Contract Baby

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In sheer shock, Polly’s lips fell open. She began to rise off the sofa. ‘I b-beg your pardon?’ she stammered shakily, convinced he couldn’t possibly have said what she thought he had said.

Raul swung fluidly round to face her again. ‘You heard me. Forget that stupid will, and for the present forget the baby too...just ditch that loser!’

Her blue eyes opened very wide. She gaped at him, and then she took a step forward, fierce anger leaping up inside her. ‘How dare you try to bribe me into doing what you want me to do? How dare you do that?’

Raul’s cool façade cracked to reveal the cold anger beneath. He sent her a sizzling look of derision. ‘Caramba! Surely you’d prefer to stay rich and single when Henry’s the only option on offer?’

Without an instant of hesitation, Polly snatched up the water jug by the bed with a feverish hand and slung the contents at him. ‘That’s what I think of your filthy offer! I’m not for sale this time and I never will be again!’

Soaked by that sizeable flood, and astonished by both her attack and that outburst, Raul stood there dripping and downright incredulous. As his lean fingers raked his wet hair off his brow, his dark eyes flamed to a savage golden blaze.

‘I’m not sorry,’ Polly admitted starkly.

Raul slung her a searing look of scantily leashed fury. ‘Por Dios...I am leaving before I say or do something I might regret!’ he bit out rawly.

The door snapped shut in his imperious wake. Polly snatched in a slow steadying breath and realised that even her hands were shaking. She had never met with a temper that hot before.

CHAPTER THREE

A VIDEO recorder arrived, complete with a whole collection of tapes, and was installed in Polly’s room by lunchtime the following day.

As a gesture, it was calculated to make her feel guilty. That evening, Polly sat in floods of tears just picking through titles like The Quiet Man and Pretty Woman and Sabrina. All escapist romantic movies, picked by a male who knew her tastes far too well for comfort. She grabbed up another tissue in despair.

Raul Zaforteza unleashed a temper she hadn’t known she had. He filled her to overflowing with violent, resentful and distressingly confused emotions. She hated him, she told herself fiercely. He was tearing her apart. She hated him even more when she felt herself react to the humiliating pull of his magnetic sexual attraction.

Worse, Raul understood her so much better than she understood him. In Vermont, she had trustingly revealed too many private thoughts and feelings, while he had been coolly evaluating her, like a scientist studying something curious under a microscope. Why? He had answered that straight off the top of his head and without hesitation.

So that he could answer her child’s questions about her in the future.

Polly shivered at the memory of that admission, chilled to the marrow and hurt beyond belief. It wasn’t possible to get more detached than that from another human being. But how many times had Raul already emphasised that there was nothing but that hateful surrogate contract between them? And why was she still torturing herself with that reality?

He had coolly, contemptuously offered her a million pounds to dump Henry and stay single. And why had he done that? Simply because he felt threatened by the idea of her marrying. Why hadn’t she grasped that fact sooner? If she married, Raul would be forced, whether he liked it or not, to stand back while another man raised his child. So why hadn’t she told him she wasn’t planning to marry Henry?

Polly was honest with herself on that point. She hadn’t seen why she should tell him the truth. What business was it of his? And she had been prepared to hide behind a pretend engagement to Henry, a face-saving pretence that suggested her life had moved on since Vermont. Only Raul had destroyed that pretence. Acquainted as he was with the intricacies of her godmother’s will, he had realised that that inheritance was the only reason Henry was willing to marry her. It mortified Polly that Raul should have guessed even that. In his presence, she was beginning to feel as if she was being speedily stripped of every defence.

But then what did she know about men? It was laughable to be so close to the birth of her own child and still be so ignorant. But her father had been a strict, puritanical man, whose rules and restrictions had made it impossible for her to enjoy a normal social life. It had even been difficult to hang onto female friends with a father who invariably offended them by criticising their clothing or their behaviour.

She had had a crush on a boy in her teens, but he had quickly lost interest when her father refused to allow her to go out with him. When she had started the university degree course that she’d never got to finish, she had lived so close to the campus she had had to continue living at home. She had kept house for her father, assisted in his many church activities and, when his stationery business began to fail, helped with his office work.

She had sneaked out to the occasional party. Riven with guilt at having lied to get out, she had endured a few overenthusiastic clinches, wondering what all the fuss was about while she pushed away groping, over-familiar hands, unable to comprehend why any sane female would want to respond to such crude demands.

