Claiming his Secret Baby & Blackmailed by The Spaniard

by Connelly, Clare

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can fight for custody, Ellie. I’ll help you.” He frowned. “I don’t like seeing you so obviously miserable.”

  “I’m not miserable,” she lied, forcing a smile to her face. The last thing Apollo needed was to worry about his sister-in-law. Besides, she didn’t want to put Joshua through a custody dispute – she’d made her decision, and now she only had to stick to it. “I’m thrilled for you and Nell.”

  And it distracted him sufficiently. His smile matched hers, except it was more genuine. She stayed a few more minutes, discussing the twins, and then she went downstairs and hailed a cab to Joshua’s school, every minute taking her closer to a future she knew to be inevitable.

  * * *

  Arabella looked just as she always did: ethereally beautiful, with not a hair out of place. She was dressed in dark jeans and a rollneck sweater with a black jacket, her hair styled into a bun, high on her head, and dark glasses on her face.

  “Xave,” she exclaimed, her eyes roaming his face. She kissed his cheek, leaving a bright red lipstick smudge, and then pulled back to look at him. “Darling, you’re so pale.”

  “I’m fine,” he dismissed through gritted teeth.

  “You had a headache. Come in and tell me what happened,” she urged, never mind that it was his house and she was the guest.

  He pulled a face, well aware that Arabella couldn’t help but mother him. He strode into the lounge room but she shook her head, moving to the kitchen. He followed, and instantly saw Elizabeth, as she’d been the night he’d hounded her until she’d apologized. And it had been like the floodgates were opening, dousing him in contemplations.

  “Xavier? What is it? You look as though you’ve seen a ghost?”

  He shook his head and took the water she held out to him, simply for something to do.

  “Tell me about our wedding,” he said, uncertainly.

  “What do you mean? You were there.” She turned away from him, pressing the button for a coffee. Arabella had always been able to drink coffee, no matter the time of day or night, and it wouldn’t affect her sleep. Even now, in the afternoon, she didn’t hesitate.

  “I mean before the accident. I feel like… I have this memory… of us having a conversation and I can’t catch the threads of it, but I feel like it’s important. Is there anything to it? Or is it my damned mind playing tricks on me?”

  She shrugged her slender shoulders and drained her coffee. “We had many conversations about the wedding before your accident.”

  “But any in particular –,” his voice thickened as his head pain sharpened. He scrunched his eyes and breathed deeply, waiting for it to pass.

  “Come on, Xave, you’re in pain. Stop thinking so hard. You should be resting.”

  “I’ll rest when I understand what I’m remembering.”

  Bella compressed her lips with disapproval.

  “I need to remember,” he said, moving closer to her, his eyes imploring. “In my mind, you said, ‘we need to talk’, and then it’s blank.”

  The sound of the keys in the door came at the worst possible moment. “Your fiancé?” Arabella asked with pleasant anticipation and relief in her voice as she stood – relief that he wasn’t going to continue down this self-destructive course of action. When his memories began to surface, he was supposed to let them rise of their own accord, not pursue them with his every conscious thought.

  The sound of Elizabeth moving through the house cracked through his thoughts. Xavier swore softly.

  “Yes. That’s Elizabeth. But she isn’t expecting you.”

  “Oh, Xavier,” Arabella smiled tightly. “She’s hardly going to care that a woman you divorced years ago is having coffee with you in the middle of the afternoon. I know you – you could never marry a possessive woman, or she’d leave you within a day.”

  He grimaced at the truth that underscored that comment. The implication that he’d given Arabella reason to be jealous?

  “Xavier?” The little boy’s voice rang through the house and a moment later, Joshua pitched into the kitchen, a certificate in his hands.

  “Master Congeniality” it read, in big, happy letters.

  Arabella was now the one who looked as though she’d seen a ghost.

