Legally His Omnibus (14 page)

‘No, I’m not. I can’t be,’ Sean denied bitterly. ‘I can’t father a child. It isn’t medically possible.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Kate said in a dry whisper as she struggled to take in what he was telling her.

It was too late for him to backtrack now; Sean knew that. Behind the shock he could see in Kate’s eyes he could also see a growing determination. He knew she would insist on being told the truth—and what point was there in hiding it now, after what he had just said?

He took a deep breath.

‘At a routine annual check-up for my private medical insurance the doctor suggested that I might as well have the full works.’ He gave a small bitter shrug. ‘It was just a formality, or so I thought—just a means of putting on paper what I believed I already knew. That I was a healthy, fully functioning man. When the results came back there was a problem...’

He paused and Kate waited, aching with compassion for him, but with the sure knowledge that, no matter what he had been told, the experts had got it wrong. He had fathered Oliver.

‘It seemed—he said... He told me that my sperm count was so low it would be impossible for me to father children,’ he said bleakly. ‘I refused to believe him at first. In fact I was so convinced he must be wrong that I demanded that they run the tests again. They weren’t wrong!’ He closed his eyes. ‘Shall I try to explain to you, Kate, how savagely humiliating I found it to have to stand there and listen to the doctor telling me that I wasn’t capable of giving you a child? How I wished I hadn’t heaped fresh humiliation on myself by demanding they re-run the tests?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me...say something?’ Kate demanded in a dry whisper.

‘I couldn’t,’ Sean said bleakly. ‘I couldn’t bear to see your face when I told you that I couldn’t give you the children I knew you wanted so much.’

So much,
Kate wanted to tell him.
But never, ever more than I wanted you, Sean.
She knew what he was like, though. She knew how deeply such news would have cut into him, into everything he’d believed about himself.

‘I had a right to know, Sean,’ she told him quietly.

‘And I had a right to protect you from knowing,’ he countered.

‘To protect
me
?’

Sean’s mouth compressed. ‘I knew if I told you you would insist on...on accepting that there could never be any children for us and...and sacrificing your own chance to be a mother because of that. I decided there and then that I wasn’t going to let you do that, and that I...I had to set you free to find another man to...to give you what I could not.’

‘To set me free?’ Now that she was over her initial shock Kate was beginning to get angry. ‘You were unfaithful to me, Sean, and—’

‘No!’

‘No?’

‘There wasn’t anyone else. I...I just made it up because...because I knew how you would feel and how you would react. I didn’t want to keep you trapped in our marriage, sacrificing yourself to it for my sake, pitying me and eventually hating me for what you were being denied. I must say, though, that I didn’t expect you to find someone else quite so quickly. Was that why it didn’t last?’

A lump had lodged in her throat and she could only shake her head in helpless denial. She didn’t know what was hurting her the most—her pain for Sean or her pain for herself.

‘Sean, I don’t care what the medical reports said. Oliver is your child,’ she told him passionately. ‘Sometimes such things are possible and—’

‘No!’ His harsh, haunted cry made her flinch.

‘Don’t offer me that kind of temptation, Kate. You are worthy of so much more than deception, and so is Oliver.’

Kate went white, but before she could defend herself he was continuing rawly.

‘Can’t you understand how I feel? How much I wish that Oliver could be mine? How much it hurts me that he isn’t? I only have to look at him, never mind hold him, to feel my lo—something here inside me that... Having children with you, giving you our children, was so deeply rooted in me, so instinctive, that I thought I could never endure knowing that another man had given you what I couldn’t. I thought it would drive me quite literally mad to see you with another man’s child. But—’

‘Oliver
is
your child,’ Kate protested emotionally. ‘He is yours, Sean—ours...’

‘Don’t do this to me, please, Kate. I can’t bear it! What do I have to do to stop you lying to me? This?’

Kate couldn’t move when he took hold of her, the fierce pressure of his mouth on hers bending her head backwards against the hard strength of his arm. The heat of their emotions, anger on anger, welded them together, and sent a shaft of pure molten reaction speeding through Kate.

