The Argentinian's Baby 0f Scandall (One Night With Consequences)

by Sharon Kendrick

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘TARA.’ LUCAS SUCKED in an impatient breath. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  A bright clump of hair was falling untidily into her eyes as the apartment door swung open and Tara stepped inside, dumping two bulging bags of groceries on the floor right by his feet.

  ‘I’m bringing home the shopping,’ she answered. ‘What does it look like I’m doing?’

  With a snort of something which felt like rage, Lucas picked up the bags and carried them into the kitchen, aware that she was following him and that his temper was building in a way which was becoming annoying familiar. He waited until he had planted the hessian sacks in the centre of the large table before turning round to confront her. She could be so stubborn! So infuriatingly hard-working! Maybe it had been a mistake to move out of the luxury hotel and into a place of his own, so that Tara could resume her housekeeper duties—especially if she was going to keep up this kind of pace. But she had insisted, hadn’t she? Had set her lips in a firm and determined line, and Lucas had found himself going along with her wishes.

  ‘You shouldn’t be carrying heavy weights,’ he objected.

  ‘Two bags of shopping is hardly what I’d call heavy. Women in rural Ireland have been shifting far more than that for centuries.’

  ‘But we aren’t in rural Ireland!’ he exploded. ‘We’re in the centre of Manhattan and there are plenty of services which will have stuff delivered right to your door. So why don’t you use one of them?’

  ‘What, and never go outside to see the day?’ she retorted. ‘Cooped up on the seventy-seventh floor of some high-rise apartment block so that I might as well be living on Mars?’

  ‘This happens to be one of the best addresses in all of New York City!’ he defended, through gritted teeth.

  ‘I’m not disputing that, Lucas, and I’m not denying that it’s very nice—but if I’m not careful I’ll never get to see anyone and that’s not how I like to live. I’ve discovered an old-fashioned Italian supermarket which isn’t too many blocks away. And I like going there—I’ve become very friendly with the owner’s wife and she’s offered to teach me how to make real pasta.’

  Remembering the Polish restaurant she’d taken him to in Dublin what now seemed like light years ago, Lucas silently counted to ten as Tara began putting away the groceries.

  ‘At least you seem to be settling in okay,’ he observed, watching her sweater ride up to show a narrow white strip of skin as she reached up to put some coffee beans in the cupboard.

  ‘Indeed I am, though it’s certainly very different from life in Ballykenna. Or Dublin, for that matter. But it’s not so bad.’ She pushed tubs of olives and fresh juice into the refrigerator and bent to pick up a speck of something from the granite floor. ‘And the people are the same as people everywhere.’

  There was a pause as he watched her tuck an errant wave of hair behind her ear, which somehow seemed only to emphasise its habitual untidiness.

  ‘You know, you’re really going to have to do something about your appearance,’ he said.

  Her shoulders stiffened and, when she turned round, her amber eyes were hooded. ‘Why?’ she demanded suspiciously. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  He made a dismissive movement towards her outfit—a gesture provoked by frustration as well as disbelief that his life had been so comprehensively turned upside down by one annoyingly stubborn woman. He still couldn’t get his head round the fact that she was pregnant, and not just because it was such an alien concept to a man who had never wanted a child of his own. It was compounded by the fact that she didn’t look pregnant yet—and her body was as slim as it had ever been. Not that he’d seen any of it, he thought moodily. Not since that first morning, when they’d very nearly had sex on the dining-room table, before she’d had second thoughts and pushed him away.

  What woman had ever refused him?

  None, he thought grimly. Tara Fitzpatrick was the first.

  The painful jerk at his groin punished him for the erotic nature of his thoughts, yet for once he seemed powerless to halt them. They’d been living in close proximity for almost three weeks yet not once had she wavered in her determination to keep their relationship platonic. He shook his head.

  Not once.

