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

He stared at her in disbelief. Was she really that naive? ‘Of course I would!’ he said vehemently, though the way her mouth crumpled when he said it made him feel distinctly uncomfortable. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

She gave him a sad smile. He would never understand—not in a million years. ‘Of course I wouldn’t.’

‘You wouldn’t?’

‘How could I?’ she asked simply. ‘When the encounter gave me a son.’

He noted her use of the word encounter. Which told him precisely how she regarded what had happened that night. Easy come. His mouth twisted. Easy go. She certainly had not bothered to spare his feelings, but then why should she? He had not spared hers. There was no need for loyalty between them—nothing at all between them, in fact, other than an inconvenient physical attraction.

And a son.

‘He looks like you,’ he observed.

‘That’s what everyone says,’ said Lisi serenely, and saw to her amazement that a flicker of something very much like…disappointment…crossed his features. ‘And it’s a good thing he does, isn’t it?’ she asked him quietly.

‘Meaning?’

‘Well, I would hate him to resemble a father who wished that the whole thing never happened.’

‘Lisi, you are wilfully misunderstanding me!’ he snapped.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. You would wish him unborn, if you could.’

‘You can’t wish someone unborn!’ he remonstrated, and then his voice unexpectedly gentled. ‘And if I really thought the whole situation so regrettable, then why am I here? Why didn’t I just stay away when I found out, as you so clearly wanted me to?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Then I’ll tell you.’ He leaned forward in the chair. ‘Obviously the circumstances of his conception are not what I would have chosen—’

‘What a delightful way to phrase it,’ put in Lisi drily.

‘But Tim is here now. He exists! He is half mine—’

‘You can’t cut him up in portions as you would a cake!’ she protested.

‘Half mine in terms of genetic make-up,’ he continued inexorably.

‘Now you’re making him sound like Frankenstein,’ observed Lisi, slightly hysterically.

‘Don’t be silly! I want to watch him grow,’ said Philip, and his voice grew almost dreamy. ‘To see him develop into a man. To influence him. To teach him. To be a father to him.’

Lisi swallowed. This didn’t sound like the occasional contact visit to her. But she had denied him access for three whole years, wouldn’t it sound unspeakably mean to object to that curiously possessive tone which had deepened his voice to sweetest honey?

And besides, what was she worrying about? He lived in London, for heaven’s sake—and, although Langley was commutable from the capital, she imagined that he would soon get tired of travelling up and down the country to see Tim.

She knew how fickle men could be. She thought of Dave, her best friend Rachel’s husband, who had deserted Rachel just over a year ago. They had a son of Tim’s age and Dave’s visits to see him had dwindled to almost nothing. And that was from a man who had fallen in love with and married the mother of his child. Who had seen that child grow from squalling infant to chubby toddler. If he had lost interest—then how long would she give Philip before he tired of fatherhood?

‘I’d like to see him now, please.’

This time there was no reason not to agree to his request, but Lisi felt almost stricken by a reluctance to do so. Something was going to end right here and now, she realised. For so long it had been just her and Tim—a unit which went together as perfectly as peaches and cream. No one else had been able to lay claim on him and, since her mother had died, she had considered herself to be his only living relation. He was hers. All hers—and now she was going to have to relinquish part of him to his father.

A lump rose in the back of her throat and she swallowed it down.

Philip was staring at her from between narrowed eyes. Did her eyes glitter with the promise of tears? ‘Are you okay?’

‘Of course I’m okay,’ she answered unconvincingly. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘Because you’ve gone so pale.’

‘I am pale, Philip—you know that.’ He had told her so that night in his arms. ‘Pale as the moon,’ he had whispered, as his lips had burned fire along her flesh. ‘Come with me,’ she said slowly.

The two of them walked with exaggerated care towards the closed door with its hand-painted sign saying, ‘Tim’s Room’.

Lisi pushed the door open quietly and tiptoed over to the bed, where a little hump lay tucked beneath a Mickey-Mouse duvet, and Philip was surprised by the clamour of a far-distant memory. So she still had a thing about Disney, did she?