How could it be that such a fierce primeval desire could be born out of anger? Her whole body shook in recognition of her vulnerable naïveté. She hadn’t recognised her danger and tried to evade it. It was too late now.

She was held in thrall, emotionally and sexually, as much to the intensity of her own surging need as she was physically to Sean’s iron-armed imprisonment of her.

When he broke the kiss, lifting his mouth from hers, his chest rising and falling quickly, Kate tried to pull away from him. But Sean refused to let her go.

‘Perhaps the only way I can stop thinking about it is to put my own sexual imprint on you, for ever.’

‘You were the one who divorced me, Sean,’ Kate reminded him, trying to free her senses from the effect his hot, turbulent gaze was having on them, and at the same time fighting frantically to stem the excited surge of liquid sexual longing that was pulsing through her.

‘I may have divorced you but I didn’t replace you in my bed, Kate,’ he answered her bitterly. ‘How much did you want him?’ he demanded rawly.

‘Sean! No!’ Kate protested, torn between shock and pain—shock that he could actually believe she had given herself to someone else when he knew how much she had loved him, and pain for him, for herself, because he did.

‘No? You didn’t say no to him, did you?’ he challenged her thickly. ‘I’m going to make you forget that you ever knew him, Kate. I’m going to make you want me so much that you’ll forget he ever existed.’

Sean was already caressing the side of her neck with his lips, deliberately seeking the special place where, she had once confessed shyly to him, feeling his mouth made her melt with longing for him.

‘Did he do this?’

The words muffled against her skin made her throat ache with agonised suppressed tears, her only response a mute shake of her head.

‘You didn’t tell him how much it turns you on?’

There was an ugly note in Sean’s voice that spiked her heart with angry pain. To her own shock, despite her anger, she ached to be able to reassure him, to convince him that no man ever had or ever could take his place in her life. In either her life, her heart, or her body. But the words wouldn’t come, despite Sean’s angry assault on her senses.

‘Did he touch you like this, Kate? And like this?’

The angry, destructive words hammered into her like blows, numbing her body and freezing her emotions. A cold emptiness was spreading inside her, squeezing the life out of her love with icy binding tentacles of rage that stiffened her body into furious rejection.

‘Oh, God, Kate.’

The groaned, anguished words were expelled with so much force that she could feel their pressure against her skin.

Releasing her, Sean went over to the bed and sat down on it, his elbows on his knees as he dropped his head into his hands.

‘What the hell am I doing?’

The suffocating anguish of his pain filled the space between them.

With his head bent over his hands, she could see how exactly like Oliver’s his hair grew, Kate noticed. For some reason that knowledge made her take a tentative step towards him.

‘What the hell’s happening to me? I know I’ve always been a jealous bastard where you’re concerned, but—’

The muffled words bled shocked despair.

Kate lifted her hand and placed it on his head.

Immediately his whole body froze.

‘For God’s sake, Kate, don’t touch me. How can you touch me?’ he demanded savagely.

As his hand moved Kate saw the telltale moisture on his face and her heart turned over with love and compassion. An extraordinary feeling of strength and understanding filled her. Reaching out, she placed her hand over his.

Immediately Sean pushed her hand away and stood up, in rejection of her touch.

‘I’ll sleep in one of the other rooms tonight,’ he said stiffly.

As he started to walk away from her Kate saw the way the light falling against his thigh revealed the swell of his arousal, and something inside her, something elemental and untamed, reacted to it.

Quickly she stepped in front of him, looked up into his face.

‘No more, Kate,’ Sean told her wearily. ‘I don’t want—’

‘This?’ She stopped him, placing her lips against his and caressing them slowly and sweetly, letting her senses and her heart revel in self-indulgent pleasure as she did so. She felt the involuntary movement of his body as he tensed it against her, but she wasn’t going to give in.

‘Or this?’ she whispered against his mouth, sealing it with her own as she let her hand drop to his body so that her fingers could stroke possessively against him.

