The Fatherhood Affair

‘Natalie, I swear before God she was with me. I invited her. I took her there. She shared my tent. Brett had Ryan with him.’

She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t add up, Damien. She wept copiously at the funeral. You didn’t go near her. Not one word or gesture of comfort.’

‘I didn’t leave your side,’ he asserted with passion. ‘She meant nothing to me. She was keen on abseiling. I asked her on the trip to make it a foursome instead of a threesome. I wasn’t to know you were going to be too sick to come. We were already there at the campsite when Brett arrived without you.’

Was he speaking the truth? Had she misread the situation? ‘How did Ryan get so close to the edge of the cliff? Why wasn’t Brett watching him? Ryan was a sensible little boy. He would have obeyed his father.’

‘Natalie, for God’s sake! Accidents can happen so quickly. Don’t torture yourself like this.’

‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ she said dully. ‘Nothing can bring my beautiful little boy back.’

She started down the staircase. She had to get away from all this. It wasn’t doing her any good, raking over the miseries of the past. She had to look to the future, break with Damien now, start a new life. That was abundantly clear.

Damien wasn’t a friend. And that hurt, too. In his way, he had acted honourably towards her. Yet she had known he had the same attitude towards challenges as Brett had. They were two of a kind. She simply hadn’t anticipated that he would see her as a challenge.

He was matching steps with her, still not prepared to let her walk away from him. ‘Why didn’t you leave Brett?’ he asked.

She didn’t answer. She couldn’t imagine any man would understand. Trapped by a pregnancy...making excuses. Trapped by wanting the best for her baby...making compromises. Hoping things would change. Wanting to believe in renewed promises because the sense of failure was too hard to face.

Brett wasn’t all bad. Mostly, but not all. She had fallen in love with his joy in living, his wit, his charm, his exuberant personality, the athletic body he made master of any physical challenge, the mind that thrived on solving problems few others could. She had thought herself the luckiest woman in the world that Brett Hayes had fallen in love with her.

She had never considered herself anyone special. She was averagely pretty, helped along by a better than average figure that had been very firm and trim when she had met Brett. She had been working then as a bush-walking guide, supplementing an irregular income from the paintings she sold to the tourists who flocked to her hometown. Noosa was a very popular seaside resort on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, and Brett had been one more tourist, indulging his love of the outdoors, and sweeping Natalie into a marriage that had seemed idyllic. At first.

She had come to realise, painfully, that Brett saw women as a challenge, too. All of them. He couldn’t resist testing himself, over and over again. Natalie he had put in a completely separate category. She was his chosen wife. The mother of his child.

Ryan...always Ryan stopping her from taking that final step away from Brett. He was indisputably a loving father, proud of his son. Ryan had adored his Daddy. She simply hadn’t been able to bring herself to deprive them of the relationship that was naturally theirs. In the end, it would have saved Ryan’s life—both their lives—if she had. She shook off the torment of ‘if only’s.

‘Brett felt inadequate,’ Damien declared. ‘He...’

‘Don’t be absurd,’ Natalie answered coldly.

Brett was the most gifted, talented individual she had met in her life. A bright golden god among other men. Brett made other people feel inadequate. People like Damien. People like herself.

Damien touched her arm to try to draw her attention back to him. ‘If you knew about his infidelities, why didn’t you divorce him? What stopped you?’ he asked, exasperation creeping into his voice.

They had reached the foyer. It didn’t really matter what she said to Damien. Whether he comprehended it or not was irrelevant. She was not going to see him again. She glanced at him with determined finality and gave him the one reason that had kept her with Brett.

‘He was the father of my child.’

She didn’t pause to gauge his reaction to that bare statement. She had no intention of explaining or embellishing it. She took a direct line towards the doors that led out of the hotel. This meeting with Damien had been a disaster from start to finish. She was ashamed of having been deluded into thinking he actually cared about her as a person.

Of course, she had realised that to Damien she was an extension of Brett, but there had been thoughtful gestures from him which she had believed were for her sake alone. She had thought he cared about her interests, suggesting ways of developing and extending her creative talent. She had no idea he was so...well, almost deranged...in his obsession about Brett.

