Proof Of Their One-Night Passion

Ever.

His life was already complicated enough. He had parents and step-parents, and seven whole and half-and step siblings scattered around the world, and not one of them had made a relationship last for any length of time. Not only that, their frequent and overlapping affairs and break-ups, and the inevitable pain and misery they caused, seemed to be an unavoidable accompaniment to any kind of commitment.

He liked life to be straightforward. Simple. Honest. It was why he’d created ice/breakr in the first place. Why make dating so needlessly confusing? When by asking and answering one carefully curated question people could match their expectations and so avoid any unnecessary emotional trauma.

Or that was the theory.

Only clearly there been some kind of glitch—a ghost in the machine, maybe?

‘So it’s not Steinn, then?’

His eyes met hers. She was not classically beautiful, but she was intriguing. Both ordinary and extraordinary at once. Mousy hair, light brown eyes… And yet her face had a capacity for expression that was mesmerising.

And then there was her voice.

It wasn’t just the huskiness that made his skin tingle, but the way she lingered over the syllables of certain words, like a blues singer. Had he judged her simply on her voice, he might have assumed she had a lifestyle to match—too many late nights and a history of heartache, but their night together had revealed a lack of confidence and a clumsiness that suggested the opposite. Not that he’d asked or minded. In fact it had only made her feverish response to him even more arousing.

Feeling his body respond to the memory of her flowering desire, he blocked his thoughts and shrugged. ‘In a way it is. Steinn is Icelandic for Stone. It was just a play on words.’

Her eyes held his. ‘Oh, you mean like calling your dating app ice/breakr?’

So she knew about the app. ‘I wanted to try it out for myself. A dummy run, if you like.’

She flinched and he felt his shoulders tense.

‘I didn’t intend to deceive you.’

‘About that? Or about wanting to spend the day with me?’ She frowned. ‘Wouldn’t it have been fairer and more honest if you’d just said you didn’t want to spend any more time with me?’

Ragnar stared at her in silence, gritting his teeth against the sting of her words. Yes, it would. But that would have been a different kind of lie.

Lying didn’t come naturally to him—his whole family played fast and loose with the facts and even as a child he’d found it exhausting and stressful. But that night he’d acted out of character, starting from the moment he’d played games with his American father’s name and booked a table as Mr Steinn.

And then, the morning after, confronted by his body’s fierce reaction to hers, and that uncharacteristic and unsettling need he’d felt to prolong their time together, the lies had kept coming.

‘I didn’t—’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ She swiped his answer away with a swift jerk of her hand. ‘That’s not why I’m here.’ She glanced past him into the street. ‘There’s a café open down the road…’

He knew it. It was one of those brightly lit artisan coffee shops with bearded baristas and clean wooden counters. Nothing like the shadowy, discreet bar where they’d met before.

His heartbeat stalled. He could still remember her walking in. It had been one of those sharply cold March evenings that reminded him of home, and there had been a crush of people at the bar, escaping the wind’s chill.

He’d been on the verge of leaving.

A combination of work and family histrionics had shrunk his private life to early-morning sessions with his trainer and the occasional dinner with an investor when, finally, it had dawned on him that his app had been launched for nearly three months.

On a whim, he’d decided to try it out.

But, watching the couples dotted about the bar, he had felt a familiar unease clutch at his stomach.

Out of habit, he’d got there early. It was a discipline he embraced—perhaps because since childhood any chance to assemble his thoughts in peace had always been such a rarity. But when Lottie had walked through the door rational thought had been swept away. Her cheeks had been flushed, and she’d appeared to be wearing nothing but a pair of slim-heeled boots and a short black trench coat.

Sadly she’d been clothed underneath but he’d stayed sitting down. If using his own dating app had been impulsive, then not leaving by another door had been the first time he’d done something so utterly unconsidered.

‘And you want me to join you there?’

Her eyes met his and there was a beat of silence before she nodded.

His pulse accelerated.

It was nearly two years since that night.

He was exhausted.

His head of security would be appalled.

And yet—

His eyes rested on the soft cushion of her mouth.