  “My God, Xavier, this is… he looks…”

  Xavier’s insides churned at the mess he knew was to follow – the pain he was about to cause both Arabella and Elizabeth. It could not have been timed worse. Why the hell hadn’t he thought this through better? Because his head had been banging all day, robbing him of his usual mental strength.

  “Joshua,” Elizabeth’s voice followed right behind. “I asked you to take your shoes off. They’re covered in mud and now the house is…” She stopped dead when she entered the kitchen, and it was immediately apparent that she recognized Arabella.

  Elizabeth reached out and braced herself on the doorframe.

  Arabella regained her composure first. She was emotionally more distant from the situation, and able to school her features into a mask of polite inquiry.

  “And who are you, young man?” She asked, crouching down to Joshua’s eye-height.

  “Joshua Jones,” he said with an impatience that channeled Xavier’s. He turned to his father. “Look, Xavier, I won a prize!”

  “So you did.” The words were heavy. “Why don’t you go to your room and get some tape so we might put it on the wall?”

  “Um, okay,” Joshua shrugged and left the room.

  “He’s your son?” Arabella asked, standing, her expression tight. Elizabeth had barely moved.

  Xavier nodded, the awkwardness of the situation made all the worse by his damned incomplete memories. A white-hot anger flashed inside of him – why couldn’t he remember? Where had those months gone in his mind? And would he ever get them back?

  “I … Excuse me.” Elizabeth muttered, spinning and almost knocking her head on the door jamb as she went.

  Xavier went to follow but Arabella caught his arm, grabbing him and spinning him around. “How old is he?”

  Xavier’s chest was being ripped in half. “I have to explain to her – and to you – but Elizabeth first –,”

  “How old?” Arabella was more determined than he’d ever seen her.

  Xavier’s head was in agony. “Three. But I must go to her…”

  “Three? But … You… I don’t understand. When?”

  “I wish I could understand how I ever came to cheat on you,” he said, thinking of Elizabeth and knowing instinctively that she was the only woman he would ever have broken his strong moral code for.

  “When did you and she meet?” Arabella asked urgently, lifting shaking fingers to her necklace and toying with it.

  “The weekend before the crash,” he said. “I apologise, Arabella. I can’t defend my actions. There is no damned defense for them.”

  “Stop.” She swallowed, her expression grim. “You’re not at fault.”

  “Don’t.” His word held a warning. “You always make excuses for me, you tolerate everything. But this is beyond excuses.”

  “No, you don’t understand. Oh, God, Xavier.” She lifted a hand to her mouth, covering a mangled noise of pain.

  But Xavier barely heard it. “I have to go to her.”

  “No.” Arabella reached for his hand and squeezed it. “You have to hear me out first.”

  * * *

  There was a ringing in Ellie’s ears.

  She watched as Joshua kicked his legs to coordinate his swinging – up and back, up and back. It was a cool afternoon but Ellie had left the house without thinking to grab a coat, so she huddled down deeper on the park bench, her eyes trained on their child as he sailed through the air, care-free and giggling.

  “He’s adorable,” a woman with a heavy European accent admired, sitting beside Ellie.

  She nodded her thanks, but didn’t reply. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. She didn’t know what she wanted.

  Only that comi
ng home to see Xavier with his ex-wife in the kitchen had filled her with the strangest feeling that she was being drowned, her head being pushed beneath water, her lungs filling with liquid until she couldn’t breathe.

  The worst of it was that Ellie had felt like an outsider – again. She had loved Xavier, and she’d loved him with all of herself. She’d made a child with him, and then he’d married someone else. And seeing that someone else in the present had rocked Ellie to the core because it reminded her that she’d always be an outsider. His second choice bride.

  None of this was about her, for him.

  God, and for Ellie?

  She swallowed convulsively, fiddling her fingers in her lap. To Ellie, he was so much more than that. He was her first lover, and her first love. He was also her first heartbreak and her biggest lesson in not trusting her heart.

