Читать книгу His Child: The Mistress's Child / Nathan's Child / D'Alessandro's Child - Catherine Spencer, Anne McAllister - Страница 10

CHAPTER FIVE

THE hours ticked by so slowly while Philip waited. He felt as though the whole landscape of his life had been altered irrevocably—as if someone had detonated a bomb and left a familiar place completely unrecognisable.

He went through the motions of working. He faxed the States. He replied to his e-mails. He made phone-calls to his London office, and it seemed from the responses given by his staff that he must have sounded quite normal.

But he didn’t feel in the least normal. He had just discovered that he was the biological father of a child who was a complete unknown to him and he knew that he was going to have to negotiate some paternal rights.

Whether Lisi Vaughan liked it or not.

He deliberately turned his thoughts away from her. He wasn’t going to think about her. Thinking about her just made his rage grow, and rage would not help either of them come to some kind of amicable agreement about access.

Amicable?

The word mocked him. How could the two of them ever come to some kind of friendly understanding after what had happened?

He went for a long walk as dusk began to fall, looking up into the heavy grey clouds and wondering if the threatened snow would ever arrive, and at seven prompt he was knocking on her door.

She didn’t answer immediately and his mouth tightened. If the secretive little witch thought that she could just hide inside and he would just go away again, then she was in for an unpleasant surprise.

The door opened, and he was unprepared for the impact of seeing her all dressed up for a party. Red dress. Red shoes. Long, slim legs encased in pale stockings which had a slight sheen to them. He had never seen her in red before, but scarlet had been the backdrop to her beauty when she had lain with such abandon on his bed. Scarlet woman, he thought, and felt the blood thicken in his veins.

‘You’d better come in,’ said Lisi.

‘With pleasure,’ he answered, grimly sarcastic.

She opened the door wider to let him in, but took care to press herself back against the wall, as far away from him as possible. She was only hanging onto her self-possession by a thread, and if he came anywhere near her she would lose it completely. But he still came close enough for her to catch the faint drift of his aftershave—some sensual musky concoction which clamoured at her senses.

He followed her into the sitting room, where the debris from the party still littered the room. He wondered how many children there had been at the party. Judging by the clutter left behind it could easily have run into tens.

There were balloons everywhere, and scrunched up wrapping paper piled up in the bin. Half-eaten pieces of cake and untouched sandwiches lay scattered across the paper cloth which covered the table.

Philip frowned. ‘Weren’t they hungry?’

‘They only ever eat the crisps.’

‘I see.’ He looked around the room in slight bemusement. ‘They certainly know how to make a mess, don’t they?’

Lisi gave a rueful smile, thinking that maybe they could be civil to one another. ‘I should have cleared it away, but I wanted to read Tim a story from one of his new books.’

The mention of Tim’s name reminded him of why he was there. ‘Very commendable,’ he observed sardonically.

‘Can I…?’ She forced herself to say it, even though his manner was now nothing short of hostile. But she had told herself over and over again that nothing good would come out of making an enemy of him, even though the look on his face told her that she was probably most of the way there. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

‘In a minute. Firstly, I want to see Tim.’

She steeled herself not to react to that autocratic demand. ‘He’s only just gone to sleep,’ she said. ‘What if he wakes?’

‘I’ll be very quiet. And anyway, what if he does wake?’

‘Don’t you know anything about children?’ she asked, but one look at his expression made her wonder how she could have come out with something as naive and as hurtful as that.

‘Actually, no.’ He bit the words out precisely. ‘Because up until this morning, I didn’t realise that I might have to.’

‘Just wait until he’s in a really deep sleep,’ she said, desperately changing the subject. ‘He might be alarmed if he wakes up to find a strange man…’ Her words tailed off embarrassedly.

He gave a bitter laugh. ‘A strange man in his room?’ he completed acidly. ‘You mean it doesn’t happen nightly, Lisi?’

It was one insult too many and on top of all the tensions of the day it was just too much. Her hand flew up to his face and she slapped him, hard. There was a dull ringing sound as her palm connected, but he didn’t react at all, just stood there looking at her, his expression unreadable.

‘Feel better now?’

She bit her lip in horror. She had never raised her hand to anyone in her life! ‘What do you think?’

