The Millionaire's Love-Child

‘Friends fall out.’

‘And lovers?’

She took a breath, swallowed. God! What was she doing? She stole a covert glance in Warren’s direction. He was looking at her—at them both, displaying a shock that matched Katrina’s moments before when she had realised where her friend was headed. She flashed Brant another smile, and in a voice as silvery as the threads running through her clinging black dress, murmured, ‘And you, Mr Cadman…’

‘Brant.’

‘Are you…involved?’

He seemed to consider her question, before lifting his hands. They were long and well-tapered. ‘I’m as you see me. I’m not, however, quite so sure about you.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

His eyes strayed to Warren and the blonde, who were now dancing to a slow, sultry blues number.

‘She’s welcome to him.’ She tried desperately for nonchalance, her lashes veiling the dark anguish in her eyes. ‘She’ll find out he’s a louse.’

‘And you think I’m not?’

She lifted her chin, her lips a scarlet invitation to him, though she was dying inside. ‘Are you?’

‘Do you know what I think?’ he said.

‘What?’

He reached to take the glass out of her hand, put it on the bar.

‘I think you’ve had too much to drink.’

‘No, I haven’t.’ In truth, she had had barely two glasses, but on an empty stomach, having eaten very frugally for days because of her misery and then her apprehension over having to facing Warren with Caroline, it had obviously been too much.

‘OK, so you haven’t,’ he accepted, humouring her. ‘So tell me about Annie Talbot.’

She had been surprised that he remembered her name. When Warren had introduced her to him at that seminar two months before, he had been distracted by someone leaning over to say something to him, and she’d thought he hadn’t even heard. But obviously the man was as astute as he was dangerous, she thought with an unexpected little shiver, wondering why her brain should conjure up such a profound adjective in connection with him.

Wrinkling her nose, however, she murmured, ‘Far too boring. I’d rather talk about you.’

‘Would you?’ He made it sound like a reprimand so that at first she thought he wasn’t going to comply. But then he shrugged and said, ‘I’m thirty-two years old. Six feet two inches tall. Difficult to live with and have been chastised for more than just having a bad temper in my time. I also never make a habit of seducing young women on the rebound.’

‘Very commendable,’ Annie purred. Her legs felt like two tubs of lead and her face was aching from the need to keep on smiling.

‘Shall we dance?’ he suggested, and when she nodded led her towards the small polished circle where Warren and his lovely model swayed with eyes only for each other.

‘What would you like me to do?’ Brant enquired as he took Annie in his arms. ‘Punch him on the nose?’

Was her misery that obvious? she thought, and made a special effort to laugh.

‘Now, why would I want that?’ she breathed, her devil-may-care attitude bringing her hands across the wide sweep of his shoulders. ‘It really isn’t that important,’ she said, then gasped as his arm tightened like a steel bar against the small of her back, drawing her against his hard body.

She trembled in his arms and her mouth went dry. She felt slightly giddy from the heady musk of his cologne. Suddenly she realised what a dangerous game she was playing, that she was way, way out of her league. What did it matter though, she thought, if she could keep everyone from guessing how she was really feeling? Salve her pride and her dignity and her self-respect?

But the effort of pretending she didn’t care was wearing her out. Her head was aching now and her energy seemed to have deserted her. Also, behind them, Warren and the model were entwined in an intimate clinch, mouths devouring each other in a way that was overtly sexual.

Annie tried not to notice, but she couldn’t avoid it. Almost inaudibly she groaned, dipped her head, and felt the soft wool of Brant’s jacket against her forehead.

It was a far too intimate action, but one she could no more have avoided making than waking in the morning. As she swayed, she heard Brant say gently, ‘Come on.’

She hadn’t intended to wind up in his room. Any more than he, she felt, had intended they should wind up in bed. Not together anyway. He had simply been intending she should rest, she was certain, when he had carried her, like a rag doll, into his bedroom and laid her down on the cool, sensuous cotton of the duvet. Her head burned and she was racked by a tense excitement she had never known before. She watched him discard his jacket and tie before he came back and sat down beside her, asked if she was all right.

It was that one light kiss that had done it, that gentle probing of her lips before he made to move away that had her clutching at his shirt like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood. ‘Stay with me,’ foolishly she had murmured.

