The Millionaire's Love-Child

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‘Friends fall out.’

‘And lovers?’

She took a breath, swallowed. God! What was she doing? She stole a covert glance in Warren’s direction. He was looking at her—at them both, displaying a shock that matched Katrina’s moments before when she had realised where her friend was headed. She flashed Brant another smile, and in a voice as silvery as the threads running through her clinging black dress, murmured, ‘And you, Mr Cadman…’

‘Brant.’

‘Are you…involved?’

He seemed to consider her question, before lifting his hands. They were long and well-tapered. ‘I’m as you see me. I’m not, however, quite so sure about you.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

His eyes strayed to Warren and the blonde, who were now dancing to a slow, sultry blues number.

‘She’s welcome to him.’ She tried desperately for nonchalance, her lashes veiling the dark anguish in her eyes. ‘She’ll find out he’s a louse.’

‘And you think I’m not?’

She lifted her chin, her lips a scarlet invitation to him, though she was dying inside. ‘Are you?’

‘Do you know what I think?’ he said.

‘What?’

He reached to take the glass out of her hand, put it on the bar.

‘I think you’ve had too much to drink.’

‘No, I haven’t.’ In truth, she had had barely two glasses, but on an empty stomach, having eaten very frugally for days because of her misery and then her apprehension over having to facing Warren with Caroline, it had obviously been too much.

‘OK, so you haven’t,’ he accepted, humouring her. ‘So tell me about Annie Talbot.’

She had been surprised that he remembered her name. When Warren had introduced her to him at that seminar two months before, he had been distracted by someone leaning over to say something to him, and she’d thought he hadn’t even heard. But obviously the man was as astute as he was dangerous, she thought with an unexpected little shiver, wondering why her brain should conjure up such a profound adjective in connection with him.

Wrinkling her nose, however, she murmured, ‘Far too boring. I’d rather talk about you.’

‘Would you?’ He made it sound like a reprimand so that at first she thought he wasn’t going to comply. But then he shrugged and said, ‘I’m thirty-two years old. Six feet two inches tall. Difficult to live with and have been chastised for more than just having a bad temper in my time. I also never make a habit of seducing young women on the rebound.’

‘Very commendable,’ Annie purred. Her legs felt like two tubs of lead and her face was aching from the need to keep on smiling.

‘Shall we dance?’ he suggested, and when she nodded led her towards the small polished circle where Warren and his lovely model swayed with eyes only for each other.

‘What would you like me to do?’ Brant enquired as he took Annie in his arms. ‘Punch him on the nose?’

Was her misery that obvious? she thought, and made a special effort to laugh.

‘Now, why would I want that?’ she breathed, her devil-may-care attitude bringing her hands across the wide sweep of his shoulders. ‘It really isn’t that important,’ she said, then gasped as his arm tightened like a steel bar against the small of her back, drawing her against his hard body.

She trembled in his arms and her mouth went dry. She felt slightly giddy from the heady musk of his cologne. Suddenly she realised what a dangerous game she was playing, that she was way, way out of her league. What did it matter though, she thought, if she could keep everyone from guessing how she was really feeling? Salve her pride and her dignity and her self-respect?

But the effort of pretending she didn’t care was wearing her out. Her head was aching now and her energy seemed to have deserted her. Also, behind them, Warren and the model were entwined in an intimate clinch, mouths devouring each other in a way that was overtly sexual.

Annie tried not to notice, but she couldn’t avoid it. Almost inaudibly she groaned, dipped her head, and felt the soft wool of Brant’s jacket against her forehead.

It was a far too intimate action, but one she could no more have avoided making than waking in the morning. As she swayed, she heard Brant say gently, ‘Come on.’

She hadn’t intended to wind up in his room. Any more than he, she felt, had intended they should wind up in bed. Not together anyway. He had simply been intending she should rest, she was certain, when he had carried her, like a rag doll, into his bedroom and laid her down on the cool, sensuous cotton of the duvet. Her head burned and she was racked by a tense excitement she had never known before. She watched him discard his jacket and tie before he came back and sat down beside her, asked if she was all right.

It was that one light kiss that had done it, that gentle probing of her lips before he made to move away that had her clutching at his shirt like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood. ‘Stay with me,’ foolishly she had murmured.

