by Kim Lawrence
Her thoughts continued to race in panicky ever-decreasing circles.
Could this be a coincidence?
Him—here in this place—now?
Or was it something more...? It was just her guilty conscience talking, suggested the voice in her head. She ignored it. Guilt was something she lived with every day; it was the price she’d paid, and it was something you were meant to feel when you made the conscious decision to conceal your child’s existence from his father, irrespective of the reasoning behind that choice.
Seeing Roman again made her certain that, from a purely selfish point of view, she had made the right decision. Having this man dipping in and out of her and Jamie’s lives would have made it impossible for her to build any sort of existence without him—he was such an incredible force of nature.
It was a decision she had made for her unborn child, yet robbing a child of his father was not something you did lightly, and her eventual decision had come with the knowledge that she would never stop feeling guilty. But better surely to have no father than one who rejected you or, at best, acknowledged you with reluctance.
She wasn’t sure which would be worse, but Marisa knew from personal experience that a child who had been deserted by a parent grew up thinking that it was somehow their fault, even when logic and a loving father in her case had told her otherwise. Not that her dad had ever bad-mouthed her mother; he had just said that motherhood was something she was not equipped to cope with.
She’d had the advantage of knowing that one parent could be enough. Her dad had been enough for her; sure, he wasn’t perfect, but whatever his faults she had always known he loved her and that was what mattered.
Her baby would never doubt her love or be made to feel that he was not good enough so she had never faltered in the belief that, morality aside, she had done the right thing... All right, perhaps she’d faltered a little...more a stumble, really, and that had only been her hormones. After Jamie had been born, in the post-birth euphoria she had nearly changed her mind about telling Roman.
She’d been so blown away by Jamie, she’d thought he was so perfect how could anyone not want to be part of his life? She had wanted so much to share this feeling with Roman, it had seemed selfish not to, and when she’d fallen asleep staring at the life she had brought into the world it had all seemed so simple.
When she’d awoken the memories had resurfaced, bringing with them a deep sense of sadness. Roman was only going to be happy about the news he was a father in her dreams. He would not share her joy. How could he when he had felt strongly enough on the subject to make it a condition of his marriage proposal?
Marriage to him, he had warned her, would not involve children...and this was not something he was ever going to change his mind about. A deal-breaker, he had called it.
So she had made her decision and lived with it.
‘I’m sorry but, no, I’m not going to invite you in. I prefer to leave the past in the past,’ she said quietly, wondering if it would actually stay there.
‘I just bet you do.’
Trying not to look worried, she didn’t ask him what he meant by that because he might just tell her, and though she knew that some fights were inevitable, you could at least choose your own time and place to have them.
Can we have a rain check on this conversation? How does thirty years’ time sound to you?
He arched a sardonic brow. ‘Fine, then we can discuss this out here if you prefer?’
She folded her arms across her chest in an unconsciously protective gesture. ‘I don’t want to talk to you at all.’
‘Oh, by the way, my brother sends his love, or he would have if he’d been in any condition to talk when I last saw him.’
Marisa pressed one hand to her stomach and the other shaking hand went to her mouth. ‘He told you.’
It wasn’t a question but Roman responded anyway.
‘Rio came over with a sudden attack of conscience,’ he remarked dryly, before adding in a voice that was as hard as his eyes were cold, ‘though it was a bit late in the day to matter.’
Without a word she turned around and went back into her suite, expecting him to follow her.
When the door closed behind him, she turned back to face him. She could tell he wasn’t quite sure what to expect as she fixed him with a direct amber stare. ‘Sit down.’ She gestured towards the brocade-covered sofa and heard herself ask with stiff formality, ‘Can I get you anything to drink...tea?’
If there was a single thing she could have said that would have sounded more ludicrous in the circumstances she couldn’t think of it.
His explosive expletive and the glare of incredulity did not come as a massive surprise. She pressed a hand to her throat where she could feel the ferocious beating of the pulse at the base of her neck.
‘I think you’re taking this lady of the manor stuff a bit too seriously.’
Marisa ignored his sneer and shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’
She glanced at his bruised knuckles.
‘You fought with your brother over this?’ She watched him place his uninjured hand over his bruised knuckles and her heart sank. ‘You do know,’ she began, her forehead creased with consternation, ‘that your brother badly wanted to tell you.’
She had never wanted to come between the brothers but she had seen no other way. It wasn’t until much later when Jamie had been given the all-clear that she had thought through the implications of putting Rio in that terrible position of keeping such a huge secret from his twin, but she had thought that so long as Roman never discovered what had happened it would be all right.
‘But he didn’t.’
‘He wanted to tell you!’ Marisa protested again.
Her defence of his twin only fed his anger. ‘A conspiracy takes two at the very least.’
‘It was my decision. We only had a casual relationship, after all, and not even a relationship in the real sense of the word, really—’
‘I proposed to you! I wanted to get married! Admittedly I didn’t know at that point you already had a husband, but proposing to you seems to suggest more than casual on my part, wouldn’t you say?’
