie nodded, noting the slight hesitancy in the woman’s voice. As though it still hurt to speak about Brant’s wife. As though she preferred not to in his presence.
And this room, Annie wondered, with its high, ornate ceiling, its silvery brocades and pale Georgian hues, had this been Naomi’s choice too? Or had she and Brant chosen things together like any normal couple setting up home for the first time? In unison. In harmony. In love.
‘It hasn’t been easy for my son,’ that cultured female voice beside her commented, and then more softly, ‘what with…losing Jack’s mother so…’ She didn’t finish, only added, ‘And now this.’
And me. Does anyone think it’s easy for me? Annie wondered, her features drawn tight with anguish. She didn’t even realise how militant she looked until she heard Felicity’s request.
‘You will consider Jack, won’t you?’ Beneath the elegant poise, her eyes—the only thing about her that resembled Brant—seemed to be begging, Please don’t take my grandson away! ‘This is the only home—only family—he’s known, as it will have been for your little boy. We have to consider them. We can’t pull their worlds apart, as we would if we decided to switch them back.’
‘There’s no question of my wanting to switch them back, or of my ever giving Sean up,’ Annie stated, adamantly, just as Brant came off the phone.
‘Ready?’ he enquired, his arm extended.
There was a calculating watchfulness about him, she sensed, noting the contrasting, fleeting smile he directed at his mother. Which said what? she wondered as he led her through the imposing hallway, up to the second storey. That he would do what he had to, what was necessary? But surely he would feel the same way about Jack as she felt about Sean?
Her heart was pounding like a steam-hammer when he opened the door to what was obviously the nursery, with its eggshell-blue paintwork and brightly patterned walls, and the toys scattered over the floor. Across the room, a window-seat offered a view of the billiard-table lawns, of high, professionally cultivated hedges.
‘Monsieur Cadman…’ Someone was coming out of an adjoining room. ‘You want to see Jack. He has just finished lunch. He wash his own face. He is a big boy now.’ Blonde, full-busted and naturally pretty, she had an accent as alluring as the long, swishing hair, Annie noted, as the French girl laughed up at Brant, and spared Annie no more than a passing glance before giving her attention to her employer again with an intensity that was painful to watch. ‘Do you want me to stay, monsieur?’
‘No, I’ll call you, Elise.’
‘Oui, monsieur.’ The girl almost bobbed at him before leaving the room.
Somewhere in her subconscious, Annie wondered if the girl’s transparent adulation amused him, or even if he’d considered doing anything about it, because Elise certainly wanted him to, but at that moment she was too distracted to care. All her attention was on the toddler who, at the sound of his father’s voice, had come tottering out of the bathroom. In a tiny red shirt and miniature combat trousers, he was now flinging his arms around Brant’s long, immaculately clad leg.
‘Hey, hey, Jack!’ With playful ease, Brant swung him up into the air, making the boy squeal in delight before setting him down on his feet again. ‘Jack, I want you to meet Annie,’ he said softly, clasping the infant’s little hand in his. ‘Annie, this is Jack.’
Moved beyond her wildest imagination, Annie could only stand there for a moment, aware of Brant’s gaze lancing across her face, aware as she crouched down to say, ‘Hello,’ of those shrewd eyes still watching her, missing nothing. Not the way she stared, transfixed, at the little mop of thick, dark hair falling forward just as hers did, or those deep brown eyes that gazed curiously back at her, like wide, dark mirrors of her own. His face was rounder than Sean’s, still in the final stages of babyhood, but unlike Sean, there was no shyness here, just a broad, toothy smile that tugged at Annie’s heart, tugged at everything in her that was maternal.
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