He didn’t respond for so long that she was almost on the point of giving up, and then suddenly and explosively the power was taken from her and he was returning her kiss—not angrily, but passionately, hungrily, as though he was starving for her.

Just as she was starving for him?

Somehow, some way, somewhere, the anger between them had taken another direction, had pushed through the barrier of her self-protection and found that place deep within herself where she was still the girl who loved Sean and responded to his lovemaking with eager, open passion.

She could feel that passion flooding through her now, taking her to a place she had thought lost to her for ever.

Clothes tugged and pulled by impatient fingers left a trail to the bed, where they stood body to naked body. Kate’s arms wrapped around Sean’s neck as she continued to kiss him with fierce female hunger.

‘Kate!’

She felt his hands on her breasts, holding and shaping them, and she shuddered, racked by fierce tremors of pleasure at his open appreciation of their soft weight in his hands. A wild wantonness had entered her blood and taken her over. As she was now taking him over! It manifested itself in the hot sensuality of the way she kissed him, touched him, the way she subtly and deliberately encouraged and invited him, winding her arms around him, pressing her naked body against him, driven by a force she could neither control nor deny.

A force she didn’t want to control or deny, Kate recognised with feverish arousal, and she slid her hands down Sean’s torso and through the soft thickness of his body hair, stroking over the hardness of his erection and then curling her fingers around the hot swollen shaft, caressing it slowly and then more urgently whilst the tension seated deep inside her own body tightened and ached until she knew it could not be contained any longer.

Sean! As she held out her arms to him Kate let the top half of her body drop onto the bed.

The last of the light was fading across the bedroom, but there was still enough left for her to see Sean’s expression, to watch the way his glittering gaze was drawn to her body, over the firm swell of her breasts, over her nipples, dark rosy peaks of open arousal. The last glow warmed her belly and highlighted the soft little curls decorating the swollen mound that signposted her sex.

Deliberately she opened her legs, and watched the shudder that racked Sean’s body.

Briefly she gave in to the temptation to stroke the wetness of her own sex, watching the way Sean’s gaze followed her small erotic movement, and then blazed with heat. A fierce spiral of female excitement ran through her.

‘You do it,’ she told him boldly.

And, as though he knew what she was feeling, Sean groaned and reached for her.

Possessively Kate wrapped her legs around him, moaning her pleasure as he touched her just as she had wanted him to do, replacing his fingers with his body when he realised how close she was to her orgasm.

Within seconds it was over, her climax so immediate and so intense that her womb actually ached with its aftermath.

Her womb!

Bright tears glittered in her eyes and she turned her head away so that Sean couldn’t see them. Once she would have taken that fierce clenching of its muscles as a sign that it was claiming the seed of life Sean had planted there, but Sean refused to believe that he could give her a child.

CHAPTER TEN

‘R
EADY
,
THEN
?’ S
EAN
asked curtly, not looking directly at Kate herself as he strode into the sitting room, but crouching down instead to hold out his arms to Oliver, who immediately ran into them.

He had been like this with her—cold, distant and rejecting—ever since the night they had made love. If he had written them out in ten-feet-high letters he could not have made his feelings plainer, Kate admitted unhappily.

He might share the large bed in the master bedroom with her, but he slept with his back to her, and the cold space between them might as well have been impassable snow-capped mountains. His whole body language told her he didn’t want her anywhere near him.

And why should he? In his eyes he had got what he wanted out of their marriage, after all, Kate acknowledged bleakly, as she looked down at her son and her husband.

‘You don’t have to take us to the hospital, Sean,’ Kate told him now. ‘This check-up is only a formality. The doctor said that himself, and I already know that I’m fully recovered.’

‘I thought you said you wanted to check on your house?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Kate admitted. ‘I know that the letting agent says he’s found someone who wants to rent it right away—’

‘You’d be better off selling it,’ Sean interrupted her grimly.

Now it was Kate’s turn to look away from him. How could she explain to a man in Sean’s enviable financial position how she felt about the small home she had worked so hard to buy? And how could she tell him there was a part of her that was afraid that somehow history might repeat itself, that she might find herself on her own and in need of the security her little cottage could provide?