The coffee shop was still busy enough that they had to queue for their drinks, but they managed to find a table.

‘Thank you.’ He gestured towards his espresso.

His wallet had been in his hand, but she had sidestepped neatly in front of him, her soft brown eyes defying him to argue with her. Now, though, those same brown eyes were busily avoiding his, and for the first time since she’d called out his name he wondered why she had tracked him down.

He drank his coffee, relishing the heat and the way the caffeine started to block the tension in his back.

‘So, I’m all yours,’ he said quietly.

She stiffened. ‘Hardly.’

He sighed. ‘Is that what this is about? Me giving you the wrong name.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘No, of course not. I’m not—’ She stopped, frowning. ‘Actually, I wasn’t just passing, and I’m not here for myself.’ She took a breath. ‘I’m here for Sóley.’

Her face softened into a smile and he felt a sudden urge to reach out and caress the curve of her lip, to trigger such a smile for himself.

‘It’s a pretty name.’

She nodded, her smile freezing.

It was a pretty name—one he’d always liked. One you didn’t hear much outside of Iceland. Only what had it got to do with him?

Watching her fingers tremble against her cup, he felt his ribs tighten. ‘Who’s Sóley?’

She was quiet for less than a minute, only it felt much longer—long enough for his brain to click through all the possible answers to the impossible one.

He watched her posture change from defensive to resolute.

‘She’s your daughter. Our daughter.’

He stared at her in silence, but a cacophony of questions was ricocheting inside his head.

Not the how or the when or the where, but the why. Of course he’d used condoms but that first time he’d been rushing. And he’d known that. So why hadn’t he checked everything was okay? Why had he allowed the heat of their encounter to blot out common sense?

But the answers to those questions would have to wait.

‘Okay…’

Shifting in her seat, she frowned. ‘“Okay”?’ she repeated. ‘Do you understand what I just said?’

‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘You’re saying I got you pregnant.’

‘You don’t seem surprised,’ she said slowly.

He shrugged. ‘These things happen.’

To his siblings and half-siblings, even to his mother. But not to him. Never to him.

Until now.

‘And you believe me?’ She seemed confused, surprised?

Tilting his head, he held her gaze. ‘Honest answer?’

He was going to ask her what she would gain by lying. But before he could open his mouth her lip curled.

‘On past performance I’m not sure I can expect that. I mean, you lied about your name. And the hotel you were staying at. And you lied about wanting to spend the day with me.’

‘I didn’t plan on lying to you,’ he said quietly.

Her mouth thinned. ‘No, I’m sure it comes very naturally to you.’

‘You’re twisting my words.’

She shook her head. ‘You mean like saying Steinn instead of Stone?’

Pressing his spine into the wall behind him, he felt a tick of anger begin to pulse beneath his skin.

‘Okay, I was wrong to lie to you—but if you care about the truth so much then why have you waited so long to tell me that I have a daughter? I mean, she must be what…?’ He did a quick mental calculation. ‘Ten, eleven months?’

‘Eleven months,’ she said stiffly. ‘And I did want to tell you. I tried looking for you when I was pregnant, and then again when she was born. But the only Ragnar Steinns I could track down weren’t you.’ She shifted in her seat again. ‘I probably would never have found you if you hadn’t been on the TV.’

He looked at her again, and despite the rush of righteousness heating his blood he could see that she was nervous, could hear the undertone of strain beneath her bravado.

But then it was a hell of a thing to do. To face a man and tell him he had a child.

His heart began to beat faster.

Years spent navigating through the maelstrom of his family’s dramas had given him a cast-iron control over his feelings, and yet for some reason he couldn’t stop her panic and defiance from getting under his skin.

But letting feelings get in the way of the facts was not going to help the situation. Nor was it going to be much use to his eleventh-month-old daughter.

Right now he needed to focus on the practical.

‘Fortunately you did find me,’ he said calmly.

‘Here.’ She was pushing something across the table towards him, but he carried on talking.

‘So I’m guessing you want to talk money?’

At that moment a group of young men and women came into the café and began noisily choosing what to drink. As the noise swelled around them Lottie thought she might have misheard.

