The Husband Hunters

As she teetered dangerously off balance, a cry of dismay escaping her, a pair of strong hands shot out to catch her by the shoulders and steady her. Heart pounding with fright, she reeled as he held her there, her head tipping back from a view of her rescuer’s silver-grey silk tie to look up.

Raul Zaforteza gazed down at her from his great height, his facial muscles locking his staggeringly handsome features into a bronze mask of impassivity that was uniquely chilling.

In severe shock, Polly trembled, soft mouth opening and closing again without sound, a look of pure panic in her gaze as she collided with eyes that had the topaz golden brilliance of a tiger ready to claw the unwary to the bone.

‘There is no place in this whole wide world where you could hope to stay hidden from me,’ Raul spelt out in a controlled tone of immense finality, his rich, accented vowel sounds tingling in her sensitive ears, throwing up a myriad of despoilt memories that could only torment her. ‘The chase is over.’

CHAPTER TWO

‘LET me go, Raul!’ Polly gasped convulsively, her heart thudding like a trapped animal’s behind her breastbone, nervous perspiration beading her short upper lip.

‘How can I do that?’ Raul countered with level emphasis. ‘You’re expecting my baby. What sort of a man could walk away?’

Without warning, pain flashed in a scorching burst across Polly’s temples, provoking a startled moan from her parted lips. Her hand flew up to press against her throbbing brow. Nausea stirred nastily in her stomach as the overpowering dizziness washed over her.

‘Por Dios ... what is the matter with you?’ Raul tightened his hold on her as she swayed like a drunk, straining with every sinew to stay upright and in control.

In another moment he bent and swept her up into his arms, cradling her easily into the strength and heat of his big, powerful frame. As the street light shone on the greyish pallor of her upturned face, Raul emitted a groan and said something hoarse in Spanish.

‘Put me down...’ Polly was not too ill to appreciate the cruel irony of Raul getting that physically close to her for the very first time.

Ignoring her, chiselled profile aggressively clenched, Raul jerked his imperious dark head and the limousine parked across the street filtered over to the kerb. The chauffeur jumped out and hurried to open the passenger door. Raul settled her down on the squashy leather back seat, but before he could climb in beside her Polly took him by surprise and lurched half out again, to be violently sick in the gutter. Then she sagged back on the seat, pressing a tissue to her tremulous lips and utterly drained.

As she lay slumped on her side, a stunned silence greeted her. Momentarily, a dull gleam of amusement touched her. Raul Zaforteza had probably got to the age of thirty-one without ever having witnessed such a distasteful event. And she hated him for being there to witness her inability to control her own body. Although she was the kind of person who automatically said sorry when other people bumped into her, a polite apology would have choked her.

‘Do you feel strong enough to sit up?’

As she braced a slender hand on the seat beneath her, Raul took over, raising her and propping her up like a rag doll. Involuntarily she breathed in the elusive scent of him. Clean, warm male overlaid with a hint of Something more exotic.

‘So you finally ran me to earth,’ Polly acknowledged curtly, refusing to look at him, staring into space with almost blank blue eyes.

‘It was only a matter of time. I went first to the house where you’re staying. Janice Grey wasn’t helpful. Fortunately I was already aware of where you worked,’ Raul imparted flatly.

She could feel the barrier between them, high and impenetrable as toughened frosted glass, the highwire tension splintering through the atmosphere, the restive, brooding edge of powerful energy that Raul always emanated. But she felt numb, like an accident victim. He had found her. She had made every possible effort to remain undetected—moved to London, even lied to friends so that nobody had a contact address or phone number for her. And all those endeavours had been in vain.

As a spasm of pain afflicted her, she squeezed her eyes tight shut.

‘What is it?’ Raul demanded fiercely.

‘Feel like my head’s splitting open,’ she mumbled sickly, forcing her eyes open again.

Raul was now studying the pronounced swell of her stomach with a shaken fascination that felt deeply, offensively intrusive.

In turn, Polly now studied him, pain like a poisonous dart piercing her bruised heart. His hair—black as midnight now, but blue-black in sunlight—the strong, flaring ebony brows, the lean, arrogant nose, the magnificent high cheekbones and hollows, the wide, perfectly modelled mouth so eloquent of the raw sensuality that laced his every movement. A devastatingly attractive male, so staggeringly good-looking he had to turn heads wherever he went, and yet only the most audacious woman would risk cornering him. There was reinforced steel in those hard bones, inflexible control in that strong jawline.