She had met another boy while studying. Like his predecessors, he had been unwilling to come to the house and meet her father just to get permission to take her out at night. At first he had thought it was a bit of laugh to see her only during the day. Then one lunchtime he had taken her back to his flat and tried to get her to go to bed with him. She had said no. He had ditched her there and then, called her ‘a pathetic, boring little virgin’ and soon replaced her with a more available girl who didn’t expect love and commitment in return for sex.

It had taken Raul Zaforteza to teach Polly what she had never felt before... a deep, dark craving for physical contact as tormenting to endure as a desperate thirst...

Polly was restless that evening. Aware that she wasn’t asleep, one of the nurses brought her in a cup of tea at ten, and thoughtfully lent her a magazine to read.

As always, during the night, her door was kept ajar to allow the staff to check easily and quietly on her. So when, out of the corner of her eye, Polly saw the door open wider, she turned with a smile for the nurse she was expecting to see and then froze in surprise when she saw Raul instead. Visiting time finished at nine, and it was now after eleven.

‘How did you get in?’ Polly asked in a startled whisper.

Raul leant lithely back against the door until it snapped softly shut. In a black dinner jacket and narrow black trousers, a bow tie at his throat, he exuded sophisticated cool. ‘Talked my way past the security guard and chatted up the night sister.’

Strolling forward, he set a tub of ice cream in front of her. ‘Peppermint—your favourite... my peace offering,’ he murmured with a lazy smile.

That charismatic smile hit Polly like a shot of adrenalin in her veins. Every trace of drowsiness evaporated. Her heart jumped, her mouth ran dry and burning colour started to creep up her throat. He lifted the teaspoon from the cup and saucer on the bed-table she had pushed away and settled it down helpfully on top of the tub.

‘Eat it before it melts,’ he advised, settling down on the end of the bed in an indolent sprawl.

It shook her that Raul should recall that peppermint was her favorite flavour. It shook her even more that he should take the trouble to call in with ice cream at this hour of the night when he had obviously been out somewhere.

With a not quite steady hand, Polly removed the lid on the tub. ‘Henry lied,’ she confided abruptly. ‘We’re not engaged. I’m not going to marry him.’

In the intimate pool of light shed by the Anglepoise lamp by the bed, a wolfish grin slashed Raul’s darkly handsome features. Polly was so mesmerised by it, she dug her teaspoon into empty air instead of the tub and only discovered the ice cream by touch.

‘You could do a lot better than him, cielita,’ he responded softly.

Polly’s natural sense of fairness prompted her to add, ‘Henry isn’t that bad. He was honest. It wasn’t like he pretended to fancy me or anything like that...’

Slumberous dark eyes semi-screened by lush ebony lashes, Raul emitted a low-pitched laugh that sent an odd little tremor down her sensitive spine. ‘Henry has no taste.’

The silence that fell seemed to hum in her eardrums.

Feeling that languorous heaviness in her breasts, the surge of physical awareness she dreaded, Polly shifted uneasily and leapt straight back into speech. ‘Why did you decide to hire a surrogate?’ she asked baldly. ‘It doesn’t make sense to me.’

His strong face tensed. ‘I wanted to have a child while I was still young enough to play with a child...’

‘And the right woman just didn’t come along?’ Polly assumed as the silence stretched.

‘Perhaps I should say that I like women but I like my freedom better. Let’s leave it at that,’ Raul suggested smoothly.

‘I’m so sorry I signed that contract.’ Troubled eyes blue as violets rested on him, her heart-shaped face strained. ‘I don’t know how I thought I could actually go through with it...but at the time I suppose I couldn’t think of anything but how sick my mother was.’

‘I should never have picked you. The psychologist said that he wasn’t convinced you understood how hard it would be to surrender your child—’

‘Did he?’

‘He said you were too intense, too idealistic.’

Polly frowned. ‘So why was I chosen?’

Raul lifted a broad shoulder in a slight fatalistic shrug that was very Latin. ‘I liked you. I didn’t want to have a baby with a woman I couldn’t even like.’

‘I was a really bad choice,’ Polly muttered ruefully. ‘Now I wish you’d listened to the psychologist.’

Raul vented a rather grim laugh. ‘I never listen to what I don’t want to hear. People who work for me know that, and they like to please me. That’s why you were fed lies to persuade you into signing the contract. A very junior lawyer got smart and set you up. He didn’t tell his boss what he’d done until after you’d signed. He expected an accolade for his ingenuity but instead he got fired.’

‘Did he?’ Polly showed her surprise.

