The Argentinian's Baby Of Scandal

by Sharon Kendrick

  ‘So. Are you going to tell me what’s going on, Tara?’ her friend demanded. ‘About why you’re looking so awful and acting so distracted?’

  Licking her tongue over bone-dry lips, Tara prepared to say something she was glad her grandmother wasn’t alive to hear. Or her mother for that matter. ‘I’m...pregnant.’

  There were a few astounded seconds while Stella appeared to be having some difficulty digesting what she’d just been told. ‘I wasn’t aware you were seeing anyone,’ she said at last, carefully. ‘Have I missed something?’

  And here it was. The horrible reality. Did she try to dress it up into acceptable bite-sized chunks so that her friend might understand? Tara wondered desperately. No, there wasn’t a single chunk of this which could in any way be described as acceptable. In the end she managed to condense it down into a couple of bald sentences which she still found difficult to believe.

  ‘I had sex with Lucas,’ she said. ‘And I’m expecting his baby.’

  ‘You had sex with Lucas Conway?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You’re kidding me?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not.’

  Stella shook her head from side to side, her thick black hair gleaming in the autumn afternoon sunshine. ‘I wasn’t even aware you fancied him!’ she exclaimed, blinking at her in astonishment. ‘Or that you were his type!’

  ‘I didn’t. And I’m not.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  Tara shrugged and the bitter taste in the back of her throat only intensified. ‘I still can’t quite work it out.’

  ‘Well, try, Tara.’

  Tara worried her teeth into her bottom lip before meeting her friend’s incredulous gaze. ‘He said something pretty mean to me, which focussed me into thinking I should get a new job.’

  ‘Which I’ve been saying to you for ages,’ said Stella darkly.

  ‘He told me he didn’t want me to leave—’

  ‘Please don’t tell me he seduced you so you’d change your mind?’

  Tara shook her head. ‘Of course he didn’t. It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘Then just how was it, Tara?’

  How could you put into words something which had flared between the two of them over dinner that evening? Something which had changed the way they were with each other, so they’d suddenly gone from being boss and employee to a man and a woman who were achingly aware of the other? Even if you could, it wasn’t something you’d dare admit to a friend, for fear of coming over as slightly deranged—or even stupid. Both of which were probably true in her case. ‘It just happened,’ she said simply. ‘I can’t explain it.’

  There was a pause and Stella’s eyes bored into her. ‘So now what happens?’

  This was the question which really needed answering and Tara knew that there was no alternative than to face the thing she was dreading more than anything else.

  ‘I’m going to have to go to New York and tell him.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE WORLD AS he knew it had just come to an end but Lucas kept his expression blank as he finished reading the letter the attorney had given him. It had shocked and sickened him—the final sentence dancing before his eyes—but somehow he kept it together. He could feel the punch of his heart and the faint clamminess at his brow, but his hands were steady as he folded the piece of paper carefully and slipped it back inside the envelope.

  ‘Do you have any queries, Mr Conway?’ the lawyer was asking him. ‘Anything you’d like to discuss with us, regarding the contents?’

  A million things, thought Lucas grimly—and then some. But they were the kind of questions which couldn’t be answered by some anonymous attorney he could see was burning up with curiosity. Not when he could manage to work out the most important bits for himself.

  And suddenly it was as if a heavy mist had lifted and everything which made up the sometimes confusing landscape of his past suddenly become clear. It explained so many important things. Why his ‘father’ had always been so cruel to him and why his mother...

  His mother.

  He felt a twist of something which felt more like anger than pain as finally he understood why he’d never felt as if he belonged anywhere. Because he didn’t. His parents were not his parents and he was not the man he’d thought himself to be. Everything had changed in the time it took to read that letter.

  And yet nothing had changed, he reminded himself grimly. Not really. He was still Lucas Conway, not Lucas Gonzalez. A pulse flickered at his temple. And no way was he ever going to call himself Lucas Sabato, his birth name. He shook his head. He was the man he had set out to be. A truly self-made man.

