Rags To Riches: At Home With The Boss: The Secret Sinclair / The Nanny's Secret / A Home for the M.D.

‘Oliver’s in the sitting room, watching cartoons,’ she said, getting down to business straight away.

Raoul looked at her carefully, and noted the way her eyes skittered away from his, the way she kept one hand on the doorknob, as though leaving her options open just in case she decided to shut the door in his face. In fact she had only half opened the door, and he peered behind her pointedly.

‘Are you actually going to let me in, or do you want me to forge a path past you?’

‘I just want to say that we’ll really need to discuss … um … the practicalities of this whole situation …’

‘As opposed to what?’

‘I’ve been thinking, Raoul …’

‘Dangerous,’ Raoul said softly. She was in a pair of jeans and a tight tee shirt that reminded him a little too forcibly of the mysterious physical hold she still seemed to have over him. He had spent the night vainly trying to clear his head of images of her.

‘I’ve been thinking that we should have as little to do with one another as possible. I don’t want anything to happen between us. Been there, done that and have the tee shirt. The important thing is that you get to know Oliver, and that should be the extent of our relationship with one another.’

‘And have you told him who I am?’

Sarah was startled and a little taken aback at the speed with which he had concluded a conversation she had spent hours rehearsing in her head. Had she hoped that he would at least try and knock down some of her defences? Had she erected her Keep Off sign in the expectation that he might just try and steamroller through it? Had she secretly wanted him to steamroller through it?

‘Not yet,’ she said crisply. ‘I thought it best that you two get to know one another first.’

‘Okay. Well, there’s some stuff I’d like to bring in.’

‘Stuff? What kind of stuff?’

He nodded to his car, which was parked a few spaces along. ‘Why don’t you go inside? I’ll be a few minutes.’

‘You haven’t bought him presents, have you?’ she asked suspiciously, but when she tried to step outside to get a closer look, he gently but firmly prevented her.

‘Now, how did I know that you would disapprove?’

‘It’s not appropriate to show up with an armful of gifts the very first time you meet him!’

‘I’m making up for lost time.’

Sarah gave up. You couldn’t buy affection, she conceded, but perhaps a small token might help break the ice. Oliver had had no male input in his short life so far aside from her own father, whom he adored. She had been too busy just trying to make ends meet to dip her toes in the dating pool, and anyway she had not been interested in trying to replace Raoul. To her way of thinking she had developed a very healthy cynicism of the opposite sex. So Oliver’s sole experience of the adult world, to a large extent, had been her.

He was in the process of trying to construct a tower of bricks, with one eye on the manic adventures of his favourite cartoon character, when Raoul appeared in the doorway. In one arm there was a huge box, and in the other an enormous sack.

There was more in the boot of the car, but Raoul just hadn’t had the arms to bring it all in. Now he was glad that he hadn’t. Oliver appeared to be utterly bewildered, and Sarah … Her mouth had fallen open in what could only be described as an expression of horror. Couldn’t she say something?

Feeling like a complete fool for the first time in as long as he could recall, Raoul remained standing in the doorway with what he hoped was a warm smile pasted to his face.

‘Oliver! This is … this is my friend, Raoul! Why don’t you say hi to him?’

Oliver scuttled over to Sarah and clambered onto her lap, leaving Raoul trying to forge a connection by introducing a series of massively expensive presents to his son.

An oversized remote controlled car was removed from the box. The sack was opened to reveal a collection of games, books and stuffed toys which, Raoul assured a progressively more alarmed Sarah, had come highly recommended by the salesperson at the toy shop. He stooped to Oliver’s level and asked him if he would care to try out the car. Oliver, by way of response, shook his head vigorously, to indicate very firmly that the last thing he wanted was to go anywhere near the aggressive silver machine that took up a fair amount of their sitting room space.

The games, books and stuffed toys garnered the same negative response, and silence greeted Raoul’s polite but increasingly frustrated questions about playschool, sport and favourite television programmes.

At the end of an agonising forty-minute question and no answer session, Oliver finally asked Sarah if he could carry on with his blocks. In various piles lay the items that Raoul had bought, untouched.

