His Child: The Mistress's Child / Nathan's Child / D'Alessandro's Child

She thought of Tim in the sitting room, watching a video, and the lurch of her heart turned into a patter of alarm.

‘Hello, Philip,’ she said calmly. ‘This is a surprise.’

He gazed at her steadily. ‘Is it? Surely you didn’t think that I was going to go away without speaking to you again, Lisi?’

‘I have nothing to say to you.’

‘But I do,’ he said implacably.

He can’t make you do anything, she told herself. ‘I’m afraid that it isn’t convenient right now.’

He let his eyes rove slowly over her, and the answering flood of heat made him wish that he hadn’t.

Her dark hair was scraped back from her face into a pony-tail and she wore cheap clothes—nothing special—a pair of baggy cotton trousers and an old sweater which clung to the soft swell of her breasts. There was a fine line of flour running down her cheek which made him think of warpaint.

And she looked like dynamite.

‘Been cooking, have you?’

‘Am cooking,’ she corrected tartly. ‘Busy cooking.’

‘Mum-mee!’

Lisi froze as green eyes lanced through her in a disbelieving question.

‘Mum-mee!’ A child who was Lisi’s very image appeared, and Tim came running out from the sitting room and up to the door, turning large, interested blue eyes up at the stranger on the doorstep. ‘Hello!’

Lisi had always been proud of her son’s bright and outgoing nature—she had brought him up to be confident—but at that moment she despaired of it. Why couldn’t he have been shy and retiring, like most other boys his age? ‘I really must go, Philip, you can see I’m really—’

He ignored her completely. ‘Hello,’ Philip said softly as he looked down at the shiny black head. ‘And what’s your name?’

The boy smiled. ‘I’m Tim, and it’s my birthday!’ he said. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Philip. A friend of Mummy’s.’

Tim screwed his eyes up. ‘Mummy’s boyfriend?’

Lisi saw the cold look of distaste which flickered across his face, and flinched.

‘Does Mummy have lots of boyfriends, then?’ Philip asked casually.

‘Tim,’ said Lisi, a note of desperation making her voice sound as though it was about to crack, ‘why don’t you go and colour in that picture that Mummy drew for you earlier?’

‘But, Mum-mee—’

‘Please, darling,’ she said firmly. ‘And you can have a biscuit out of the tin—only one, mind—and Mummy will come and help you in a minute, and we can organise all the games for your party. Won’t that be fun? Run along now, darling.’

Thank heavens the suggestion of an unsolicited biscuit had captured his imagination! He gave Philip one last, curious look and then scampered back towards the sitting room.

Lisi tried to meet the condemnatory green stare without flinching. ‘It’s his birthday,’ she explained. ‘And I’m busy organising—’

‘So that was why you had to ring your mother,’ he observed softly.

It was not the aggressive question she had been expecting and dreading. She stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘What?’

‘The night you slept with me,’ he said slowly. ‘I wondered why you should bother to do that, when we were only supposedly going for a quick drink,’ he added witheringly. ‘I guess you had to arrange for your mother to babysit. Poor little soul,’ he finished. ‘When Mummy jumps into bed with a man whenever the opportunity presents itself.’

For a moment, Lisi couldn’t work out what he was talking about, and then his words began to make sense. Tim was a tall boy, as Marian had said. He looked older than his years. And Philip didn’t even suspect that the child might be his. God forgive me, she thought. But this is something I have to do. For all our sakes. He hates me. He thinks the worst of me—he’s made that heartbreakingly clear. What good would it do any of us if he found out the truth?

‘I have never neglected my son, Philip,’ she said truthfully.

Did this make them quits? All the time he hadn’t told her about Carla, lying desperately sick in her hospital bed—Lisi had carried an awesome secret, too. A baby at home. And who else? he wondered. ‘So where’s the father?’ he demanded. ‘Was he still on the scene when you stripped off and climbed into my bed?’

‘How dare you say something like that?’

‘It was a simple question.’

She jerked her head in the direction of the sitting room door. ‘Just keep your voice down!’ she hissed, and then met the fury in his eyes. ‘Oh, what’s the point of all this? You’ve made your feelings about me patently clear, Philip. There is nothing between us. There never was—other than a night of mad impetuosity. We both know that. End of story. And now, if you don’t mind—I really do have a party to organise.’

