The Paternity Claim

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CHAPTER ONE (#udba95c75-b5a0-5baa-99a9-fcc1b1649662)

COME on, come on! With a frustration born out of fear, Isabella jammed her thumb on the doorbell one last time and let it ring and ring, long enough to wake the dead—and certainly long enough to rouse the occupant of the elegant London townhouse. Just in case he hadn’t heard her the first time round.

But there was nothing other than the sound of the bell echoing and her hand fell to her side as she forced herself to accept the unthinkable. That he wasn’t there. That she would have to make a return journey—if she could summon up the courage to come here for a second time.

And then the door was flung open with a force of a powerhouse—and one very angry man stood looking down at her, his crisp dark head still damp and shining from the shower. Tiny droplets of water sparkled among the brown-black waves of his hair. Lit from behind, it almost looked as though he were wearing a halo—though the expression on his face was about as unangelic as you could get.

His black eyes glittered with irritation at this unwelcome intrusion and Isabella felt her heart begin to race. Because even in her current nerve-jangled state of crisis his physical impact was like a shock to the senses.

He was wearing nothing but a deep blue towel which was slung low around narrow olive hips and came to midway down a pair of impressively muscled thighs. Half of his chin was covered with shaving foam and in his hand he held an old-fashioned cut-throat razor which glinted silver beneath the gleam of the chandelier overhead.

Isabella swallowed. She had seen his magnificent body in swimming trunks many, many times—but never quite so intimately naked.

‘Yes?’ he snapped, in an accent which did not match the Brazilian ancestry of his looks and a tone which suggested that he was not the kind of man to tolerate interruption. ‘Where’s the fire?’

‘Hello, Paulo,’ she said quietly.

For the split second before his brain started making sense of the information it was receiving, Paulo stared impatiently at the woman who was standing on his doorstep looking up at him with such wary expectation in her eyes.

He ignored the sensual, subliminal messages which her sultry beauty was hot-wiring to his body, because his overriding impression was how ridiculously exotic she looked.

She wore a brand-new raincoat which came right down to a pair of slender ankles, so that only her face was on show. A face covered with droplets of rain from the summer shower, her dark hair plastered to her head. Huge, golden-brown eyes—like lumps of old and expensive amber—were fringed with the longest, blackest lashes he had ever seen. Her lips were lush, and unpainted. And trembling, he thought with a sudden frown. Trembling…

She looked like a lost and beautiful waif, and a warning bell clanged deep within the recesses of his mind. He knew her, and yet somehow he also knew that she shouldn’t be here.

Wrong place. Definitely.

‘Hello,’ he murmured, while his mind raced ahead to slot her into her rightful place.

‘Why, Paulo,’ she said softly, thinking for one unimaginable moment that he actually didn’t recognise her. ‘I wrote and told you that I was coming—didn’t you get my letter?’

The moment she spoke a complete sentence, the facts fell into place. Her accent matched her dark, Latin looks—although her English was as fluent as his. The almond-shaped eyes set in a skin which was the seamless colour of cappuccino. The quiet gleam of black hair which lay plastered against her skull by the rain.

The last time he had seen her, she had been standing illuminated by the brilliant sunshine of a South American day. Her silk shirt had been stretched with outrageous provocation over her ripe, young breasts and there had been the dark stain of sweat beneath her arms. He had wanted her in that moment. And maybe before that, too.

Resolutely he pushed that particular thought away, even as his eyes began to soften with affection. No wonder he hadn’t recognised her, against the grey and teaming backdrop of an English summer day, looking cold and hunched. And dejected.

‘Isabella! Meu Deus! I can’t believe it!’ he exclaimed, and he leaned forward to kiss her on each cheek. The normal and formal Latin American greeting, but rather bizarre and unsettling—considering that he was wearing next to nothing. He noticed that although she offered him each cool cheek, she shrank away from any contact with his bare skin. And he offered up a silent prayer of thanks.

‘Come in,’ he urged. ‘Are you on your own?’

‘M-my own?’

He frowned. ‘Is your father here with you?’

Isabella swallowed. ‘No. No, he’s not.’

He opened the door wider and she stepped inside.

‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me you were coming?’ he demanded. ‘This is so—’

‘Unexpected?’ she put in quickly. ‘Yes, I know it is.’ She nodded her head in rapid agreement—but then she was prepared to agree to almost anything if he would only help her. She didn’t know how—she just knew that Paulo Dantas was the kind of man who could cope with anything that life threw at him. ‘But you got my letter, didn’t you?’ she asked.