By the time she had realised the implications of what she was saying—doing—she was in the grip of a subjugating passion she had no will or desire to control. She had used him to blot out her misery, and didn’t expect after one mind-blowing climax in Brant’s bed that Warren Maddox would blur into insignificance, that in the morning her overriding emotion would be raw shame. Because how strong must her feelings for her fiancé have been in the first place, she wondered, if she could be reduced to such a wanton, sobbing creature, craving fulfilment by a man she’d merely seduced while on the rebound?

Rising before he was even awake, she raced home to pack, rang her boss to quit her job, then fled to Provence and anonymity.

It was when she had returned from France two months later that Katrina had told her Brant was married. Annie hadn’t seen him again until he had turned up at the flat the previous afternoon. Warren, as far as she had been aware, had moved in with his precious model. And, of course, when she had returned to England she had been in the early stages of pregnancy with Sean.

Brant had driven the pain of Warren’s betrayal away, only to replace it with a shaming humiliation. And with what skill and expertise! she thought now, trying not to dwell too deeply on the devastating few hours she had spent in his arms, telling herself again that she would be a fool to throw herself back into them, no matter how dangerously her hormones reacted to him. He had simply taken what she had had to offer at the time and then gone off and married Naomi Fox, and she had no one to blame but herself.

But one thing he wasn’t going to do was take Sean away! she determined, forcing herself up out of the chair and throwing herself into unnecessary household chores to try and keep her raging anxieties at bay.

And later, as soon as it was a respectable time to do so, unable to wait a minute longer, she did as he had advised, picked up the phone and tapped out the international dialling code for New Zealand.

CHAPTER THREE

ANNIE tried to concentrate on the little miniature painting, but nothing was working. Neither her brain, nor her fingers, nor her brush. Even the paint she was using for her foreground on the smooth translucent surface had blended with her horizon to create an unwanted, indistinct blur.

Like her life, Annie thought. Or at least how it had become since Brant had turned up there five days ago, threatening everything she valued, loved.

He was coming round at twelve to take her back to his home so that she could meet the little boy the hospital claimed was hers.

Annie’s hands trembled as she discarded the painting she had started earlier in the hope of losing herself in something useful, because as much as she was longing for this meeting, now that the time was almost upon her she was afraid, too.

How would she react when she came face to face with the toddler? This child to whom she was supposed to have given birth? Would she feel any maternal bond? Anything? Would she recognise him? Would there be some instinctive feeling in him towards her? And if there was, what would she do then? Because she couldn’t—wouldn’t—give up Sean.

‘He’s ours, Annie. Of course he is!’ She remembered Jane Talbot’s words coming shrilly across miles of ocean the evening she had rung her parents. ‘It doesn’t matter how many tests they say they have to do. They’ll only show up that he’s ours. Oh, my goodness! I want to come over,’ the woman had raced on. ‘I wish I could come right away, but I can’t leave your father. He needs me too much at the moment. Whatever am I going to do?’

Annie had been grateful that she had spoken to her father first; that he had been nearest the phone to pick it up when she had rung, because she hadn’t been able to stop herself breaking down, let alone cope with her mother’s hysterics as well. Though he had been naturally shocked and unhappy when she had told him that the grandson they adored might not be their grandson at all, Simon Talbot had taken it as he took everything life threw at him, good or bad. In his quiet, rational and unruffled way.

‘Annie. Annie,’ he’d soothed, hiding his own distress in an attempt to console his daughter. ‘This man Cadman and his wife…they’re going to feel the same way as you do. Of course they are. They won’t want to give up the child they’ve been bringing up as their own. They might want visitation rights to what might be their natural child—just as you might—but they—’

‘No, Dad. You don’t understand.’ She hadn’t made it clear, she had realised then. ‘Brant’s lost his wife. Therefore he’s got even more reason to want to take my baby away—because he’s part of her. Part of what he’s lost. Don’t you see…?’

From the silence that came across the miles, Annie had realised that he did. She could visualize his dear, familiar face, those character lines deepening beneath the black and grey peppered hair, his lean frame partially immobilised as he lounged, frustrated at having to relinquish his golf and his sailing, but most of all his staunch independence, to the ministrations of his easily overwrought wife.

‘If he’s a reasonable man, he wouldn’t hurt you like that, Annie. He’ll see it your way as well.’

But would he? Annie thought now, remembering her father’s words, as well as how exhausted she had been after she had come off the phone.

Traumatised as she had been herself, trying to console her mother had drained her, along with trying to convince Jane Talbot that she couldn’t possibly think about leaving her husband, so she shouldn’t worry. Annie had Katrina, didn’t she, who was a good friend. So she wasn’t entirely alone.