Only she knew that she hadn’t.

Ever since arriving in London that morning she’d been questioning whether she was doing the right thing, and the thought of seeing Ragnar again had made her stomach perform an increasingly complicated gymnastics routine. Her mood had kept alternating between angry and nervous, but when he’d walked out into the street her mood had been forgotten and a spasm of almost unbearable hunger had consumed everything.

If she’d thought seeing him on TV had prepared her for meeting him again then she’d been wrong. Beneath the street lighting his beauty had been as stark and shocking as the volcanic rock of his homeland.

And he was almost unbearably like the daughter they shared. Only now it would appear that, just like her own father, Ragnar seemed to have already decided the terms of his relationship.

‘Money?’ She breathed out unsteadily. The word tasted bitter in her mouth. ‘I didn’t come here to talk to you about money. I came here to talk about our daughter.’

Her heart felt suddenly too big for her chest. Why did this keep happening? Why did men think that they could reduce her life to some random sum of money?

‘Children cost money.’ He held her gaze. ‘Clearly you’ve been supporting her alone up until now and I want to fix that. I’ll need to talk to my lawyers, but I want you to know that you don’t need to worry about that anymore.’

I’m not worrying, she wanted to scream at him. She wasn’t asking to be helped financially, or fixed. In fact she wasn’t asking for anything at all.

‘I’ve not been alone. My mother helps, and my brother Lucas lives with me. He works as a tattooist so he can choose his own hours—’

‘A tattooist?’

Glancing up, she found his clear blue eyes examining her dispassionately, as if she was some flawed algorithm. She felt slightly sick—just as she had in those early months of the pregnancy. Only that had been a welcome sickness. A proof of new life, a sign of a strong pregnancy. Now, though, the sickness was down to the disconnect between the man who had reached for her so frantically in that hotel room and this cool-eyed stranger.

She stared at him in silence.

What made this strange, unnerving distance between them a hundred times harder was that she had let herself be distracted by his resemblance to Sóley. Let herself hope that the connection between Ragnar and his daughter would be more than it had been for her and her own father—not just bones and blood, but a willingness to claim her as his own.

But the cool, dispassionate way he had turned the conversation immediately to money was proof that he’d reached the limit of his parental involvement.

She cleared her throat. ‘I know you’re a rich man, Ragnar, but I didn’t come here to beg.’ She swallowed down her regret and disappointment. ‘This was a mistake. Don’t worry, though, it’s not one I’ll make again—so why don’t you get back to the thing that clearly matters most to you? Making money.’

Ragnar reached across the table, but even before he’d got to his feet she had scraped back her seat and snatched up her coat, and he watched in disbelief as she turned and fled from the cafe.

For a moment he considered chasing after her, but she was moving fast and no doubt would already have reached the underground station on the corner.

He sat back down; his chest tight with an all too familiar frustration.

Her behaviour—having a child with a complete stranger, keeping that child a secret, turning up unannounced to reveal the child’s existence and then storming off—could have come straight from his family’s playbook of chaos.

Glancing down, he felt his pulse scamper forward as for the first time he looked at what she’d pushed across the table. It was a photo of a little girl.

A little girl who looked exactly like him—Sóley.

Reaching out, he touched her face lightly. She was so small, so golden, just like her name. And he was not going to let her grow up with no influence but her chaotic mother and whatever ragtag family she had in tow.

He might love his own family, but he knew only too well the downside of growing up in the eye of a storm and he didn’t want that for his daughter.

So arrangements would have to be made.

Picking up the photo, he slid it into his wallet and pulled out his phone.

CHAPTER TWO

HITCHING HER SLEEPING daughter further up on to her shoulder, Lottie glanced around the gallery.

Groups of people were moving slowly around the room, occasionally pausing to gaze more closely at the sketches and collages and sculpted resin objects before moving on again. It wasn’t rammed, but she was pleased—she really was. She was also exhausted.

‘Nearly over.’

