The Heir From Nowhere (13 page)

‘And it was okay. For a while.’ She turned her head away. ‘You know the rest.’ She squeezed her eyes shut, expecting the pain and the prick of tears and wanting to hide her face before that happened, but surprisingly neither pain nor tears arrived. She exhaled a long, slow sigh of relief. Good. So maybe she was over feeling sorry for herself. Just as well, because by the lack of response, it looked like nobody else was interested. ‘So that, in a nutshell, is the whole sad story. Are you asleep yet?’

‘Not likely. Tell me, how did your mother die?’

She looked around, searching the high street shops lining the road, wanting a diversion if not an escape and wondering if it was fair to blame all her discomfort on the humidity. How far was this baby shop anyway? And why was he insisting she even do this? She didn’t want to buy things for a baby she’d never know. She didn’t want to lie in bed at night and imagine it lying in a tiny bassinet she’d chosen or wearing precious little outfits she’d selected.

Couldn’t he see that? Couldn’t he tell that she didn’t want to know anything that would make it harder to forget this child?

And what was he even doing here? He’d shown no real interest in this baby, other than claiming ownership. He’d avoided her the last month and now he wanted to go nursery shopping? What was that about?

‘Unless you don’t want to tell me,’ he prompted.

She put her head back against the headrest, closing her eyes. ‘Breast cancer,’ she said finally. ‘By the time they found it …’ She squeezed her lids tighter together,
but this time there was no denying the pain or the tears that squeezed out, suddenly right back there, back at the restaurant and the celebration they’d all assumed it was.

‘Mum treated us all for Christmas lunch, said she’d won some money on Lotto and wanted to splurge. She shouted us all—Shayne and me, his parents, even his sisters and their partners. I think she loved the idea of having a big family around her for once.’ She paused. ‘We’d never had a Christmas meal out before. It was such a treat to eat in a real restaurant. Everyone was wearing party hats and pulling Christmas crackers. It was the best Christmas we’d ever had.’

She dragged in air. She should have realised how tired her mother had looked, even as she’d so valiantly smiled and laughed and joined in. She should have noticed the shadows under her eyes and how little she had eaten herself while everyone around her was feasting. ‘Mum made it a special Christmas for everyone. Until we got home and she confided to Shayne and me the truth. That she was dying. That she had only weeks to live and there was nothing anyone could do for her. The only thing she wanted more than anything was to know that her daughter would be taken care of.’

She took a deep breath, praying for strength to finish. Somehow she needed to finish, if only to explain how she could marry someone who could let her down so badly. ‘We’d only been going out three months by then—when it came down to it we barely knew each other—but Shayne, to his damn credit and his eternal damnation, got down on his knee and proposed right then and there in front of her and what could I do? What could I say? I knew it was crazy and reckless but how could I say no to someone who wanted a dying woman’s wish to come
true? We were married a month later next to her hospital bed. Mum was my matron of honour.’

She dropped her head into her lap, one hand covering her mouth to cover the sobs she could no longer contain. ‘We lost her the next day.’

Grief took her then. Grief for her loss. Grief for a well-intentioned but hasty and ill-conceived marriage. Grief for a lost mother and all those lost years. And then she felt his hand around hers, and this time it wasn’t sparks she felt, but warmth and a jolt of connectivity as his fingers squeezed hers, his thumb stroking the back of her hand until the car jerked to a stop and he hauled her bodily against him. She tried to fight, she tried to push herself away, finally giving in when she knew she had no energy for the fight. No hope.

‘She was the reason I was born at all!’ She turned her head up to him through the curtain of her tears, uncaring of her swollen eyes and the mess she’d made of her face. ‘My scumbag father wanted me aborted to avoid the responsibility of having a child. My grandparents wanted me aborted to avoid the shame of an illegitimate grandchild. My mother refused them all. She left everything and everyone she had once loved to protect me.’

Her sobs racked her slender body and he pulled her closer, surprised how easily, how comfortably, she fitted against him, how right it felt holding her.