‘Well, that was a roaring success,’ was the first thing Raoul muttered venomously under his breath, once he and Sarah were in the kitchen, leaving Oliver in the sitting room.

‘It’s going to take time.’

Raoul glared at her. ‘What have you told him about me?’ ‘Nothing. Just that you were an old friend.’ ‘Hence the friendly way with in I was greeted?’ His own son had rejected him. Over the years, in his inexorable upward march, Raoul had trained himself to overcome every single setback, because every setback could be seen as a learning curve. He needed to speak French to close a deal? He learnt it. He needed intimate knowledge of the gaming market to take over a failing computer company? He acquired sufficient knowledge to get him by, and employed two formidable gaming geeks to do the rest. He had built an empire on the firm belief that he was capable of doing anything. There were no obstacles he was incapable of surmounting.

Yet half an hour in the company of a four-year-old had rendered him impotent. Oliver had been uninterested in every toy pulled out of the bag and indifferent to him. There was no past experience upon which Raoul could call to get him through his son’s lack of enthusiasm.

‘Most kids would have gone crazy over that toy car,’ he imparted in an accusatory tone. ‘At least that’s what the salesperson told me. It’s been their biggest seller for the past four years. That damned car can do anything except carry passengers on the M25. So tell me what the problem was?’ He glared at her as she serenely fetched two glasses from the cupboard and poured them some wine. ‘The boy barely glanced in my direction.’

‘I don’t think it was such a good idea to bring so many toys for him.’

‘And how do you work that one out? I would have been over the moon if I had ever, as a kid, been given one new toy! So how could several new, expensive, top of the range toys fail to do the trick?’

With a jolt of sympathy that ran contrary to every defence mechanism she had in place, Sarah realised that he really didn’t have a clue. He had drawn from his own childhood experiences and arrived at a solution for winning his son’s affections—except he hadn’t realised that there was more to gaining love and trust than an armful of gifts.

‘Do you know,’ Raoul continued, swallowing the contents of his glass in one gulp, ‘that every toy I ever played with as a child had come from someone else and had to be shared? A remote controlled car like the one languishing in your sitting room would have caused a full-scale riot.’

‘That’s just awful,’ Sarah murmured.

‘Now you’re about to practise some amateur psychology on me. Don’t. You should have told me that he liked building things. I would have come armed with blocks.’

‘You’re missing the point. You need to engage him. Like I said, he’s used to only having me around. He’s going to view any other adult on the scene with suspicion. What happened on birthdays? Christmas?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘With you? Didn’t you get birthday presents? What about Father Christmas?’

Raoul looked at her with a crooked smile that went past every barrier and settled somewhere in the depths of her heart.

‘I don’t see what this has to do with anything, but if you really want to know Father Christmas was tricky. Frankly, I don’t think I ever believed in the fat guy with the beard. My earliest memory is of my mother telling me when I was three years old that there was no such person. Thinking about it now, I suspect she didn’t want to waste valuable money on feeding that particular myth when the money could have been so much better spent on a bottle of gin. Anyway, even at the foster home there wasn’t much room to hold on to stories like that. Father Christmas barely rated a mention.’ He laughed without rancour. ‘So—you’re going to give me a lesson on engagement. If Oliver has no time for anything I bought for him, then how do we proceed?’

‘Are you asking for my help?’

‘I’m asking for your opinion. If I remember correctly, you have never been short of those …’

‘Why don’t you go out there and build something with him?’ she suggested. ‘No. I’ll get him to bring his bricks in here, and the two of you can build something on the kitchen table while I prepare supper.’

‘Forget about cooking. I’ll take you both out. Name the restaurant and I’ll ensure the chef is only too happy to whip up something for Oliver.’

‘No,’ Sarah said firmly. ‘This is what normal life is all about with a child, Raoul. Spaghetti Bolognese, familiar old toys, cartoons on television, reading books at night before sleep …’ Except, she thought, suddenly flustered by the picture she had been busy painting, that was the ideal domestic situation—one in which two people were happily married and in love. It certainly wasn’t their situation. As she had told him—and she had meant every word of it—they had no relationship outside the artificial one imposed by circumstance.

