Temporary Parents

‘I never do,’ he agreed cheerfully.

No. Not for anyone or anything. What Max wanted, he wanted now—or he walked away and found the next most pleasing substitute.

‘Well, you can this time. Go back and sit down and wait—or keep walking out of my flat door and don’t come back!’ she cried, rubbing her face hard in temper with a riskily released corner of the towel.

‘You’ve got five minutes,’ he drawled. ‘I’m in a hurry.’

‘Go and feed the parrot,’ she suggested maliciously, knowing Fred would bite off Max’s finger if he tried.

‘No, thanks.’ There was a lazy amusement in his voice. ‘It looks diseased.’

Laura pummelled her wet breasts with the towel as if she were kneading bread, furious on her pet’s behalf. Somewhere in the background she was aware of the sound of Max’s retreating steps.

‘By the way,’ he called back as an afterthought. ‘There’s a ladder exploring your left thigh.’

Laura clapped a hand to the back of her leg. He was right. Red-faced and breathing hard, she clutched the towel securely around her and turned in a violent movement to find that he’d vanished.

She loathed him. He made her want to lash out, to slap that arrogant, smoothie face. To knock him off-balance with a step-by-step explanation of what he’d done to her, with all the gory details.

It beggared belief that he was here to make a shameful admission—and yet was strolling around casually, quite unperturbed by the fact that he ought to be ashamed of his actions.

One day, Max Pendennis...one day! she promised vehemently. Then she felt exasperated with herself. In the back of her mind, she’d wanted to appear cool and collected, the epitome of a woman who couldn’t care less what he did. Yet already he’d got her stamping mad. Her eyes sparked angrily and she tried to haul down her temper from the stratosphere.

All she had to do was listen to him with a superior smile hovering on her face, make sure that he wasn’t going to ruin Fay’s marriage by telling Daniel what had happened, and then show him the door.

She decided not to tell him about her pregnancy. She had no intention of playing the sad victim. Her preference was to appear remote, dignified and unassailable...

And yet, she thought, her sense of humour briefly reasserting itself, she’d opened up the proceedings with a classic girlie-magazine pose, presenting her flimsily clad backside, suspenders and stocking-tops to him!

‘Three minutes, and counting.’

Laura sent a hot-poker glare at the only bit of him she could see, a pair of long, male legs in soft silver-grey suiting crossed at the ankles, and two glassily polished black shoes.

He was sitting in her favourite easy chair, facing the bed and wardrobe, like someone waiting for the next show to begin.

She stalked into the room just as he was reaching down from the chair to pick up the discarded grey jersey dress. Without a word she took it from him, suddenly conscious of the homely untidiness around her.

There were piles of half-read paperbacks near his feet and a stack of various friends’ letters stuffed into the chair beside him. Evidence of her studying lay scattered on every available surface—papers, files, pens, notepads. Max hated mess.

Avoiding contact with his eyes, she stepped over his outstretched legs, toed the daily paper under the small table to join the parrot’s tinkly bell and headed for the wardrobe.

All too late, she realised that she’d been clutching the towel around her so tightly that her figure must have been perfectly outlined for him. She eased her neurotic grip, giving him a few more folds to deal with.

Max inhaled audibly behind her as if exasperated.

‘If you want me to hurry up,’ she said haughtily over her shoulder, ‘then face the other way. I’m not dressing while you look on.’

‘It would save time if you stayed as you are.’ The words slid over her like smooth icing from a spoon. ‘It makes no difference to me what you’re wearing—’

‘Well, it does to me!’ she snapped, and regretted losing control. Again. Giving herself a mental kick for her stupidity, she waited haughtily for him to make a move.

The sigh of irritation was repeated, and then there was a scraping sound as the chair was pushed back. When she checked in the mirror, she saw that he was gazing out of the window and standing a disease-free distance from Fred, who was pacing up and down his perch and measuring his chances of a crafty nip.

Satisfied, she opened the wardrobe door, Max’s reflected image filling her head.

Tall. Hair still a gleaming raven-black like hers. But the thick waves had been tamed and cut to ruthless perfection, as if his barber had painstakingly worked with a ruler, measuring the requisite distance from that razoredged white collar.