He went to stand beside her, and looked down, unprepared for the kick of some primitive emotion deep inside him. The sleeping child looked almost unbearably peaceful, with only one small lock of dark hair obscuring the pure lines of a flawless cheek. His lashes were long, he realised—as long as Lisi’s—and his mouth was half open as he took in slow, steady breaths.

‘So innocent,’ he said, very softly. ‘So very innocent.’

It was such a loaded word, and Lisi felt a strange, useless yearning. He thought her the very antithesis of innocence, didn’t he? If only it could be different. But she knew in her heart that it never could. She nodded, gazing down with pride at the shiny-clean hair of her son. Their son. He looked scrubbed-clean and contented. Good enough to eat.

She stole a glance at Philip, who was studying Tim so intently that she might as well not have existed. Strange now how his profile should remind her of Tim’s. Had that been because he had not been around to make any comparisons?How much else of Tim was Philip? she wondered. What untapped genetic secrets lay dormant in that sweet, sleeping form?

Philip turned his head and their eyes made contact in a moment of strange, unspoken empathy. She read real sadness in his eyes. And regret—and wondered what he saw in hers.

He probably didn’t care.

She put her finger onto her lips and beckoned him back out. She did not want Tim to wake and to demand to know what this man was doing here. Again. She shut the door behind them and went back into the sitting room, where Philip stood with his back to the fire, looking to all intents and purposes as if he were the master of the house.

But he never would be. She must remember that. In fact, it was almost laughable to try to imagine Philip Caprice living in this little house with her and Tim. The ceiling seemed almost too low to accommodate him, he was so tall. She tried to picture them all cramming into the tiny bathroom in the mornings and winced.

‘Would you like some more wine?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘No, thanks. Coffee would be good, though.’

She was glad of the opportunity to escape to the kitchen and busy herself with the cafetière. She carried it back in with a plate of biscuits to find him standing where she had left him, only now he was staring deep into the heart of the fire with unseeing eyes.

He took the cup from her and gave a small smile of appreciation. ‘Real coffee,’ he murmured.

At that moment she really, really hated him. Did he have any idea just how patronising that sounded? ‘What did you expect?’ she asked acidly. ‘The cheapest brand of instant on the market?’

He shook his head, still dazed by the emotional impact of seeing his son. ‘You’re right—if anything was cheap it was my remark.’

And what about the others? she wanted to cry out. The intimation that she had deliberately got pregnant. Wasn’t that the cheapest remark a man could ever make to a woman? He wasn’t taking those back, was he?

‘So who else knows?’ he demanded.

Lisi blinked. ‘Knows what?’

‘About Tim,’ he said impatiently. ‘How many others are privy to the secret I was excluded from?

She shook her head. ‘No one. No one knows.’

‘No-one at all?’ he queried disbelievingly.

‘No. Why should they? As far as anyone knew—we simply had a professional relationship. Even Jonathon thought that—and nobody was aware that I went up to your room at the hotel that night.’ She shuddered, thinking how sordid that sounded. She bit her lip. ‘The only person I told was my mother, just before she died.’

‘You told her the whole story?’ he demanded incredulously.

Again, she shook her head. ‘I edited it more than a bit.’

‘Was she shocked?’

Lisi shrugged. ‘A little, but I made it sound…’ She hesitated. She had made it sound as though she had been in love with him, and that bit she had found surprisingly easy. ‘I made it sound rather more than it had been.’ And her mother had pleaded with her to contact him. But then the bit she had omitted to tell her mother had been that Philip had already been married.

He looked at her and gave a heavy smile. ‘My parents will want to meet him,’ he said, wondering just how he was going to tell his elderly parents that he, too, was a parent.

‘Your p-parents?’

His eyes were steady. ‘But of course. What did you expect?’

What had she expected? Well, for one thing—she had expected to live the rest of her life without ever seeing Philip again. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I haven’t really thought it through.’

‘He’s in my life now, too, Lisi,’ he said simply. ‘And I don’t come in a neat little box marked ‘‘Philip Caprice’’—to be opened up at will and shut again when it suits you. I have family who will want to get to know him. And friends, too.’

And girlfriends? she wondered. Maybe even one particular girlfriend who was very special to him? Maybe even… She raised troubled aquamarine eyes to his. ‘Have you married, again, Philip?’ she asked quietly.