‘Okay. I’ll bring Oliver in and you can start chopping some onions. They’re in the salad drawer in the fridge. Chop them really small.’

‘You want me to cook?’

‘Well, to help at any rate. And don’t tell me that you’ve forgotten how to cook. You used to cook on the compound.’

‘Different place, different country.’

‘So … you just eat out all the time?’ Sarah asked, distracted.

‘It’s more time-efficient.’

‘And what about with your girlfriends? Don’t you want to stay in sometimes? Do normal stuff?’

The questions were out before she had the wit to keep her curiosity to herself, and now that she had voiced them, she realised that it had been on her mind, poised just beneath the surface, ever since she had laid eyes on him again. In fact, thinking about it, it was something she had asked herself over and over again through the years. Had he found someone else? Had another woman been able to capture his interest sufficiently for him to make the commitment that he had denied her? He hadn’t loved her, but had he fallen in love with someone else? Someone prettier or cleverer or more accomplished?

‘Not that it’s any of my business,’ she added, and laughed airily.

‘It is now. Haven’t you said that yourself? No women in Oliver’s presence … Rest assured that the only woman in my life at the moment is you …’

‘That’s not what I was asking and you know it, Raoul!’

‘No. You’re just curious to know what I’ve been getting up to these past few years. There’s nothing wrong with curiosity. Curiosity’s healthy.’

‘I don’t care what you’ve been getting up to!’ It was a lie. She cared. Who were these women he had dated? What had he felt for them? Anything? Had he preferred them to her? She was mortified just thinking about that particular question.

‘I haven’t been getting up to anything of interest,’ Raoul replied drily. ‘Yes, there have been women. But I’ve deterred them from doing anything that involved pots, pans, an apron, candlelight and home-cooked food.’

‘Oh, Raoul, you’re such a charmer.’ But a tendril of relief curled inside her. She squashed it. ‘Now, I’m going to fetch Oliver.’

‘Hey, what about you? Don’t I get the low-down on your life? No man at the moment, but any temptations? Do you cook your spaghetti Bolognese for anyone else aside from Oliver?’

His voice was light and mildly amused, and he wondered why he felt so tense when it came to thinking of her with another man. He, after all, had never been and would never be a candidate when it came to marriage and rings on fingers. He was now a father, and that was shocking enough, but that was the only derailment to his carefully constructed life on the cards as far as he was concerned.

‘Maybe …’

‘Maybe? What does that mean?’ The amusement sounded forced. ‘Am I in competition with someone you’ve got hidden in a cupboard somewhere?’

‘No,’ Sarah admitted grudgingly. ‘I’ve been too busy being a single mum to think of complicating my life with a guy.’ She sensed rather than saw the shadow of satisfaction cross his face, and continued tartly, ‘But, as you’ve pointed out, life is going to get much easier for me now. It’s going to make a huge difference with you around, playing a role in Oliver’s life. I won’t be doing it on my own. Also, it’ll be nice not having to think about money, or rather the lack of it, all the time—and it’ll be fantastic having a bit of time to myself … time to do what I want to do.’

‘Which doesn’t mean that you’ve now got carte blanche to do whatever you like.’ Raoul didn’t care for the direction in which this conversation was now travelling.

‘You make me sound like the sort of girl who can’t wait to pick someone up!’

She was wondering what right he had to lay down any kind of laws when it came to her private life. Raoul Sinclair didn’t want his life encumbered with attachments. True, he had discovered that some encumbrances were beyond his control, but just as he had never contemplated committing to her, so he had never contemplated committing to anyone. It was small comfort. He might think that it was perfectly acceptable to lead a life in which he and his son were the only considerations, but it was totally unfair to assume that she felt the same way. He might want to pick up women and discard them when they were no longer of any use, but she needed more than that. For Raoul, a single life was freedom. For her, a single life would be a prison cell.