She made another futile attempt to push away again but there was no way he was letting her go. ‘I’m making you all wet,’ she protested, and still he clung on.

How could he let her go? Because suddenly he understood. Suddenly it all made sense. He had never understood before why she had taken the stance she had,
why she had refused her husband the solution the clinic had offered and that Shayne had demanded.

She herself had been given the opportunity to live.

So she would not take another’s life.

And he didn’t want to let her go.

He thought about the agreement, about the money he’d offered and the way she’d protested every step of the way and he finally realised why she would have done this for nothing. Finally he understood.

She deserved a thousand times more for doing what she was doing but she’d wanted nothing and he hadn’t believed her.

Not completely. Not until now.

He held her while her sobs abated, while her breathing calmed. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘You didn’t need to hear all that.’

‘I think I did,’ he told her, his lips brushing her hair, drinking in her scent. ‘And now I understand. Now I know why you are such a special woman.’

She turned her face up to him and he saw the questions skate across the surface of her liquid eyes. Her face was flushed and tear-swept. There were mascara smudges at both eyes. He brushed a loose strand of hair from her face, stroked the pads of his fingers down her cheek and jaw, till they got to her chin and he could angle her face just the way he wanted. She looked so sad he wanted to kiss away her pain. Wanted to let her know he understood.

For a scant second he wondered at his actions. Once before he’d wanted to kiss her. He’d written off the impulse as an aberration. But it hadn’t been an aberration, he now realised. It had been a necessity. An imperative.

One he wasn’t about to let pass again. ‘You are
special,’ he told her, part because he suspected she needed to hear it, part because it was true and another part because he damned well wanted to. ‘You are strong and beautiful and if I may say so, very, very alluring.’

Her gasp told him all he needed to know. She didn’t believe it. Which meant that he would just have to convince her.

‘Believe it,’ he said, his lips coming closer, the first pass no more than a whisper of shared air and coiled expectation. Her lips followed his and he smiled. She wanted him. He wanted her to want him.

He knew this was right. Even here, sitting in a car in the midst of a nursery equipment warehouse car park in the middle of a busy day, he knew this was no aberration. This was right.

And this time his lips hesitated, hovered breathlessly above, until the need became urgent and the lure of her became too great. And then his lips met hers and he came undone.

His mouth meshed with hers, his fingers tangling in her hair and, like a man dying of thirst, he drank her in.

She was breathing hard when he broke off the kiss.

Breathing almost as hard as he was when he pulled away, his hands lining her jaw, his thumbs working the space between where her lips ended and her cheeks began. Her eyes were wide, brilliant blue and brimming with questions and wonder and fear. It was the fear that scared him the most, the fear that made him realise what he’d done.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, letting her go. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’

‘It’s okay,’ she said, dabbing her eyes with a tissue,
still looking shell-shocked though he could see she was aiming for cool. ‘I realise it didn’t mean anything.’

He climbed from the car, rankled that she’d used the very words that would normally be uppermost in his mind. ‘It meant something,’ he said, pulling her door open a few moments later. ‘It meant sorry for everything you’ve been through. It meant thank you for what you are doing. It meant thank you for telling me.’

‘That’s okay then,’ she said, her composure returned though still wary enough to keep her distance as she climbed out. ‘Maybe we should just forget it happened.’ And she headed for the entrance.

Forget it happened? Forget the sweet taste of her mouth under his? Forget the way she felt so right in his arms?

How the hell was he supposed to do that?

The shop helped. Only it wasn’t a shop, he decided, it was his worst nightmare. The place was acres across. How could anything as tiny as a baby warrant so much stuff?

‘How do we do this quickly?’ he asked.

She looked almost as overwhelmed. ‘Maybe they have some kind of personal shopping consultant service.’

The notion appealed immensely. ‘Let’s find out,’ he said, cutting a swathe through the crowds of couples inspecting prams and cots and baby gear to the service desk.

The woman was serving someone at the head of a line but still she looked up, as if some sixth sense had alerted her. Looked again when she saw what was approaching in his dark trousers and fitted cotton knit top.

