The Secret He Must Claim

Elin was saved from answering as she entered the library and Peter Carstairs immediately got up from an armchair. ‘Elin, Jarek, I am sure this is a difficult day for you and I will endeavour not to take up too much of your time.’

‘Thank you.’ Elin wondered why the normally affable solicitor seemed tense. ‘Would you like a drink?’

‘No, thank you. I think we should proceed.’ Mr Carstairs moved to the chair behind the desk and Elin followed her brother over to the sofa. She suddenly remembered that Baines had said he had shown two men into the library, but before she could suggest that they wait until the solicitor’s clerk returned—presumably he was visiting the cloakroom—Mr Carstairs picked up a document and began to read from it.

He began by announcing several small bequests that Ralph Saunderson had made to members of the household staff. ‘Next we come to the Saunderson’s estate winery.’ The solicitor cleared his throat. ‘I leave a fifty per cent share of the vineyards and winery to my adopted daughter Elin Dvorska Saunderson.’

Elin felt a jolt of surprise. She had assumed that Ralph would hand the entire ownership of the estate winery to her. She’d worked as production manager for the past eighteen months and was committed to fulfilling Lorna Saunderson’s vision of producing world class English sparkling wine. Jarek had never shown any interest in the vineyards and winery, but perhaps Ralph had hoped his heir would become more involved in developing Saunderson’s Wines, she reasoned.

She was vaguely aware of the library door opening and heard a faint click as it closed again, but her attention was on Mr Carstairs and she did not look round to see who had entered the room. The solicitor gave another nervous cough. ‘There is a stipulation attached to the bequest, Elin. Mr Saunderson decreed that you must marry within one year and provide your son with a father before you can claim your inheritance. If you choose not to fulfil the obligation, your share of Saunderson’s Wines will revert to your adoptive father’s main heir.’

Shock rendered Elin speechless. She knew her adoptive father had disapproved of her being a single mother but once Harry had been born he’d seemed delighted with the baby. ‘I can’t believe Ralph would really have expected me to meet the terms of his will,’ she said at last in a shaky voice. ‘Or that a judge would uphold such an outrageous stipulation if I contested the will.’

‘Mr Saunderson was completely within his rights to distribute his assets in any manner he saw fit,’ the solicitor murmured. ‘I have to advise you that there are no grounds on which you could contest your father’s wishes.’

Her brother reached over and squeezed Elin’s hand. ‘You know Ralph liked to play his little games,’ he said sardonically. ‘This is just his way of trying to maintain control from beyond the grave. Don’t worry, Ellie. Your share of the wine business will come to me if you haven’t married in a year and I’ll sign the whole of Saunderson’s Wines over to you. I have no desire to toil in the vineyards.’ Jarek glanced at the solicitor. ‘Do you mind getting on with it? I have other things to do today.’

Mr Carstairs cleared his throat again. ‘There are only two further items.’ He continued to read the will. ‘I leave two properties, Rose Cottage and Ivy Cottage, to my adopted children, Jarek and Elin, to live in or dispose of according to their wishes.’

Why had Ralph made the odd bequest? Elin’s feeling of unease grew. It did not make sense. Her brother was Ralph’s heir and would inherit the entire Cuckmere estate, which included Cuckmere Hall, two thousand acres of Sussex farmland, woodland and vineyards, plus thirty-five cottages and the pub in Little Bardley. She knotted her fingers together in her lap while Mr Carstairs continued.

‘Finally, I give everything I own at my death, excluding the aforementioned bequests, all monies and properties and also the position of chairman of Saunderson’s Bank, of which it is my right to appoint my successor, to my only natural son, Cortez Ramos.’

Silence. Lasting for what felt like a lifetime. Elin pressed her hand to her chest to try and ease the violent thud of her heart as the solicitor’s words reverberated around her head.

Cortez.

It couldn’t be the Cortez she’d had sex with a year ago. It must be a ghastly coincidence, she frantically told herself. But her sense of dread intensified when she remembered the dark figure she’d caught sight of in the graveyard. What did Ralph’s astonishing will mean for her and Jarek? For her son? Her heart felt as if it would jump out of her chest. Fear, she realised. The certainty of the future that she had taken for granted had just been blown apart.

She was aware that her brother had stiffened but as always he kept tight control over his emotions. ‘Is this some kind of joke, Carstairs?’ Jarek drawled. ‘You know full well that Ralph and Lorna Saunderson were unable to have children and so they adopted my sister and I. Ralph did not have a natural son and this Cortez Ramos, whoever he is, cannot have any legal claim to my adoptive father’s estate.’