‘No.’

She felt the fierce, triumphant leap of her heart and despaired at herself. Fool, she thought. Fool! ‘So where do we go from here?’

He despised himself for the part of him which wanted to say, Let’s go to bed—because even though the distance between them was so vast that he doubted whether it could ever be mended, that didn’t stop him from being turned on by her. He shifted uncomfortably in the chair. Very turned on indeed. He met her questioning gaze with a look of challenge. ‘You tell Tim about me as soon as possible.’

Her mouth fell open. ‘Tell him?’

‘Of course you tell him!’ he exploded softly. ‘I’m back, Lisi—and I’m staking my claim.’

It sounded so territorial. So loveless. ‘Oh, I see,’ she said slowly.

He narrowed his eyes. ‘Just how were you planning to explain to him about his father? If I hadn’t turned up.’

‘I honestly don’t know. It’s not something I ever gave much thought to. He’s so young, and whenever he asked I just said that Mummy and Daddy broke up before he was born and that I hadn’t seen you since.’ It had seemed easier to bury her head in the sand than to confront such a painful issue. ‘Maybe one day I might have told him who his real father was.’

‘When?’ he demanded. ‘When he was five? Six? Sixteen?’

‘When the time was right.’

‘And maybe the time never would have been right, hmm, Lisi? Did you think you could get away with keeping me anonymous for the rest of his life, so that the poor kid would never know he had a father?’

She met the burning accusation in his eyes and couldn’t pretend. Not about this. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered.

He rose to his feet. ‘Well, just make sure you do it. And soon. I don’t care how you do it—just tell him!’

She nodded. She wanted him gone now—with as long a space until his next visit as possible. ‘And when will we see you again? Some time after Christmas?’

He heard the hopeful tinge to her question and gave a short laugh. ‘Hard luck, Lisi,’ he said grimly. ‘I’m afraid that I’m not going to just conveniently disappear from your life again. I’m intending to be around quite a bit. Just call it making up for lost time, if it makes you feel better. And it’s Christmas very soon.’

‘Christmas?’ she echoed, in a horrified whisper.

‘Sure.’ His mouth hardened into an implacable line. ‘I was tempted to buy him a birthday present today, but I didn’t want to confuse him. However, there’s only a week to go until Christmas and some time between now and then he needs to know who I am.’ His eyes glittered. ‘Because you can rest assured that I will be spending part of the holiday with him.’

She wanted to cry out and beg him not to disrupt the relatively calm order of her life, but as she looked into Philip’s strong, cold face she knew that she would be wasting her breath. He wasn’t going to go away, she recognised, and if she tried to stop him then he would simply bring in the best lawyers that money could buy in order to win contact with his child. She didn’t need to be told to know that.

‘Understood?’ he asked softly.

‘Do I have any choice?’

‘I think you know the answer to that. Don’t worry about seeing me to the door. I’ll let myself out.’

As if in a dream she watched him go and shut the front door quietly behind him, and only when she had heard the last of his footsteps echoing down the path did she allow herself to sink back down onto the chair and to bury her head in her hands and take all that was left to her.

The comfort of tears.

CHAPTER SIX

LISI was woken by the sound of the telephone ringing, and as she picked it up she was aware that something was not as it should be.

‘Hello?’

‘Lisi, it’s Marian.’

Sleepily, Lisi wondered what her boss was doing ringing her this early in the morning… She sat bolt upright in bed. That was it! That was what was not right! She had overslept—she could tell that much by the light which was filtering through the curtains. ‘What time is it?’ she asked urgently.

‘Nine-thirty, why—?’

‘Wait there!’ swallowed Lisi, and left the receiver on the bed while she rushed into Tim’s bedroom. What was the matter with him? Why hadn’t he woken at his usual unearthly hour? Had Philip Caprice climbed in through one of the windows in the middle of the night and kidnapped his son?

But to her relief her son was sitting on his bed, engrossed in playing with some of his new birthday toys. He looked up as Lisi flew into the room, and smiled.

‘Lo, Mum-mee,’ he said happily. ‘Me playing with tractor!’