‘I’m not going to suddenly start scouring the nightclubs for eligible men,’ she expanded, with a bright, nervous laugh, ‘but I will be able to get out a bit more—which will be nice.’

‘Get out a bit more?’

‘Yes—when you have Oliver.’

‘I don’t think we should start projecting at this point,’ Raoul said deflatingly. ‘Oliver hasn’t even spoken to me as yet. It’s a bit premature to start planning a hectic social life in anticipation of us becoming best friends. Let’s just take one day at a time, shall we?’

‘Of course. I wasn’t planning on going clubbing next week!’

Clubbing? What did she mean by that? Other men? Sleeping around? While he kept Oliver every other weekend?

He pictured her dressed in next to nothing, flaunting herself on a dance floor somewhere. Granted, the women he went out with often dressed in next to nothing, but for some reason the thought of Sarah in a mini-skirt, high heels and a halterneck top set his teeth on edge.

‘Good. Because it won’t be happening.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Think about it, Sarah. Oliver doesn’t even know that I’m his father. Don’t you think that he’ll be just a little bit confused if your friend, who has mysteriously and suddenly appeared on the scene from nowhere, starts engineering outings without you? You’re the constant in his life. As you keep telling me. For me to have any chance of being accepted we have to provide a united front. We have to get to a point where he trusts me enough to leave you behind now and again.’

‘Exactly what are you trying to say, Raoul?’

‘That you have to scrap any crazy notions of us having nothing to do with one another. You’re living in cloud cuckoo land if you think that’s going to work. The whole bedtime story, spaghetti Bolognese thing is going to have to involve both of us. Of course it’ll be a damn sight easier when you get out of this place and move somewhere more convenient. And less cramped. On the subject of which—I have my people working on that.’

There were so many contentious things packed into that single cool statement that Sarah looked at him, staggered.

‘When you say involve both of us …’

Raoul flushed darkly and dealt her a fulminating look from under his lashes.

‘I don’t know the first thing about being a parent,’ he told her roughly. ‘You’ve witnessed my sterling performance out there.’

‘I didn’t know the first thing about being a parent either,’ Sarah pointed out with irrefutable logic. ‘It’s just a case of doing your best.’

The thought of doing things with Raoul and Oliver, a cosy threesome, was enough to bring on the beginnings of a panic attack in her. Already she was finding it difficult to separate the past from the present. She looked at him, and who was she kidding when she told herself that she was no longer attracted to him? Raoul was in a different place, and would be able to take her on board as just a temporary necessity in his life, easily set aside once he had what he wanted: some sort of ongoing relationship with his son. But she was aghast at the prospect of having him there in her life. How on earth was she ever going to get to that controlled, composed place of detachment if she was continually tripping over him in the kitchen as he attempted to bond with his son over fish fingers?

Perhaps he had exaggerated, she thought, soothing her own restless, panicked mind. He was still smarting from Oliver’s less than exuberant reception of him. Right at this very moment this was the only plan he could see ahead of him, and Raoul was big on plans. He would not be taking into account the simple fact that when children were involved plans could never really be made. In a day or two he would probably revise his ideas, because she very much doubted that he wanted to spend quality time with her in the picture.

‘And the whole house issue …’ she continued faintly. ‘You have your people working on it?’

‘Here’s one of the things I’ve discovered about having money: throw enough of it at a problem and the problem goes away. Right now they’re in the process of drawing up lists of suitable properties. I will be giving them until the end of next week. So,’ he drawled when she failed to respond, ‘are we on the same wavelength here, Sarah?’

‘I can’t just move into a house you happen to choose. I know you probably don’t care about your surroundings, but I care about mine …’

‘Don’t you trust me to find somewhere you’d like?’

He’d used to be amused at her dreamy, whimsical ideas. From where he had stood there had been little use for dreams unless you had the wherewithal to turn them into reality, and even then he had never made the mistake of confusing dreams with the attainment of real, concrete goals. What was the point in wishing you could own a small island in the middle of the Pacific if the chances of ever having one were zero? But her dreams of cottages and clambering roses and open fires had made him smile.

