‘You didn’t see the need.’
‘No. And Imogen shouldn’t have called you. In fact, I asked her not to. You’ve been away and the last thing I wanted was for you to rush here when you probably had work commitments.’ She kept her voice as businesslike as possible. ‘It was just a scare, as a matter of fact.’
‘I think I have a right to know when you have a scare.’
Before, she thought bitterly, she would have subconsciously construed that as a thoughtful gesture that included her. It would have given her a warm, tingly feeling and she might have smiled at him and confided how worried she had been. She might even, depending on how much that warm, tingly feeling was, have mentioned that she was glad to see him. He would have taken her back to the house and used that gentle, concerned, friendly voice on her and she would have deluded herself into thinking that she meant something more important than just an incubator for his child. Not now.
‘Hopefully, there won’t be another,’ she said politely and Cesar frowned at her.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When I left you, you were sunny and upbeat. Is this change of mood because you’re worried? The consultant said that there’s no need to worry. Actually, the last thing you want to do is get stressed out.’
Because stress might affect the baby. I couldn’t give a damn about your welfare!
‘Of course.’
‘You have to rest. No more working round the clock on fool projects. From now on, you’ll put your feet up and listen to what the consultant said. I’ll get a housekeeper in. Someone to cook, clean and run whatever errands you want her to run. There’ll be no need for you to lift a finger.’
‘They’re not fool projects.’
‘You’ll do as I say,’ Cesar grated. There was no point pussyfooting round her sensibilities. ‘Your good health is the baby’s good health, it’s as simple as that.’ He didn’t know what kind of mood she was in but he wasn’t best pleased with it. He had rushed to the hospital, worried out of his mind, and that cool voice of hers was getting on his nerves.
Simple as that. It always had been.
‘Don’t even think about telling me that you can do without a housekeeper,’ he said, forestalling any possible idiot objection to this particular ground rule.
‘I wasn’t. I’m not stupid, Cesar. I realise that I’ll need help around the house and I won’t be driving out for any more of my fool projects, as you call them. At least not for the moment.’ She remembered when Imogen had been rushed into hospital. The stricken look on Freddy’s face when she’d seen him. That look had been all about love. In that moment she had known that he would have given up everything for Imogen, would have done anything for her.
Cesar’s worry was reserved solely for the child she was carrying.
‘I’m tired now,’ she told him abruptly. ‘It’s been a long day and I want to go back to sleep.’
‘You’ll need some clothes.’
Jude hadn’t given that a moment’s thought. She was still in the hospital gown they had provided. She shrugged and nodded.
‘Tell me what you want and I’ll bring them.’
‘There’s really no need to trouble yourself, Cesar. Your driver can fetch what I need.’ She stifled a yawn.
‘Don’t be absurd.’ Cesar thought of his driver rifling through her underwear and he scowled with distaste. It was worse than unacceptable. It was obscene. ‘I’ll get what you need and I’ll make sure that a housekeeper is in place by the time you get back to the house. In fact, I’ll get my secretary working on that immediately.’ He flipped open his cell phone and Jude listened as he gave orders. Orders that would be obeyed without question and handled with a level of efficiency that a high salary guaranteed. His voice was crisp, the voice of a man who knew that when he gave orders, they were obeyed. His secretary was paid to obey them.
He had used different tactics on her, though, but the net result was the same. He had given his orders, orders cloaked with smiles and concern, and she had obeyed them. She had even been paid, in a manner of speaking, because where was she living? In a house he had chosen in an area he had picked for reasons that suited him. The only fly he had found in the ointment had been her refusal to marry him, which would have legitimised his baby, but in every other respect he had persuaded her into the corner he had wanted and she had put up very little resistance.
But that scare had reminded her that she was essentially disposable and it was time she sat up and took notice of the fact before she found herself carried too far downstream on the current to ever get back to safe shores.
CHAPTER TEN
I’VE BEEN DOING some thinking…
Jude was back at the house and Cesar was on his way. The housekeeper had been employed in record time, had already cleaned the house for Jude’s return and had now been dispatched to the supermarket with a list of food items to buy. This so that the house could be empty when Cesar arrived.
She looked in the mirror and carried on with the speech she had rehearsed. She’d been doing some thinking and, first of all, wanted to make sure that the correct documents were signed so that the house which he had bought was in his name. That would establish the tenor of the conversation straight away.
Thereafter, it would be easier to maintain a grip on her emotions, especially when she moved onto the thornier subject of the personal boundaries which needed to exist between them. Of course he would tell her that no boundaries had been crossed, that they were conducting a civilised, adult and perfectly amicable relationship because it would make things easier when it came to jointly caring for their child. She had her answer to that one all worked out. Dinners out went beyond being friendly and she wouldn’t be put in a position of being under his thumb, a single woman to all intents and purposes but one with her life controlled by him. She would raise the issue of what would happen when one of them found a partner, someone meaningful with whom to share their life. Basically, she would let him know, in not so many words, that he was a bystander in her life when it came to her emotions.