Max had wider shoulders than she remembered, poured into a sharply tailored suit which had clearly been built on his hard, sinewy body, inch by perfect inch. His spare frame was not heavy with grossly inflexible muscle, but powerfully shaped nevertheless, like that of an athlete in his prime.

He looked breathtakingly handsome. But then he’d always been that—mooned over by her schoolfriends on the rare occasions he’d come home from his prep and then public schools. Son of the wealthy General William Pendennis. Bright future in the City. Every girl’s dream—hers included.

Except...he wasn’t her Max any more, and hadn’t been for a long time. He belonged in a different sphere. A world of privilege and class, peopled by well-bred, elite movers-and-shakers. A world at large which embraced big business, financial deals and where international flights were far more commonplace than number nine buses.

Perhaps aware that she hadn’t moved for a few moments, he began drumming his fingers on the high windowsill and tapping his foot Max hated being cooped up as much as he hated being kept waiting, she reflected, pushing hangers about aimlessly. He was the most restless and active man she’d ever known.

‘Will you step on it?’ he complained impatiently. ‘I’ve got a flight to catch—and you have one hell of a lot to organise.’

‘I have?’ That didn’t sound as if he was planning a confession about his relationship with Fay—and the consequences. Puzzled, Laura heaved the towel around her top half, grabbed her best suit from the wardrobe and slid the short, straight skirt up over her slender hips. Instantly she felt prim and efficient. ‘You’d better talk while I dress, then,’ she advised edgily.

His persistent drumming and tapping was driving her mad. She felt a dangerous shakiness creeping into her voice, and tried to calm down. Steeling herself, she flung down the gauntlet.

‘Tell me about you and Fay,’ she ordered.

‘Me and...?’

Jerking her head around, alerted by his astonishment, she found that he was facing her, meeting her startled gaze with a hard, uncomprehending stare. She recoiled, shaken. Partly, if she was honest, by the unexpected head-on impact of his stunning good looks.

‘That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’ she demanded, refusing to let him intimidate her. He was the one in the wrong! Was he now going to deny the whole affair? ‘Losing courage to speak? Don’t make me despise you more than I already do, Max,’ she muttered.

His dark eyes narrowed but she realised he hadn’t heard a word. For the first time he was scrutinising her still puffy eyes fringed with wet black lashes, her tousled hair and unevenly pink and white skin, fresh from its brutal assault at the basin.

She stared back at the pure lines of his sculpted jaw and tried not to feel crushed by his assessment, and horribly unattractive.

‘What the devil’s been happening to you?’

The softly spoken concern wriggled briefly beneath her defences. Then she remembered. He didn’t really care a jot. This was how he got women sewing on his buttons.

‘Nothing. A busy morning,’ she replied crossly, struck by the ruthless perfection of his grooming and the messiness of hers. Already he’d lowered her self-esteem.

Desperate not to let it sink further, she straightened the slipping towel around her tiny body, turned back to the mirror and grabbed a brush. As she forced it through her tangled mop, she longed for her hair to miraculously turn into a smooth, sophisticated style for once.

She could see Max watching critically, his arms folded over his lean, taut torso and the plumb-line-straight navy tie accurately bisecting the advertisement-white shirt.

‘I can understand,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘that the guy downstairs mussed your hair up in that clinch...but who made you cry in the first place?’

Her lip quivered and she pulled it into a grimace. He’d laugh if she said a baby! So she said nothing, not even issuing a denial about the clinch. Her brushing became more frantic, but she only ended up with shiny, fly-away hair which flew away in a multitude of directions.

Her face looked small and defenceless, her short upper lip bowing to form an ‘oh’ of dismay. Two enormous, wet-fringed eyes stared back at her. She looked as if she’d been stabbed in the heart.

Max didn’t let up. ‘You and the beefy guy had a row...’ He paused in the middle of his surmising, a faint frown on his beautifully tanned forehead. ‘About me? Because I was coming here and you’d told him we’d been lovers?’ he guessed.

‘Don’t exaggerate your own importance!’ she said, shooting a scornful glance at his reflection.

But she quailed at his piercing, bone-melting assessment and longed to be in full war paint for protection. She picked up a tube of all-in-one foundation and powder and began to spread it with shaking, ice-cold fingers.

‘You were kissing and—’

‘No! That’s a lie!’