The baby kicked, blanking out her mind, making her wince.

His incongruously long and lush black lashes swept up, and she was pinned to the spot by glinting gold eyes full of enquiry.

‘May I?’ he murmured almost roughly.

And then she saw his half-extended hand, those lean brown fingers full of such tensile strength, and only after a split second did she register in shock the source of his interest. His entire attention was on the giant mound of her stomach, a strangely softened expression driving the tension from his firm lips.

‘May I feel my child move?’ he clarified boldly.

Polly gave him a stricken look of condemnation, and with shaking, frantic hands tried somewhat pointlessly to try and yank her coat over herself. ‘Don’t you dare try to touch me!’

‘Perhaps you are wise. Perhaps touching is not a good idea.’ Nostrils flaring, Raul flung himself back in the corner of the seat, hooded eyes betraying only a chilling glint of intent gold, his bronzed face cold as a guillotine, impassive now in icy self-restraint.

And yet Polly was reminded of nothing so much as a wild animal driven into ferocious retreat. He had never looked at her like that in Vermont, but she had always sensed the primal passion of the temperament he restrained. Then, as now, it had exercised the most terrifying fascination for her—a male her complete opposite in nature, an outwardly civilised sophisticate in mannerism, speech and behaviour, but at heart never, ever cool, predictable or tranquil.

‘Take me home,’ she muttered tightly. ‘I’ll meet you tomorrow to talk.’

He lifted the phone and spoke in fluid Spanish to his driver. Polly turned away.

She remembered him in Vermont, addressing Soledad in Spanish. She remembered the maid’s nervous unease, her undeniable servility. When Raul had been around, Soledad had tried to melt into the woodwork, too unsophisticated a woman to handle the cruel complexity of the situation he had unthinkingly put her in. In his eyes she had only been a servant after all. Raul Zaforteza was not a male accustomed to taking account of the needs or the feelings of lesser beings...and in Soledad’s case he had paid a higher price than he would ever know for that arrogance.

The powerful car drew away from the kerb and shot Polly’s flailing and confused thoughts back to the present. While Raul employed the car phone to make a lengthy call in Spanish, she watched him helplessly from below her lashes. She scanned the width of his shoulders under the superb fit of his charcoal-grey suit, the powerful chest, lean hips and long muscular thighs that not the most exquisite tailoring in the world could conceal.

‘I can’t touch you but every look you give me is a visual assault,’ Raul derided in a whiplash aside as he replaced the phone. ‘I’d eat you for breakfast, little girl!’

Her temples throbbed and she closed her eyes, shaken that he could speak to her like that. So many memories washed over her that she was cast into turmoil. Raul, tender, laughing, amber eyes warm as the kiss of sunlight, without a shade of coldness. And every bit of that caring concern aimed at the ultimate well-being of the baby in her womb, at the physical body cocooning his child not at Polly personally. She had never existed for him on any level except as a human incubator to be kept calm, content and healthy. But how could she ever have guessed that shattering truth?

‘You look terrible,’ Raul informed her tautly. ‘You’ve lost a lot of weight and you were very slim to begin with—’

‘Nobody could ever accuse me of that now.’

‘Your ankles are swollen.’

Polly rested her pounding head back wearily, beyond caring about what she must look like to him now. It scarcely mattered. She had been ten times more presentable in Vermont and he had not been remotely attracted to her, although she had only recognised that humiliating reality in retrospect. ‘You’re not getting my baby,’ she warned him doggedly. ‘Not under any circumstances.’

‘Calm yourself,’ Raul commanded deflatingly. ‘Anxiety won’t improve your health.’

‘It always comes first, right?’ Polly could not resist sniping.

‘Desde luego...of course,’ Raul confirmed without hesitation.

She winced as another dull flash of pain made her very brain ache. She heard him open a compartment, the hiss of a bottle cap released, liquid tinkling into a glass, and finally another unrecognisable sound. And then she jerked in astonishment when an ice-cold cloth was pressed against her pulsing brow.