Tears blurred her eyes. She had looked forward to telling Damien about the commission to illustrate a children’s book. Damien had taught her creative graphic design. She had imagined him being pleased for her. She had actively gone after the job and got it, an achievement she was sure would earn his approval. Finally.

She had tried so hard to get her life moving again in order to please him. She was proud of her efforts over the past two months. She had wanted Damien to be proud of her.

Disappointment wrenched her heart. This was her second bad mistake, letting another man like Brett get close to her. At least Damien wasn’t pressing any more questions on her. She was grateful for his silence as he accompanied her out to the covered driveway that serviced the hotel. As far as she was concerned, there was nothing more to say. Except goodbye. Forever.

‘Taxi?’ the doorman asked.

‘Please,’ Natalie answered.

‘We need to talk this through, Natalie,’ Damien murmured as the doorman moved forward to summon the first cab from the rank in the street below.

‘No point,’ she demurred.

‘You have some serious misconceptions...’

‘Mine have already been sorted out. Yours haven’t.’

‘Look at me!’ he commanded in exasperation.

‘I don’t want to.’

She kept her gaze steadfastly locked on the taxi turning slowly up the duel driveway, taking the lane closest to the hotel entrance. She couldn’t bear to see that blaze of desire in Damien’s eyes again. It reduced her to nothing but another potential conquest.

‘I’ve a lot to say to you,’ he burst out.

‘I’ve heard enough.’

‘You can’t dismiss five years in five minutes and reduce it to nothing, Natalie.’

‘Watch me.’

‘Give me the chance to explain. You owe me that.’

‘I didn’t ask you for anything, Damien. You gave it.’

‘You accepted it.’

‘Call me stupid. I didn’t understand what my role was,’ she said bitterly. ‘I didn’t realise I was supposed to become another bed partner.’

‘You’re the woman I want in my life.’

‘For the present.’

‘Give it a chance.’

‘So you can play and lay while I have your children?’ She turned derisive eyes to his as the taxi halted in front of her. ‘No, thanks, Damien. I’ve been through that once. Perhaps the next woman you feed that line to will be more accommodating. Goodbye and good luck to you.’

The passenger door of the taxi was held open for her by the hotel employee. She stepped forward and swung herself into the back seat.

‘Natalie...’

She ignored the urgency in Damien’s voice, but she couldn’t ignore the strong bulk of his body.

‘I’m coming with you.’ His powerfully muscled thigh pressed against hers.

She hastily scrambled to the other side of the seat. ‘No, you’re not,’ she protested.

‘Otherwise we will never see each other again.’

‘That’s what I want.’

He closed the door. The inside of the car suddenly seemed filled with his presence. It pulsed with an energy that clutched at her heart and caused her senses to sharpen alarmingly.

‘It’s over!’ she cried, feverishly desperate in her need to convince him.

‘It never started,’ he replied, a rough edge of passion in his voice.

‘It wasn’t meant to be.’

He turned to her, his face stripped of any civilised veneer. Raw, jungle hunger leapt from his eyes and impaled her.

‘I won’t accept you judging me by your experience with Brett.’

Her mind swam with the realisation that she had underestimated Damien. She shouldn’t have likened him to Brett. He was as dark in nature as Brett was bright. Dark and deep and intense, and with all his unleashed energy, indefinably dangerous.

For years she had wondered what went on inside him. What restraints he had...and, if all his secret longings were bared, what would a woman experience? The thought had intrigued her. She was getting more than a glimpse of the answer now, and it both fascinated and frightened her. She saw a primitive male hunter, relentless in his determination to track down his quarry, unstoppable.

She shivered. ‘I don’t want you, Damien. I don’t want you.’ She heard the wary, almost excited note in her voice, and didn’t care as long as he got the message.

‘What would happen if I took you in my arms, Natalie?’ His eyes burned down to the agitated rise and fall of her breasts as she took quick breaths to calm her pulse-rate. ‘If I were to kiss and caress you...’

‘Stop it! I won’t listen! Go away!’