He turned away. He didn’t want her looking at him all vulnerable and lost like that. He wanted to steel his heart against her pale beauty and the black hair which streamed down her back, tied back with a scarlet ribbon which matched the dress. ‘You don’t want to hear what I think,’ he said heavily. ‘I’ll take that drink now.’

She went into the kitchen and took wine from the fridge and handed him the bottle, along with two glasses. ‘Maybe you could just open that, and I’ll clear up a little,’ she said.

He sat down in one of the squashy old armchairs and began to open the wine, but his eyes followed her as she moved around the room, deftly clearing the table and bundling up all the leftover party food into the paper cloth.

He wished that she would go and put on the baggy trousers she had been wearing this morning. The sight of the shiny red material stretching over the pert swell of her bottom was making him have thoughts he would rather not have. He was here to talk about his son, not fantasise about taking her damned dress off.

She had lit the fire, and the room flickered with the shadowedreflections of the flames. On the now-cleared table he saw her place a big copper vase containing holly, whose bright berries matched the scarlet of her dress. It was, he thought, with bitter irony, a delightfully cosy little scene.

She took the glass of wine he handed her and sat in the chair facing his, her knees locked tightly together, wishing that she had had the opportunity to change from a dress which was making her uncomfortably aware of the tingling sensation in her breasts. Just what did he do to her simply by looking? She twisted the stem of her glass round and round. ‘What shall we drink to?’

He studied her for a long moment. ‘How about to truth?’

She took a mouthful and the warmth of the liquor started to unravel the knot of tension which had been coiled up in the pit of her stomach all day. She stared at him. ‘Do you really think that you have a monopoly on truth? Why the hell do you think I didn’t contact you and tell you when I found out I was pregnant?’

‘What goes on in your mind is a complete mystery to me.’

Because you don’t know me, thought Lisi sadly. And now you never will. Philip’s opinion of her would always be distorted. He saw her as some kind of loose woman who would fall into bed with just about any man. Or as a selfish mother who would deliberately keep him from his own flesh and blood.

‘Think about the last words you said to me,’ she reminded him softly, but the memory still had the power to make her flinch. ‘You told me you were married. What was I supposed to do? Turn up on your doorstep with a bulging stomach and announce that you were about to be a daddy? What if your wife had answered the door? I can’t imagine that she would have been particularly overjoyed to hear that!’

He didn’t respond for a moment. He had come here this morning intending to tell her about the circumstances which had led to that night. About Carla. But his discovery of Tim had driven that far into the background. There were only so many revelations they could take in one day. Wouldn’t talking about his wife at this precise moment muddy the waters still further? Tim must come first.

‘You could have telephoned me,’ he pointed out. ‘The office had my number. You could have called me any time.’

‘The look on your face as you walked out that night made me think that you would be happy never to see me again. The disgust on your face told its own story.’

Self-disgust, he thought bitterly. Disgusted at his own weakness and disgusted by the intensity of the pleasure he had experienced in her arms. A relative stranger’s arms.

He put the wineglass down on the table and his eyes glittered with accusation.

‘The situation should never have arisen,’ he ground out. ‘You shouldn’t have become pregnant in the first place.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know! I didn’t exactly choose to get pregnant!’

‘Oh, really?’ The accusation in his voice didn’t waver. ‘You told me that it was safe.’ He gave a hollow laugh. ‘Safe? More fool me for believing you.’

Her fingers trembling so much that she was afraid that she might slop wine all over her dress, Lisi put her own glass down on the carpet. ‘Are you saying that I lied, Philip?’

His cool, clever eyes bored into her.

‘Facts are facts,’ he said coldly. ‘I realised that we were not using any protection. I offered to stop—’ He felt his groin tensing as he remembered just when and how he had offered to stop, and a wave of desire so deep and so hot swept over him that it took his breath away. He played for time, slowly picking up his glass and lifting it to his lips until he had his feelings under control once more.

‘I offered to stop,’ he continued, still in that hard, cold voice. ‘And you assured me that it was safe. Just how was it safe, Lisi? Were you praying that it would be—because you were so het-up you couldn’t bear me to stop? Or were you relying on something as outrageously unreliable as the so-called ‘‘safe’’ period?’

‘Do you really think I’d take risks like that?’ she demanded.

‘Who knows?’

She gave a short laugh. If she had entertained any lingering doubt that there might be some fragment of affection for her in the corner of his heart, then he had dispelled it completely with that arrogant question.

‘For your information—I was on the pill at the time—’

‘Just in case?’ he queried hatefully.