Before Mr Carstairs could reply, a voice spoke from the back of the room. A deep voice with a husky accent that Elin had heard too often in her dreams in the past year. ‘Ralph did not have a legitimate natural son, but he had a bastard.’ The voice became harsh. ‘I am Ralph Saunderson’s biological son and heir.’

Elin felt her stomach twist. This can’t be happening, she thought, prayed. If I turn my head, he won’t be there and this whole nightmare will have been a dream. She jerked her head round and her heart juddered to a standstill. At her birthday party a year ago she’d thought him the most beautiful man she’d ever seen, but Cortez was even more stunning than her memories of him.

‘So it was you I saw in the church,’ she choked. ‘I thought I’d recognised you, but there was no reason why you should be there...or so I believed.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper as the shock of seeing him stole her breath from her lungs.

Jarek had leapt up from the sofa. He looked at Cortez and back to Elin. ‘Do you know this man?’

She swallowed, desperately trying to block out the images in her mind of Cortez’s naked, powerfully muscular body poised above her as she lay sprawled on her bed at the house in Kensington. His dark olive skin a stark contrast to her paleness as he pushed her dress up around her waist and nudged her thighs apart. A bold conquistador laying claim to his prize. At least all that sleek, hard beauty was clothed today, but the formality of his charcoal-grey suit that he wore with a black shirt and tie did not lessen the impact of his raw masculinity.

‘We...we met once,’ she managed. The gold flecks in Cortez’s dark eyes gleamed with what Elin furiously recognised was amusement. Never had she been more grateful for her reserved English upbringing with its emphasis on controlling her emotions. ‘It was an unmemorable event,’ she said coolly.

Her brother frowned. ‘Did you know of his alleged relationship to Ralph?’

‘Of course not.’ The faint suspicion in Jarek’s eyes felt like a knife in her heart. She owed her life to her brother. If it hadn’t been for him, God knew what would have happened to her when Sarajevo had been attacked and a bomb had landed on the orphanage. ‘If I’d had any inkling I would have told you.’

Elin bit her lip as her brother strode across the library and flung open the door. ‘Jarek—where are you going?’ She carefully did not look at Cortez as she hurried past him, but she was conscious of his tall, brooding presence and the evocative spicy scent of his aftershave tugged on her senses.

‘You know why Ralph has done this, don’t you?’ Jarek said bitterly when Elin caught up with him in the entrance hall. ‘He blamed me for Mama’s death. And he was right. I should have saved her.’

‘There was nothing you could have done against an armed raider. It wasn’t your fault. Jarek...’ Elin’s hand fell from her brother’s arm as he spun away from her and grabbed his motorbike helmet from the hall table.

‘If I hadn’t tried to be a hero, Lorna would still be here. I took a gamble when I tackled the gunman, but the gamble failed. I understand why Ralph excluded me from his will but he had no reason to cut you out.’ Jarek opened the front door and turned to face her. ‘Do you know what I wish?’ he said rawly. ‘I wish that when we were held hostage in the raid on the jewellers the goddamned gunman had shot me instead of Mama. It’s obvious that’s what Ralph wished.’

‘Oh, please be careful.’ Elin wanted to go after her brother when he ran down the front steps and leapt onto his motorbike parked on the drive, but Peter Carstairs came out of the library and spoke to her.

‘Mr Ramos was kind enough to give me a lift here and I arranged for a taxi to collect me,’ he said as a car turned onto the driveway. ‘I’m sorry to have been the harbinger of bad news, my dear. This must all be a great shock.’

The solicitor was the master of the understatement, Elin thought with a flash of macabre humour. ‘My father died from a brain tumour. Is it possible that he was not of sound mind when he made Cortez Ramos his heir? Do we even know for sure that Mr Ramos is Ralph’s son?’

She tensed when she saw Cortez standing in the doorway of the library and realised he must have overheard her. Too bad, she thought grimly. She was fighting for her and her brother’s inheritance and, more importantly, for her son’s future.

Harry was Cortez’s son.

Oh, God, she couldn’t think about the implications now, or how she was going to break the news to the granite-faced stranger she’d had sex with one time that he had fathered a child. She heard Jarek’s motorbike roar off down the drive and a knot of fear for his safety tightened in her stomach.

The solicitor shook his head. ‘Mr Saunderson was definitely of sound mind when he asked me to draw up a new will for him six months or so after his wife’s death. I believe he had suspected for some time that Mr Ramos could be his son and when a DNA test proved it, he invited his son here to Cuckmere Hall. He asked me to draw up the new will on the same day that Mr Ramos visited, on the third of March a year ago.’

‘The third of March is my birthday,’ Elin said faintly. The realisation that her adoptive father had written his extraordinary will, which effectively left her penniless, on her birthday, felt like a devastating betrayal. There was no possibility of her marrying within a year so that she could claim a fifty per cent share of Saunderson’s Wines.