It was Marisa’s turn to be angry. ‘Why didn’t I tell you about our baby? Oh, I don’t know, Roman—how about the small print in your proposal?’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
Her fists clenched in reaction to his response, she shot to her feet, her anger energising her. ‘You made it quite clear to me that if I did marry you there would be no children under any circumstances and you were not ever going to change your mind.’
A blank look spread across his face. ‘I might have said something like that—’
‘No, you said exactly that, so what would you have said if I’d come to you and told you I was pregnant, Roman? You’d have said, “Great, let’s be a family,” would you? Do me a favour, of course you wouldn’t. You’d have told me to get rid of it.’
The accusation wiped all the colour from his face but, ignoring all the danger signs, she pushed on, the long-suppressed emotions spilling out of her.
‘Jamie is only here because of me...you never even wanted him to exist.’ Her flashing eyes dared him to contradict her, not that she allowed him the opportunity. There was a breathless passionate sincerity in her concluding words. ‘But from the moment I knew he existed I wanted my baby.’
Her words rang with a truth that for a moment silenced him.
‘We will never know what I’d have said or done, will we? Because you didn’t tell me. You let the world and presumably your poor sucker of a husband believe that the child was his.’
‘Rupert never knew. I didn’t realise that I was pregnant until after he...after he died.’ She had put the tiredness down to the upheaval of Rupert’s death, always expected, but in the end it had all happened very quickly, leaving her f
eeling dazed and alone. Theirs might not have been a marriage in the conventional sense but while Rupert was alive she had always known there was someone who cared about her. His support had not just been financial, but emotional. For a short time, probably the only time in her life, she’d had a security that she had always lacked, that she had secretly longed for.
Her first suspicion had come when she was sitting in the lawyer’s office feeling nauseous. She had got so tired of sitting there nodding in response to statements couched in dry, technical legal terms and had asked wearily, ‘But what does all that mean?’
‘It means, Mrs Rayner, that you are a very wealthy woman.’
‘But if he had you’d have passed my child off as his, though I suppose that would have involved you sleeping with him first,’ Roman jeered.
She felt her anger flare. ‘You have no right to speak about Rupert like that. We had no secrets from one another, and if things had been different he would have made a fantastic father.’
‘So you told him all about me, then?’
Her eyes slid from his for the first time. ‘It wasn’t the right time.’ When she’d arrived back the evening of Roman’s proposal the butler had greeted her at the door with the news that Rupert had had a very bad turn.
Rushing up the stairs to her husband’s bedroom, she’d taken in at a glance his grey face and had immediately called an ambulance. How could she have offloaded her problems onto Rupert when he was so ill?
‘Where is the child now?’ Something flashed in his eyes. ‘What do you call him? James or Alexander?’
‘Jamie, and he is at home.’ She hadn’t even known the country estate in Sussex had existed until she’d inherited it after Rupert’s death. Then it had seemed like the perfect place to bring up a child.
‘So how often do you leave him?’
Resenting that he made her sound like some sort of absentee mother, she began to retort hotly and then stopped herself, realising she had been on the brink of explaining herself to him. ‘Do you have a problem with working mothers?’
He blinked at finding she had neatly turned the tables on him. ‘Of course I don’t,’ he retorted irritably.
‘Actually, he has a very excellent nanny.’
‘So where is home, exactly?’
‘Sussex.’
‘I want to see him.’
‘Why?’
His brows met in a straight line above his dark eyes and he looked at her as though she had just asked the most ridiculous question on earth. ‘Isn’t it obvious? He is my son!’
‘Biologically, yes, he is your son,’ she agreed. ‘But you’re not his father—it takes more than DNA to be that. What do you want, Roman? To hear him call you Daddy or do you want him to appear in front of you on his best behaviour once or twice a year?’
‘I want—’ He paused and then went on slowly, ‘You have robbed me of nearly five years of his life so I think you owe me this.’
‘And if I say no?’ She already knew the answer to that, and if she hadn’t, the expression in his liquid dark eyes and the ruthless smile on his face would have been confirmation.
‘I will not permit you to say no. You owe me, Marisa.’
She pressed her fingers to her temple where needles of pain were telling her that a migraine was inevitable at this stage.
Another inevitability was that if she refused Roman access to Jamie he would only find another way. At least if she agreed to a meeting, she could control the situation. A quick glance at his profile made her realise that she was being overly optimistic.
‘I owe Jamie, but I can see how you might feel that. So how about Friday?’
The offer made, she held her breath and waited...
‘Tomorrow.’
‘But I—’
‘Your event is in the morning. Sussex is not Outer Mongolia, is it? I’ll be there at two.’