He made to turn away. Hadn’t a part of him nurtured a tiny, unrealistic hope that her behaviour that night had been a one-off—that it had been something about him which had made her so wild and so free in his bed? And all the time she’d had a child by another man! It was a fact of modern life and he didn’t know why he should feel so bitterly disappointed. But he did.

‘Goodbye, Philip.’ Her overwhelming feeling was one of relief, but there was regret as well. She couldn’t have him—she would never have him—not when his fundamental lack of respect for her ran so deep. But that didn’t stop a tiny, foolish part of her from aching for what could never be.

He looked deep into her eyes and some sixth sense told him that all was not how it seemed. Something was not right. She was tense. Nervous. More nervous than she had any right to be, and he wondered why.

She started to close the door when he said, ‘Wait!’

There was something so imperious in his command, something so darkly imperative in the glacial green gaze that Lisi stopped in her tracks. ‘What?’

‘You didn’t say how old Tim was.’

She felt the blood freeze in her veins, but she kept her face calm. ‘That’s because you didn’t ask.’

‘I’m asking now.’

A thousand thoughts began to make a scrabbled journey through her mind. Could she carry it off? Would he see through the lie if she told him that Tim was four? It was credible—everybody said that he could easily pass for a four-year-old.

Her hesitation told him everything, as did the blanching of colour from her already pale face. He felt the slow, steady burn of disbelief. And anger. ‘He’s mine, isn’t he?’

If she had thought that seeing him again was both nightmareand dream, then this was the nightmare sprung into worst possible life. She stared at him. ‘Philip—’

‘Isn’t he?’ he demanded, in a low, harsh voice which cut through her like a knife.

She leant on the door for support, and nodded mutely.

‘Say it, Lisi! Go on, say it!’

‘Tim is your son,’ she admitted tonelessly, and then almost recoiled from the look of naked fury in his eyes.

‘You bitch,’ he said softly. ‘You utter little bitch.’

She had played this unlikely scenario in her mind many times. Philip would magically appear and she would tell him about Tim, but she had never imagined a reaction like this—with him staring at her with a contempt so intense that she could have closed her eyes and wept.

‘Go away,’ she whispered. ‘Please, just go away.’

‘I’m not going anywhere. I want to know everything.’

‘Philip.’ She sucked in a ragged breath. Should she appeal to his better nature? Surely he must have one? ‘I will talk to you, of course I will—’

‘Well, thanks for nothing!’ he scorned.

‘But not now. I can’t. Tim will come out again in a minute if I’m not back and it isn’t fair—’

‘Fair?’ he echoed sardonically. ‘You think that what you have done is fair? To deny me all knowledge of my own flesh and blood? And then to lie about it?’

‘I did not lie!’ she protested.

‘Oh, yes, you did,’ he contradicted roughly. ‘It was—to use your own words, my dear Lisi—a lie by omission, wasn’t it? Just now, when I asked you his age, you thought about concealing it from me.’ His mouth hardened into a cruel, contemptuous line. ‘But I’m afraid your hesitation gave you away.’

‘Just go,’ she begged. ‘Don’t let Tim hear this. Please.’

He hardened his heart against the appeal in her eyes. He had lived with death and loss and all the time she had brought new life into the world and had jealously kept that life to herself. As if they had stumbled across unexpected treasure together, and she had decided to claim it all for herself.

‘What time does his party finish?’

She could scarcely think. ‘At around s-six.’

‘And what time does he go to bed?’

‘He’ll be tired tonight. I should be able to settle him down by seven.’

‘I’ll come at seven.’

She shook her head. ‘Can’t we leave it until tomorrow?’ she pleaded.

He gave her a look of pure scorn. ‘It has already been left three years too long!’

‘Then one more night won’t make any difference. Sleep on it, Philip—you won’t feel so…so…angry about it in the morning.’

But he couldn’t ever imagine being rid of the rage which was smouldering away at the pit of his stomach. ‘How very naive you are, Lisi—if you think that I’ll agree to that. Either I come round tonight once Tim has gone to sleep, or I march straight in there now and tell him exactly what his relationship to me is.’