  At first, he’d thought her stand-off might be motivated by pride, or a resolve to get some kind of commitment from him before agreeing to have sex again, despite her defiant words about not wanting marriage. He’d thought the undoubted sizzle of chemistry which erupted whenever they were together would be powerful enough to wear down her defences. To make her think: what the hell? And then give into what they both wanted.

  But she hadn’t. And hadn’t he felt a grudging kind of respect for her resilience, even if it was making him ache so badly every night?

  Perhaps it was that frustration which had made him go out and find this apartment. Tara had been complaining that with fleets of chambermaids and receptionists and waiters, there was nothing much for her to do at the hotel—so he had ordered Brandy to come up with some more rental places for him to look at. Eventually she had found a penthouse condominium on West Fifty-Third Street, a place which had caused even his jaded palate to flicker with interest as Brandy had shown him and Tara through each large and echoing room. Eight hundred feet above the ground, the vast condo had oversized windows which commanded amazing views over park, river, city and skyline. There was a library, a wine room, a well-equipped gym in the basement and a huge pool surrounded by a vertical garden. Most women would have been blown away by the undeniable opulence and upmarket address.

  But Tara wasn’t like most women, he was rapidly coming to realise. She had been uncharacteristically quiet when he’d given her an initial tour of the building. He’d watched her suspiciously eying Brandy and she had then proceeded to exclaim that he couldn’t possibly be planning to live in a place that size. He remembered the shock on Brandy’s face—probably worried she was about to lose her commission. But that was exactly what he was planning to do, he had explained. In New York you needed to display the trappings of success in order to be taken seriously, and luxury was the best way in which to go about it.

  ‘Wealth inspires confidence,’ he’d told her sternly afterwards, but she had shrugged as if she didn’t care and he thought she probably didn’t.

  ‘You still haven’t told me what’s wrong with my appearance!’ Her soft Irish brogue voice broke into his thoughts as she closed the door of the refrigerator and, plucking her navy-blue overall from a hook on the back of the door, began to shrug it on.

  He stared at her. Where did he begin? Aware of the volatility of her mood—something he guessed had to do with fluctuating hormones—Lucas strove to find the right words. ‘In Ireland you used to cook dinner whenever I had people over, and I’d like to be able to entertain here, too. In fact, I’ve arranged to hold a small dinner next week.’ He jerked his head towards the impressive vista of skyscrapers. ‘Show off the view.’

  ‘It sounds as if there’s a “but” coming,’ she observed as she did up the last button of her uniform.

  Lucas sighed. Maybe there was no easy way to say this. ‘That...that thing you insist on wearing,’ he said, his gaze sweeping over the offending item and noticing for the first time that her breasts seemed a little bigger than before and that the material was straining very slightly across the bust. A pulse hammered at his temple. ‘It’s not really very suitable for serving guests.’

  ‘But you never complained when I wore it in Dublin!’

  ‘In Dublin, you came over as someone mildly eccentric—while here you’re in danger of being classified as some kind of screwball.’

  ‘Some kind of screwball,’ she repeated, in a hollow voice. ‘Is that what you think?’

  He wasn’t surprised to see her face whiten but he was surprised how uncomfortable it made him feel. ‘No, it’s not what
I think and it wasn’t meant to be an insult, Tara,’ he amended hastily. ‘Anyway, there’s a simple solution.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ she said moodily.

  ‘Sure. You can go shopping. Get yourself some new clothes. It’s fixable. I’m happy to pay for whatever it takes.’

  He thought that a man might reasonably expect to see a woman’s eyes light up at the prospect of a lavish buying expedition when someone else was paying. But Tara failed to oblige. He could see her biting her lip and for one awful moment he thought she was going to cry and that made him feel oddly uncomfortable. Her face screwed itself up into a fierce expression but when she spoke, her voice was quite steady.

  ‘Whatever it takes,’ she repeated. ‘You’re saying you want me to buy new clothes to make sure that I look the part—whatever the part is?’

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it.’ He flicked her unruly curls a glance. ‘And maybe you could do something about your hair while you’re at it.’

