‘I knew she was getting married again. I knew she was making overtures to him.’ he said grimly. ‘I didn’t know it was preying on his mind like this.’
‘I still don’t understand why.’
‘Why? I’ll tell you. Serena swore she would never have any more children—once was enough, she reckoned. But her husband-to-be may not be aware of that and she could be hoping to placate any fatherly tendencies he might display by giving him a ready-made son.’
Clare gasped. ‘She’d do … that?’
‘She’d do anything to preserve her figure,’ he said sardonically.
‘But—’
He glanced at her. ‘He’s also extremely rich.’
‘So are you,’ Clare pointed out.
He smiled unpleasantly. ‘But I never could abide flaunting it.’
‘Poor Sean,’ she said, blinking.
‘Oh, I know how to fight for my own.’ He paused and his mouth twisted wryly after a moment. ‘So Sean is quite alive to what is going on between us?’
‘Apparently.’
‘Well, then, we can cross him off our list of problems.’
She started to say something, stopped and said instead, ‘Only if we could guarantee the success of a marriage between us, Lachlan.’
‘How can you ever do that?’
She hesitated. ‘By not…trying to mix oil and water, for starters.’
‘Clare,’ he said slowly, ‘the difference between you and Serena—one of them—is that she tends to act purely on instinct. Nine times out of ten she gets away with it. She has a certain arrangement of genes plus a kind of sheer vitality and sensuality that can make her instincts irresistible. Until you run up against her most basic one—she’s utterly selfish.’
‘What are you saying?’ Clare asked after a moment.
‘I’m saying that I believe where Serena wouldn’t take responsibility for her actions when they were in conflict with her ego you would.’
He paused and looked her directly in the eye. ‘I’m saying that not only you, but both of us, know where our moral responsibilities lie and we could work together to make this work.’
Clare digested that and wondered about moral blackmail but she couldn’t deny it was a powerful argument. Unexpected, too. But why would he go to these lengths? she wondered. Because he was a morally responsible man? Would he not have persevered with Serena if he felt so strongly, though? Perhaps he had wanted to, perhaps she was the one who broke it all up?
Or perhaps, she thought suddenly, it’s all to do with being able to keep Sean out of his mother’s clutches…
‘I can’t think straight,’ she murmured distractedly, and made a sudden decision. ‘Besides which I’m damp and sandy and shedding it all over the place. Could I just have a quick shower?’
He sat back and shrugged.
While she was showering she half expected him to come in, but he didn’t.
She washed her hair as well and towelled it dry then put on a long, loose cotton knit dress in a colour that matched her eyes, and she gathered her hair back in a silver scrunchie.
When she got back to the living room, she found that he’d made them tea and opened a packet of biscuits. He was sitting at the dining-room table with the tea tray in front of him, talking on his mobile phone.
She hesitated then sat down opposite him. She poured the tea as he finished his call and snapped the aerial of the phone down.
And, as if nothing had changed between them, she couldn’t help but do what she would have done normally—raise an enquiring eyebrow at him.
‘Ansett,’ he said laconically. ‘I’m flying down to pick Sean up this afternoon.’
She looked surprised.
‘He’s over the contagious stage.’
‘You’ll be exhausted,’ she said involuntarily.
‘He’s dying to come home. By the way, he’s thrilled to hear about the baby.’
She put her pretty Wedgwood teapot down with suddenly shaking hands. ‘You … you didn’t!’
His grey eyes were unreadable. ‘Why not? This baby is closely related to him. Far better that he knows about it—just say it’s a girl? Not knowing could cause all sorts of complications later in life.’ He stirred his tea.
Her lips parted incredulously because this was unanswerable but it also assumed that she was a fool if not worse.
He said then, ‘You do see, don’t you, Clare, that you’re not the only who’s involved? Just because you’re actually carrying it that doesn’t mean to say—’
‘Stop it,’ she said hoarsely. ‘I should have known!’