Tidying her paints, and pushing back her magnifier on the anglepoise lamp, she took the brush in its jar out to the kitchen sink, rinsing them both under the tap. She felt awful for thinking it, but much as she needed a shoulder to lean on, she was aware of a measure of relief that her mother couldn’t come. She didn’t think she could have stood Jane Talbot’s fussing on top of everything else.

It had been agreed that Annie would meet Jack before introducing Sean to any other members of Brant’s household. It being Saturday, Katrina had taken him off to the bouncy castle in the local park, where Annie always took him as a special treat.

‘I don’t have to tell you to be careful, do I?’ her friend had warned her knowingly as Annie was gathering up Sean’s little cap and cuddly lion for him to take. ‘All that stupendous arrogance and dynamism! Unless you’re less vulnerable than you were—what was it? Three years ago?’

‘Not quite,’ Annie had corrected. ‘And it isn’t what you’re imagining, Katrina.’ Unable to keep it to herself any longer, she had told her friend the truth.

The woman had been shocked, then sympathetic, her arms going around Annie in such a caring hug she’d felt tears bite behind her eyes.

‘Ten times more vulnerable,’ the woman had cautioned, so that now as she went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, Annie felt an ominous little shiver run along her spine.

Forty minutes later, the purr of a car engine had her rushing to the bedroom window. She reached it just in time to see Brant stepping out of the Mercedes in the tree-lined street.

Her gaze locked on him, following his long, lithe physique, impeccably encased in a dark business suit, until his glance up at the window made her pull away, wondering if he had noticed her reluctant interest.

‘Are you ready?’ At the door, his eyes made a swift survey of her mock-suede lilac jacket and the low-slung trousers she had teamed with a cream silk camisole.

She nodded, and saw his brow furrow as he studied her pale, tense features.

‘How do you feel?’

Annie inhaled deeply. ‘Terrified,’ she admitted.

His mouth pulled down on one side. ‘Is that why you pretended not to see me just now? Are you terrified of me, too?’

She was. Of those energies and that forceful determination that had brought him from a working-class background to millionaire status in just a few short years, if what she had heard about him was right. Of his charisma and charm and that intensely masculine attraction that had once swept the very ground from under her, and still had the power to do it again if she let it. But above all, of what he might come to represent.

‘Of course not,’ she lied, and, unable to stand the waiting any longer, murmured, ‘Can we go?’

His home was a huge Georgian house in one of the most sought-after suburbs of the city. A place that intimidated her on her first impression with its august formality, with its myriad windows that looked out on to extensive, perfectly maintained grounds.

‘Mother lived in Shropshire—in a busy little town she didn’t really want to leave—and where we both came from originally,’ he explained as they got out of the car, which was as much as he was going to tell her then, she realised, about his more humble beginnings. ‘When…Jack came on the scene, she moved down here to help out so that Jack wouldn’t be with total strangers whenever I went away. And then, so it doesn’t get too much for her, we have Elise.’

Annie glanced up at him, curious, as he was locking the car, but he didn’t enlarge.

Now, as she entered the formal drawing room with the tall man at her side, she felt the unsettling interest of the slim, subtly-blonde woman who was moving towards them with an elegance befitting her surroundings, and guessed that this could only be Brant’s mother.

‘I see what you mean,’ was the woman’s first remark with a startled glance up at Brant, so that Annie, catching his almost indiscernible nod, wondered what he had been saying about her.

‘I’m sorry.’ Her hostess smiled and, quickly recovering herself, extended a hand, her manners as polished as her pale-tipped fingers. ‘I’m Felicity Cadman, and you’re Annie, aren’t you? The other devastated party in all this. You must feel dreadful, my dear—as in limbo as we all are. I don’t know about Brant, but for me, it hasn’t really sunk in.’

‘Nor for me,’ Annie murmured, able, through her own chaotic emotions, to sympathise with Brant’s mother.

She could feel the woman’s quiet assessment of her, discreet yet curious glances that conveyed what she must have been thinking since Annie had walked in. Is this really the mother of the grandson I’ve helped raise?

‘I take it Jack’s in the nursery?’

Of course. They would have a nursery, Annie thought as Brant’s mother nodded. Living in such refinement, if Sean really were his, his and Naomi’s, then wouldn’t he want to make sure his son was part of it?

Everything inside her rebelled against such thinking as Brant started to lead her away, just as the phone pinged on a table close by, doing nothing for her edginess and her racing heart.

