Their Secret Baby (13 page)

‘Can he kiss you until you’re moaning under his caress? Can he arouse you, wake that yearning sensuality that I know is inside you just waiting for a light to be put to its fuse?’

Once again, he suited action to the words, sliding his hands under the white top, smoothing them over her skin, tracing hot, erotic patterns up to her breasts. He teased her nipples into hungry tightness, tugging at them softly, before his fingers slid under the lacy cups of her bra.

She was weakening. He was winning. He was getting to her; making her melt, making her respond. She couldn’t stop herself, couldn’t help herself…

‘No! No, no, no,
no
!’

With a terrible effort she pulled herself away, the force of the movement throwing her halfway across the room so that she collided painfully with the side of the settee, almost tumbling over onto the striped cushions with the force of the impact.

‘Get out!’

She couldn’t recognise her own voice in the hard, cold, shrill sound that echoed through the quiet room.

‘Get out and stay out! I never want to see you again.’

‘What’s wrong, sweetheart?’ he taunted. ‘Can’t you cope with a real man? Is that the truth of it—that you can only handle the cold memory of your precious Joshua, not with the red-blooded, passionate feelings of a real man?’

‘I can cope with a man but not an animal! And I can handle the
feelings
too—when there are any feelings to handle. But there’s only one thing you’re after—and I wouldn’t honour that with the description of a
feeling
. It’s just sex—just lust—nothing more. Now get out. And don’t think about taking Fleur with you because if you do then I’ll have the police after you as fast as you can blink.’

‘And when I claim that she’s mine?’

‘Prove it!’

The words fell into a sudden deep and deadly silence. A silence in which she felt the echoes of her words reverberate around her like the ripples in a pool when a stone was thrown into the water.

‘Prove it,’ Rhys echoed, injecting the words with deadly venom. ‘Oh, I’ll prove it all right. I wasn’t going to insist on this but you’ve left me no alternative. I want my child, and no one is going to stand in my way. And Fleur
is
my child—a DNA test should soon prove that incontrovertibly. You’d better hold yourself ready for that, my darling. Because one way or another I’m going to get the evidence that will prove my claim.’

T
HE
letter had been lying on his desk for so long that Rhys had just about forgotten exactly when it had arrived in his office.

It had been there long enough for his secretary to notice and comment more than once about the fact that it was still unopened.

‘Is it something you want me to deal with?’ she’d asked and had got an unexpectedly short, sharp, and strongly negative response to her question.

‘I’m sorry, Ms Scamans,’ he’d amended hastily when she’d been plainly indignant. ‘It’s a personal matter. Something I have to deal with myself.’

Something he
wasn’t
dealing with himself, he admitted privately.

Face facts, man! You’ve been avoiding opening the damn thing for over a week now.

And would go on avoiding it until he could find some way out of his quandary.

Because the truth was that he couldn’t think of a way of looking at the question of just who was Fleur’s father without the facts creating a whole new set of problems. Ones that now appeared to be worse than the original enquiry that had set him out on this quest in the first place.

If he was Fleur’s father, then Caitlin would feel obliged to hand the little girl over to him. He would take her home to live with him—and he would lose Caitlin as a result.

If he was
not
Fleur’s father, then Caitlin would keep the baby and care for her, bring her up as her daughter. And he would have no place in their lives at all.

And no excuse ever to see Caitlin again.

So it seemed that either way he lost.

Lost what really mattered to him—which was the chance of a future with both Fleur and Caitlin in it.

‘And why would only having Fleur feel like you’ve lost?’ his personal assistant, Sarah, had asked him one day when, grouchy as a bear with a sore head, he’d growled at her that he’d made a total mess of things, and a fool of himself into the bargain.

‘It just would.’

‘But I thought Fleur was the one thing you wanted. The only reason you went up there in the first place.’

‘She was, but—things changed.’

‘Changed how? You met Caitlin?’

‘Yes.’

‘And? Oh, I see!’ she said knowingly when he turned a furious glare on her. ‘And now just Fleur is not enough?’

‘She’s my daughter, Sarah!’

‘I know. And this…’ Sarah smoothed a caressing hand over the faint swell where her pregnancy was beginning to show ‘…is my child. Someone I already love to pieces even though we’ve not yet met. But Damon…’ Her face softened and her smile grew as she thought of the tall, dark Greek she was married to. ‘Damon’s my soul mate. The other half of me. The bit that makes me complete. Without him I would always feel there was something missing.’

‘But you love Damon.’

‘I know. And what does that tell you about your Caitlin?’

‘Are you trying to claim that I’m in love with her?’

‘I wouldn’t dare!’

Sarah flashed him a teasing smile as she turned and headed for the door.

