Contract Baby

‘It was kind of you to call in, Henry,’ she murmured quietly. ‘Tell your mother that I really appreciate all her kindness, but that I won’t be coming back to stay with you—’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Henry had gone all red in the face.

‘I just don’t want to marry you...I’m sorry.’

‘I’ll visit later in the week, when you’re feeling more yourself.’

As Henry departed, Polly reflected that she was actually feeling more herself than she had in many weeks. Stepping off the treadmill of exhaustion had given her space to think.

As she slowly, awkwardly raised herself, Raul appeared through a door on the far side of the courtyard. He angled a slashing, searching glance over the little clusters of patients taking the fresh air nearby. Screened by the shrubbery, Polly made no attempt to attract his attention.

His suit was palest grey. He exuded designer chic. In the sunlight, his luxuriant hair gleamed blue-black. His lean, strong face possessed such breathtaking sexy symmetry that her breathing quickened and her sluggish pulses raced. Raul radiated raw sexuality in virile waves. The media said that men thought about sex at least once a minute. One look at Raul was enough to convince her.

But a feeling of stark inadequacy and rejection now threatened her in Raul’s radius. How the heck had she ever believed that a male that gorgeous was interested in her? How wilfully blind she had been in Vermont! If a woman excited Raul, he probably pounced on the first date, or maybe he got pounced on, but he had never made a pass at her, or even tried to kiss her. At first he had made her as nervous as a cat on hot bricks. But before very long his exquisite manners and flattering interest in her had soothed her inexperienced squirmings in his presence and given her entirely the wrong impression.

Incredibly, she had believed that one of the world’s most notorious womanisers was actually a cautious and decent guy, mature enough to want to get to know a woman as a friend before trying to take the relationship any further. Remembering that fact now made Polly feel positively queasy. She had thought Raul was perfect; she had thought he was wonderful; she had thought he was really attracted to her because he continued to seek out her company...

Far from impervious to Raul’s cool exasperation when he finally espied her, lurking behind the shrubbery, Polly dropped her head, her shining fall of mahogany hair concealing her taut profile.

‘What are you doing out of bed?’ Raul demanded the instant he got within hailing distance. ‘I’ll take you back up to your room.’

‘I’m allowed out for fresh air as long as I don’t overdo it,’ Polly said thinly.

‘We’ll go inside,’ Raul decreed. ‘We can’t discuss confidential business here.’

Polly swung her legs off the lounger and got up. ‘Business? I’ve learnt the hard way that my baby is not a piece of merchandise.’

‘Do you really think I feel any different?’ Raul breathed with a raw, bitter edge to his rich, dark drawl. ‘Do you really think you’re the only one of us to have learnt from this mess?’

She couldn’t avoid looking at him in the lift. He stood opposite her, supremely indifferent to the two nurses in the corner studying him with keen female appreciation. He stared at Polly without apology, intense dark eyes welded broodingly to her heart-shaped face and the heated colour steadily building in her cheeks.

She had one question she desperately wanted to ask him. Why did a drop-dead gorgeous heterosexual male of only thirty-one feel the need to hire a surrogate mother to have his child? Why hadn’t he just got married? Or, alternatively, why hadn’t he simply persuaded one of his innumerable blonde bimbo babes into motherhood? Why surrogacy?

The minute Polly settled herself down on the sofa in her room, Raul breathed with a twist of his expressive mouth, ‘You’re still angry with me about Vermont. We should deal with that and get it out of the way...it’s clouding the real issues at stake here.’

At that statement of intent, Polly stiffened, and her skin prickled with shrinking apprehension. ‘Naturally I’m still angry, but I see no point in talking about it. That’s in the past now.’

Raul strolled over to the window. He dug a lean brown hand into the pocket of his well-cut trousers tightening the fit of the fine fabric over his narrow hips and long, muscular thighs. Polly found herself abstractedly studying a part of the male anatomy she had never in her life before studied, the distinctively manly bulge of his manhood. Flushing to the roots of her hair, she hurriedly looked away.

But it was so peculiar, she thought bitterly. So peculiar to be pregnant by a man she had never slept with, never been intimate with in any way. And Raul Zaforteza was all male, like a walking advertisement for high testosterone levels and virility. Why on earth had he chosen to have his child conceived by an anonymous insemination in a doctor’s surgery?

‘If I’m really honest, I wanted to meet you and talk to you right from the moment you signed the contract,’ Raul drawled tautly, interrupting her seething thoughts.

‘Why, for heaven’s sake?’

‘I knew my child would want to know what you were really like.’

A cold chill of repulsion trickled down Polly’s spine. So impersonal, so practical, so utterly unfeeling a motivation.