By the time she had realised the implications of what she was saying—doing—she was in the grip of a subjugating passion she had no will or desire to control. She had used him to blot out her misery, and didn’t expect after one mind-blowing climax in Brant’s bed that Warren Maddox would blur into insignificance, that in the morning her overriding emotion would be raw shame. Because how strong must her feelings for her fiancé have been in the first place, she wondered, if she could be reduced to such a wanton, sobbing creature, craving fulfilment by a man she’d merely seduced while on the rebound?

Rising before he was even awake, she raced home to pack, rang her boss to quit her job, then fled to Provence and anonymity.

It was when she had returned from France two months later that Katrina had told her Brant was married. Annie hadn’t seen him again until he had turned up at the flat the previous afternoon. Warren, as far as she had been aware, had moved in with his precious model. And, of course, when she had returned to England she had been in the early stages of pregnancy with Sean.

Brant had driven the pain of Warren’s betrayal away, only to replace it with a shaming humiliation. And with what skill and expertise! she thought now, trying not to dwell too deeply on the devastating few hours she had spent in his arms, telling herself again that she would be a fool to throw herself back into them, no matter how dangerously her hormones reacted to him. He had simply taken what she had had to offer at the time and then gone off and married Naomi Fox, and she had no one to blame but herself.

But one thing he wasn’t going to do was take Sean away! she determined, forcing herself up out of the chair and throwing herself into unnecessary household chores to try and keep her raging anxieties at bay.

And later, as soon as it was a respectable time to do so, unable to wait a minute longer, she did as he had advised, picked up the phone and tapped out the international dialling code for New Zealand.

CHAPTER THREE

ANNIE tried to concentrate on the little miniature painting, but nothing was working. Neither her brain, nor her fingers, nor her brush. Even the paint she was using for her foreground on the smooth translucent surface had blended with her horizon to create an unwanted, indistinct blur.

Like her life, Annie thought. Or at least how it had become since Brant had turned up there five days ago, threatening everything she valued, loved.

He was coming round at twelve to take her back to his home so that she could meet the little boy the hospital claimed was hers.

Annie’s hands trembled as she discarded the painting she had started earlier in the hope of losing herself in something useful, because as much as she was longing for this meeting, now that the time was almost upon her she was afraid, too.

How would she react when she came face to face with the toddler? This child to whom she was supposed to have given birth? Would she feel any maternal bond? Anything? Would she recognise him? Would there be some instinctive feeling in him towards her? And if there was, what would she do then? Because she couldn’t—wouldn’t—give up Sean.

‘He’s ours, Annie. Of course he is!’ She remembered Jane Talbot’s words coming shrilly across miles of ocean the evening she had rung her parents. ‘It doesn’t matter how many tests they say they have to do. They’ll only show up that he’s ours. Oh, my goodness! I want to come over,’ the woman had raced on. ‘I wish I could come right away, but I can’t leave your father. He needs me too much at the moment. Whatever am I going to do?’

Annie had been grateful that she had spoken to her father first; that he had been nearest the phone to pick it up when she had rung, because she hadn’t been able to stop herself breaking down, let alone cope with her mother’s hysterics as well. Though he had been naturally shocked and unhappy when she had told him that the grandson they adored might not be their grandson at all, Simon Talbot had taken it as he took everything life threw at him, good or bad. In his quiet, rational and unruffled way.

‘Annie. Annie,’ he’d soothed, hiding his own distress in an attempt to console his daughter. ‘This man Cadman and his wife…they’re going to feel the same way as you do. Of course they are. They won’t want to give up the child they’ve been bringing up as their own. They might want visitation rights to what might be their natural child—just as you might—but they—’

‘No, Dad. You don’t understand.’ She hadn’t made it clear, she had realised then. ‘Brant’s lost his wife. Therefore he’s got even more reason to want to take my baby away—because he’s part of her. Part of what he’s lost. Don’t you see…?’

From the silence that came across the miles, Annie had realised that he did. She could visualize his dear, familiar face, those character lines deepening beneath the black and grey peppered hair, his lean frame partially immobilised as he lounged, frustrated at having to relinquish his golf and his sailing, but most of all his staunch independence, to the ministrations of his easily overwrought wife.

‘If he’s a reasonable man, he wouldn’t hurt you like that, Annie. He’ll see it your way as well.’

But would he? Annie thought now, remembering her father’s words, as well as how exhausted she had been after she had come off the phone.