His Child: The Mistress's Child / Nathan's Child / D'Alessandro's Child

He shook his head. ‘No, thanks. Coffee would be good, though.’

She was glad of the opportunity to escape to the kitchen and busy herself with the cafetière. She carried it back in with a plate of biscuits to find him standing where she had left him, only now he was staring deep into the heart of the fire with unseeing eyes.

He took the cup from her and gave a small smile of appreciation. ‘Real coffee,’ he murmured.

At that moment she really, really hated him. Did he have any idea just how patronising that sounded? ‘What did you expect?’ she asked acidly. ‘The cheapest brand of instant on the market?’

He shook his head, still dazed by the emotional impact of seeing his son. ‘You’re right—if anything was cheap it was my remark.’

And what about the others? she wanted to cry out. The intimation that she had deliberately got pregnant. Wasn’t that the cheapest remark a man could ever make to a woman? He wasn’t taking those back, was he?

‘So who else knows?’ he demanded.

Lisi blinked. ‘Knows what?’

‘About Tim,’ he said impatiently. ‘How many others are privy to the secret I was excluded from?

She shook her head. ‘No one. No one knows.’

‘No-one at all?’ he queried disbelievingly.

‘No. Why should they? As far as anyone knew—we simply had a professional relationship. Even Jonathon thought that—and nobody was aware that I went up to your room at the hotel that night.’ She shuddered, thinking how sordid that sounded. She bit her lip. ‘The only person I told was my mother, just before she died.’

‘You told her the whole story?’ he demanded incredulously.

Again, she shook her head. ‘I edited it more than a bit.’

‘Was she shocked?’

Lisi shrugged. ‘A little, but I made it sound…’ She hesitated. She had made it sound as though she had been in love with him, and that bit she had found surprisingly easy. ‘I made it sound rather more than it had been.’ And her mother had pleaded with her to contact him. But then the bit she had omitted to tell her mother had been that Philip had already been married.

He looked at her and gave a heavy smile. ‘My parents will want to meet him,’ he said, wondering just how he was going to tell his elderly parents that he, too, was a parent.

‘Your p-parents?’

His eyes were steady. ‘But of course. What did you expect?’

What had she expected? Well, for one thing—she had expected to live the rest of her life without ever seeing Philip again. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I haven’t really thought it through.’

‘He’s in my life now, too, Lisi,’ he said simply. ‘And I don’t come in a neat little box marked ‘‘Philip Caprice’’—to be opened up at will and shut again when it suits you. I have family who will want to get to know him. And friends, too.’

And girlfriends? she wondered. Maybe even one particular girlfriend who was very special to him? Maybe even… She raised troubled aquamarine eyes to his. ‘Have you married, again, Philip?’ she asked quietly.

‘No.’

She felt the fierce, triumphant leap of her heart and despaired at herself. Fool, she thought. Fool! ‘So where do we go from here?’

He despised himself for the part of him which wanted to say, Let’s go to bed—because even though the distance between them was so vast that he doubted whether it could ever be mended, that didn’t stop him from being turned on by her. He shifted uncomfortably in the chair. Very turned on indeed. He met her questioning gaze with a look of challenge. ‘You tell Tim about me as soon as possible.’

Her mouth fell open. ‘Tell him?’

‘Of course you tell him!’ he exploded softly. ‘I’m back, Lisi—and I’m staking my claim.’

It sounded so territorial. So loveless. ‘Oh, I see,’ she said slowly.

He narrowed his eyes. ‘Just how were you planning to explain to him about his father? If I hadn’t turned up.’

‘I honestly don’t know. It’s not something I ever gave much thought to. He’s so young, and whenever he asked I just said that Mummy and Daddy broke up before he was born and that I hadn’t seen you since.’ It had seemed easier to bury her head in the sand than to confront such a painful issue. ‘Maybe one day I might have told him who his real father was.’

‘When?’ he demanded. ‘When he was five? Six? Sixteen?’

‘When the time was right.’

‘And maybe the time never would have been right, hmm, Lisi? Did you think you could get away with keeping me anonymous for the rest of his life, so that the poor kid would never know he had a father?’

She met the burning accusation in his eyes and couldn’t pretend. Not about this. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered.

He rose to his feet. ‘Well, just make sure you do it. And soon. I don’t care how you do it—just tell him!’

She nodded. She wanted him gone now—with as long a space until his next visit as possible. ‘And when will we see you again? Some time after Christmas?’

He heard the hopeful tinge to her question and gave a short laugh. ‘Hard luck, Lisi,’ he said grimly. ‘I’m afraid that I’m not going to just conveniently disappear from your life again. I’m intending to be around quite a bit. Just call it making up for lost time, if it makes you feel better. And it’s Christmas very soon.’

‘Christmas?’ she echoed, in a horrified whisper.

‘Sure.’ His mouth hardened into an implacable line. ‘I was tempted to buy him a birthday present today, but I didn’t want to confuse him. However, there’s only a week to go until Christmas and some time between now and then he needs to know who I am.’ His eyes glittered. ‘Because you can rest assured that I will be spending part of the holiday with him.’

She wanted to cry out and beg him not to disrupt the relatively calm order of her life, but as she looked into Philip’s strong, cold face she knew that she would be wasting her breath. He wasn’t going to go away, she recognised, and if she tried to stop him then he would simply bring in the best lawyers that money could buy in order to win contact with his child. She didn’t need to be told to know that.

‘Understood?’ he asked softly.

‘Do I have any choice?’

‘I think you know the answer to that. Don’t worry about seeing me to the door. I’ll let myself out.’

As if in a dream she watched him go and shut the front door quietly behind him, and only when she had heard the last of his footsteps echoing down the path did she allow herself to sink back down onto the chair and to bury her head in her hands and take all that was left to her.

The comfort of tears.

CHAPTER SIX

LISI was woken by the sound of the telephone ringing, and as she picked it up she was aware that something was not as it should be.

‘Hello?’

‘Lisi, it’s Marian.’

Sleepily, Lisi wondered what her boss was doing ringing her this early in the morning… She sat bolt upright in bed. That was it! That was what was not right! She had overslept—she could tell that much by the light which was filtering through the curtains. ‘What time is it?’ she asked urgently.