  She drew herself up very straight. ‘So what you’re really saying is that you want to make me look nothing like myself?’

  ‘That’s a rather dramatic summary of what I just said, Tara. Think of it as making the best of yourself for once.’

  ‘You certainly seem to have been giving it some thought.’ Suddenly that fierce look was back. ‘Yet you didn’t even bother asking me what the doctor said when I went to see him yesterday, did you, Lucas?’

  Lucas met the accusation in her eyes, his body growing tense. He knew he was still in denial about impending fatherhood. That he was doing what he always did when confronted with something he didn’t want to deal with, or which caused him pain. He blocked it. Locked it away. Stored it in a dark place never to be examined again. But you couldn’t keep doing that when there was a baby involved. No matter how much he tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. He kept thinking that one morning he was going to open his eyes and discover that he was the same Lucas as before, one with no ties or commitments.

  And that was never going to happen.

  And lately he’d been experiencing the occasional flicker of curiosity—uneasy little splinters of thought which spiked away at him at the dead of night when he lay in bed, aching for Tara. He kept remembering the final line of the letter written by the woman who had subjected him to a life of misery. His mother. Except that she was not his real mother, despite the fact that she had spent her life pretending to be. Surely no real mother would have treated their child with such disregard and cruelty. And surely no real mother would have tried to justify their behaviour with the flimsiest of excuses. His mouth hardened with contempt. She had done it because she was desperate for the love of a man who didn’t really want her. Because she had put her desire for Diego Gonzalez above everything else, hopelessly pursuing it with single-minded determination which had pushed her adopted son into the shadows. And that was what people did for love, he summarised bitterly as he processed the accusation Tara had just thrown at him. They manipulated and they lied.

  ‘Okay. Tell me. What did the doctor say?’ he said.

  But his dutiful question seemed to irritate her more than please her and she answered it like someone recounting the words by rote. She and the baby had been pronounced perfectly healthy, she told him tartly, and she had been booked in for a scan the following week. Her eyes had narrowed like a watchful cat. ‘Perhaps you’d like to accompany me, Lucas?’

  ‘We’ll see,’ he said, non-committally, pulling back the cuff of his shirt to glance at his watch. ‘I have a meeting scheduled, so I’d better run. And in the meantime, do you want to organise yourself a shopping trip?’

  Tara met the faintly impatient question in his eyes and tried to tell herself he wasn’t being unreasonable, though in her heart she wasn’t sure she believed it. But then, she was mixed up and confused and out of her depth in so many ways. Frightened about the future and unsure about the present. Every morning she awoke to a slew of different emotions but she’d refused to let them show, knowing that bravado was the only way of surviving this bizarre situation.

  Her feelings about Lucas didn’t help and she thought how much easier it would be if she didn’t want him so badly. If only she could blind herself to the certainty that he could break her heart. She sighed, because in many ways she couldn’t fault him. He had accepted her demand for no intimacy with composure and then hadn’t she driven herself half mad wishing he hadn’t accepted it quite so calmly? Perhaps she’d imagined he would come banging on her door at night, demanding she let him in. Or just walk in without asking, slide in between her sheets and take her into his arms. And wasn’t there a big part of her that wished he would adopt such a masterful role and take the decision right out of her hands?

  But no. He’d found this apartment within walking distance of Central Park—with the assistance of the intimidating Brandy—and had booked her in to see a wonderful obstetrician in Lexington, who had immediately made her feel at ease. In some ways their familiar working pattern had simply been transferred to a brand-new setting, except that here she had no bicycle because even she had to concede that in New York it was too dangerous.

  Yet despite their superficial compatibility, she recognised that he was still a stranger to her. Despite that one-off night of intimacy, she knew no more about Lucas Conway than when they’d been living in Dublin. Back then it hadn’t been relevant—but now she was carrying his baby and it was. Didn’t she have the right to know something about him?