  ‘We had some difficulty tracking you down after your father’s death,’ the lawyer was saying smoothly. ‘Given that you’d changed your name and settled in Europe. And given, of course, that you were estranged from your family.’

  Behind his desk the man was looking at him with a hopeful expression, as if waiting for Lucas to put him out of his misery and reveal why he had been so keen to conceal his true identity for all these years. Lucas felt his mouth flatten.

  Because he had no intention of enlightening the lawyer.

  No intention of enlightening anyone.

  Why should he? His inner life had always been his and his alone—his thoughts too dark to share. And they had just got a whole shade darker, he realised bitterly, before pushing them away with an ease born of habit. Much simpler to adopt the slick and sophisticated image he presented to the world—the one which discouraged people to dig beneath the surface. Because who in their right mind wanted to explore certain and unremitting pain?

  Hadn’t that been one of the unexpected advantages to becoming a billionaire at such an early age—that people were so dazzled by his wealth, they didn’t stop to explore his past too deeply? Or rather, people became so obsequious when you were loaded, that you were able to control how you wanted conversations to play out. He was good at evasion and obfuscation. He didn’t even tell people where he’d been born—sidestepping curious questions with the same deft touch which had enabled him to become one of the youngest billionaires in all Ireland. His accent had helped to obscure his background, too. It had been difficult to place—his cultured New York drawl practically ironed out by years of multilingual schooling in Switzerland. And Ireland had provided the final confusing note—with the soft, lilting notes he had inevitably picked up along the way.

  ‘Thanks for all your help,’ he said smoothly as he rose to his feet, tucking the envelope into the inside pocket of his jacket.

  He was barely aware of the lawyer shaking his hand or the secretary outside who stood up and smoothed her pencil skirt over her shapely bottom as he passed by, her hopeful smile fading as he failed to stop by her desk. Outside he was aware of the faint chill in the air. The reminder that fall was upon them. After a busy couple of weeks of business meetings, things had looked very different this morning when he’d lined up another apartment viewing, intending to stay in the city for a minimum of six months. Yet there was no reason to change that plan, he reminded himself. No reason at all. He hadn’t been back here in years because he hadn’t wanted to run into his father, but the man who had erroneously claimed that title was now dead and he wasn’t going to let that bastard reach out from beyond the grave and influence him any more. Why not reclaim the city of his youth and enjoy it as he had never been able to do before?

  With a quick glance at his watch, he set off by foot to meet the real-estate agent. He walked along Fifth Avenue, his body tensing as he stared up at the Flatiron building he hadn’t seen since he’d been, what...fourteen? Fifteen? That had been the last time he’d spent his school vacation here. That particular homecoming had ended in the usual violence when his father had raised his fist to him but Lucas had turned his back and simply walked away, trying to block out the sound of the other’s man’s taunts which
had been ringing in his ears.

  ‘Not man enough to fight?’

  It had been a flawed assessment because for the first time ever, Lucas had felt too much of a man to fight back. He’d filled out that summer and his muscles had been hard and strong. The almost constant sport he’d done at his fancy Swiss boarding school had made him into a fine athlete and deep down he knew he could have taken out his adoptive father, Diego Gonzalez, with a single swipe.

  And the reason he hadn’t was that because he was afraid once he started, he wouldn’t know when to stop. That he would keep punching and punching the cruel bully who had made his life such a misery.

  So he had carried on walking and not looked back. The only other time he had returned had been for his mother’s funeral, when the two men had sat on opposite sides of the church without speaking. With the cloying scent of white lilies making him want to retch, Lucas remembered staring at the ornate scrolling on the lavish coffin, realising he’d never really known the woman he’d thought at the time had given birth to him. And he had been right, hadn’t he? He hadn’t known her at all.

  But he wasn’t going to dwell on that. He had spent his life rejecting the past and he wasn’t going to change that now.