Disastrously forgetting her intention to stay composed, Laura whirled around indignantly, her eyes glowing fiercely in anger, hair flying about her briefly animated face in jet black tendrils. The wild gipsy look, he’d once said admiringly, before he’d crushed her soft, poppy-coloured mouth beneath his.

For a moment there was a flash of intense light in Max’s eyes. She felt it searing a path straight for her soul. But she was dead inside and it didn’t reach anywhere important. He didn’t even know he was projecting sexual desire, she thought peevishly. It was as natural to him as breathing.

‘Too vehement a response, Laura,’ he declared quietly. ‘I saw you quite clearly. And why shouldn’t you hug and kiss him? Unless...’ His mouth became a tight snarl. ‘Unless he’s married, of course?’

She couldn’t help widening her eyes at his deduction. ‘He owns the business,’ she said evasively, for something to say.

‘And he employs you,’ Max persisted, in a savage undertone, contempt rippling through his harsh features. ‘He gives you a flat—’

‘It’s a bedsit!’ she declared. ‘Of the non-swinging-cat variety! And I pay for it. And I get up at five to start the ovens—’

‘It’s very convenient,’ he agreed disparagingly.

She fell silent. He was going to think the worst of her, but she wasn’t going to keep protesting her innocence. What was the point? In half an hour or so Max would be out of her life again. She hoped.

His lashes dropped, and she realised he was watching the way the first curves of her pinkly shining breasts rose and fell above the failing towel. They went pinker still and her skin prickled as if he’d switched on an electric current in her body.

She turned her back on him and rummaged in a drawer for her shirt, drawing it on and securing the first two buttons before replying.

‘I don’t owe you any explanation of my behaviour,’ she said flatly.

‘No. You don’t So long as you don’t ask for any explanation of mine.’

They were getting closer to the confession. He felt ashamed of two-timing her. Good!

Triumphantly she finished doing up the last button—only to find it wasn’t the last button at all. She had one left over. Annoyed, she started again. Doggedly she worked her way down, her fingers fumbling because he’d moved to one side and was watching every move she made. Her breathing thickened—or the air did; she wasn’t sure.

‘Are you ready to listen now?’ Max asked.

‘Perfectly.’

She made sure she spoke in a clipped tone. From now on she’d be detached. He wasn’t used to women showing no interest in him and it pleased her that, despite looking and sounding devastatingly handsome and sexy, he’d roused no deep, lingering desires.

A little more confidently, she tucked the shirt in and arranged her small body primly in a threadbare wing chair. Legs neatly crossed at the ankles. Back erect. Distantly involved expression on her face.

‘Fire away,’ she said, with all the appearance of a woman about to hear something boring. But she felt she might snap at any moment.

Max began wandering about and fingering everything he came across. ‘I hope you realise I should be in Paris.’

Absently he stroked the gleaming top of the cluttered mahogany sewing table which had once belonged to her grandmother. He seemed absorbed by the feel of the highly polished wood, his whole face responding to the satiny sensuousness beneath his fingertips. It was a very hedonistic action and had Laura’s gaze glued to every lingering caress.

She heaved her mind back to his remark. ‘Of course I didn’t. Paris, you say?’ she asked, intending to sound rudely uninterested, but her remark came out with croaky edges. She cleared her throat as surreptitiously as possible.

Max gave her a look of lazy curiosity and she hardened her eyes in case he got the wrong idea. ‘I’ve had to cancel two meetings.’

He moved lithely on to the mantelpiece, nonchalant and loose-limbed. Casually he began to examine a china herring-gull her mother had sent her. Laura wriggled, uncomfortable with the way he delicately traced the smooth curves of the beautiful bird.

‘Must be important news, then,’ she encouraged him.

‘You can say that again. One of these days, your sister will go too far!’

‘I thought she already had,’ Laura retaliated, wishing he wouldn’t prowl so. It made her feel restless. And it set off his long, sinewy legs and lean thighs too well.

He was already on the other side of the room, his hands thrust in his pockets, shoulders hunched as he brooded at her. Such an electric force field surrounded him that, by moving around, he was filling her tiny bedsit with his energy. If he carried on much longer she’d begin to feel suffocated by it.

‘Daniel rang me,’ Max said sternly.

‘I thought you and your brother hadn’t spoken since the day he married my sister,’ she remarked, lacing her voice with asperity.