He raised a wry eyebrow at her. ‘What?’
‘How hard you were. I saw it during your divorce but this is unbelievable. You’re not only treating me like a fool but surely I was entitled to expect that this would be just between the two of us until we came to a decision of some kind? There’s so much to discuss, so many factors to take into account, but now you’ve gone and—’ She broke off, breathing heavily.
‘Haven’t you told anyone?’
‘Well, Valerie Martin knows—’
‘I wasn’t referring to your doctor.’
‘Sue knows,’ she said. ‘Sue Simpson, the girl I hired, I had to tell her—’
‘Knows it’s me? By the way—’ he frowned ‘—is this the same Sue Simpson who comes from Lismore?’
‘Yes… And yes, she knows it’s you,’ Clare said heavily. ‘I couldn’t help myself.’
‘There you go. These are all small towns basically, Clare.’
‘No,’ she said intensely. ‘Sue won’t tell a soul and it’s quite different from telling Sean!’
He just looked at her.
‘Until … until we know what we’re going to do,’ she said unsteadily, and, to her horror, she did burst into tears.
He let her weep into her hands for about a minute then got up and came round the table to her.
‘No,’ she gulped, but he pulled her to her feet, picked her up and carried her over to the settee.
‘Hey,’ he said quietly, when he’d settled her on his lap and tilted her chin then lightly kissed her streaming cheek, ‘this isn’t good for the baby.’
‘It’s all your fault,’ she retorted, then stopped and sighed. ‘I mean—I don’t mean the baby is—’
‘I know what you mean. Right at this moment you hate me.’
‘I don’t hate you, I just don’t know what to do for the best.’ She hiccuped then laid her head on his shoulder. ‘Well, I do, but you won’t let me!’
‘Should we put this discussion on hold for a while?’ he suggested, and stroked dark tendrils of her damp hair behind her ear.
‘What else can we talk about?’ she asked bleakly.
He looked down at her wryly. ‘Have you had a scan yet? Or is it too early?’
‘Yes, about eighteen weeks, Valerie said.’
‘That’s right. What about an obstetrician?’
She told him the arrangements she’d made. ‘I … I feel comfortable with Valerie. To be honest, the thought of hospitals, labour wards, obstetricians and so on makes me a little nervous.’
‘I don’t blame you.’
‘I’ve never been in a hospital in my life, as a patient,’ she confessed.
He smiled and it crinkled the corners of his eyes in a way that always fascinated her. ‘They’re quite modern about these things now. They even call them birthing centres, some of them, so you don’t feel as if you’re in such an alien, traumatic environment.’
She thought for a bit then said honestly, ‘I’m also a little intimidated by, well, to be honest, how little I know about it all. Less than you, even.’ She smiled faintly. ‘It’s as if I got to twenty-seven ignoring a very basic part of me. And the other surprising thing is I’ve never had the least desire to coo over babies, yet—’ she rubbed her stomach gently ‘—I’ve kind of got pretty wrapped up in this one and it isn’t even moving, let alone born yet.’
He put his hand over hers. ‘G
ive it another month and it will be starting to move.’
‘There you go again—is there anything you don’t know about pregnancy?’ she asked whimsically as he started to rub her stomach very gently and it felt wonderful.
‘Of course,’ he said quietly. ‘I can never know exactly what you go through, but I do know that you don’t have to do it alone.’
‘Lachlan,’ she said huskily as they stared into each other’s eyes, and she stopped as she became aware of how close they were and how safe she felt, how warm and protected, and suddenly her eyes were agonized. ‘I’m still not sure.’
‘All right, let’s not fight about it. But is there any reason for us not to do this?’
She blinked.
The way he kissed her was unusually tender. He released her hair from her scrunchie so he could run his fingers through it and stroked her face and neck, to start with, and gradually teased her lips apart.
Then, as always, things started to run away with them, and when they finally drew apart she was quivering with desire and could see it reflected in the heavy-lidded way he was watching her.