  Deliberately focussing his attention on the here and now, he saw a woman standing up at the lights in front of him and the tawny colour of her hair made him think about Tara, even though that was something else he had decided was off-limits. He’d told himself that it had been a mistake. That maybe it had happened because he’d been thrown off-balance by what had lain ahead of him in New York. But at least he had let her down gently and no real harm had been done. And as she’d said herself—she’d had to lose her virginity some time.

  Yet his eagerness to put her out of his mind hadn’t been the plain sailing he’d expected. His night-time dreams had been haunted by memories of her slim, pale body and the delicious tightness he’d encountered as he had entered her. He would wake up frustrated and angry—with a huge erection throbbing uncomfortably between his thighs.

  He still couldn’t quite believe he’d had sex with her—his innocent housekeeper. Someone who, despite her fiery curls, had always seemed to blend into the background of his life, so that he hadn’t regarded her as a woman at all—just someone to cook and clean and scrub for him. But she’d been a woman that night in his bed, hadn’t she? All milky limbs and hair which had glowed like fire as the storm had flashed through the sky with an elemental force which had seemed to mimic what had been taking place in his bed. He found himself recalling the passion with which she’d kissed him and the eagerness with which she’d fallen into his arms. And then the unbelievable realisation—of discovering he was her first and only lover.

  How could he have been so reckless?

  His uncomfortable preoccupation was interrupted by the vibration of the cell-phone in his pocket and when he pulled it out his fingers froze around the plastic rectangle as he saw the name which had flashed up onto the screen. He shook his head in slight disbelief, as if his thoughts had somehow managed to conjure up her presence.

  Tara.

  Quickly, he calculated the time in Dublin and frowned. Getting on for ten in the evening, when normally she would have been laying the table for his breakfast, before retiring to her room at the top of the house. Of course, he wasn’t there to make breakfast for, so she was free to do whatever she wanted, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that she was ringing him.

  Why was she ringing him?

  He couldn’t think of a conversation they could possibly have which wouldn’t be excruciatingly uncomfortable, but, despite wanting to let the call go to voicemail, he knew he couldn’t ignore her. He might wish he could take back that night and give it a different outcome but that wasn’t possible. And she’d been a faithful employee for many years, hadn’t she? Didn’t he owe her a couple of minutes of conversation, even if it was going to be something of an ordeal? What if there’d been a burglary—a bone fide one this time, not just some holy statue crashing to the floor in the middle of a storm?

  He felt an unmistakable wave of guilt as his thumb hit the answer button. ‘Tara!’ he said, his voice unnaturally bright, and he thought how usually he would have greeted such a call with a faint growl—the underlying message that he hoped she had a good reason for ringing. ‘This is a surprise!’

  ‘Is it a bad time to ring?’

  She sounded nervous. Maybe she was remembering that other time when she’d called him and he’d been abroad, with a model called Catkin. Despite the warning look he’d given her, Catkin had picked up his phone and answered it, her voice laughing and smoky with sex. He remembered Tara’s stuttering embarrassment when she’d finally come on the line and the way the model had sniggered beside him, loud enough to be heard. And with that loathsome demonstration of feminine cruelty, she had unwittingly put an end to their relationship.

  ‘I’m dodging pedestrians on Fifth Avenue, Tara,’ he said lightly. ‘So you may have trouble hearing me above all the traffic noise.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She sounded flat now and he thought how their easy familiarity seemed to have been replaced by an odd new formality as he asked a question which sounded more dutiful than caring. ‘Nothing’s wrong, I hope?’

  Her response was cautious. As if she was picking out her words—like someone sorting through the loose change in their pocket while searching for a two-euro coin. ‘Not exactly.’

  Not exactly? What the hell was that supposed to mean? Please don’t start telling me that you miss me or that—God forbid—you’ve decided you’re in love with me. ‘No burst pipes in the basement?’ he enquired, his forced joviality not quite hitting the mark.