Looking at her reflection as she applied some mascara, she wondered what this fictional character, destined to appear at some point on the horizon, would be like. Would she even recognise him as a possibility when her head was so full of Cesar? Even if he was carrying a placard which said Look No Further, I’m The Man Of Your Dreams? No one seemed to match up to Cesar. He was so much larger than life that, alongside him, all other men faded into the background. He had burst into her life and had dominated it and she had swooned and fallen in love like a tragic heroine from a Victorian novel.
She made a little grimace at herself and then walked through to the sitting room. From the sofa, she could look out onto the back garden and right now it was bathed in sunshine.
She heard the front door open and knew it was Cesar before he stepped into the sitting room. Those wretched antennae again! Gorgeous, sexy, incredible Cesar in a pair of cream trousers and a rugby shirt which, he’d explained to her some time in a past that now seemed like another lifetime, was a leftover from his university days when he’d been captain of the rugby team.
Jude felt her heart give its usual little flip.
‘Obeying doctor’s orders,’ he said approvingly. ‘Good.’ He sat down on the chair facing her and crossed his legs. She’d told him to come at four and he’d spent the last three hours edgily aware that he was looking at his watch way too often and wondering why she had told him a specific time when before she had been happy enough for him to pole over whenever he felt like it.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Fine. Thank you.’
Fine? Thank you? That same politeness fringed with just a touch of frost. Or was that just his imagination playing tricks on him?
‘And the housekeeper? Working out all right? Where is she, anyway?’
‘Annie’s working out fine and she’s at the supermarket right now. I asked her to go because…I really t
hink we need to talk…’
Cesar had no trouble in recognising that tone of voice. He had used it himself in the past, usually on women whose role in his life had gone beyond their sell-by date. Then he would take them out for an expensive meal and over liqueurs would tell them that they needed to talk…
‘Talk on.’
Jude noticed that the easy smile had left his face. In its place was that shuttered expression which had once chilled her to the bone. ‘I…I did a lot of thinking yesterday, Cesar. When I thought that…well, when I thought the worst…and I realise that we really need to sort out one or two details…’ She cleared her throat and waited for him to say something.
‘What details?’ Cesar eventually asked.
‘This house, for instance.’
‘Is in my name. As you asked.’
‘Good.’ His dark, watchful eyes were unsettling, making her stumble over the brisk, no nonsense tone she had planned on using. ‘And…and we need to discuss what happens if and when either of us meets someone else.’
‘Are you telling me that there’s someone else?’
‘Of course not! Look at me, Cesar. I’m pregnant!’
Of course there wasn’t anyone else. It had been a ridiculous question but he had found himself asking it anyway.
‘But there might be. One day. Just as there might be for you.’ She half hoped that he would deny such a preposterous thing but naturally no such denial was forthcoming and why should it be? He had offered her marriage, had told her that she was eligible for money, as if she were an employee who was worthy of a pay rise after a satisfactory probationary period. He had never said anything about fidelity. She gave voice to something that was only now occurring to her.
‘Why did you ask me to marry you, Cesar?’
‘Not this again!’
‘I know you’re a traditionalist. I know you don’t like the thought of having a baby born out of wedlock. But was it also because you didn’t want any other man on the scene? Muddying the waters with the upbringing of your child?’
‘That thought never crossed my mind!’ But Cesar flushed. Had it crossed his mind? Even subconsciously? Was that why he felt more comfortable with her living closer to him? Because he could keep an eye on her? He didn’t like the thought of being possessive. He had never been a possessive man. Indeed, had never felt the need to know the whereabouts of any of the women he had dated in the past, although he had always known that none of them would have thought about straying. Even with Marisol…yes, he had been protective. She had been very feminine and very helpless, had needed his protection…but possessive?
‘Where is this going?’ he asked harshly. ‘Have I not complied with every request you’ve made?’ She had been fine a few days previously. What had changed?
Jude saw that dark flush that had stained his high, aristocratic cheekbones when she had asked him about his reasons for proposing to her and knew, with a sinking heart, that she had hit a tender nerve. He would tether her to him, would make it impossible for her to ever find anyone else because he would have no other man interfere in his child’s life. It was a game played by his rules and only his rules.
‘I’m laying down a few ground rules,’ she told him steadily. ‘I thought that I was going to lose the baby. In fact, right now I’m taking nothing for granted.’
‘Has the consultant said anything to you that he kept from me?’ Cesar demanded, frowning. ‘If he has, there will be hell to pay!’
‘This doesn’t have anything to do with the baby.’ Jude looked away. She didn’t want to see his expression close over. ‘This has to do with me. Actually, with us.’
‘If we’re talking about us, I thought we were getting along just fine until I came back to England to discover a black cloud hanging over you.’
‘We are getting along just fine,’ Jude told him. ‘But I think it’s important to remember that we’re not friends. We’re two people who made a mistake by sleeping together and getting more than either of us bargained for. Let’s not forget that we wouldn’t, actually, be here having any sort of conversation if I hadn’t discovered that I was pregnant. I appreciate all that you’ve done…’
‘Will you stop talking to me as though I’m a stranger!’
