Accidental Mistress

Accidental Mistress
CATHY WILLIAMS

FROM HERE TO PATERNITY The bachelor and the baby! Lisa hadn't planned to fall in love. If only she hadn't accepted an invitation to be Angus Hamilton's guest and found herself in a different world, seduced by glamour, a jet-set-life-style… and Angus! She'd become an accidental mistress-and now she was accidentally pregnant!But Angus was more interested in living it up than in settling down. Yet suddenly he was delivering Lisa's baby-and loving every minute! Had fatherhood turned a dedicated playboy into perfect husband material?FROM HERE TO PATERNITY - men who find their way to fatherhood by fair means, by foul or even by default!

“I am not going to be your mistress.” (#u37bbc9a7-8dd4-5406-9171-614e9bc4624d)About the Author (#u32e9e2fc-e64e-583c-944d-201e7426b450)Title Page (#ua50f35fd-518b-5d01-9915-5b667bea0748)CHAPTER ONE (#uc74bbdf9-3445-5ce5-b937-fc3dd07bad17)CHAPTER TWO (#uf40d8308-37e3-5cb4-ac39-25a3dc2f0c4c)CHAPTER THREE (#u9ec9e071-a071-5953-9446-ac0b926d1351)CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

“I am not going to be your mistress.”

“Why not?” he asked in a low, furious tone. “What do you want? Marriage?” And when she didn’t answer, he carried on relentlessly. “Marriage is not for me.”

“And children?” Lisa flung at him.

“...are for other people, and good luck to them. I am offering you as much commitment as I’ve ever offered any woman. Take it!”

She could feel his eyes burning into her, but she refused to meet them. Did he expect her to abandon everything so she could spend an indefinite length of time living on a knife’s edge...?

FROM HERE TO PATERNITY—romances that feature fantastic men who eventually make fabulous fathers. Some seek paternity, some have it thrust upon them, all will make it—whether they like it or not!

CATHY WILLIAMS

is Trinidadian and was brought up on the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago. She was awarded a scholarship to study in Britain, and went to Exeter University in 1975 to continue her studies into the great loves of her life: languages and literature. It was there that Cathy met her husband, Richard. Since they married, Cathy has lived in England, originally in the Thames Valley but now in the Midlands. Cathy and Richard have three small daughters.

Accidental Mistress

Cathy Williams

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS raining very hard. Lisa Freeman pulled her coat tightly around her, wishing that she had had the sense to wear something waterproof instead of her thick navy blue coat which now seemed to be soaking up every wretched drop of water and growing heavier by the minute.

She also wished that she had had the sense to take a taxi to the airport instead of foolishly counting her pennies and deciding in favour of the bus, because the bus had been running late, so that she had spent the entire journey agonisingly looking at her watch every five minutes to make sure that she wouldn’t miss the plane. It had also deposited her further away from the terminal than she had expected, which had meant braving the rain with no hat, no raincoat, one suitcase and her hand luggage.

She dumped the suitcase on the pavement so that she could consult her watch for the millionth time and also give her arm a rest, and comforted herself with the thought that soon she would be flying away from all this appalling weather. Flying to sunny climes—or at least it would be sunny if the newspaper weather listings were anything to go by. Spain, she had read the day before, was warm. Not hot, because it was, after all, January, but warmer than wretched England with its never-ending clouds and wind and sleet and rain and depressing promises of more to come.

Through the driving rain, the airport terminal loomed in front of her, and she began to feel a little panicky. It was the first time she had ever been overseas. It was difficult to try and think back to exactly when she had started contemplating a holiday abroad. Certainly, as a child, she never had. Her time had been spent on the road, traipsing behind her parents as her father went from one job to another, settling down in cheap rented accommodation, only to be uprooted just when their lives appeared to be taking shape.

It wasn’t something that she had resented—at least not until she was old enough to realise that friends would never be a permanent fixture and that the only company she could rely on was her own.

Both her parents were now dead, but the legacy of the nomadic childhood they had subjected her to must have been more tenacious than she would ever have believed possible, because only within the last three years had that ferocious desire to be in one place, to be safe and secure, eased up sufficiently to allow daydreams of other countries to enter her head.

And until now, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, and in an era of cheap foreign travel, she had still never managed to get around to going anywhere out of the country because there had always seemed to be something better to spend her hard-earned money on.

Every year, for the past three years, she’d told herself that she would treat herself, every year she’d religiously collected a mouth-watering pile of brochures on places ranging from the Mediterranean to the Seychelles, every year she’d given herself a long, persuasive lecture on how much she would dearly love a break abroad, and every year she’d worked out the costs.

It had never been feasible. Anywhere like the Seychelles was out of the question. She’d only got the brochures because the pictures were so alluring. And the Mediterranean, while within the scope of her finances—just—had always been so carefully considered, each pro and con meticulously worked out, that in the end she’d always abandoned the idea. The spot of decorating in the living room surely needed doing before a two-week fling on the Costa del Sol. Then there was her car.