‘But I think you should know that the man I used know as Rhys Morgan went off in pursuit of his daughter—and a very different guy came back.’

A very different guy came back.

Sarah’s words echoed in his head now, along with his own thoughts of just a few moments before.

No excuse ever to see Caitlin again.

Did he want an excuse to see Caitlin?

Hell, yes! Any excuse!

In the four weeks since he’d been at the Linford, he’d seen her only on a couple of occasions and each of those had been too brief and too uncomfortable to satisfy the longing he had just to spend time with her. How could they be anything else when he had put his foot well and truly in it by implementing his threat to arrange a DNA test? At least one of those meetings had been when Caitlin had had to take Fleur to a doctor to arrange for the necessary samples to be taken.

Which, of course, had not exactly created a situation that was conducive to anything other than the most constrained and distant conversation.

They had talked about Fleur and how she was sleeping. The fact that she now had a single tooth in her gaping, smiling mouth. That she was putting on weight, growing well…

Everything other than anything important.

And he had sat in that damn doctor’s waiting room and longed to kiss her. Longed to take her in his arms and tell her that he had never meant any of it. That he would never take Fleur away from her—that what he wanted was them
both
in his life. For the rest of his life.

And Caitlin had treated him like the enemy that she clearly believed he was. She had held herself stiffly, well away from him. Answered his questions with monosyllables. Turned on him a glare so furious that it should have shrivelled him into a pile of ashes where he sat when Fleur had roared a desperate protest at the doctor’s treatment.

And then Caitlin had said goodbye very coldly. And no thank you, she didn’t need a lift in his car, in spite of the fact that she blatantly obviously needed a lift in his car, when it was once again pouring with rain and the pushchair meant that she couldn’t manage an umbrella as well.

And she had walked away from him without ever looking back.

No excuse ever to see Caitlin again.

Rhys’s fingers drummed out a tattoo of impatience on the surface of his desk, the sound becoming softer as they moved over the thick, expensive vellum of the envelope that contained the report that could change his future forever.

No excuse ever to see Caitlin again.

Hell and damnation, he had the perfect excuse to see her right here!

Grabbing the envelope, he pushed it into the inside pocket of his jacket in the same moment as he pressed the switch on the intercom through to his secretary’s desk.

‘Ms Scamans—cancel everything in my diary for the next week at least. I’m going out of town and I don’t expect to be back for some time.’

Caitlin pushed the last of Fleur’s little dresses into the suitcase and closed the lid, zipping it firmly to fasten it.

There. She was done.

Lugging the case to the bottom of the stairs, she left it standing in the hall near to the door and went back up to the bedroom to start getting Fleur ready. The little girl was lying happily in her cot, small hands reaching up to pat and pull at the brightly coloured activity toy hanging above her.

‘Just a couple more minutes, sweetie.’

They were in good time, Caitlin told herself. And Fleur looked so contented. She could afford to let the little girl have a bit more time.

And she could do with a sit-down.

Thankfully she sank down onto a nearby chair and drew in a couple of deep, slow breaths. She hadn’t been feeling too good for the past couple of days and today she had felt rough from the moment she had woken up.

Stress, she had decided, admitting that she had never really fully relaxed since the day she had found out just who Rhys Morgan was. And, with the threat of the DNA test results hanging over her head, she had found it totally impossible to find any real peace of mind. Any day now, Rhys might turn up with a document that proved he really was Fleur’s biological father and demand that she hand over his daughter to him.

And besides, she really didn’t feel right about keeping the little girl from him any more. She knew that Rhys loved Fleur—she’d seen it happen right before her eyes. Fleur had taken to him with a similar heart-stopping speed. And really, as he and Amelie had still been married when the baby was born, he had every right to make a claim to be her father.

If only she felt well enough to tackle the problem properly. Her energy seemed to have totally deserted her and her stomach had been queasy and nauseous all morning. And that had brought with it worries that she didn’t want to consider. Worries that had her counting up dates and getting a result that even stress would not explain.

A sudden shriek of protest from Fleur alerted her to the fact that a small blue rabbit, the baby’s favourite toy, had fallen through the bars of the cot and onto the floor.

‘Oh, you’ve lost Flopsy! We can’t have that, can we?’

Reacting automatically, she bent down to scoop up the small soft toy, then reeled as the simple action of raising her head again made her thoughts swim, and her stomach heave protestingly.

‘Oh, help!’

Tossing the toy back into the cot, she held on to the side of the little bed, struggling to breathe normally, and waiting for the moment to pass.

It didn’t. If anything, it got worse.

It was like being on the deck of a rolling and pitching ship, but with the movement being only in her head, not actually underfoot. Her head spun, her stomach lurched, she tasted something bitter in the back of her throat.