‘Actually—’ But she stopped short of telling him why. She was under no obligation to explain that, although she had broken up with her steady boyfriend a year earlier, the pill had suited her and given her normal periods for the first time in her life and she had seen no reason to stop taking it. ‘It’s none of your business why I was taking it.’

I’ll bet, he thought grimly. ‘So why didn’t it work?’

‘Because…’ She sighed. ‘I guess because I had a bout of sickness earlier that week. In the heat of the moment, it slipped my mind. It was a million-to-one chance—’

‘I think that the odds were rather higher than that, don’t you?’ He raised his eyebrows insolently. ‘You surely must have known that there was a possibility that it would fail?’

Unable to take any more of the cold censure on his face, she leaned over to throw another log on the fire and it spat and hissed back at her like an angry cat. ‘What do you want me to say? That I couldn’t bear for you to stop?’ Because that was the shameful truth. At the time she had felt as if the world would come to an abrupt and utter end if he’d stopped his delicious love-making. But she hadn’t consciously taken a risk.

‘And couldn’t you, Lisi? Bear me to stop?’

She met his eyes. The truth he had wanted, so the truth he would get. ‘No. I couldn’t. Does that flatter your ego?’

His voice was cold. ‘My ego does not need flattering. And anyway—’ he topped up both their glasses ‘—how it happened is now irrelevant—we can’t turn the clock back, can we?’

His words struck a painful chord and she knew that she had to ask him the most difficult question of all. Even if she didn’t like the answer. ‘And if you could?’ she queried softly. ‘Would you turn the clock back?’

He stared at her in disbelief. Was she really that naive? ‘Of course I would!’ he said vehemently, though the way her mouth crumpled when he said it made him feel distinctly uncomfortable. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

She gave him a sad smile. He would never understand—not in a million years. ‘Of course I wouldn’t.’

‘You wouldn’t?’

‘How could I?’ she asked simply. ‘When the encounter gave me a son.’

He noted her use of the word encounter. Which told him precisely how she regarded what had happened that night. Easy come. His mouth twisted. Easy go. She certainly had not bothered to spare his feelings, but then why should she? He had not spared hers. There was no need for loyalty between them—nothing at all between them, in fact, other than an inconvenient physical attraction.

And a son.

‘He looks like you,’ he observed.

‘That’s what everyone says,’ said Lisi serenely, and saw to her amazement that a flicker of something very much like…disappointment…crossed his features. ‘And it’s a good thing he does, isn’t it?’ she asked him quietly.

‘Meaning?’

‘Well, I would hate him to resemble a father who wished that the whole thing never happened.’

‘Lisi, you are wilfully misunderstanding me!’ he snapped.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. You would wish him unborn, if you could.’

‘You can’t wish someone unborn!’ he remonstrated, and then his voice unexpectedly gentled. ‘And if I really thought the whole situation so regrettable, then why am I here? Why didn’t I just stay away when I found out, as you so clearly wanted me to?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Then I’ll tell you.’ He leaned forward in the chair. ‘Obviously the circumstances of his conception are not what I would have chosen—’

‘What a delightful way to phrase it,’ put in Lisi drily.

‘But Tim is here now. He exists! He is half mine—’

‘You can’t cut him up in portions as you would a cake!’ she protested.

‘Half mine in terms of genetic make-up,’ he continued inexorably.

‘Now you’re making him sound like Frankenstein,’ observed Lisi, slightly hysterically.

‘Don’t be silly! I want to watch him grow,’ said Philip, and his voice grew almost dreamy. ‘To see him develop into a man. To influence him. To teach him. To be a father to him.’

Lisi swallowed. This didn’t sound like the occasional contact visit to her. But she had denied him access for three whole years, wouldn’t it sound unspeakably mean to object to that curiously possessive tone which had deepened his voice to sweetest honey?

And besides, what was she worrying about? He lived in London, for heaven’s sake—and, although Langley was commutable from the capital, she imagined that he would soon get tired of travelling up and down the country to see Tim.

She knew how fickle men could be. She thought of Dave, her best friend Rachel’s husband, who had deserted Rachel just over a year ago. They had a son of Tim’s age and Dave’s visits to see him had dwindled to almost nothing. And that was from a man who had fallen in love with and married the mother of his child. Who had seen that child grow from squalling infant to chubby toddler. If he had lost interest—then how long would she give Philip before he tired of fatherhood?