‘I will take care of you now. Did I not do so before? And look at you now, like a living corpse...’ Raul condemned, his dark drawl alive with fierce undertones as he bent over her. ‘I wanted to shout at you. I wanted to make you tremble. But how can I do that when you are like this?’

Her curling lashes lifted. Defenceless in pain, she stared up into frustrated and furious golden eyes so nakedly at variance with the compassionate gesture of that cool, soothing cloth he had drenched for her benefit. Being kind to her was killing him. She understood that. Suffering that grudging kindness was killing her.

‘You taught me to hate,’ she whispered, with a sudden ferocity alien to her gentle nature until that moment.

The stunning eyes veiled to a slumberous gleam. ‘There is nothing between us but my baby. No other connection, nada más...nothing more,’ he stressed with gritty exactitude. ‘Only when you can detach yourself from your emotional mindset and recall that contract will we talk.’

Hatred flamed like a shooting star through Polly. She needed it. She needed hatred to race like adrenalin through her veins. Only hatred could swallow up and ease the agonizing pain Raul could inflict.

‘You bastard,’ Polly muttered shakily. ‘You lying, cheating, devious bastard...’

At that precise moment the limo came to a smooth halt. As the chauffeur climbed out, Polly gaped at the well-lit modern building with its beautifully landscaped frontage outside which the car had drawn up. ‘Where are we?’ she demanded apprehensively.

A uniformed nurse emerged from the entrance with a wheelchair.

In silence Raul swung out of the limo and strode round the bonnet to wave away the hovering chauffeur. He opened the door beside her himself.

‘You need medical attention,’ he delivered.

Her shaken eyes widened, filling with instantaneous fear. Not for nothing had she visited the library to learn all she could from newspapers about Raul Zaforteza’s ruthless reputation. ‘You’re not banging me up in some lunatic asylum!’ she flung in complete panic.

‘Curb your wild imagination, chica. I would do nothing to harm the mother of my child. And don’t you dare try to cause a scene when my only concern is for your well-being! ’ Raul warned with ferocious bite as he leant in and scooped her still resisting body out of the luxurious car as if she weighed no more than a feather.

‘The wheelchair, sir,’ the nurse proffered.

‘She weighs nothing. I’ll carry her.’ Raul strode through the automatic doors, clutching her with the tense concern of someone handling a particular fragile parcel. The mother of his child. Cue for reverent restraint, she reflected bitterly. Restraint and concern that the human incubator should be proving less than efficient. But, weak and sick from pain, even her vision blurring, she rested her head down against a broad shoulder.

‘Hate you,’ she muttered nonetheless, and would have told him that with her last dying breath because it was her only defence.

‘You’re not tough enough to hate,’ Raul dismissed as a grey-haired older man in a white coat moved towards them.

Raul addressed him in a flood of Spanish. Scanning her with frowning eyes, the doctor led the way into a plush consulting room on the ground floor.

‘Why does nobody speak English? We’re in London,’ Polly moaned.

‘I’m sorry. Rodney Bevan is a consultant who worked for many years in a clinic of mine in Venezuela. I can talk faster in my own language.’ Raul laid her down carefully on a comfortable treatment couch.

‘Go away now,’ Polly urged him feverishly.

Raul stayed put. The consultant said something quiet in Spanish. Raul’s blunt cheekbones were accentuated by a faint line of dark colour. He swung on his heel and strode out to the waiting area, closing the door behind him.

‘What did you say?’ Polly was impressed to death.

As the waiting nurse moved forward to help Polly out of her coat, the older man smiled. ‘You’re the star here, not him.’

The nurse took her blood pressure. Why were their faces so solemn? Was there something wrong with her blood pressure? Her body felt like a great weight pulling her down.

‘You need to relax and keep calm, Polly,’ the doctor murmured. ‘I want to give you a mild sedative and then I would like to scan you. Is that all right with you?’

‘No, I want to go home,’ she mumbled fearfully, knowing she sounded like a child and not caring, because she didn’t feel she could trust anybody so friendly with Raul.

The voices went away. Raul’s rich, dark drawl broke into her frantic barely half-formed thoughts. ‘Polly...please let the medics do what they need to do,’ he urged.