‘No…’

Scrambling to her feet, she headed desperately for the bathroom, only just reaching it in time. She hadn’t eaten much yesterday, even less for breakfast, but her stomach didn’t seem to know that, and she ended up in the most ungainly position possible, kneeling over the toilet, retching miserably.

And it was then that she heard the ring at the doorbell.

‘Go away!’ she groaned.

But then, on second thoughts, maybe it was her father…Lifting her head, she tried to call.

‘Dad!’

No, that only made matters worse.

And it couldn’t be her father. There was no way he would press the bell that hard, for that long. By now he would have opened the door.

Groaning, she gave in to another attack of nausea. And as she did so she heard the handle being turned, the door pushed open.

Oh, thank heaven!

‘Dad!’

‘Caitlin? Where are you?’

‘Up here!’

Heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs, taking them in leaps of two or more at a time just in the same seconds that she registered that the voice she had heard had most definitely
not
been her father’s.

‘Oh, no—please, no!’

Could fate really be that cruel? Couldn’t the new arrival possibly have been someone—
anyone
—else? Did she really have to face Rhys now, like this, when she felt terrible and must look much, much worse?

But fate was not feeling kind and the bathroom door opened abruptly to admit a tall, dark, masculine figure that looked taller, darker and infinitely more male from her humiliatingly undignified position on the floor.

‘Caitlin? The door wasn’t locked and I—’

‘Go away!’

At least that was what she wanted to say, but the fear of being sick again if she opened her mouth properly made the words come out more like ‘Mmph mweay’.

But Rhys ignored them anyway, taking in the situation in a glance and coming down beside her on the floor.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Isn’t it obvious? I’m sick…’ she flung at him, only to pay for the foolhardiness of the feeble attempt at defiance by proving her point with a violence and ferocity that left her shivering and exhausted by the time it was over.

‘OK, sweetheart, I’m here.’

She had forgotten about Rhys’s unwanted presence until she felt the cool hand on her hot forehead, smoothing her hair back from her face. At a welcome pause in the horrible retching, he picked up a clean face cloth, wrung it out in warm water from the tap and then gently wiped her face and mouth with it, smoothing away the mess and the bitter tears at the same time.

And it felt so good, so wonderful, that Caitlin forgot who he was and the threat he had held over her and Fleur, and simply relaxed back into his care, sighing in weak contentment.

There was a long silence, a silence Caitlin wished could go on forever and never break. But she had to face him at some point, and so she wearily forced open her eyes.

‘I’m OK now.’

‘I doubt that very much,’ he returned drily. ‘You don’t throw up what looks like half the contents of your stomach without there being something very badly wrong.’

‘I—think I’ve stopped being sick. For now at least.’

‘Then we’ll get you into bed.’

But that was more than Caitlin could cope with. The thought of being helped to bed by this man, of being taken to her bedroom, maybe even undressed coldly and clinically by the same man who had performed those actions with such passion only a few short weeks ago was too humiliating even to think of.

She couldn’t let him.

‘Oh, no!’

‘Oh, yes,’ Rhys corrected firmly. ‘You clearly aren’t fit to manage on your own. And then I’ll get the doctor. Where’s Fleur?’

‘In her cot—she’s quite safe…’

The sensation of being on a rolling ship was slowly receding. She was beginning to feel slightly less nauseous, though miserably weak and light-headed.

‘And I don’t need a doctor…’

A doctor would mean that Rhys would be likely to stick around, at least until the consultation was over. And what a doctor might have to say was something that panicked her even more.

‘Really, there’s no need…’

She found herself being totally ignored as he helped her to her feet and supported her out of the bathroom and down the landing to the bedroom. It was humiliating to admit, even to herself, how thankful she was for the strength of his arm around her waist, the warm weight of muscle that was holding her up.

‘Fleur…’ she managed when, feeling slightly breathless and rather more faint than she wanted to acknowledge, she reached her room and was lowered carefully to sit on the edge of the bed.

‘I’ll check on her. Now, can you get yourself into bed or—?’

‘I’ll manage!’ Caitlin said hastily.

She would, if it killed her. Being undressed by Rhys, looking and feeling as she did now, would be the ultimate embarrassment.

‘Well, if you’re sure, then I’ll look in on Fleur and phone the doctor.’

‘There’s no need…’ Caitlin tried again but she was talking to empty air. Rhys had taken her at her word and was already heading back down the landing to the baby’s tiny room.

It was as much as she could do to pull off her jeans and blue T-shirt and crawl under the covers. Finding and putting on a nightdress was just beyond her. With an exhausted sigh of relief she lay back against the softness of the pillows and closed her eyes, willing the room to stop spinning.