Family feuds were so stupid in her view, and Max was small-minded where Fay was concerned. He owed her sister more courtesy than a flat rejection of her existence.

But then, Fay had said he was carrying a torch for her. Max wouldn’t have liked being superseded by his less prepossessing brother.

Max grunted. ‘I’ve been funding Daniel for the last few years.’

‘Oh. That’s very brotherly of you.’ She waited while Max did his best to wear out her cheap carpet.

‘I did it for the kids.’

She stiffened. Was he going to say more? ‘So you should—’

‘But,’ he went on, snapping out the word and glaring at her for interrupting, ‘it seems I was funding something else.’ He came to a halt in front of her, his face unnervingly grim.

‘Wh-what do you mean?’ she asked, prompted by his air of utter disgust.

Her sister had done some stupid things in her time. She and Daniel acted like flower-children, wandering around the country with travellers in battered old vans and defying authority.

‘Daniel and Fay have been arrested,’ Max said starkly.

Her heart sank. ‘Trespass? Again?’ she ventured, remembering she’d had to bail Fay out last time for refusing to leave some farmer’s land.

‘You don’t understand.’ Max’s mouth tightened as if he didn’t want to continue. His shoulders lifted and stayed high while she stared at him anxiously, then he said, punching out the words with barely contained anger, ‘They’re in jail in Marrakesh.’

Her eyes widened and her mouth fell open in sheer astonishment as his rage became clear. She knew how much he hated Daniel’s way of life. He was furious with his brother for blotting the family name. It was all right to get village girls pregnant and dump them, that was what the squirearchy did for kicks, but jail was unthinkable.

‘For... what?’ she asked breathlessly, her whole attention on his narrowed, glittering eyes.

‘Possession of drugs.’

‘Oh, God!’

She slumped heavily into the chair, staring into space, appalled.

‘There’s no time for histrionics—’ he began testily.

‘What histrionics? Did you see histrionics?’ she seethed through tightly clenched teeth. ‘I was thinking about the children. What’s happened to them? And what can we do about getting Fay and Daniel out—?’

‘Nothing,’ he said brutally.

‘Nothing? But—’

He silenced her with a scowl and a wipe-out gesture of his expressive hands. ‘The kids are the first priority.’

‘Of course, but—’

‘Listen, will you?’ he snapped tetchily.

‘You’ve had time to get used to this!’ she protested.

‘I’m just trying to get my head around what’s happened. OK. So who’s looking after Perran and Kerenza now?’

‘A traveller friend who’s now got tired of playing mothers and fathers.’

Her mind reeled. ‘In Marrakesh?’

‘No. Port Gaverne.’

Laura’s mouth fell open again. ‘But that’s in Cornwall!’ He gave her a slow, mocking hand-clap, making her feel stupid. ‘I don’t understand...are you telling me...Fay’s in Marrakesh and she left her children in Cornwall? How could she go away when Kerenza’s only a few months old?’

‘She’s not noted for her devotion to domesticity,’ Max said in a grim and disapproving voice.

Laura secretly agreed. She loved Fay, but her sister’s behaviour was beyond her. They’d always been chalk and cheese. If she had a four-year-old and a baby she’d have to be torn away from them. But then, if something came easy you didn’t value it—and Fay had always bemoaned the ease with which she fell pregnant and how the kids hampered her freedom. Laura lowered her eyes to hide the pain. She’d love her freedom to be hampered.

‘Well, thanks for telling me,’ she said woodenly.

‘Someone had to.’

‘Presumably the children are at your parents’ house right now?’

Max gave her an odd look. ‘My mother and father don’t live in the manor any more. They’ve moved to Scotland. The kids are staying in the cottage my father gave Daniel.’ He began quartering the floor again, clearly impatient to impart all the details and then go. ‘Not that he’s ever used it much. It’s been rented out most of the time, so goodness knows what kind of state it’s in.’

She remembered it. A tiny white stone building set into the side of a cliff. A narrow road ran down from it to the narrow inlet which formed Port Gaverne Bay, the less populated community next to the more bustling Port Isaac, where she’d been brought up, the child of a fisherman.

Fay loathed the cottage. She said it wasn’t big enough for a rat—and couldn’t the old man have done better than that. The Pendennis family had lived in Pendennis Manor then, further up Port Gaverne Valley. Fay had been hoping for something similar.