CHAPTER FOUR
RUPERT HAD BOUGHT the Carolean manor and the surrounding acres as an investment. But to Marisa it was her home, maybe her first real one. She had never known where she was going to spend her holidays: a hotel suite in the South of France, a luxury penthouse in London or, when her father was down on his luck, not that she had realised it at the time, as a guest in one of her dad’s friends’ homes. She had slept on a lot of floors in her time.
She’d had some pretty bedrooms too over the years but she had learnt not to get too attached to them. She kept her important possessions, the ones that mattered to her, in an easily transportable tin for convenience, kept under whatever bed she was sleeping in.
She wanted Jamie’s childhood to have the feeling of permanence she had always longed for, have the pets she could never have and the lasting friendships.
She’d moved into Rozens Manor when she was pregnant so this was the longest she had ever lived anywhere. The previous owner had renovated the house and outbuildings and Rupert hadn’t touched them, not interested in putting his stamp on the place into which he had just installed a skeleton staff to maintain it.
After opening it up Marisa had put her own stamp on it instead, enjoying the process of refurbishment, but she had seen no reason to increase the number of staff already employed. The place was, in estate-agent speak, a small manageable estate, in as much as anywhere that had eight bedrooms, a dower house and converted stables could be termed small.
The only new member of staff was the nanny, who even in this enlightened age had raised a few eyebrows, and he was with Jamie in the garden now as she waited for Roman’s arrival with the sort of enthusiasm normally reserved for the flu.
She had given everyone else a day off. The local tongues had wagged enough when she’d employed a male nanny, but while gossip was inevitable, and would probably not be confined to the local community when Roman appeared, there was no point inviting it, especially this early.
Roman was obviously keen to stake his claim but, given that children had never been part of his plan, who knew how he would react when faced with the reality of parenthood, a reality that he had been so deadly determined to avoid? Marisa had no idea what his reasons were for not wanting children, and though she was ready to accept that people could change, this situation wasn’t the same as discovering you liked broccoli after a lifetime of avoidance—this was fundamental.
Roman said he wanted to be part of his son’s life but could she trust this knee-jerk reaction? She could wear contact lenses and have blue eyes, but they wouldn’t really be blue. Roman said he wanted to be a father...hell, he demanded it, and he might even think he meant it, but would he really once reality hit?
There wasn’t a single conclusion to the incessant questions that had kept her up into the small hours and none of the scenarios Marisa had dreamt up were ones that made her happy. She didn’t want Roman in their lives, but for Jamie’s sake she didn’t want him to reject his son either.
One hand pressed to the coat of arms above the fireplace of the long-dead people who had built this place, she was staring deep into the bowl of hydrangeas that filled the carved stone recess when she heard a car door slamming.
Marisa swallowed and tugged nervously at the roll-collar neckline of the fine-sleeved navy cashmere top she had teamed with a pair of pale blue linen cut-off trousers and soft leather ballerina slip-ons, because she hadn’t wanted to give the impression she was trying too hard.
She was going to be cool, casual but in control, and they were going to play by her rules because this was about Jamie.
She closed her eyes for the count of ten before squaring her shoulders at the distinctive sound of gravel crunching under a purposeful rapid stride. The sound spurred her into action because for some reason at that moment it felt important that she open the door, not respond to his knock demanding entry.
The soles of her shoes made no noise on the flagged floor as she made a dash to the door that was flanked by two c
arved stone lions and, rather more practically, a wellington rack. The massive metal-banded door complete with the original seventeenth-century key was heavy to open so she was glad she’d left it slightly ajar.
A last-minute smoothing down of her hair and a conscious effort to iron out the frown lines of tension on her brow and she pushed the door further open, her smile of welcome fighting with the wariness in her eyes.
Roman paused as the door swung open revealing the slim figure who presumably had been standing behind it. He took a deep breath and held it because she looked so... His thoughts tailed off. He had no word for it or for the reaction her physical presence had on his nervous system.
He settled for elegant, ignoring the voice inside his head that scorned this cop-out. It was true, even drenched to the skin in mud-splattered clothes and with her hair plastered to her skull that first time they’d met, she had still radiated an elegance that was simply innate and no more contrived than being left-handed was. Combined with her earthy sexuality, it was a devastating combination.
He liked things of beauty—who didn’t?—and even if there was more sex than aesthetics involved in the heat that streaked through him, settling in his groin, he knew there was no danger of him mistaking this reaction for anything more significant.
He had moved on.
Which did not mean he could deny the mind-sapping effect her physical presence had on him. He could enjoy the way she moved, though enjoy, he conceded, was perhaps the wrong word for the fascination her most mundane actions exerted and the inevitable gut-punch of raw hunger that followed—but there was absolutely no question of him doing anything about it. And, more importantly, no question of him mistaking what had been excellent, actually exceptional, sex for some sort of deeper bond between them.
They were going to have contact, it was inevitable, so in the meantime he was just going to have to suck it up, until this thing burnt itself out. He had never known it not to, so he was confident that in time this would too.