‘So I see! And a lovely tractor it is too, darling,’ said Lisi, charging across the room to drop a kiss on top of his head. ‘Mummy’s just talking to Marian on the telephone and then we’ll have a great big breakfast together!’

But Tim’s head was bent over his toy again and he was busy making what he imagined to be tractor noises.

On the way back to speak to Marian, Lisi reflected how different things felt this morning. She no longer felt weak or intimidated by Philip. He had decided that he wanted contact and there was nothing she could do about it—but he could do all the legwork. She would just be polite. Icily polite.

Because during the middle of her largely sleepless night she had come to her senses and a great sense of indignation had made her softly curse his name.

He had been so busy attacking her that she hadn’t really had time to consider that he had shown no remorse about betraying his wife. Nor any shame for his part in what had happened. Philip obviously wanted to make her the scapegoat—well, tough! He should look to himself first!

She picked the phone back up. ‘Hello, Marian—are you still there?’

‘Just about,’ came the dry reply. ‘Where did you go—Scotland?’

‘Very funny.’

‘You sound more cheerful today,’ observed Marian.

‘I am,’ said Lisi. ‘Much happier!’

There was a short pause. ‘I don’t know if you’re going to be after what I’m about to tell you.’

A sudden sense of foreboding filled Lisi with dread. This was something to do with Philip. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s Philip Caprice.’

Exasperation and impatience made Lisi feel like screaming—until she reminded herself that the worst had already been exposed. There was nothing he could do to hurt and upset her now. ‘What now?’ she asked.

‘He wants you to show him round a property later this morning.’

‘He has to be kidding! Did you tell him that I’m off now until after Christmas?’

‘I told him that yesterday. Lisi, has something happened between you two?’

‘Apart from the very obvious?’ she asked tartly.

‘You know what I mean.’

Yes, she knew what Marian meant and she guessed that it was pointless keeping it from her boss—especially as she had already guessed that Philip was Tim’s father.

‘I told him,’ she said flatly.

‘You told him?’

‘He guessed,’ Lisi amended.

‘And?’

Lisi sighed. She had planned to get onto the phone first thing and tell Rachel all about it, but just then she badly needed to confide in somebody, and Marian was older and wiser. Lisi suspected that she had known straight away that a man as discerning as Philip would be bound to guess eventually.

‘He wants to be involved.’

‘With you?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Lisi with a hollow laugh. ‘Definitely not with me. With Tim.’

‘I see.’ Marian’s voice sounded rather strained. ‘That explains it, then.’

That sense of foreboding hit her again. ‘Explains what?’ she asked, her voice rising with a kind of nameless fear.

‘He really does want to buy somewhere here. In Langley.’

Lisi’s mouth thinned. ‘I see.’

‘And that’s not the worst of it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He wants you to show him around a property—’

‘But I’m on holiday, Marian!’

‘I already told him that.’

‘And even if I weren’t—I don’t want to show him around a property!’

‘He’s…well, he’s insisted, dear.’

‘He can’t insist,’ whispered Lisi. ‘Can he?’

Another pause. ‘He is the customer,’ said Marian apologetically, and suddenly Lisi understood. Marian was a businesswoman—and business was business was business. Philip Caprice was a wealthy and influential man and if he said jump, then presumably they would all have to leap through hoops for him.

She thought of all the times when Marian had let her have the morning, or even a couple of days, off work. When Tim had been ill. Or when she had taken him to have his inoculations. She was an understanding and kind employer, and Lisi owed her.

‘Okay,’ she sighed. ‘I can probably arrange for Rachel to look after Tim. When does he want to look round?’

‘Later on this morning. Think you can manage it? You can even leave Tim in here with us, if it’s difficult.’

‘I’m sure Rachel will be able to have him.’

‘Good!’ Marian’s voice grew slightly more strained. ‘There’s just one more thing, Lisi.’

Lisi tried to inject a note of gallows humour into her voice. ‘Go on, hit me with it!’

‘The property in question…it’s…it’s The Old Rectory.’

The world spun. It was a cruel trick. A cruel twist of fate. Was he planning to hurt her even more than he already had done? Lisi heard herself speaking with a note of cracked desperation. ‘Is this some kind of joke, Marian?’

‘I wish it was, dear.’