Her car, for the past three years, had always seemed to need some expensive repair work just when her savings had reached their optimum in the building society. She had begun to suspect that the heap of slowly disintegrating machinery had a mind of its own and the mind was telling it to make sure that its driver did not vacation abroad and leave it unused for two weeks.

But this time things had worked out for her.

She heaved the suitcase off the pavement, realising that it felt even heavier now that she had rested her arm for a few minutes, and thought about that envelope that had slipped into her letterbox three months before.

Never having won anything in her life before, and then suddenly winning a trip abroad had made it doubly exciting.

She smiled at the memory of it, stepped off the pavement with her eyes firmly focused on the terminal building ahead of her, which, through the driving rain, was only a blurred outline, and then what happened next became a somewhat confused sequence of events.

Had she slipped on the wet road? Had she stupidly not looked where she was going? Or had the driver of the car been as blinded by the rain as she had?

She just knew that she saw the car bearing down on her, moving quite slowly, although from where she was standing it seemed like a hundred miles an hour, at precisely the same time as the driver saw her step in front of it. There was a horrendous squeal of brakes and she felt a sharp burst of pain as the car swerved, but not enough to stop it from glancing against her leg.

She lay on the ground, unable to move, and all she could think was that she was going to miss her holiday. She had spent every waking hour looking forward to it and now she was going to miss it. She didn’t even stop to think that she was lucky—that things could have been worse.

Her leg was hurting badly, with a red-hot pain that made her grit her teeth, and in between the pain she had images of the plane taking off and merrily winging its way to sunny climes without her, and depositing all of its passengers onto the tarmac at the other end, less one, because here she was, lying on the ground, with what felt very much like a broken leg. Or at any rate a leg that wasn’t going to do much walking for a little while yet.

She moaned heavily, noticing that quite a crowd appeared to have gathered around her and also that her suitcase had thoughtfully split open and was revealing its cargo of sodden clothes to whoever cared to look.

‘I’ve called an ambulance from my car phone,’ a voice said from next to her and she turned her head slowly towards it. ‘It will be here any minute.’

The onlookers were crowding in to hear what was said, and the man, whoever he was, made a swift, authoritative movement with his hand. They shuffled back and within a few minutes most of them had dispersed.

Lisa looked at him. He had black hair, plastered against his face because of the rain, although that didn’t appear to bother him unduly, and the lines of his face were harsh and aggressive. Aggressive enough to have sent the circle of bystanders skittering away.

He looked down at her and the fuzzy, fleeting impression of someone quite good-looking crystallised into the most amazingly masculine face she had ever seen in her life. His features were hard, his eyes startingly blue, the face of a man born to give orders.

‘Are you an airport official?’ she asked faintly, and a glimmer of a smile curved his mouth.

‘Do I resemble an airport official?’ he asked. He had a nice voice, she thought, deep, lazy, with an undertone of amusement running through it that lent it a certain indefinable charm.

She heard the wail of the ambulance pelting towards them.

‘I hope it stops in time,’ she said with weak humour, no longer thinking of the missed holiday, simply relieved that she would soon be able to have some wonderful, numbing injection to take the pain away, ‘or else there will be a few more broken bodies lying around than they’d bargained for.’

The man, who was still bending over her and was not an airport official—stupid question really since she could see his expensive grey suit underneath the flaps of his overcoat and since when did airport officials wear expensive grey suits?—laughed. He had, she thought, closing her eyes and feeling rather light-headed and faint, a rather nice laugh as well. Warm and rich and vaguely unsettling. Or maybe the pain was just making her hallucinate slightly.

Then, through the swimming haze, she heard voices and the sounds of things happening and she felt someone carefully examining her, feeling her leg—but so skilfully that it didn’t hurt—and then everything moved quickly. Painkillers were administered, she was carried by stretcher into the back of the ambulance, still with her eyes closed, and that was all she remembered.

The next time she opened her eyes she was on a small bed, in a small room, with a doctor bending over her and a thermometer sticking sideways out of her mouth.

‘I’m Dr Sullivan,’ the man said, smiling, while the nurse who was standing next to the bed whipped the thermometer out of her mouth, looked at it, and then shook it so vigorously that Lisa, staring, felt quite faint. ‘Do you remember how you got here?’

She dragged her attention away from the nurse, now writing up some notes. ‘Hit by a car,’ she said with a faint smile. While clutching my battered suitcase, she could have added, and feeling terribly thrilled at the prospect of a holiday abroad.

‘You’ve suffered a fracture to your leg,’ the doctor said, ‘and quite a few bruises which will look far worse than they feel. I need not tell you that you were very lucky indeed.’

‘I would feel luckier if it hadn’t happened in the first place,’ Lisa said seriously, and the young doctor threw her a bemused look before smiling politely.

‘Of course you would, my dear,’ he said kindly, straightening up and consulting his watch. ‘But unfortunately these things happen. It does mean, however, that you’ll be with us for a couple of weeks, while everything knits back together. Nurse will show you where everything is, and I shall be back to have a look at you later on today.’