But the images evoked did have an insidiously seductive power. Damien might be the hunter, but as a woman she knew if she tossed over the traces, threw everything upon the wind...anything and everything was possible. There had been solitary, vulnerable moments when she had fantasised... Damien wild, irrepressible, adoring her, approving of her, being proud of her. They had been some kind of solace at the time when Brett was entertaining himself with some other woman.

She had sternly repressed such wicked thoughts. That they should focus on her husband’s best friend made them even more reprehensible. They were not fitting for a married woman who considered herself moral and decent. It dragged her down to Brett’s level. Natalie had been ashamed of herself that they had occurred at all.

Now Damien wanted to do what she had forbidden herself to think about. More. Natalie felt there was some key to her mind and heart and body, and if some man was to unlatch the lock... Brett had had the key for a while but he had thrown it away.

Damien probably had the key, too, but it would not last. The experience would be wild and wonderful and dangerous, and in the end, as with Brett, would cost her too much. She had to stop this now, not let Damien tempt her into something she knew would lead to more hurt and disillusionment. Men didn’t seem to understand how it was for a woman: the giving of more than her body.

She felt for the handle of the passenger door on her side. If Damien wouldn’t get out of the taxi...

‘You’ve always avoided touching me, Natalie,’ he said softly, suggestively.

‘You avoided it, too,’ she flung at him.

‘We didn’t dare touch one another for fear of what would follow,’ he taunted her.

‘I feel the same way now.’

‘I don’t.’

There was too much truth in what Damien was suggesting. Natalie felt an urgent need to escape from it. She found the handle, lifted it, and flung the door open. Before Damien could stop her she leapt out of the taxi, plunging away from him.

She heard the shout, ignored it. The screech of tyres gripping the road surface in protest she didn’t ignore. She didn’t see the car in the other lane. She didn’t feel it hit her, and she didn’t feel any pain. Violet, purple and red colours merged momentarily on her retina. She felt an impact. Then nothing, nothing at all.

CHAPTER THREE

NATALIE’S mind was definitely fuzzy. She had the sense of being disembodied. She was in a bed. It wasn’t her own bed. How she knew she wasn’t quite sure, but she knew.

She tried to reason out where she was and why. Nothing surfaced. Her memory seemed to have disintegrated into a jigsaw where the pieces needed to be sorted out. She gave up the effort. The thought came to her she should open her eyes and look.

She did so with some trepidation. It was a hospital bed. Tubes looped to her arm. She shut her eyes again. She’d seen enough to identify where she was. It was an intensive care unit.

Someone was talking nearby.

‘...severe concussion. Brains are a bit scrambled at the present moment. Nothing broken. Nothing that won’t heal properly.’

It was an affable voice, speaking with confident authority, but how dared he speak of her brains as if they were a pastiche of broken eggs!

‘So the prognosis is...?’

A different voice, deeper, warmer, richer, more passionate.

‘Fine. There’ll be some memory loss for a short period. That will return quite naturally.’

‘How long?’

‘Somewhere between a few days and a few months.’

‘But her memories, all her recollections, will return?’

‘Without fail. Everything.’

Natalie forced a wary eye open. Who were these people who appeared to be discussing her quite openly in front of her?

The light wasn’t too bad. She opened the other eye, as well. Two doctors stood at the foot of the bed.

‘Ah, she’s awake again.’

That was the affable voice. It belonged to a short, slightly built man with sandy hair and spectacles.

‘Do you know your name?’ he asked.

‘Of course, I know my name. It’s Natalie.’

‘Natalie what?’

‘It’s not Natalie Watt at all.’

‘Can you tell me your second name, Natalie?’

The persistent questioning made her feel very uncomfortable. She knew she knew the answer but it didn’t come to mind.

‘Natalie Something,’ she responded irritably. They wouldn’t be able to argue with that.

‘That’s good. Very good,’ the affable man soothed.

Natalie dismissed him. She turned her attention to the other man, the one with the passionate voice. He was tall and broad-shouldered and so good-looking Natalie bet all the nurses swooned in his wake. He moved around the bed and sat on a chair beside her. He had riveting eyes, grey, with double rows of thick black lashes.

‘You’ve had a nasty knock on the head. Seven stitches. Everything is going to be fine,’ he assured her.

‘I know that, Doctor,’ she assured him back. She’d heard the other one say there was nothing that wouldn’t heal properly.