‘I’d like to see him now, please.’

This time there was no reason not to agree to his request, but Lisi felt almost stricken by a reluctance to do so. Something was going to end right here and now, she realised. For so long it had been just her and Tim—a unit which went together as perfectly as peaches and cream. No one else had been able to lay claim on him and, since her mother had died, she had considered herself to be his only living relation. He was hers. All hers—and now she was going to have to relinquish part of him to his father.

A lump rose in the back of her throat and she swallowed it down.

Philip was staring at her from between narrowed eyes. Did her eyes glitter with the promise of tears? ‘Are you okay?’

‘Of course I’m okay,’ she answered unconvincingly. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘Because you’ve gone so pale.’

‘I am pale, Philip—you know that.’ He had told her so that night in his arms. ‘Pale as the moon,’ he had whispered, as his lips had burned fire along her flesh. ‘Come with me,’ she said slowly.

The two of them walked with exaggerated care towards the closed door with its hand-painted sign saying, ‘Tim’s Room’.

Lisi pushed the door open quietly and tiptoed over to the bed, where a little hump lay tucked beneath a Mickey-Mouse duvet, and Philip was surprised by the clamour of a far-distant memory. So she still had a thing about Disney, did she?

He went to stand beside her, and looked down, unprepared for the kick of some primitive emotion deep inside him. The sleeping child looked almost unbearably peaceful, with only one small lock of dark hair obscuring the pure lines of a flawless cheek. His lashes were long, he realised—as long as Lisi’s—and his mouth was half open as he took in slow, steady breaths.

‘So innocent,’ he said, very softly. ‘So very innocent.’

It was such a loaded word, and Lisi felt a strange, useless yearning. He thought her the very antithesis of innocence, didn’t he? If only it could be different. But she knew in her heart that it never could. She nodded, gazing down with pride at the shiny-clean hair of her son. Their son. He looked scrubbed-clean and contented. Good enough to eat.

She stole a glance at Philip, who was studying Tim so intently that she might as well not have existed. Strange now how his profile should remind her of Tim’s. Had that been because he had not been around to make any comparisons?How much else of Tim was Philip? she wondered. What untapped genetic secrets lay dormant in that sweet, sleeping form?

Philip turned his head and their eyes made contact in a moment of strange, unspoken empathy. She read real sadness in his eyes. And regret—and wondered what he saw in hers.

He probably didn’t care.

She put her finger onto her lips and beckoned him back out. She did not want Tim to wake and to demand to know what this man was doing here. Again. She shut the door behind them and went back into the sitting room, where Philip stood with his back to the fire, looking to all intents and purposes as if he were the master of the house.

But he never would be. She must remember that. In fact, it was almost laughable to try to imagine Philip Caprice living in this little house with her and Tim. The ceiling seemed almost too low to accommodate him, he was so tall. She tried to picture them all cramming into the tiny bathroom in the mornings and winced.

‘Would you like some more wine?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘No, thanks. Coffee would be good, though.’

She was glad of the opportunity to escape to the kitchen and busy herself with the cafetière. She carried it back in with a plate of biscuits to find him standing where she had left him, only now he was staring deep into the heart of the fire with unseeing eyes.

He took the cup from her and gave a small smile of appreciation. ‘Real coffee,’ he murmured.

At that moment she really, really hated him. Did he have any idea just how patronising that sounded? ‘What did you expect?’ she asked acidly. ‘The cheapest brand of instant on the market?’

He shook his head, still dazed by the emotional impact of seeing his son. ‘You’re right—if anything was cheap it was my remark.’

And what about the others? she wanted to cry out. The intimation that she had deliberately got pregnant. Wasn’t that the cheapest remark a man could ever make to a woman? He wasn’t taking those back, was he?

‘So who else knows?’ he demanded.

Lisi blinked. ‘Knows what?’

‘About Tim,’ he said impatiently. ‘How many others are privy to the secret I was excluded from?

She shook her head. ‘No one. No one knows.’

‘No-one at all?’ he queried disbelievingly.

‘No. Why should they? As far as anyone knew—we simply had a professional relationship. Even Jonathon thought that—and nobody was aware that I went up to your room at the hotel that night.’ She shuddered, thinking how sordid that sounded. She bit her lip. ‘The only person I told was my mother, just before she died.’