‘After your mother died, I was aware that you were in considerable distress,’ Raul continued levelly. ‘You needed support... who else was there to provide that support? If you hadn’t discovered that I was the baby’s father, you wouldn’t have been so upset. And isn’t it time you told me how you did penetrate that secret?’

In her mind’s eye, Polly pictured Soledad and all the numerous members of her equally dependent family being flung off the ancestral ranch the older woman had described in Venezuela. She gulped. ‘You gave yourself away. Your behaviour...well, it made me suspicious. I worked the truth out for myself,’ she lied stiltedly.

‘You’re a liar...Soledad told you,’ Raul traded without skipping a beat, shrewd dark eyes grimly amused by her startled reaction. ‘A major oversight on my part. Two women stuck all those weeks in the same house? The barriers came down and you became friendly—’

‘Soledad would never have betrayed you if you hadn’t come into my life without admitting who you were!’ Polly interrupted defensively. ‘She couldn’t cope with being forced to pretend that she didn’t know you.’

‘I was at fault there,’ Raul acknowledged openly, honestly, taking her by surprise. ‘I’m aware of that now. Vermont was a mistake...it personalised what should have remained impersonal and compromised my sense of honour.’

A mistake? A gracious admission of fault, an apology underwritten. Gulping back a spurt of angry revealing words, Polly swallowed hard. He was so smooth, so reasonable and controlled. She wanted to scratch her nails down the starkly handsome planes of those high cheekbones to make him feel for even one second something of what she had suffered!

‘So, now that you know how I found out, are Soledad and her family still working for you?’ Polly enquired stiffly.

Raul dealt her a wry smile. ‘Her family is, but Soledad has moved to Caracas to look after her grandchildren while her daughter’s at work.’

A light knock at the door announced the entry of a maid, bearing Polly’s afternoon tea. Raul asked for black coffee, it not occurring to him for one moment that as a visitor he might not be entitled to refreshment. Blushing furiously, the maid literally rushed to satisfy his request.

Cradling the coffee elegantly in one lean hand, Raul sank down lithely into the armchair opposite her. ‘Are you comfortable here?’

‘Very.’

‘But obviously it’s a challenge to fill the empty hours. I’ll get a video recorder sent in, some tapes, books...I know what you like,’ Raul asserted with complete confidence. ‘I should’ve thought of it before.’

‘I’m not happy with what this place must be costing you,’ Polly told him in a sudden rush. ‘Especially as I am not going to honour that contract.’

Raul scanned her anxious blue eyes. A slight smile momentarily curved his wide, sensual mouth. ‘You need some time and space to consider that decision. Right now, I have no intention of putting pressure on you—’

‘Just having you in the same room is pressure,’ Polly countered uncomfortably. ‘Having you pay my bills makes it even worse.’

‘Whatever happens, I’m still the father of your baby. That makes you my responsibility.’

‘The softly, softly, catchee monkey routine won’t work with me... I’m so fed up with people telling me that I don’t know what I want, or that I don’t know what I’m doing.’ Polly raised her small head high and valiantly clashed with brilliant black eyes as sharp as paint. ‘The truth is that I’ve grown up a lot in the last few months...’

Raul held up a fluid and silencing hand in a gesture that came so naturally to him that she instinctively closed her lips. ‘In swift succession over the past year or so you have lost the three people you cared about most in this world. Your father, your mother and your godmother. That is bound to be affecting your judgement and your view of the future. All I want to do is give you another possible view.’

Setting aside his empty coffee cup, he rose gracefully upright again. Polly watched him nervously, the tip of her tongue stealing out to moisten the dry curve of her lower lip.

Raul’s attention dropped to the soft, generous pink curve of her mouth and lingered, and she felt the oddest buzzing current in the air, her slight frame automatically tensing in reaction. Raul stiffened, the dark rise of blood emphasising the slashing line of his hard cheekbones. Swinging on his heel, he strode over to the window and pushed it wider.

‘It’s stuffy in here... As I was saying, an alternative view of the future,’ he continued flatly. ‘You can’t possibly want to marry that little jerk Henry Grey—’

Taken aback, Polly sat up straighter. ‘How do you know?’

His chiselled profile clenched into aggressive lines. ‘He’s just being greedy...he wouldn’t look twice at a woman expecting another man’s child unless she was an heiress!’

Polly flinched at that revealing assertion. ‘So you found out about my godmother’s will...’

‘Naturally...’ Raul skimmed an assured glance in her direction. ‘And the good news is that you don’t have to marry Henry to inherit that money and make a new start. You’re only twenty-one; you have your whole life in front of you. Why clog it up with Henry? He’s a pompous bore. I’m prepared to give you that million pounds to dump him!’