‘True, the thatched cottage with the roses and the apple trees might be a little troublesome to find in London …’

Sarah blushed, unsettled by the fact that he had remembered her corny youthful notion of the perfect house. Which she recalled describing in tedious detail.

‘But I’ve got them working on the Aga in the kitchen, the garden overlooking water, and the fireplaces …’

‘I can’t believe you remember that conversation!’

She gave a brittle laugh, and went an even brighter shade of red when he replied softly, ‘Oh, there’s a lot I remember, Sarah. You’d be surprised.’

He didn’t miss the flare of curiosity in her eyes. She might have made bold statements about not wanting anything to do with him, about shoving that kiss they had shared into a box at the back of a cupboard in her head, where she wouldn’t have to confront it, but every time they were in each other’s company he could feel that undercurrent of electricity—a low, sizzling hum that vibrated just below the radar.

‘Well, I don’t actually remember all that much,’ Sarah responded carelessly.

‘Now, I wonder why I’m not believing you …’

‘I have no idea, and I don’t care. Now, if you wouldn’t mind getting to work on those onions, I’ll go and fetch Oliver.’

She disappeared before he could continue the conversation. When he looked at her like that she would swear that he could see right down into the very depths of her. It was an uncomfortable, frightening sensation that left her feeling vulnerable and exposed. Once she had gladly opened up to him—had told him everything there was to know about herself. She had taken him at face value and turned a blind eye to the fact that while she had been falling deeper and deeper in love with him, he had pointedly refused to discuss anything that involved a future between them. He had taken everything she had so generously given and then politely jettisoned her when his time on the compound was up.

Raoul was a taker, with little interest in giving back. When he looked at her with those lazy, brooding eyes she could sense his interest. Some of his remarks carried just that little hint of flirtation, of deliberately treading very close to the edge. He had possessed her once, much to her shame. Did he think that he could possess her again?

She returned with Oliver to find him at the kitchen counter, dutifully chopping the onions as instructed.

Oliver had brought in a handful of his blocks, and Sarah sat him on a chair and then called Raoul over. She made sure to keep her voice light and friendly, even though every nerve in her body tingled as he strolled towards them, a teatowel draped over one shoulder.

‘Blocks … my favourite.’

She had sat at the table, next to Oliver, and now Raoul leaned over her, his strong arms trapping her as he rested his hands on the table on either side of her. Sarah could feel his breath whisper against her neck when he spoke.

‘Did you hear that, Oliver? Raoul loves building things! Wouldn’t it be fun for you two to build something for me? What about a tower? You love building towers! Do you remember how high your last tower was? Before it fell?’

‘Twelve blocks,’ Oliver said seriously, not looking at Raoul. ‘I can count to fifty.’

‘That’s quite an achievement!’ Raoul leaned a little closer to Sarah, so that the clean, minty smell of her shampoo filled his nostrils.

She shifted, but had almost no room for manoeuvre. Her eyes drifted compulsively to his forearm, to the fine sprinkling of dark hairs that curled around the dull matt silver of his mega-expensive watch.

‘Why don’t you sit down, Raoul?’ she suggested stiltedly. ‘You can help Oliver with his tower.’

‘I don’t need any help, Mum.’

‘No, he really doesn’t. I sense that he’s more than capable of building the Empire State Building all on his own.’

Oliver glanced very quickly at Raoul, and then returned to the task in hand.

Sarah heard Raoul’s almost imperceptible indrawn breath as he abruptly stood back, and when she turned to look at him he had removed himself to the kitchen sink, his expression one of frustrated defeat.

‘Give it time,’ she said in a low voice, moving to stand in front of him.

‘How much time? I’m not a patient man.’

‘Well, I guess you’ll have to learn how to be. Good job with the onions, by the way.’

But she could feel his simmering impatience with the situation for the rest of the evening. Oliver was not so much hostile as wary. He answered Raoul’s questions without meeting his eye and, dinner over, finally agreed to go outside with him to test drive the car which had been abandoned in the sitting room.

Through the kitchen window, Sarah watched their awkward interaction with a sinking heart.