But she was also troubled. ‘I don’t think…’ She unwound her arms from his neck, sat up and fanned her face with her hand. ‘Um, I didn’t think I would feel this way, should feel this way,’ she said unevenly.
A gleam of amusement lit his eyes. ‘Why not?’
‘This is going to sound silly but I’m not sure if it’s proper—I knew it would sound silly,’ she said hollowly.
‘Proper? Because we’re not married?’ he queried gravely.
She bit her lip. ‘Proper for someone increasingly into maternity.’
‘Clare.’ He reached for her and was laughing but there was something else in his eyes, a little glint of wonderment, she thought, but couldn’t be sure. ‘You are amazingly naive at times. It’s perfectly proper—No, I’m not going to go any further,’ he said as she tensed a little. ‘At what cost you’ll never know.’
He stopped and waited as she relaxed slowly. ‘It’s all to do with what I was telling you earlier, my sweet innocent. This middle trimester in other words.’
‘Oh.’
‘Uh-huh. It should be a golden time for husbands and wives.’
‘I see. Of course, if I’d stopped to think about it, I would have realized that,’ she said ruefully. ‘Not that my first trimester stopped me from…’ She paused and put her hands to her suddenly hot cheeks.
He laughed and kissed her lightly. ‘You were sensational.’
‘Don’t remind me—as a matter of fact that was the first time I had morning sickness, at night.’
‘If only I’d known.’ He looked at her, suddenly quite serious.
‘Are we—’ she clasped her hands nervously ‘—getting back onto… what to do?’
Something flickered in his eyes then they became enigmatic. ‘Unfortunately, I have to go. My plane leaves in an hour. But I’ll be back tomorrow. I’ve got the feeling my thinking is not going to change, however.’
‘Lachlan—’
‘Clare,’ he said quietly but determinedly, ‘if you don’t know what we’ve got going for us, then you must be blind.’
And he lifted her to her feet and stood up.
She opened her mouth to ask him if he and Serena hadn’t had the same thing going for them once but what had that proved? Some instinct made her leave it unsaid, though.
He watched her for a long moment, taking in the new ontline of her figure beneath the thin cotton knit of her dress, the gorgeous mass of her hair, her troubled eyes.
A smile touched his mouth. ‘I won’t be able to call you Slim for a while,’ he murmured, kissed her and added as he picked up his jacket, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ Then he was gone.
Why didn’t she just do it? she asked herself in the middle of the night. Say this was a legal tangle between two other people and she was adjudicating. What would she do?
She would add up the pros and cons and point out where the balance lay. So—pros. He was a good father. There could only be assets for a child born into the Hewitt family, not only materially but in what they would inherit in the sense of family, history and worth. Especially for a child who inherited its father’s love of the land.
And all that, she mused silently, has got to beat having a single mother. But say, just say she did feel stifled at Rosemont, that she wasn’t the kind of wife he needed, that he had been pitch-forked into this position because of Serena’s machinations? Having a wife whom Sean liked to bring to Rosemont—the family home the boy obviously loved—it had to strengthen his hand against Serena.
She turned over restlessly and thought that this baby couldn’t have come at a better time if that were so, but it wasn’t much help to her.
The phone rang on her bedside table and she started up with her heart racing. It was her mother to say that her father had had a heart attack and could she come straight away.
Armidale was a four-hour drive from Lennox Head and she made it just as dawn was breaking. She’d thrown a bunch of clothes into a bag. Instead of waking Sue or Lucy in the middle of the night, she’d left a message on the office answering machine to the effect that she’d been called away suddenly but would be in touch or they could get in touch with her on her mobile.
As she drove through Armidale to the hospital, she was struck by the very clear memory of her mobile phone still sitting on her kitchen counter next to the battery charger stand.
‘Damn,’ she muttered. ‘Oh, well, there’s nothing I can do about it.’