‘Sí...’ Raul’s mouth tightened. ‘But my lawyer saw no reason to tell me what had happened. He had no idea that either of us would ever be in a position to find out.’

Polly ate the ice cream, lashes lowering as she savoured each cool, delicious spoonful. The seconds ticked by. Raul watched her. She was aware of his intent scrutiny, curiously satisfied by the attention, but extremely nervous of it too, as if she was a mouse with a hawk circling overhead. It was so quiet, so very quiet at that hour of the night, no distant buzzing bells, no quick-moving feet in the corridor outside.

And then Polly stiffened, a muffled little sound of discomfort escaping her as the baby chose that moment to give her an athletic kick.

Raul leant forward. ‘Que...what is it?’ he demanded anxiously.

‘The baby. It’s always liveliest at night.’ She met the question in his eyes and flushed, reaching a sudden decision. Setting down the ice cream, she pushed the bedding back the few necessary inches, knowing that she was perfectly decently covered in her cotton nightie but still feeling horrendously shy.

Raul drew closer and rested his palm very lightly on her stomach. As he felt the movement beneath his fingers, a look of wonder filled his dark, shimmering gaze and he smiled with sudden quick brilliance. ‘That’s amazing,’ he breathed. ‘Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl yet?’

‘Mr Bevan offered to tell me but I didn’t want to know,’ Polly admitted unevenly, deeply unsettled by that instant of intimate sharing but undeniably touched by his fascination. ‘I like surprises better.’

Raul slowly removed his palm and tugged the sheet back into place. His hands weren’t quite steady. Noting that, she wondered why. She could still feel the cool touch of his hand like a burning imprint on her own flesh. He was so close she could hardly breathe, her own awareness of him so pronounced it was impossible to fight. At best, she knew she could only hope to conceal her reaction, but though she was desperate to think of something to say to distract him her mind was suddenly a blank.

‘You can be incredibly sweet...’ Raul remarked, half under his breath.

Her intent gaze roamed over him, lingering helplessly on the glossy luxuriance of his black hair, the hard, clean line of his high cheekbones and the dark roughening of his jawline that suggested a need to shave twice a day. Reaching the wide, passionate curve of his mouth, she wondered as she had wondered so often before what he tasted like. Then, wildly flustered by that disturbing thought, her eyes lifted, full of confusion, and the dark golden lure of his gaze entrapped and held her in thrall.

‘And incredibly tempting,’ Raul confided huskily as he brought his sensual mouth very slowly down on hers.

She could have pulled back with ease; he gave her every opportunity. But at the first touch of his lips on hers she dissolved into a hot, melting pool of acquiescence. With a muffled groan, he closed his hand into the tumbling fall of her hair to steady himself and let his tongue stab deep into the tender interior of her mouth. And the whole tenor of the kiss changed.

Excitement so intense it burned flamed instantly through her, bringing her alive with a sudden shocking vitality that made her screamingly aware of every inch of her own humming body. And as soon as it began she ached for more, lacing desperate fingers into the silky thickness of his hair, palms sliding down then to curve over to his cheekbones. Only at some dim, distant, uncaring level was she conscious of the buzzing, irritating sound somewhere close by.

Raul released her with a stifled expletive in Spanish and sprang off the bed. With dazed eyes, Polly watched him pull out a mobile phone. And in the deep silence she heard the high-pitched vibration of a woman’s voice before he put the phone to his ear.

‘Dios...I’ll be down in a moment,’ Raul murmured curtly, and, switching the phone off, he dug it back into his pocket.

‘I’m sorry but I have to go. I have someone waiting in the car.’ He raked restive fingers through his now thoroughly tousled black hair, glittering golden eyes screened from her searching scrutiny, mouth compressed into a ferocious line. ‘I’ll see you soon. Buenas noches.’

The instant he left the room, Polly thrust back the bedding and scrambled awkwardly out of bed. She flew over to the window which overlooked the front entrance and pulled back the curtain. She saw the limo...and she saw the beautiful blonde in her sleek, short crimson dress pacing beside it. Then she watched the blonde arrange herself in a studied pose against the side of the luxury car so that she looked like a glamorous model at an automobile show.

Polly rushed back across the room to douse the lamp and then returned to the window. Raul emerged from the clinic. The blonde threw herself exuberantly into his arms Polly’s nerveless fingers dropped from the curtain. She reeled back against the cold wall and closed her arms round her trembling body, feeling sick and dizzy and utterly disgusted with herself.