She forced her eyes open, focusing on him with difficulty, seeing those lean bronzed features through a blur. ‘I can’t trust you...or them...you know him!’

And even in the state she was in she saw him react in shock to that frightened accusation. Raul turned pale, the fabulous bone structure clenching hard. He gripped her hand, brilliant eyes shimmering. ‘You must trust him. He’s a very fine obstetrician—’

‘He’s a friend of yours.’

‘Si, pero...yes, but he is also a doctor,’ Raul stressed with highly emotive urgency.

‘I don’t want to go to sleep and wake up in Venezuela... Do you think I don’t know what you’re capable of when you’re crossed?’ Polly managed to frame with the last of her energy.

‘I’ve never broken the law!’

‘You would to get this baby,’ Polly told him.

The silence smouldered, fireworks blazing under the surface.

Raul stared down at her, expressive eyes veiled, but she knew she had drawn blood.

‘You’re not well, Polly. If you will not believe my assurances that you can trust the staff here, then at least think of the baby’s needs and put those needs first,’ he breathed, not quite levelly.

A pained look of withdrawal crossed her exhausted face. She gave a jerky nod of assent, but turned her head to the wall. A minute later she felt a slight prick in her arm and she let herself float, and would have done anything to escape that relentless pounding inside her skull and forget that unjust look of cruel reproach she had seen in Raul’s gaze.

As she drifted like a drowning swimmer, all the worst moments of her life seemed to flash up before her.

Her earliest memory was of her father shouting at her mother and her mother crying. She had got up one morning at the age of seven to find her mother gone. Her father had flown into a rage when she’d innocently tried to question him. Soon after that she had been sent to stay with her godmother. Nancy Leeward had carefully explained. Her mother, Leah, had done a very silly thing: she had gone away with another man. Her parents were getting a divorce, but some time, hopefully soon, when her father gave permission, her mother might come to visit her.

Only Leah never had. Polly had got her mothering from her godmother. And she had had to wait until she was twenty years old and clearing out her father’s desk, days after his funeral, to discover the pitiful wad of pleading letters written by the distraught mother who had to all intents and purposes abandoned her.

Leah had gone to New York and eventually married her lover. She had flown over to England half a dozen times. at an expense she could ill afford, in repeated attempts to see her daughter, but her embittered ex-husband had blocked her every time—not least by putting Polly into boarding school and refusing to say where she was. Polly had been shattered by what she’d uncovered, but also overjoyed to realise that her mother had really loved her, in spite of all her father’s assertions to the contrary.

In New York, she had had a tearful, wonderful reunion with Leah, whose second husband had died the previous year. Her mother had been weak, breathless, and aged far beyond her years. The gravity of her heart condition had been painfully obvious. She had been living on welfare, what health insurance she had had exhausted. The harassed doctor at the local clinic had reluctantly told Polly under pressure that there was an operation performed by a worldfamous surgeon which might give her mother some hope, but that it would take a lottery win to privately finance such major surgery.

Up, down—too much down in her life recently, and not enough up, she thought painfully as she wandered through her own memories.

And then she saw Raul, strolling through the glorious Vermont woods where she had walked every day, escaping from Soledad’s kind but fussing attentions to cry in peace for the mother she had lost. Raul, garbed in faultlessly cut casual clothes, smart enough to take Rodeo Drive by storm and so smooth, so impressively natural in his surprise at stumbling on her that it was a wonder he hadn’t cut himself with his own clever tongue.

And she had met those extraordinary eyes of amber and bang...crash...pow. She had been heading for a down that would take her all the way to hell, even though she had naively felt she was on an up the instant he angled that first smouldering smile at her.

Polly woke up the following morning wearing a hideous billowing hospital gown. She had a room to herself with a private bathroom. Her head no longer hurt, but tiredness still filled her with lethargy.

The nurse who came in response to the bell cheerfully ran through routine checks, efficiently helped her to freshen up and neatly side-stepped most of her anxious questions. She consulted her chart and informed Polly that she was to have complete bedrest. Mr. Bevan would be in around lunchtime, she confided, just as breakfast was delivered.