Lisi didn’t remember putting the phone down, she just found herself sitting on the bed staring blankly at it. He couldn’t, she thought fiercely. He couldn’t do this to her!

The Old Rectory.

The house she had grown up in. The house her mother had struggled to keep on, even after the death of her father, when everyone had told her to downsize and to move into something more suitable for a mother and her daughter on their own.

But neither of them had wanted to. A house could creep into your heart and your soul, and Lisi and her mother had preferred to put on an extra sweater or two in winter. It had kept the heating bills down at a time when every penny had counted.

After her mother had died, Lisi had reluctantly sold the house, but by then she had needed to. Really needed to, because she’d had a baby to support. She had bought Cherry Tree Cottage and invested the rest of the proceeds of the sale, giving just enough for her and Tim to live on. To fall back on.

And now Philip Caprice was going to rub her nose in it by buying the property for himself!

Over my dead body! she thought.

She gave Tim his breakfast.

‘I want birthday cake,’ he had announced solemnly.

‘Sure,’ said Lisi absently, and began to cut him a large slice.

‘Can I, Mum-mee?’ asked Tim, in surprise.

She glanced down at the sickly confection and remembered feeding Philip birthday cake all those years back and her heart clenched. She looked into Tim’s hopeful face and relented. Oh, what the heck—it wouldn’t hurt for once, would it?

While Tim was chomping his way through the cake, she phoned Rachel, who agreed to look after him without question.

‘Bless you!’ said Lisi impulsively.

‘Is everything okay?’

She heard the doubt in Rachel’s voice and wondered if she sounded as mixed-up and disturbed as she felt. Probably. ‘I’ll tell you all about it later,’ she said grimly.

‘Can’t wait!’

Lisi went through the mechanics of getting ready. She ran herself a bath and left the door open and Tim trotted happily in and out. She wondered whether Philip was prepared for the lack of privacy which caring for a young child inevitably brought. And then she imagined him lording it in her old family home and she could have screamed aloud with fury, but for Tim’s sake—and her own—she won the inner battle to stay calm.

She supposed that she ought to dress as if for work and picked out her most buttoned-up suit from the wardrobe. Navy-blue and pinstriped, it had a straight skirt which came to just below the knee and a long-line jacket. With a crisp, white blouse and her hair scraped back into a chignon, she thought that she looked professional. And prim.

Good!

The scarlet dress had been a big mistake last night. He might not like or respect her, but it was obvious that he still felt physically attracted to her. She had seen the way he’d watched her last night, while trying to appear as if he hadn’t been. And she had seen the tension which had stiffened his elegant frame, had him shifting uncomfortably in his chair. It had been unmistakably a sexual tension, and Lisi wasn’t fooling herself into thinking that it hadn’t been mutual.

Later that morning, after she had deposited Tim and some of the leftover party food at Rachel’s house, Lisi walked into the agency to find Philip waiting for her.

His face was unsmiling and his eyes looked very green as he nodded at her coolly. ‘Hello, Lisi,’ he said, speaking as politely and noncommittally—as if this were the first time he had ever met her.

Marian was sitting at her desk looking a little flustered. ‘Here are the keys,’ she said. ‘The owners are away.’

Her heart sinking slightly, Lisi took them. She had hoped that one of the divorcing couple would be in. At least the presence of a third party might have defused the atmosphere. She could not think of a more unpalatable situation than being alone in that big, beautiful house with Philip.

Unpalatable? she asked herself. Or simply dangerous?

‘We can walk there,’ she told him outside. ‘It’s just up the lane.’

‘Sure.’

But once away from Marian’s view, she no longer had to play the professional. ‘So you’re going through with your threat to buy a house in the village,’ she said, in a low, furious voice.

‘I think it makes sense, under the circumstances,’ he said evenly. ‘Don’t you?’

Nothing seemed to make sense any more—not least the fact that even in the midst of her anger towards him—her body was crying out for more of his touch.

Was that conditioning? Nature’s way of ensuring stability? That a woman should find the father of her child overwhelminglyattractive? No. It couldn’t be. Rachel had completely gone off Dave—she told Lisi that the thought of him touching her now made her flesh creep. But then Dave had run off with one of Rachel’s other supposed ‘friends’.