‘I’m not a doctor.’

‘Who are you then?’

‘I’m... Damien.’

He looked anxious, uncertain, so she smiled to put him at ease. ‘Hello, Damien.’

He relaxed and took her hand in his. ‘Hello, Natalie.’

He had a beautiful voice. His fingers gently stroked her palm. Her skin tingled. It was a pleasurable sensation, soothing in one way yet oddly intimate, as though he was imparting some of his own energy through his fingers. She could feel little rivulets of warmth travelling up her arm. She wondered if he had healing hands.

‘I like your touch,’ she said.

His face broke into a smile. His lips gave it a rueful twist but his eyes simmered with a warm approval that seemed to zing right into her heart. There was something very special about this man.

‘Are you some kind of therapist?’ she asked.

He looked at her helplessly, seemed to come to some decision. ‘I’m your lover,’ he explained. There was a blaze of determination in his eyes, as though he wanted to sear that claim indelibly on her mind.

Natalie stared at him in consternation. How could she mislay a memory of that magnitude? What was she doing with a lover anyway? Then she recollected she was in an intensive care unit. Only family was allowed there. Had he lied to get in? If so, who had sent him? And why?

She looked sharply at the doctor who still stood at the foot of the bed. Did he accept this man as her lover? He didn’t look suspicious. He seemed to have adopted the role of interested spectator. Natalie decided to get some facts straight.

‘Where is my mother?’ she demanded.

The doctor gestured to the man called Damien. Natalie swung her gaze back to him, her eyes sharply watchful as she waited for answers.

‘Your mother’s in Noosa, Natalie.’

‘Did the ambulance take me to Brisbane?’

‘No. You’re in Sydney.’

‘What for?’

‘Do you remember what happened to you?’

‘I had a fall in the gym. Tried a double somersault over the vault.’ She frowned, not quite sure she had that right. ‘Maybe it was a triple.’

‘You’ve been floating in and out of consciousness for two days, Natalie.’

She’d lost two days of her life. No wonder they were dripping something into her arm! She couldn’t comprehend why they had flown her to Sydney.

‘Can I go home now?’ she asked.

‘If you tried to stand up you’d probably fall over. Try sitting up.’

Natalie tried and gave up without a struggle. It was easier to lie still.

‘You had an accident. Your memory will come back. So will your strength.’ Damien fondled her hand, pressing reassurance. ‘It will simply take a little time.’

She had a very uneasy feeling about those statements. ‘What’s wrong with my memory?’

‘What happened in the gym must have occurred years ago, Natalie. You’re here because you were knocked over by a car.’

Years ago?

Her mind whirled. That couldn’t be right. She stared at him, looking for some waver in his steadfast gaze. There was none. The grey eyes had more than caring concern in them. They poured a message straight into her bewildered mind. I’m here for you. I’ll look after you. I’m the rock for you to lean on.

‘How old am I?’ she asked, feeling that he knew. She should know, too.

‘Twenty-eight,’ he said without hesitation.

He squeezed her hand hard—or did she squeeze his? Twelve years lost! She had been sixteen when she had taken that fall in the gym. What had she done with her life since then? She remembered her ambition to become an artist, as well as a great gymnast. She suspected she hadn’t been much good at either.

‘What kind of work do I do?’ she asked, feeling an urgent need to fill in the gaps.

‘You’re very creative. You do graphic design on a computer. At the present moment, you’ve signed a contract to illustrate a children’s book.’

‘I must be good at it, then,’ she said in surprise.

‘Your work is stunning.’

The admiration in his voice gave her a deep sense of pleasure.

‘Keep telling her everything that will prompt recall,’ the doctor encouraged. ‘The patient is doing fine. I’ll leave you to it.’ He gave Natalie a smile, Damien a man-to-man nod, and made a brisk departure.

The doctor’s confidence was comforting. Natalie did her best to relax. She rolled the name ‘Damien’ around in her mind, trying to find echoes of it to patch together into a meaningful picture.

Nothing.

Yet his hand and eyes said she belonged with him, and the feeling he evoked in her suggested the same thing. She looked at him wonderingly. She was twenty-eight. He looked to be in his mid-thirties. What precisely was their connection?