A couple of hours later Raul’s chauffeur arrived, like an advance party before him. He settled down a suitcase that Polly recognised because it was her own. The case bulged with what struck her as very probably every possession she had last seen in her room at the Greys’. A maid in an overall came in and helped her change into one of her own nighties. Polly then retrieved a creased brown envelope from the jumble of items in the foot of her case. It was time to confront Raul with the worst of the deceptions practised on her.

By the time mid-morning arrived, Polly was sitting bolt upright with wide, angrily impatient eyes and, had she but known it, the first healthy colour in her cheeks for weeks. She raked restive fingers through the silky mahogany hair tumbling round her shoulders and focused on the door expectantly, like someone not only preparing to face Armageddon but overwhelmingly eager to meet it.

The ajar door finally spread wide, framing Raul.

Her breath caught in her throat.

Sleek and powerful, in a summerweight double-breasted beige business suit, he looked sensationally attractive, supremely poised and shockingly self-assured. Polly lost her animated colour, ashamed of that helpless flare of physical response to those dark good looks and that lithe, lean, muscular physique. He was a ruthless and unashamed manipulator.

Black eyes raked over her, black eyes without any shade of warm gold. Emotionless, businesslike, not even a comforting hint of uncertainty about his stance. ‘You look better already,’ he remarked levelly.

‘I feel better,’ Polly was generous enough to admit. ‘But I can’t stay here—’

‘Of course you can. Where else could you be so well cared for?’

‘I’ve got something here I want you to explain,’ Polly delivered tautly.

His attention dropped to the envelope clutched between her tense fingers. ‘What is it?’

A shaky little laugh escaped Polly. ‘Oh, it’s not real proof of the manipulative lies I was fed...you needn’t worry about that! Your lawyer was far too clever to allow me to retain any original documents, but I took photocopies—’

Raul frowned at her. ‘Dios mio, cut to the base line and tell me what you’re talking about,’ he incised impatiently. ‘You were told no lies at any time!’

‘Off the record lies,’ Polly extended tightly. ‘It was very clever to give me the impression that I was being allowed a reassuring glimpse at highly confidential information.’

Raul angled back his imperious dark head. ‘Explain yourself.’

Polly tossed the envelope to the foot of the bed. ‘How you can look me in the face and say that I will never know.’

Raul swept up the envelope with an undaunted flourish. ‘And don’t try to pretend you didn’t know about it. When I was asked to sign that contract, I said I couldn’t sign until I was given some assurances about the couple who wanted me to act as surrogate for them.’

The...couple?’ Raul queried flatly, ebony brows drawing together as he extracted the folded pages from the envelope.

‘Your lawyer said that wasn’t possible. His clients wanted complete anonymity. So I left. Forty-eight hours later, I got a phone call. I met up in a café with a young bright spark from your lawyer’s office. He said he was a clerk,’ Polly related jerkily, her resentment and distaste blatant in her strained face as she recalled how easily she had been fooled. ‘He said he understood my concern about the people who would be adopting my child, and that he was risking his job in allowing me even a glance at such confidential documents—’

‘Which confidential documents?’ Raul cut in grittily.

‘He handed me a profile of that supposed couple from an accredited adoption agency. There were no names, no details which might have identified them...’ Tears stung Polly’s eyes then, her voice beginning to shake with the strength of her feelings. ‘And I was really moved by what I read, by their own personal statements, their complete honesty, their deep longing to have a family. They struck me as wonderful people, and they’d had a h-heartbreaking time struggling to have a child of their own...’

‘Madre mía...’ Raul ground out, half under his breath, scorching golden eyes pinned to her distraught face with mesmeric force.

‘And you see,’ Polly framed jaggedly, ‘I really liked that couple. I felt for them, thought they would make terrific parents, would give any child a really loving home...’ As a strangled sob swallowed her voice, she crammed a mortified hand against her wobbling mouth and stared in tormented accusation at Raul through swimming blue eyes. ‘How could you sink that low?’ she condemned strickenly.

Raul gazed back at her, strikingly pale now below his olive skin, so still he might have been a stone statue, a stunned light in his piercing dark eyes.

With the greatest difficulty, Polly cleared her throat and breathed unevenly. ‘I asked the clerk to let me have an hour reading over that profile and I photocopied it without telling him. That afternoon, I went in and signed the contract. I thought I was doing a really good thing. I thought I would make that couple so happy... I was inexcusably dumb and shortsighted!’