‘You wouldn’t do that.’

‘Just try me,’ he said, in a voice of soft menace.

Lisi swallowed. ‘Okay. I’ll see you here. Tonight. Unless…’ she renewed the appeal in her eyes ‘—unless you’d rather meet on…neutral territory? I could probably get a babysitter.’

But he shook his head resolutely. ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ he said coldly. ‘Maybe I might like to look in on my sleeping son, Lisi. Surely you wouldn’t deny me that?’

My sleeping son. The possessive way that he said it made Lisi realise that Philip Caprice was not intending to be an absentee father. Already! How the hell was she going to cope with all the implications of that?

But what about Tim? prompted the voice of her conscience. What about him?

‘No, I won’t deny you that,’ she told him quietly. ‘I’ll see you here tonight, around seven.’

He gave a brief, mock-courteous nod and then turned on his heel, walking away from her without a second glance, the way he had done the night his son had been conceived.

She shut the door before he was halfway down the path, and looked down to see that her hands were shaking.

She waited until her breath had stopped coming in short, anxious little breaths, but as she caught a glance at her reflection in the mirror she saw that her face was completely white, her eyes dark and frightened, like a trapped animal.

I must pull myself together, she thought. She had a son and a responsibility to him. Today was his party—his big day. She had already messed up in more ways than one. She mustn’t let the complex world of adult relationships ruin it for him.

She forced a smile onto her lips and hoped that it didn’t look too much like a grimace, and then she opened the door to the sitting room, where her beloved son sat with his dark head bent over his colouring, his little tongue protruding from between his teeth, just the way hers did. He’s my son, too, she told herself fiercely. Not just Philip’s.

‘Hello, darling,’ she said softly. ‘Shall Mummy come and help for a bit?’

Tim looked up, his eyes narrowed in that clever way of his, and Lisi stared at him with a sudden, dawning recognition. His eyes might be blue like hers, but that expression was pure Philip. Why had she never seen it before? Because she had deliberately blinded herself to it as too painful?

‘Mum-mee,’ said Tim, and put his crayon down firmly on top of the paper. ‘Who was that man?’

Not now, she told herself. How he must be told was going to take some working out.

‘Oh, he’s just a friend, darling,’ she said, injecting her voice with a determined cheerfulness. ‘A friend of Mummy’s.’

But the words rang hollow in her ears.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE hours ticked by so slowly while Philip waited. He felt as though the whole landscape of his life had been altered irrevocably—as if someone had detonated a bomb and left a familiar place completely unrecognisable.

He went through the motions of working. He faxed the States. He replied to his e-mails. He made phone-calls to his London office, and it seemed from the responses given by his staff that he must have sounded quite normal.

But he didn’t feel in the least normal. He had just discovered that he was the biological father of a child who was a complete unknown to him and he knew that he was going to have to negotiate some paternal rights.

Whether Lisi Vaughan liked it or not.

He deliberately turned his thoughts away from her. He wasn’t going to think about her. Thinking about her just made his rage grow, and rage would not help either of them come to some kind of amicable agreement about access.

Amicable?

The word mocked him. How could the two of them ever come to some kind of friendly understanding after what had happened?

He went for a long walk as dusk began to fall, looking up into the heavy grey clouds and wondering if the threatened snow would ever arrive, and at seven prompt he was knocking on her door.

She didn’t answer immediately and his mouth tightened. If the secretive little witch thought that she could just hide inside and he would just go away again, then she was in for an unpleasant surprise.

The door opened, and he was unprepared for the impact of seeing her all dressed up for a party. Red dress. Red shoes. Long, slim legs encased in pale stockings which had a slight sheen to them. He had never seen her in red before, but scarlet had been the backdrop to her beauty when she had lain with such abandon on his bed. Scarlet woman, he thought, and felt the blood thicken in his veins.

‘You’d better come in,’ said Lisi.

‘With pleasure,’ he answered, grimly sarcastic.

She opened the door wider to let him in, but took care to press herself back against the wall, as far away from him as possible. She was only hanging onto her self-possession by a thread, and if he came anywhere near her she would lose it completely. But he still came close enough for her to catch the faint drift of his aftershave—some sensual musky concoction which clamoured at her senses.