  “Mummy!” Joshua came running over, his little hands outstretched, and when she looked down, saw that he’d found a small rock, shaped like a perfect heart. “Look! It’s for you!”

  She smiled slowly, wistfully, and grabbed for him, lifting him to her lap and cuddling him close. “Is it, baby?”

  “I’m not a baby!” He disputed, then giggle when she tickled his tummy. “I’m such a big boy now! Xavier says so!”

  Ellie nodded, her cheek pressed against his soft, downy curls. That was true – he was growing up too fast.

  “Do you want it?” She looked down at the little heart stone he was offering so freely and swept her eyes shut for a moment. Hearts were special, and should be given freely, just like this.

  She’d given all of her heart to Xavier four years earlier, and he hadn’t deserved it. And now? He still held it. She’d given it freely, a long time ago, and it turns out, there was no taking it back. She’d loved him and probably always would.

  That was why the pain of seeing him with Arabella was corking through her like a stick of dynamite.

  It was why her chest felt like it had the weight of a ten tonne cement mixer pressing down on it. It was why her ears were screeching and her eyes were stinging and her stomach was rolling with waves of panic.

  It was why adrenalin fired in her veins and she felt like she wanted to fight or scream or run and run and run.

  “Here.” He reached for Ellie’s hand and placed the rock in it, then jumped off her lap. “Five more minutes, mummy?” He asked sweetly, repeating her standard refrain before she’d had a chance to offer it.

  “Ten,” she said with an indulgent smile. He was thrilled – he didn’t know that this park was a refuge. He didn’t understand that they were hiding from home.

  Her heart twisted painfully in her chest because she knew it was just a temporary respite. Soon, they would need to return to Xavier’s, and the life that was waiting for them, and somehow, she’d have to learn to protect herself from this all-consuming love and need.

  She’d have to learn to at least appear not to care, when all of her was still as bound up in the Spaniard as ever before.

  * * *

  By the time he’d disposed of Arabella and gone in search of Elizabeth and Josh, he found them gone. And a stone of concern landed heavily inside of him. Worry perforated his gut.

  He called her phone; it was off.

  He thought of going in search of her but had no clue where she might be. Her house had been rented quickly after she’d moved out. Nell’s?

  Where did she stay while in London?

  He groaned, pacing the lounge room floor until finally, a little before six, the door flew open and an ice wind followed.

  “Elizabeth,” he sounded angry, yet he wasn’t. Concern and the bastard of a headache were robbing him of the ability to think straight.

  She flinched.

  He tried to soften his question. “Where have you been?”

  She spoke calmly, and without meeting his eye. “At the park,” she said. “I thought I’d give you some space.”

  A muscle jerked in his jaw. “It’s not what you think,” he said, impatiently. “I need to explain…”

  Her smile was forced, over-bright, and brittle, like it might crack on her face. “I need to get Josh ready for bed,” she said. “He’s tired.”

  And he became aware of the small boy, his miniature version, with huge eyes that saw everything, roaming from one parent to another.

  “Let me,” he offered, the exhaustion in her face impossible to bear.

  “No!” For a second, her façade dropped and she was shrill and desperate. She shook her head, clearing the tone from the air. “I want to do it. Excuse me.”

  She reached down for Josh and lifted him, holding him close as though he were her salvation.

  It took Xavier several moments to gather his thoughts. “I’ll make his dinner…”

  “We ate while we were out.”

  He compressed his lips and resumed pacing, waiting, impatient, frustrated and still reeling from his conversation with Arabella.

  By the time Elizabeth returned to the lounge area, her face was drawn. “I only came to get a cup of tea,” she murmured, moving to squeeze past him.

  “Listen to me,” he pleaded urgently.