Instantly her face lit up, and she shoved a bag in the direction of the customers she’d just put through the register so they could pack their purchases themselves.
He didn’t need to jump the queue. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, all bright-eyed and breathless in her eagerness to please.

‘I need your help,’ Dominic said in that ultra-deep voice, and the woman’s eyes told them he could have whatever he wanted. ‘You see, I’m having this baby and I don’t have the first clue what I need. And all this …’ he swept his arm in an arc around the showroom ‘… I have no time for this. Do you have some kind of consultancy service who can assist?’

Angie almost felt sorry for her. The woman was almost hyperventilating as he explained. He’s not
that
special, she thought, and then she looked around at all the people in the store. There were a fair share of those who looked kind of normal, a few more who looked even better, and then, she had to concede, there was Dominic.

He was in a class of his own here. No wonder the woman was falling all over him.

‘I can help,’ she said, calling an assistant to take over her register. She stood to one side and smiled wanly at the next person waiting in line to check out their purchases, feeling guilty when she realised just how long the queue was.

Apparently they would all remain waiting until Dominic Pirelli’s every need was satisfied. Strangely it was only the men who looked resentful. The women just looked hungry and, when they glanced her way, openly envious.

They’d look even more envious if they had any idea what they’d just been doing in the car. Angie trembled at the memories, remembering the way he had cradled her, comforting her, remembering how comfort had so quickly turned to something else. His lips had been
surprisingly gentle, his taste had been addictive and there had been no way she’d been going to stop him.

What a fool. He’d kissed her because he felt sorry for her and she’d stupidly kissed him back as if he really meant it.

God, she was a fool!

She knew what he thought of her. She was the lowest of the low, from the back blocks of western Sydney, while he was a billionaire with a mansion on the sea. She’d seen his lip curl when they’d first met. She remembered the look on his face when he’d stepped inside her home, as if he was slumming it. She did not belong in his world and there was only one reason why she was here and it was not to be kissed by him or to kiss him, or to imagine this was some kind of fairy tale where they might all end up happily ever after.

Damn. She’d be every kind of fool if she thought that!

The consultant led the way, a clipboard on her arm with a list at least twice as long as Angie’s. ‘Your first baby?’ she asked, and Angie had no doubt the woman didn’t really care, she just wanted him to keep talking and enjoy the sensation of Dominic’s deep voice rumbling through her bones again.

‘It is,’ was all he offered.

She sighed wistfully as she looked over her shoulder. ‘I dare say it’ll be a beautiful baby then, if it takes after you two.’

Dominic scowled and Angie squirmed. The woman was right, the baby would be beautiful, but it had nothing to do with her.

Thankfully, they arrived at the nursery decor section and the consultant got distracted. For the next hour they got lost in displays and colour schemes. Angie forced
herself to think of it as a job, as Dominic had insisted it was. It had nothing to do with her. Not really. She was merely an onlooker here. She had to think of what this baby needed functionality wise—and not think of it as the baby growing inside her at all. The baby she wouldn’t ever know …

She clamped down on the pointless pang of regret. She couldn’t afford to think that way. She’d done the right thing, hadn’t she? She’d reunited this child with its rightful father. She couldn’t afford to have regrets.

Though it was getting harder and harder not to.

She looked around this massive baby warehouse, looked at all the people shopping for their child, for their baby. Envied them. For she’d never realised it would be this hard. She’d imagined handing the baby over would be easy. She’d never realised this stranger growing inside her would be so interesting or demand so much of her attention. She’d never realised it would make her feel as if it was truly part of her.

That it was hers …

Just for a moment she allowed herself to wonder what it would be like if things were different, if this baby were truly hers and she was shopping now with the most devastatingly handsome man in the store, if not in the whole of Sydney, for their child. How would that feel?

But no. She shook her head to clear the wayward thoughts away. There was no point going there. The reality was cold and hard and stared her in the face every time she remembered how he had treated her because of who she was and where she had come from. There was no place for fantasy here. She was merely a means to an end. An incubator for his baby. A temporary inconvenience.