  ‘No, nothing like that. Lucas, I have... I have to talk to you.’

  He could feel his heart sink because this sounded exactly as he’d feared. He’d had too many of these conversations in the past with women unable to recognise that their needs were very different. That the sex they’d shared meant nothing—it was just sex. She probably wanted to see him again, and soon—while he most definitely wanted to close the page on it. ‘I thought that’s exactly what we were doing,’ he said smoothly.

  ‘No. I don’t mean a phone call. I mean face to face!’ she burst out, her voice tinged with a desperation he’d never heard there before.

  ‘But I’m in New York, Tara,’ he told her, almost gently, because if he was going to have to let her down—which he suspected he was—then he needed to be kind about it. Because wasn’t it his own damned fault that his housekeeper was now clearly pining for him? ‘And you’re in Dublin.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ she corrected, sounding a little more confident now. ‘I’ve just flown into LaGuardia.’

  ‘LaGuardia?’ he echoed incredulously. ‘You mean you’re in New York?’

  ‘Obviously.’ Her voice became terse.

  Afterwards Lucas would wonder how he could have been so stupid, but that was only afterwards, when the hard, cold facts had finally percolated into his disbelieving brain. Maybe it was the double whammy of finding out the truth about his parentage which had sucked all the sense and perception out of him. Which meant he was able to shelve the glaringly obvious reason why Tara Fitzpatrick had taken it into her head to follow him to America, and to give a nod of acknowledgement to the curvy real-estate agent who had appeared outside the main entrance of the apartment block.

  ‘Look, I haven’t got time for this now, Tara. I’m meeting someone. Hi, Brandy,’ he said, forcing a smile before putting his mouth close to the phone and hissing into it. ‘Can you take a cab from the airport?’

  ‘Of course I can!’ She sounded angry now. ‘I’m not a complete fool.’

  ‘Meet me in the bar of the Meadow Hotel at seven. We can talk then.’

  He cut the call and walked up the stairs towards the elegant town house, where the agent was slanting him a grea
t big smile.

  CHAPTER SIX

  DESPITE ALL HER BRAVADO, Tara wondered if Lucas had deliberately chosen to meet her in the most inaccessible bar in New York. It was situated deep in the bowels of the fanciest hotel she could ever have imagined—a place which instantly made her feel overheated, overdressed and scruffy. She’d worn a thick sweater with her jeans because it was autumn and the city was supposed to be colder than Dublin—but the temperature inside the hotel made it feel more like summer and consequently there were little beads of sweat already appearing on her brow and stubborn curls were sticking to the back of her neck, like glue. And she couldn’t take the sweater off because she had only a very old vest top on underneath.

  After convincing the granite-faced doorman that her appointment was genuine, she was instructed to put her anorak and old suitcase in the cloakroom, where she was given a look of frank disbelief by the attendant. Her long scarf she kept draped round her neck out of habit, like an overaged child still clutching a security blanket. Tucking her ticket into her purse, she walked through the huge foyer—past impossibly thin women on impossibly high heels who were smiling adoringly into the faces of much older men—and never had she felt quite so awkward. Several times she had to ask for directions and was made to feel even more self-conscious for not knowing where she was going. As if showing any kind of ignorance meant you’d failed a test you hadn’t even realised you were taking.

  Eventually she found the bar, which was situated down a dimly lit passageway—dimly lit and daunting with its understated display of quiet opulence and a lavish oriental feel. Standing in front of a display of coloured glasses and bottles, a barman was vigorously shaking a cocktail mixture as if it were a pair of maracas, playing to the group of businessmen sitting on tall stools at the bar in front of him. It was definitely a man’s room but Tara was met with nothing but disparaging glances, indicating that without the clothes, the sophistication or the glamour, she was the wrong kind of woman to drink in a place like this. And didn’t that simple fact acknowledge more clearly than words ever could just how awful the predicament in which she now found herself?