  “It’s fine. I don’t know why I was surprised. You cheated on her with me and now… you’re seeing her again. It’s fine. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Would you stop for one damned second?” She flinched again and he cursed inwardly. He needed to do this quickly, like ripping off a bandaid. “I called Arabella because I’d had a strange recollection this morning, and I had no idea if it was true or not. It’s hard to know, sometimes. My memories are like ghosts, shimmering in front of me, sometimes make-believe, figments of imaginations, or memories of dreams. Other times, true, but incomplete, so I have an impression of something that occurred but no clue as to the circumstances surrounding it.”

  Her eyes were cool when they sliced to his. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  She moved into the kitchen and he followed, watching as she flicked the kettle on.

  “She came here because she was worried about me. The headaches I get can be debilitating – and they always accompany a memory.”

  Elizabeth’s back stiffened visibly, her tension a force in the room.

  “I asked her about what I had remembered, and she lied.”

  Elizabeth said nothing.

  “She didn’t understand the significance of the memory until you and Josh came back here.”

  Nothing. He couldn’t blame her.

  “Elizabeth? Arabella and I broke up a month before I met you.” At that, Elizabeth stilled – if it was possible. Before she had been unmoving and now she was like stone. Every cell of her body was held tense, taut, frozen.

  “I couldn’t recall it; I lost so many memories. And she was wracked with guilt after the accident. She thought maybe I’d been drinking or something, mourning the demise of our relationship,” he spat the words, finding it impossible to conceal his anger with his ex-fiancé now, even when he knew her lie had been innocent enough.

  He sucked in a breath, trying to cool his temper. “I didn’t cheat on her with you. Whatever happened between us that weekend was honest. Whatever I said to you, I meant.”

  She was still not-moving. He made a growling sound and paced across the kitchen turning her in his arms. But her face was stricken, her eyes not meeting his.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” He demanded. “It was over between Arabella and me. Long over. We weren’t in love. The engagement had made sense but she knew I didn’t care for her the way she wanted. It was all very sensible. Amicable. And over.”

  Ellie shook her head. “But your parents – did they know?”

  He frowned. “Why does that matter?”

  She bit down on her lip. “I’m just trying to make sense of everything.”

  “They didn’t,” he said. “We decided we’d break it to them together – they adore Bella, like a daughter – and I was travelling so much. We hadn’t had a chance to tell them.”

>   “But I thought you were engaged,” she said, still unable to implicate his parents in all of this, even when her heart desperately wanted her to. “She announced herself at the hospital as your fiancé. You got married.”

  “She was caught between a rock and a hard place. My parents didn’t know we’d broken up and she didn’t want to tell them right after I’d been in an accident. Then I came to and didn’t even remember that we’d ever broken up. I thought she was my fiancé, and she believed it would be bad for me to go through our break up again. So she married me, when it was the last thing she wanted.”

  “Oh, God.” Elizabeth shook her head from side to side and stared at him. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “What?”

  She shoved him aside and ran to the kitchen bin, retching over it and vomiting, her back wracked with the movements. He closed the distance and rubbed a hand along her spine until she was done. And then, she straightened, shaking his touch away.

  “I wasn’t engaged, Elizabeth.”

  “God,” she swallowed, and he reached for a glass, pouring her a water. “I can’t believe this.”

  “I don’t understand? I thought you’d be pleased?”

  “Pleased?” She repeated with obvious disbelief. “Why the hell would I be pleased?”

  “Because I didn’t cheat on her. Or you. It was all genuine.”

  “But I would have known that if I’d told you about the pregnancy! Don’t you get it? I’ve put us both through hell because I chose to keep Joshua secret from you! At least when I thought you’d cheated, I believed us both to have done wrong. I almost thought you deserved to have missed out on having Josh in your life because you were such a lying bastard! Can’t you see that? We were both culpable, or so I thought. But that’s not true. It was all me, all my fault.”

  “No,” he spoke harshly, then frowned, because technically, he supposed, she was correct. But he couldn’t put the blame at her feet. Not when so many circumstances had been beyond her control.

  “Yes,” she nodded, sipping the water then placing the cup down so abruptly it splashed liquid out of the sides.