Brant snatched it up from the mirror-polished surface, grunted something about being tied up to whoever was on the line. But they must have told him it was urgent, because after his curt, ‘Excuse me,’ to Annie, he turned away, to take the call.

Probably some vital decision that needed his sanction, she thought, staring at the sculpted white marble of the fire surround, an exquisitely glazed vase sitting on top, aware of his deep voice ushering orders with that authority that made him a force to be reckoned with, yet respected and admired too, she remembered, among his competitors and his employees.

Conscious of Felicity watching her, Annie dragged her gaze away from the vase.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she uttered with an awkward smile and for something to say, only fully alive to her queasy anticipation and the impatience in the deep voice on the other side of the room.

‘Yes.’ Brant’s mother inhaled sharply. This whole situation was a strain for her also. ‘Yes, it was my…daughter-in-law’s choice.’

Tensely, Annie nodded, noting the slight hesitancy in the woman’s voice. As though it still hurt to speak about Brant’s wife. As though she preferred not to in his presence.

And this room, Annie wondered, with its high, ornate ceiling, its silvery brocades and pale Georgian hues, had this been Naomi’s choice too? Or had she and Brant chosen things together like any normal couple setting up home for the first time? In unison. In harmony. In love.

‘It hasn’t been easy for my son,’ that cultured female voice beside her commented, and then more softly, ‘what with…losing Jack’s mother so…’ She didn’t finish, only added, ‘And now this.’

And me. Does anyone think it’s easy for me? Annie wondered, her features drawn tight with anguish. She didn’t even realise how militant she looked until she heard Felicity’s request.

‘You will consider Jack, won’t you?’ Beneath the elegant poise, her eyes—the only thing about her that resembled Brant—seemed to be begging, Please don’t take my grandson away! ‘This is the only home—only family—he’s known, as it will have been for your little boy. We have to consider them. We can’t pull their worlds apart, as we would if we decided to switch them back.’

‘There’s no question of my wanting to switch them back, or of my ever giving Sean up,’ Annie stated, adamantly, just as Brant came off the phone.

‘Ready?’ he enquired, his arm extended.

There was a calculating watchfulness about him, she sensed, noting the contrasting, fleeting smile he directed at his mother. Which said what? she wondered as he led her through the imposing hallway, up to the second storey. That he would do what he had to, what was necessary? But surely he would feel the same way about Jack as she felt about Sean?

Her heart was pounding like a steam-hammer when he opened the door to what was obviously the nursery, with its eggshell-blue paintwork and brightly patterned walls, and the toys scattered over the floor. Across the room, a window-seat offered a view of the billiard-table lawns, of high, professionally cultivated hedges.

‘Monsieur Cadman…’ Someone was coming out of an adjoining room. ‘You want to see Jack. He has just finished lunch. He wash his own face. He is a big boy now.’ Blonde, full-busted and naturally pretty, she had an accent as alluring as the long, swishing hair, Annie noted, as the French girl laughed up at Brant, and spared Annie no more than a passing glance before giving her attention to her employer again with an intensity that was painful to watch. ‘Do you want me to stay, monsieur?’

‘No, I’ll call you, Elise.’

‘Oui, monsieur.’ The girl almost bobbed at him before leaving the room.

Somewhere in her subconscious, Annie wondered if the girl’s transparent adulation amused him, or even if he’d considered doing anything about it, because Elise certainly wanted him to, but at that moment she was too distracted to care. All her attention was on the toddler who, at the sound of his father’s voice, had come tottering out of the bathroom. In a tiny red shirt and miniature combat trousers, he was now flinging his arms around Brant’s long, immaculately clad leg.

‘Hey, hey, Jack!’ With playful ease, Brant swung him up into the air, making the boy squeal in delight before setting him down on his feet again. ‘Jack, I want you to meet Annie,’ he said softly, clasping the infant’s little hand in his. ‘Annie, this is Jack.’

Moved beyond her wildest imagination, Annie could only stand there for a moment, aware of Brant’s gaze lancing across her face, aware as she crouched down to say, ‘Hello,’ of those shrewd eyes still watching her, missing nothing. Not the way she stared, transfixed, at the little mop of thick, dark hair falling forward just as hers did, or those deep brown eyes that gazed curiously back at her, like wide, dark mirrors of her own. His face was rounder than Sean’s, still in the final stages of babyhood, but unlike Sean, there was no shyness here, just a broad, toothy smile that tugged at Annie’s heart, tugged at everything in her that was maternal.