He followed her into the sitting room, where the debris from the party still littered the room. He wondered how many children there had been at the party. Judging by the clutter left behind it could easily have run into tens.

There were balloons everywhere, and scrunched up wrapping paper piled up in the bin. Half-eaten pieces of cake and untouched sandwiches lay scattered across the paper cloth which covered the table.

Philip frowned. ‘Weren’t they hungry?’

‘They only ever eat the crisps.’

‘I see.’ He looked around the room in slight bemusement. ‘They certainly know how to make a mess, don’t they?’

Lisi gave a rueful smile, thinking that maybe they could be civil to one another. ‘I should have cleared it away, but I wanted to read Tim a story from one of his new books.’

The mention of Tim’s name reminded him of why he was there. ‘Very commendable,’ he observed sardonically.

‘Can I…?’ She forced herself to say it, even though his manner was now nothing short of hostile. But she had told herself over and over again that nothing good would come out of making an enemy of him, even though the look on his face told her that she was probably most of the way there. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

‘In a minute. Firstly, I want to see Tim.’

She steeled herself not to react to that autocratic demand. ‘He’s only just gone to sleep,’ she said. ‘What if he wakes?’

‘I’ll be very quiet. And anyway, what if he does wake?’

‘Don’t you know anything about children?’ she asked, but one look at his expression made her wonder how she could have come out with something as naive and as hurtful as that.

‘Actually, no.’ He bit the words out precisely. ‘Because up until this morning, I didn’t realise that I might have to.’

‘Just wait until he’s in a really deep sleep,’ she said, desperately changing the subject. ‘He might be alarmed if he wakes up to find a strange man…’ Her words tailed off embarrassedly.

He gave a bitter laugh. ‘A strange man in his room?’ he completed acidly. ‘You mean it doesn’t happen nightly, Lisi?’

It was one insult too many and on top of all the tensions of the day it was just too much. Her hand flew up to his face and she slapped him, hard. There was a dull ringing sound as her palm connected, but he didn’t react at all, just stood there looking at her, his expression unreadable.

‘Feel better now?’

She bit her lip in horror. She had never raised her hand to anyone in her life! ‘What do you think?’

He turned away. He didn’t want her looking at him all vulnerable and lost like that. He wanted to steel his heart against her pale beauty and the black hair which streamed down her back, tied back with a scarlet ribbon which matched the dress. ‘You don’t want to hear what I think,’ he said heavily. ‘I’ll take that drink now.’

She went into the kitchen and took wine from the fridge and handed him the bottle, along with two glasses. ‘Maybe you could just open that, and I’ll clear up a little,’ she said.

He sat down in one of the squashy old armchairs and began to open the wine, but his eyes followed her as she moved around the room, deftly clearing the table and bundling up all the leftover party food into the paper cloth.

He wished that she would go and put on the baggy trousers she had been wearing this morning. The sight of the shiny red material stretching over the pert swell of her bottom was making him have thoughts he would rather not have. He was here to talk about his son, not fantasise about taking her damned dress off.

She had lit the fire, and the room flickered with the shadowedreflections of the flames. On the now-cleared table he saw her place a big copper vase containing holly, whose bright berries matched the scarlet of her dress. It was, he thought, with bitter irony, a delightfully cosy little scene.

She took the glass of wine he handed her and sat in the chair facing his, her knees locked tightly together, wishing that she had had the opportunity to change from a dress which was making her uncomfortably aware of the tingling sensation in her breasts. Just what did he do to her simply by looking? She twisted the stem of her glass round and round. ‘What shall we drink to?’

He studied her for a long moment. ‘How about to truth?’

She took a mouthful and the warmth of the liquor started to unravel the knot of tension which had been coiled up in the pit of her stomach all day. She stared at him. ‘Do you really think that you have a monopoly on truth? Why the hell do you think I didn’t contact you and tell you when I found out I was pregnant?’

‘What goes on in your mind is a complete mystery to me.’

Because you don’t know me, thought Lisi sadly. And now you never will. Philip’s opinion of her would always be distorted. He saw her as some kind of loose woman who would fall into bed with just about any man. Or as a selfish mother who would deliberately keep him from his own flesh and blood.