And all thoughts of work faded anyway, during that long day as her father fought for his life, and her mother retreated into a shell-shocked little world of her own.
But the next morning, although still critical and in Intensive Care after a bypass operation, he was pronounced stable and the prognosis was hopeful.
Clare took her mother home to the comfortable house she’d grown up in and put her to bed. She thought then of ringing work but was so tired herself, she lay down with the phone right beside her and fell asleep immediately.
There was further improvement when they visited Tom Montrose that afternoon, and Clare’s mother started to come out of her trance. They spent a few hours with him then drove home through the leafy streets of Armidale, stopping to buy a pizza on the way.
‘He’d be horrified,’ Jane Montrose said as they sat down to eat it at the kitchen table. It was cool, much cooler than down on the coast, as the evening drew in.
‘I know.’ Clare grinned. Any kind of take-away food was anathema to her father—one of the many tiresome stances he took in life. ‘Mum,’ she said suddenly, ‘why do you let him walk all over you?’
Her mother sighed. ‘He’s that kind of man and I’m that kind of woman, Clare. I think I was born docile and domesticated and to be honest, although I know how much it’s infuriated you, I’ve always understood that it’s his basic insecurity that makes him the way he is.’
Clare blinked.
‘So, while there are times when he can be impossible, we have a very close relationship. And now,’ Jane went on, ‘it will be my turn to be the strong one both outwardly and inwardly.’
Clare stared at her then said softly, ‘Forgive me, I never understood.’
‘I know.’ Jane smiled. ‘Marriage is a strange thing, what works for some doesn’t work for others but one thing I do know—you have to work at it. You have to take the good with the bad, you have to cherish the good and thank your lucky stars because the bad could be so much worse. For example, your father has never looked at another woman and he would be absolutely lost without me, as I would be without him.’
Clare herself was lost in thought for a long moment as it struck her that this was reality and responsibility her mother was talking about. Not the version of love and marriage that told you you could walk out of it when the going got tough. Not the version that took vows but took them lightly… Then she stood up to pour the coffee that was bubbling on the stove.
She all but dropped the coffee pot and looked down at herself in her baggy, fleecy-lined tracksuit. ‘H-how can you … tell?’ she stammered.
‘Darling, I know you. You’re my only child. And because you haven’t been able to tell me I know that there must be some problem.’
The phone in the hall rang and her mother sprang up to answer it. But she came back almost immediately. ‘It’s someone called Lachlan Hewitt for you. Do you want to speak to him?’.
‘I … yes,’ Clare said, and swallowed.
‘Lachlan,’ she said into the phone a few seconds later, ‘I’m sorry but my father had a heart attack.’
‘And you didn’t think to let me know?’ His voice was grim down the line although he went on immediately, ‘I’m sorry to hear it, I hope he’s recovering, but do you realize, Clare, that we’ve all been wondering whether you’d been run over by a bus? Your mobile doesn’t answer—’
‘That’s my fault, in my rush I forgot to bring it. Look, I really am sorry but he nearly died, although he is recovering now.’
‘Oh, hell,’ he said down the line. ‘Now I feel like an absolute heel. Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine but, Lachlan—By the way, how did you find me?’
‘It was the only place Sue and I could think of to at least make a start. Fortunately there aren’t many Montroses in the telephone book.’
Clare bit her lip.
‘You were going to say?’
She cleared her throat. ‘I’ve decided to stay with my mother for a couple of weeks—at least until he’s up and about again. Um—I’m sure Sue can cope and anyway now that the crisis is over, hopefully, I’ll be able to communicate with her.’
There was a little silence, then he said, ‘What about me? I’d like to come down.’
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea—he doesn’t know about us or the baby and it mightn’t be the best time to…confront him with it.’
‘Clare…’ he paused and his voice was grim again ‘…is that the only reason?’
She hesitated and sighed. ‘No, it will give me a little breathing space, I guess.’
Having His Babies (Harlequin Presents) Page 7