He nodded thoughtfully. It had been an oddly disjointed letter mentioning that she might be coming to England sometime soon. But he had thought of soon in terms of years. He certainly wasn’t expecting her now, not yet—when she was still at university. ‘Yeah, I got your letter. But that was a couple of months back.’

She had written it the day she had found out for sure. The day she realised the trouble she was in. ‘I shouldn’t have just burst in on you like this. I tried ringing, but the line was engaged and so I knew you were here and I…I…’

Her voice faded away, unsure where to go from here. In her mind she had practised what she was going to say over and over again, but the disturbing sight of a near-naked Paulo had startled her, and the carefully rehearsed words were stubbornly refusing to come. Not, she thought grimly, that it was the kind of thing you could just blurt out on somebody’s doorstep.

‘I thought it might be nice to surprise you,’ she finished lamely.

‘Well, you’ve certainly done that.’

But Isabella saw his sudden swift, assessing frown. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve come at an awkward time—’

‘Well, I can’t deny that I was busy—’ he murmured, as the hand which wasn’t holding the razor strayed down to touch the towel at his hips, as if checking that the knot remained secure. ‘But I can dress and shave in a couple of minutes.’

‘Or I could come back later?’

‘What, send you away when you’ve travelled thousands of miles?’ He shook his crisp, dark head. ‘No, no! I’m intrigued to discover what brings Isabella Fernandes to England in such dramatic style.’

Isabella paled, as she tried to imagine what his reaction would be when she told him her momentous piece of news. But there was one more obstacle to overcome before she dared accept his offer of hospitality. What she had to tell him was for his ears alone. ‘Is Eduardo here?’

And some sort of transformation occurred. A face which was fundamentally hard and uncompromising underwent a dramatic softening, and a smile of pure pleasure lifted the corners of his mouth—making him look even more outrageously handsome than he had done before.

‘Eduardo? Unfortunately, no.’ The mouth curved into heart-stopping grin. ‘Ten-year-old boys prefer to play football with their friends rather than keep their father company—and my son is no exception. He won’t be back until later. A—’ Inexplicably, he hesitated. ‘A friend of mine is bringing him home.’

‘Oh.’ The word came out with just the right amount of disappointment, but Isabella wondered if the relief showed on her face. She also wondered who the friend was, as she quickly wiped a raindrop off her cheek.

Paulo watched the jerky little movement of her hand. She seemed nervous, he thought. Excessively nervous. Not a quality he had ever associated with Isabella. She could outshoot most men—and ride a horse with more grace than he had ever seen in another human being. He had watched her grow from child to woman—in the condensed, snap-shot way you did when you only saw someone once a year.

‘You’ll see him later. Come on—take off that wet raincoat. You’re shivering.’

She was shivering for a variety of reasons—and coldness was the least of them.

‘Th-thank you.’ She stood blinking beneath the glow of the artificial light which danced overhead, frozen by the strangeness of this new environment. And the fact that Paolo was standing next to her, still wearing next to nothing, a faint drift of lemon about him—as indolently at ease with his semi-naked state as if he had been wearing a three-piece suit.

With numb fingers, she began fumbling with the buttons of her coat and Paulo felt the strongest urge to unbutton it for her, as you would a child—except that the first lush glimpse of her T-shirted breasts reinforced the fact that she was anything but a child. And that if he didn’t put some decent clothes on in a minute…

‘I can’t believe you didn’t buy an umbrella, Bella?’ he teased, in an attempt to divert his uncomfortable thoughts. ‘Did nobody tell you that in England it rains and rains? And then it rains some more—even in summer!’

‘I thought I’d buy one when I got here, and then I…well, I forgot,’ she finished lamely, although an umbrella had been the very last thing on her mind. She had spent weeks and weeks just wearing her father down. Telling him that it was her life and her decision. And that lots of people of her age dropped out of university. She had told him that it wasn’t the end of the world, but the look on his face had told her otherwise. Isabella shivered. And he didn’t the know the half of it.

He felt the slight tremor in her body as he tugged the cuff of her jacket over her wrist and hung the garment on a peg above a radiator. ‘There. You’re dry underneath. Come into the sitting room.’

Reaction set in. He was letting her stay. Her teeth started to chatter but she clamped them shut. ‘Thank you.’