She turned, eyes widening, and then began to smile as the woman standing beside her gave her a conspiratorial wink. Slim, blonde, and with the kind of cheekbones that grazed men’s eyes as they walked past, Georgina Hamilton was the gallery’s glamorous and incredibly competent co-owner, and despite the fact that she and Lottie were different in as many ways as it was possible to be, she had become an ally and fierce supporter.

Lottie screwed up her face. ‘Do I look that desperate?’

Her friend stared at her critically. ‘Only to me. To everyone else you probably just look artistically dishevelled.’ She glanced at the sleeping Sóley. ‘Do you want me to take her?’

Their eyes met and then they both began to giggle. They both knew that Georgina’s idea of hands-on childcare was choosing baby clothes in her cousin’s upmarket Chelsea boutique.

‘No, it’s okay. I don’t want to risk waking her.’ Lottie looked down at the top of her daughter’s soft, golden-haired head. ‘She’s been really unsettled the last couple of nights.’

And she wasn’t the only one.

Her cheeks were suddenly warm, and she tilted her head away from Georgina’s gaze. It was true that Sóley was struggling to fall asleep at night, but it was Ragnar who had actually been keeping her awake.

It wasn’t just the shock of seeing him again, or even his disappointingly predictable reduction of their daughter’s life to a financial settlement. It was the disconcerting formality between them.

She pressed her face into her daughter’s hair. The disconnect between her overtly erotic memories of the last time they’d met and his cool reserve in the coffee shop had made her feel as if she’d stepped through the looking glass. He had been at once so familiar, and yet so different. Gone was the passion and the febrile hunger, and in their place was a kind of measured, almost clinical gaze that had made her feel she was being judged—and found wanting.

Her heartbeat twitched. And yet running alongside their laboured conversation there had been something pulsing beneath the surface—a stirring of desire, something intimate yet intangible that had made her fingers clumsy as she’d tried to pick up her cup.

She blinked the thought away. Of course what had happened between them had clearly been a blip. After all, this was a man who had turned people’s need for intimacy into a global business worth billions—an ambition that was hardly compatible with empathy or passion.

Her jaw tightened. What was it he’d said about that night? Oh, yes, that it had been a ‘dummy run’ for his app. Well, she was a dummy for thinking he might have actually wanted to get to know his daughter.

From now on she was done with doing the right thing for the wrong people. She was only going to let the people she could trust get close—like the woman standing in front of her.

‘Thanks for staying, Georgina, and for everything you’ve done. I honestly don’t think I would have sold as well if you hadn’t been here.’

Swinging her cape of gleaming blonde hair over her shoulder, Georgina smiled back at her. ‘Oh, sweetie, you don’t need to thank me—firstly, it’s my job, and secondly it’s much better for the gallery to have a sold-out exhibition.’

‘Sold out?’ She blinked in confusion. ‘But I thought there were still three pieces left—those sketches and the collage—?’

Georgina shrugged. ‘Not any more. Rowley’s contacted me at lunchtime and bought all of them.’

Lottie felt her ribs tighten. Rowley’s was a prestigious art dealer with a Mayfair address and a client list of wealthy investors who flitted between Beijing, New York, and London, spending millions on houses and cars and emerging artists.

They also had an unrivalled reputation for discretion.

She opened her mouth, but Georgina was already shaking her head.

‘No, they didn’t give me a name.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘You don’t look very pleased.’

‘I am,’ Lottie protested.

After finding out she was pregnant, working had been a welcome distraction from the upheaval in her life, but it had quickly become much more.

She glanced at the visitors who were still drifting around the gallery. ‘I just prefer to meet the buyers directly.’

‘I know you do—but you know what these collectors are like. They love to have the cachet of buying up-and-coming artists’ early work, but they love their anonymity more.’ Georgina tutted. ‘I know you hate labels, but you are up-and-coming. If you don’t believe me then believe your own eyes. You can see all the “Sold” stickers from here.’ Watching Lottie shift her daughter’s weight to her other arm, she said, ‘Are you sure I can’t take her?’

Lottie shook her head. ‘It’s fine. They must be on their way. I mean, Lucas was supposed to meet Izzy at the station and then they were coming straight back.’