‘You told her the whole story?’ he demanded incredulously.

Again, she shook her head. ‘I edited it more than a bit.’

‘Was she shocked?’

Lisi shrugged. ‘A little, but I made it sound…’ She hesitated. She had made it sound as though she had been in love with him, and that bit she had found surprisingly easy. ‘I made it sound rather more than it had been.’ And her mother had pleaded with her to contact him. But then the bit she had omitted to tell her mother had been that Philip had already been married.

He looked at her and gave a heavy smile. ‘My parents will want to meet him,’ he said, wondering just how he was going to tell his elderly parents that he, too, was a parent.

‘Your p-parents?’

His eyes were steady. ‘But of course. What did you expect?’

What had she expected? Well, for one thing—she had expected to live the rest of her life without ever seeing Philip again. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I haven’t really thought it through.’

‘He’s in my life now, too, Lisi,’ he said simply. ‘And I don’t come in a neat little box marked ‘‘Philip Caprice’’—to be opened up at will and shut again when it suits you. I have family who will want to get to know him. And friends, too.’

And girlfriends? she wondered. Maybe even one particular girlfriend who was very special to him? Maybe even… She raised troubled aquamarine eyes to his. ‘Have you married, again, Philip?’ she asked quietly.

‘No.’

She felt the fierce, triumphant leap of her heart and despaired at herself. Fool, she thought. Fool! ‘So where do we go from here?’

He despised himself for the part of him which wanted to say, Let’s go to bed—because even though the distance between them was so vast that he doubted whether it could ever be mended, that didn’t stop him from being turned on by her. He shifted uncomfortably in the chair. Very turned on indeed. He met her questioning gaze with a look of challenge. ‘You tell Tim about me as soon as possible.’

Her mouth fell open. ‘Tell him?’

‘Of course you tell him!’ he exploded softly. ‘I’m back, Lisi—and I’m staking my claim.’

It sounded so territorial. So loveless. ‘Oh, I see,’ she said slowly.

He narrowed his eyes. ‘Just how were you planning to explain to him about his father? If I hadn’t turned up.’

‘I honestly don’t know. It’s not something I ever gave much thought to. He’s so young, and whenever he asked I just said that Mummy and Daddy broke up before he was born and that I hadn’t seen you since.’ It had seemed easier to bury her head in the sand than to confront such a painful issue. ‘Maybe one day I might have told him who his real father was.’

‘When?’ he demanded. ‘When he was five? Six? Sixteen?’

‘When the time was right.’

‘And maybe the time never would have been right, hmm, Lisi? Did you think you could get away with keeping me anonymous for the rest of his life, so that the poor kid would never know he had a father?’

She met the burning accusation in his eyes and couldn’t pretend. Not about this. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered.

He rose to his feet. ‘Well, just make sure you do it. And soon. I don’t care how you do it—just tell him!’

She nodded. She wanted him gone now—with as long a space until his next visit as possible. ‘And when will we see you again? Some time after Christmas?’

He heard the hopeful tinge to her question and gave a short laugh. ‘Hard luck, Lisi,’ he said grimly. ‘I’m afraid that I’m not going to just conveniently disappear from your life again. I’m intending to be around quite a bit. Just call it making up for lost time, if it makes you feel better. And it’s Christmas very soon.’

‘Christmas?’ she echoed, in a horrified whisper.

‘Sure.’ His mouth hardened into an implacable line. ‘I was tempted to buy him a birthday present today, but I didn’t want to confuse him. However, there’s only a week to go until Christmas and some time between now and then he needs to know who I am.’ His eyes glittered. ‘Because you can rest assured that I will be spending part of the holiday with him.’

She wanted to cry out and beg him not to disrupt the relatively calm order of her life, but as she looked into Philip’s strong, cold face she knew that she would be wasting her breath. He wasn’t going to go away, she recognised, and if she tried to stop him then he would simply bring in the best lawyers that money could buy in order to win contact with his child. She didn’t need to be told to know that.

‘Understood?’ he asked softly.

‘Do I have any choice?’

‘I think you know the answer to that. Don’t worry about seeing me to the door. I’ll let myself out.’

As if in a dream she watched him go and shut the front door quietly behind him, and only when she had heard the last of his footsteps echoing down the path did she allow herself to sink back down onto the chair and to bury her head in her hands and take all that was left to her.

The comfort of tears.