  ‘If I agree to smarten up my appearance to fit in with your billionaire image...’ she hesitated, lifting her gaze to his ‘...will you agree to do something for me?’

  His green gaze was shot with cynicism. ‘Ah. This sounds like bargaining territory to me.’

  ‘Maybe it is—but that’s irrelevant. Because I know nothing about you. Do you realise that, Lucas? You’re the father of my baby and yet you’re practically a stranger to me...’ As her words tailed off she heard a trace of vulnerability in her own voice. Did he hear it too? Was that why his face darkened? But he relented, didn’t he? Even if he did clip out the words like bullets.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  Everything. But Tara sensed that if she asked for too much, she would get nothing at all.

  ‘What was in that letter?’ she questioned suddenly.

  ‘The letter?’ he said, and she knew he was playing for time.

  ‘You know very well which letter. The one you received just before you came out here.’

  The one which made you act so strangely and look so haunted.

  She hesitated and said it exactly as it was. ‘Which made you look so angry. Who was it from, Lucas?’

  It was then that Lucas realised just how much Tara Fitzpatrick did know about him. Probably more than any other living person. His mouth hardened. But that was the thing about having a housekeeper. You thought they just existed in the shadows of your life. You thought they were there simply to enable things to run smoothly—but in reality they were watching you and listening to you. Absorbing all the comings and goings like a detached observer. And although her pregnancy meant Tara could no longer be described as detached—didn’t that make her entitled to know the truth?

  A truth he had firmly locked away. A truth he had never talked about with anyone before.

  His throat dried as he looked into the soft question in her eyes and suddenly he found himself wanting to confide in her—to share the ugly facts with someone. ‘It was from my father’s...’ His mouth twisted as he said the word. ‘His attorney.

  ‘Your father?’ She blinked at him in surprise.

  He nodded. ‘He died a few months back.’

  ‘You never said—’

  ‘Well, I’m saying now. There was no reason to tell you before,’ he said. ‘And before you look at me with that reproachful gaze—I didn’t go to his funeral because I hated him and he hated me.’ He paused
for a moment, long enough to get his breathing under control but he could do nothing about the painful clench of his heart. ‘They found a letter from my mother among his belongings. A letter addressed to me, which I never received, even though it was written a long time ago, just before she died. But it seemed she didn’t have the sense or the wherewithal to give it to her own lawyer. She entrusted it to her husband, which was a dumb thing to do because he kept it all this time and I only got to hear about it after his death.’

  Her face creased with concentration as if she was trying to piece together a puzzle of facts. ‘So is New York where you were born?’

  He shook his head, his laugh bitter as, unwittingly, she asked the most pertinent question of all. ‘It’s where I grew up. I don’t know where I was born because last week I discovered that my mother and father weren’t my real parents.’

  ‘You mean...’ she frowned again ‘...that they kept that fact hidden from you?’

  ‘Yes, they did. Though there’s a more accurate way of putting it. They lied to me, Tara. All through my life they lied.’ He saw her wince. ‘Because they couldn’t bear to tell me the truth.’

  ‘And was the truth so very awful?’ she whispered.

  ‘Judge for yourself.’ There was silence for a moment before he shrugged, but his shoulders still felt as if they were carrying a heavy weight. ‘The woman I called my mother was in her forties when she married a man who was decades younger. She was a hugely wealthy heiress and he was a poor, good-looking boy from Argentina—who happened to have a pretty big gambling habit. Her Alabama family cut her off when she married Diego and the two of them moved to Manhattan. In her letter she explained that he wanted a child but her age meant she was unable to give him one.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘So she did what she’d spent her whole life doing. She tried to solve a problem by buying her way out of it. That’s when she bought me.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘My mother bought me, Tara. But when the deal was done she discovered that having me around wasn’t the quick solution to her troubles she thought I would be. She’d bought me, but she didn’t want me and neither did Diego. Suddenly I was in the way and a child isn’t as easy to dispose of as one of the fancy sports cars my father loved to drive.’