‘How long have you been my lover?’

His eyes were unflinching, steely, unrelenting. ‘Many years. But in all that time we never made love physically.’

‘Why not?’

‘You were married.’

Another shock! ‘Who was I married to?’

‘A man named Brett. Brett Hayes.’

His eyes were searching hers.

She looked away, disconcerted at not remembering. How could she possibly forget a husband? And a lover! She glanced down at her left hand. No rings. The hospital staff might have taken them off. She stared at her ring finger. The golden tan of her skin was unbroken by a pale band. She couldn’t have worn her wedding-rings.

‘Am I divorced?’

‘No. Widowed.’

She felt a glimmering of memory...something coming back...something important. Her heart filled with a rush of maternal love and pride. She swung her gaze to Damien, feeling a sense of triumph. ‘I have a son. A beautiful boy.’

He nodded gravely. ‘His name was Ryan.’

‘Where is he now?’ she cried eagerly. ‘Why isn’t he here?’

It was Damien’s turn to be discomfited. He lifted her hand and kissed her fingers, transmitting his healing warmth and a deep caring. Then he looked at her with a sad compassion that chilled the warmth. ‘I’m sorry, Natalie. There was another accident a year ago. Ryan was...killed.’

As soon as he said it, she knew it was true. The happiness drained out of her heart, leaving an aching, senseless void. Her beautiful boy was gone. Like the years he had occupied in her life.

Damien must have seen or felt her distress. ‘That’s why you want to have another child,’ he said, the intensity in his voice drawing her attention back to him.

‘Do I?’ she asked listlessly.

‘Yes. More than anything else,’ he asserted. ‘And I want very much to be the father of that child.’

His passion poured into the empty spaces inside her and stirred a consideration of the future. She didn’t understand how he was her lover, yet they still hadn’t made love together. He looked a very virile man. It must be she who was holding back for some reason.

Damien’s fingers grazed longingly over hers, wanting a response from her, not demanding, but she could feel the wanting reaching into her, finding a deep chord of harmony that assured her he was speaking the truth.

She didn’t know why, but the thought of this man being her lover felt...familiar. A sense of rightness, of contentment, swept through Natalie. Yes, she did want another child. And what better man could she choose as the father? Most women would gladly line up to have such a man as their mate.

‘We’re not married,’ she half-queried.

‘I don’t think you wish to marry again.’

‘Why not?’

‘Your first marriage...’ He hesitated. She could see it pained him to talk about it. He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t all you wanted it to be, Natalie.’

So that was the problem. She was wary of commitment. It wasn’t exactly fair on Damien to load him with the damage caused by another man. If he had loved her for years, he had been waiting a long time for her acceptance. She should know...

‘Chandler,’ she said. ‘You’re Damien Chandler.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And I’m Natalie Arnott.’

‘Before you were married you were Natalie Arnott.’

Whatever had happened in her marriage was over, Natalie thought. Damien must be more important to her now. She had remembered his name.

‘Thank you for being a nice and very patient lover, Damien,’ she said warmly. ‘Thank you for...for looking after me.’

His smile irradiated sunshine. ‘I’d do anything for you, Natalie.’

She sighed, deeply moved by his devotion to her. The talking had made her very tired. Her eyelids closed of their own weight. She could feel the light tingling of his strong hands. It forged a bond of trust.

‘I like your touch,’ she reaffirmed.

Of one thing she was certain. Whatever she had been like before the accident, her instincts had been very good at choosing a lover.

CHAPTER FOUR

DAMIEN came to see her every day.

No one else did.

He brought her flowers, chocolates, fruit, magazines, highly expensive and beautifully perfumed toiletries, everything she might desire to make the hours in hospital less burdensome. She was moved out of Intensive Care after the danger of a cerebral haemorrhage subsided. In the more relaxed atmosphere of a ward, Damien’s attention to her excited curiosity and speculative gossip.

That was all very fine, but Natalie wanted her memory back. Once she was out of her drug-haze from the initial trauma of the accident, it weighed very heavily on her mind that she had a twelve-year gap in her life, and she was increasingly frustrated in her efforts to recall it.