She felt bombarded by one shock after another, and on top of the worry about her future she was terrified that her brother would risk his life riding his motorbike dangerously fast. She felt the same sensation of being unable to breathe that she’d experienced two nights ago in a crowded nightclub. Her legs buckled beneath her, and as if from a long way off she heard Cortez swear.

CHAPTER THREE (#u22f8934d-e6c4-51e2-a156-7cfcba9ca0e0)

ELIN WEIGHED NEXT to nothing, Cortez discovered as he sprang forwards and caught her before she hit the floor. Her fragility was the first thing that had struck him when he’d seen her standing at the front of the church. Was her slender figure the result of dieting to be fashionably thin, or was there a more sinister reason? he wondered as he strode into the library with her in his arms.

Two days ago, pictures of her being carried out of a London nightclub had been plastered over the front pages of the tabloids. There had been speculation that she’d taken cocaine or another recreational drug, popular on the club scene. Is this proof that Elin has resumed her party lifestyle? had been one headline.

Cortez had been annoyed with himself for pandering to his curiosity and buying the newspaper to read the full story. The references to Elin’s party girl reputation of a year ago, before she had mysteriously dropped off the paparazzi’s radar for a few months, had made him shove the paper into the rubbish bin in disgust.

What the hell had possessed him to have sex with her when he’d unwittingly gatecrashed her party? The answer felt like a punch in his gut. The same punch that had made him catch his breath when he’d watched her dancing at her party. Desire. Uncontrollable, ferocious desire had shot through him like a lightning bolt.

Unbidden memories pushed into his mind of Elin wearing a low-cut red dress that barely covered her pert breasts. Her pale blonde hair fell in a silken curtain around her shoulders, framing her exquisite face with its elfin features and a wide mouth that was entirely sensual. The moment he’d seen her he’d been unable to take his eyes off her. Even knowing what she was—a spoilt little rich girl who cared about nothing other than where the next party was being held and—if the press stories about her were true—where she could get her next fix—hadn’t lessened his hunger for her.

It was a little over twelve months ago when he had come to England after he’d received the result of a DNA test which confirmed he was Ralph Saunderson’s son. Ralph had invited him to Cuckmere Hall, and Cortez had gone because he could not deny he was curious to meet his biological father, who had abandoned his mother when she was pregnant. He had already discovered that Ralph was wealthy and the Saundersons were an old aristocratic family.

Driving through the vast Cuckmere estate on his way up to the mansion, Cortez had felt bitter remembering how his mother had worked herself literally into an early grave. Thirty-five years ago, Marisol Ramos had been pregnant and alone, abandoned by her lover and shunned by her family in Spain. She had managed to establish a small vineyard in Andalucía and from almost as soon as Cortez could walk he had helped his mother tend the vines and harvest the grapes. The bodega had produced a fine sherry, but it couldn’t compete with the big sherry producers in the sherry triangle in south-west Spain. Life had been hard, and when his mother had died at the age of forty-two Cortez had been convinced that she’d simply felt too exhausted to carry on living.

When he had finally met Ralph Saunderson the only emotion he’d felt was anger that his father had consigned his mother to a life of poverty and hardship. At the time of his visit to Cuckmere Hall the English press had been full of stories about Ralph’s adopted son and daughter’s jet set lifestyle, in particular Elin’s wild partying. But the pictures of her in the newspapers and her photo on Ralph’s desk that had caught Cortez’s attention had not prepared him for the impact she had on him when he saw her dancing at her birthday party.

He jerked his mind from the past as Elin’s eyelashes fluttered open. For a few seconds she stared at him with her dark blue eyes that had reminded him of sapphires when he’d danced with her a year ago. He recalled how she had pressed her body up close to his. As close as she was now, except that then she had been soft and pliant in his arms and she’d parted her lush mouth in an invitation he had been unable to resist.

That should have been a warning, he thought grimly. He never had a problem resisting women. He was always in control and when he took a mistress it was always on his terms, with rules and boundaries established first. Falling into bed with Elin had broken every rule he’d imposed on himself since he’d fallen in love with Alandra in his early twenties and she had shattered his illusions about love and his own judgement.

‘What are you doing? Put me down.’

Cortez heard panic in Elin’s voice and he felt a stab of irritation when he lowered her onto the sofa and she immediately recoiled from him as if he were infected with a contagious disease. She hadn’t behaved like that a year ago, he brooded. She’d been all over him then. He walked across to the desk, where the butler had left a tray of drinks, and tried to dismiss the memory of Elin sprawled on a bed with her red dress rucked up around her waist and her pale thighs spread wide open.