‘Think about the last words you said to me,’ she reminded him softly, but the memory still had the power to make her flinch. ‘You told me you were married. What was I supposed to do? Turn up on your doorstep with a bulging stomach and announce that you were about to be a daddy? What if your wife had answered the door? I can’t imagine that she would have been particularly overjoyed to hear that!’

He didn’t respond for a moment. He had come here this morning intending to tell her about the circumstances which had led to that night. About Carla. But his discovery of Tim had driven that far into the background. There were only so many revelations they could take in one day. Wouldn’t talking about his wife at this precise moment muddy the waters still further? Tim must come first.

‘You could have telephoned me,’ he pointed out. ‘The office had my number. You could have called me any time.’

‘The look on your face as you walked out that night made me think that you would be happy never to see me again. The disgust on your face told its own story.’

Self-disgust, he thought bitterly. Disgusted at his own weakness and disgusted by the intensity of the pleasure he had experienced in her arms. A relative stranger’s arms.

He put the wineglass down on the table and his eyes glittered with accusation.

‘The situation should never have arisen,’ he ground out. ‘You shouldn’t have become pregnant in the first place.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know! I didn’t exactly choose to get pregnant!’

‘Oh, really?’ The accusation in his voice didn’t waver. ‘You told me that it was safe.’ He gave a hollow laugh. ‘Safe? More fool me for believing you.’

Her fingers trembling so much that she was afraid that she might slop wine all over her dress, Lisi put her own glass down on the carpet. ‘Are you saying that I lied, Philip?’

His cool, clever eyes bored into her.

‘Facts are facts,’ he said coldly. ‘I realised that we were not using any protection. I offered to stop—’ He felt his groin tensing as he remembered just when and how he had offered to stop, and a wave of desire so deep and so hot swept over him that it took his breath away. He played for time, slowly picking up his glass and lifting it to his lips until he had his feelings under control once more.

‘I offered to stop,’ he continued, still in that hard, cold voice. ‘And you assured me that it was safe. Just how was it safe, Lisi? Were you praying that it would be—because you were so het-up you couldn’t bear me to stop? Or were you relying on something as outrageously unreliable as the so-called ‘‘safe’’ period?’

‘Do you really think I’d take risks like that?’ she demanded.

‘Who knows?’

She gave a short laugh. If she had entertained any lingering doubt that there might be some fragment of affection for her in the corner of his heart, then he had dispelled it completely with that arrogant question.

‘For your information—I was on the pill at the time—’

‘Just in case?’ he queried hatefully.

‘Actually—’ But she stopped short of telling him why. She was under no obligation to explain that, although she had broken up with her steady boyfriend a year earlier, the pill had suited her and given her normal periods for the first time in her life and she had seen no reason to stop taking it. ‘It’s none of your business why I was taking it.’

I’ll bet, he thought grimly. ‘So why didn’t it work?’

‘Because…’ She sighed. ‘I guess because I had a bout of sickness earlier that week. In the heat of the moment, it slipped my mind. It was a million-to-one chance—’

‘I think that the odds were rather higher than that, don’t you?’ He raised his eyebrows insolently. ‘You surely must have known that there was a possibility that it would fail?’

Unable to take any more of the cold censure on his face, she leaned over to throw another log on the fire and it spat and hissed back at her like an angry cat. ‘What do you want me to say? That I couldn’t bear for you to stop?’ Because that was the shameful truth. At the time she had felt as if the world would come to an abrupt and utter end if he’d stopped his delicious love-making. But she hadn’t consciously taken a risk.

‘And couldn’t you, Lisi? Bear me to stop?’

She met his eyes. The truth he had wanted, so the truth he would get. ‘No. I couldn’t. Does that flatter your ego?’

His voice was cold. ‘My ego does not need flattering. And anyway—’ he topped up both their glasses ‘—how it happened is now irrelevant—we can’t turn the clock back, can we?’

His words struck a painful chord and she knew that she had to ask him the most difficult question of all. Even if she didn’t like the answer. ‘And if you could?’ she queried softly. ‘Would you turn the clock back?’