‘And stop shouting at me in my own house!’
‘But it’s not your own house, is it?’
There was a tense, electric silence and then Jude said slowly, the colour draining from her face, ‘Is that it, Cesar? Your house and therefore I have to abide by your rules? Toe the line because you’ve paid for the roof over my head? The roof, incidentally, that I don’t remember asking for?’
‘This is ridiculous!’ Cesar said fiercely.
‘No, it’s not!’ She thought of his trip to swinging New York. ‘Okay, here’s a question. How would you feel if I did meet someone down the line—someone I wanted to play a big part in my life? Someone who would inevitably come into contact with our child? Have an influence over him or her? Would that be all right with you? Or would I have to abide by your rules so long as I’m living in a house you paid for?’
Cesar dearly wanted to inform her that she could do as she damn well wanted to do, just so long as his child was kept out of it, but images of her with another man made him clench his jaw in fury.
‘Don’t worry about answering that, Cesar. I know the answer from your silence. You…you think you can do whatever you want while I stay in the house you paid for doing motherly things!’
‘Do whatever I want?’
Jude realised that somewhere along the line her cool, calm, mature speech had gone down the pan. Now, she felt like bursting into tears.
‘I mean, what did you get up to in New York?’ she was appalled to hear herself ask, especially when he was looking at her as though she had taken leave of her senses. ‘Not that I care. I’m just saying that to prove a point. You are free to do whatever you want, and I expect to be free to do whatever I want as well.’
‘So let me get this straight,’ Cesar said tightly. ‘If I told you that I went to New York, met up with an old flame and spent three very sexy nights with her, you wouldn’t be bothered.’
‘Did you?’
‘At the risk of flying in the face of all your preconceptions, no, I didn’t.’
‘That’s not to say that you won’t some time in the future,’ Jude goaded him, relieved to death by what he had said but already bleakly contemplating a time when his answer would be different and hating herself for knowing that she would always care enough to ask and to be hurt.
‘And, of course, if I did, you wouldn’t try to stop me.’
‘What would be the point? You’re a free man, Cesar. Even if we got married, you would still be a free man and there’d be nothing I could ever do to hold you back.’
Cesar thought that once he had been a free man and any hint of a woman trying to tame him would have signalled the immediate end to a relationship. But did a free man lose track of work because his mind was too taken up with one very stubborn, very frustrating woman with short dark hair and a line of conversation that had absolutely no respect for his barriers? And did a free man count the hours until he could see the one woman who consumed his every waking moment? He found it hard to remember when he had last been a free man.
Now she was talking about Marisol, telling him what might have been true once upon a time. He held up one hand, cutting her off in mid-rant, and waited until she had subsided into silence.
‘Everything you’re telling me is true,’ he admitted roughly, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. He ran his fingers through his hair, a gesture with which Jude had become so familiar that it brought a lump to her throat.
‘I loved Marisol. Hell, we were so young and had so little time together. Too little time to really find out each other’s faults and yes, I put her on a pedestal.’ His coal-black eyes tangled with hers.
Jude wanted to put her hand over his beautiful mouth because she didn’t want him confirming everything s
he had just said. She realised that in all her mentally rehearsed speeches, he had largely been a silent listener.
‘She was…compliant, soft, subservient…’
‘I know. I think you’ve told me this before. She was everything I’m not.’
Cesar nodded in confirmation. ‘Which makes me wonder whether we were ever really suited.’
‘What?’ She raised her head and focused her wide brown eyes on his face.
He felt a giddy, strange sensation, as though he were standing on the edge of an abyss, looking down.
‘I always thought that sweet and subservient was what I wanted until I met a headstrong, mouthy, argumentative woman who had the nerve to question everything I did and said and thought.’
Jude found that she was holding her breath, wondering whether she was hearing properly, but the expression on his face told her that she was. He looked oddly vulnerable. It wasn’t an expression she had ever seen before. She wanted to reach out and go across to him, sit on his lap, stroke his face, but she also didn’t want the spell to end.
‘When I left your cottage, I really thought that I could return to London, that my life would pick up where it had left off. I was accustomed to women being transient. Sure, my ego was hurting because you’d sent me on my bike when I wanted to prolong what we had, but I told myself that it was for the best. Thing is, I couldn’t get you out of my mind.’
‘You couldn’t?’
Cesar shook his head wryly.
‘That’s probably because…you know…the sex thing… wanting the one thing you thought you couldn’t have…’
‘Are you fishing, by any chance?’
Jude grinned reluctantly at him. ‘Sort of.’
‘Fishing for what?’
She shrugged and watched as he covered the distance separating them, until he was sitting on the sofa by her so that she was squashed to one side to accommodate his big body. Very happily squashed because she had missed him being close to her, feeling the warmth of his body. He was so vibrant, so aggressively alive and he made her feel the same. Without him, she was a shadow, lacking definition.
The Notorious Gabriel DiazRuthless Tycoon, Inexperienced Mistress Page 32