Georgina sniffed. She was not a huge fan of Lottie’s family. ‘Yes, well… I expect they got “distracted”.’ She smoothed the front of her sculpted nip and tuck dress, and then her eyes narrowed like a tigress spotting her prey. ‘Oh, my…’ she said softly.

‘What’s the matter?’ Lottie frowned.

‘Don’t look now but an incredibly hot guy has just walked into the gallery. He has the most amazing eyes I’ve ever seen.’’

Lottie shook her head. No doubt they were fixed on the woman standing beside her.

‘Ouch.’ She winced as Georgina clutched at her arm.

‘He’s coming over to us.’

‘To you, you mean—and of course he is,’ Lottie said drily. ‘He’s male.’

Georgina had the most incredible effect on men, and she was used to simply filling the space beside her.

‘He’s not looking at me,’ Georgina said slowly. She sounded stunned. ‘He’s looking at you.’

Lottie laughed. ‘Perhaps he hasn’t put his contact lenses in this morning. Or maybe he—’

She turned and her words stopped mid-sentence. Her body seemed to turn to salt. Walking towards her, his blue eyes pinning her to the floor, was Ragnar Stone.

She stared at him mutely as he stopped in front of her. He was dressed more casually than when she’d stopped him outside his office, but such was the force of his presence that suddenly the gallery seemed much smaller and there was a shift in tension, as though everyone was looking at him while trying to appear as though they weren’t.

His blue eyes really were incredibly blue, she thought weakly. But Georgina had been wrong. He wasn’t looking at her. Instead, his eyes were fixed on his daughter. For a few half-seconds, maybe more, he gazed at Sóley, his face expressionless and unmoving, and then slowly he turned his head towards her.

‘Hello, Lottie.’

She stared at him silence, her heartbeat filling her chest, her grip tightening around her daughter’s body. In the café there had been so much noise, but here in the near museum-level quiet of the gallery his voice was making her body quiver like a violin being tuned.

It was completely illogical and inappropriate, but that didn’t stop it being true.

‘Hello, Ragnar,’ she said stiffly. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you.’

She wasn’t sure what kind of a response he would make to her remark, but maybe he felt the same way because he didn’t reply.

‘So you two know one another, then?’ Georgina said brightly.

‘Yes.’

‘No!’

They both spoke as one—him quietly, her more loudly.

Lottie felt her cheeks grow warm. ‘We met once a couple of years back,’ she said quickly.

‘Just shy of two years.’

Ragnar’s blue eyes felt like lasers.

There was a short, strained silence and then Georgina cleared her throat. ‘Well, I’ll let you catch up on old times.’

Clearly dazzled by Ragnar’s beauty, she smiled at him sweetly and, blind to Lottie’s pleading expression, sashayed towards an immaculately dressed couple on the other side of the room.

‘How did you find me?’ she said stiffly. Her heart bumped unsteadily against her ribs. She was still processing the fact that he had come here.

He held her gaze. ‘Oh, I was just passing.’

Remembering the lie she’d told, she glared at him. ‘Did you have me followed?’

Something flickered across the blue of his pupils. ‘Not followed, no—but I did ask my head of security to locate the exhibition you mentioned.’

A pulse was beating in her head. His being here was just so unexpected. Almost as unexpected as the feeling of happiness that was fluttering in time to her heart.

‘Aren’t you going to introduce me?’

For a moment she gazed at Ragnar in confusion. Was he talking about Georgina? A mixture of disbelief and jealousy twisted her breathing. Was he really using this moment to hit on another woman?

‘Her name’s Georgina. She’s—’

‘Not her.’

She heard the tension in his voice before she noticed it in the rigidity of his jaw.

‘My daughter.’

Her heart shrank inside her ribs.

In the twenty-four hours since she’d left Ragnar, and his unsolicited offer of financial help, she’d tried hard to arrange her emotions into some kind of order. They hadn’t responded. Instead she had kept struggling with the same anger and disappointment she’d felt after meeting her father. But at least she had been able to understand if not excuse Alistair’s reluctance to get involved. Meeting an adult daughter he hadn’t even known existed was never going to be easy, but Sóley wasn’t even one yet.