‘I’m sure it’s fine,’ Laura said, not sure at all.

She studied a slender leg, thoughtfully. This was a different kind of news from the sort she’d been expecting. Her face grew dreamy. Images came to her: sunny blue skies, glittering waves, dark cliffs. The smell of the sea was so real that she could almost taste the salt on her lips. For a moment she felt the spring of sea pinks beneath her feet, and then there was nothing other than the thin, worn lino.

She smiled faintly, wistfully. ‘Perran is probably having a great time on the beach every day—’

‘He’ll be there on his own by tomorrow morning,’ Max informed her sourly. ‘The friend is off to some music festival.’ He seemed as edgy as she was about the situation.

‘Well, that’s out! She can’t leave the children!’ Laura protested, bristling with indignation.

He shrugged. ‘The woman wasn’t paid to babysit. Why should she stay?’

‘Because they’re in need!’ she spluttered, amazed at people’s lack of responsibility.

‘She’s adamant about going. I don’t blame her. Fay promised they’d only be gone two days on a trip to London, and it’s now two weeks. She deliberately lied. Your sister isn’t too familiar with the truth, is she?’

Laura wished she could defend Fay. Her sister was wonderful fun to be with, but not very grounded in the real world. ‘I’m sure there’s a good reason—’

‘There is. Fay’s not cut out to be a mother and the children hinder her activities,’ Max said drily.

She winced. ‘What’s to be done?’ she asked, concentrating on the practical.

Max paused and lifted a black eyebrow. He seemed to be fixated on her softly parted mouth. She closed it and swallowed, bringing his gaze to her throat. Warmth stole over her skin and she knew she was flushing like a stupid schoolgirl. Angry with herself, she set her teeth and fixed her gaze somewhere in the mid-distance.

‘Isn’t that obvious?’ he observed smoothly. ‘If someone doesn’t get down there to take over, the kids’ll be dumped on the beach and abandoned.’

Laura wasn’t slow. She could see where this was leading. It was written all over his face. So she pre-empted him. ‘And you’re going down to look after them,’ she said, giving him what she imagined to be an admiring look. ‘Very good of you—’

‘It’s not good at all. You’re going.’

She looked at him steadily. No way. It was a suggestion so far into the stratosphere that she didn’t even fear it would come true.

She’d vowed never to return. Nor would she get involved with her sister’s children. She’d never even seen them. Kerenza was a baby. The other...

Perran was Max’s child.

CHAPTER TWO

SHE’D feared that Max had found out and had come to claim his rights as a father. Instead, he was asking her to look after his own son and a little baby! Perhaps he didn’t know about Perran after all!

‘I can’t. I have my job,’ she explained, proud to be as cool as a cucumber.

‘OK.’

To her surprise, he made no attempt to argue but headed straight for the door. She gaped at him. Was that it?

‘What are you going to do about the children?’ she cried in astonishment.

‘Me?’ Max half turned, presenting his clean-cut profile. ‘I saw that as your responsibility. If you’re not interested, well...there it is. I’ll let you know the phone number of the Home they’re in—’

‘Home? What do you mean “Home”?’ she yelled, jumping up.

‘It’s a place where orphans or children at risk go—’

‘I know what a Home is!’ she hurled. ‘You know what I meant—don’t be so obtuse! You couldn’t possibly contemplate the idea of putting your own nephew and niece into care.’

‘What other options are there?’ With infuriating rationality he ticked off the reasons for his conclusion on his long, lean fingers. ‘You won’t go, I can’t go, so they’ve got to be cared for by the State, since you’re not keen to let them live on the street and raid dustbins.’ Quite unconcerned, he put his hand out to open the door.

Laura was there before he made contact, sliding herself between him and the thin chipboard. He had no heart. Since he was his own boss, he could easily take time off to care for his son and niece. But he wouldn’t bother to put himself out, would he? Her face registered its disgust, and when a small smile played about his lips she gave him her fiercest scowl.

‘For once in your life,’ she said, the pitch and intensity of her voice showing the full force of her anger, ‘do something for someone else! For two little children—’

‘Ditto back.’

How could he be so unemotional about this? Almost amused! Laura knew she had to persuade him to take on his responsibilities as an uncle. And father.