‘I prefer to keep it,’ she answered him.

‘I spoke to my solicitor yesterday,’ Sean announced, standing up. ‘About the adoption.’

Oliver was running towards the door, but even so Kate gave Sean a warning look—which he obviously misinterpreted. As Oliver hurried out to the car Sean’s face hardened.

‘In your eyes I might be Oliver’s father, Kate, but in my own eyes I am not—so I want to make sure that I am in the eyes of the law, for Oliver’s sake as much as my own.’

Too heartsore to make any response, Kate followed him out to the car.

* * *

They had stopped off on their way to have some lunch, and now Sean was parking his car outside the doctor’s surgery.

‘There’s no need for you and Oliver to come in with me, Sean,’ Kate said as she opened the car door, but she might as well have saved her breath.

Not only did Sean insist on waiting with her to see the doctor, he also insisted on going into the room with her.

‘I can understand your husband’s concern,’ the doctor further infuriated her by saying placatingly. ‘You were very poorly.’ He shook his head. ‘Yours was certainly the worst case of this virus I have seen.’

‘Perhaps she should have a full medical—with heart and lung checks?’ Sean suggested.

‘Sean, there is nothing wrong with me,’ Kate told him angrily.

‘Mummy was sick after breakfast!’

In the silence that followed Oliver’s innocent but revealing piece of information all three adults turned to look at him.

‘I...it was the red wine I had with dinner,’ Kate explained uncomfortably.

Immediately the doctor’s expression relaxed, although he did tell Kate warningly, ‘Red wine can sometimes prove too strong for a delicate stomach.’

‘You barely touched your wine last night,’ Sean pointed out as they left the surgery.

‘Because I wasn’t enjoying it,’ Kate returned quickly.

To her relief he didn’t pursue the matter. Instead he said, ‘We might as well leave the car here and walk to your house. It isn’t very far.’

Automatically Kate fell into step beside him, with Oliver in between them.

Perhaps the walk was too familiar to her, or perhaps her mind was on other things—Kate didn’t know which, but obviously her concentration wasn’t what it should have been, because when Oliver pulled his hand free from hers and shouted out the name of his friend she didn’t react as quickly as she could have done. Oliver had run into the road before she had realised what was happening.

She did see the huge lorry bearing down on him, though, and she did hear her own voice screaming out his name in anguished terror as she started to run towards him, even though she knew she would be too late.

There was a blur of movement at her side as Sean ran past her and into the road, grabbing hold of his son in a rugby tackle movement, covering Oliver’s body with his own.

Kate heard Oliver’s screams and the hiss of air brakes. She could smell the odour of burning rubber, taste her own fear in her mouth. The lorry had slewed to a stop and people were running into the road to stand over the still, crumpled figure lying there.

But Kate got there first.

Sean lay motionless on the tarmac, blood oozing from a cut on his head, one of his legs splayed out at a sickeningly unnatural angle. And, lying safely next to Sean’s unconscious body, Kate could see Oliver, his eyes wide with shock as he whimpered, ‘Daddy...’

There were people everywhere—the doctor...sirens... an ambulance...

Hugging Oliver tightly to her, Kate got in it—after the paramedics had carefully lifted Sean onto a stretcher and placed him inside.

His face was drained of colour and Kate had to fight back the sickly sensation of wanting to faint as one of the paramedics expertly set up a drip and started to check his vital signs.

‘His body’s in shock, love,’ one of them said, trying to comfort Kate as she stared at him in anguish. Unable to stop herself she took hold of one of his hands. It felt icy cold—as though...

Her heart lurched against her ribcage, her gaze going fearfully to the heart monitor.

‘Hospital’s coming up now. And we’ve got one of the best A&E departments in the country here,’ the friendly medic told her proudly. ‘Good timing, too. We’ve still got over half the golden hour left.’

‘The golden hour?’ Kate questioned numbly.

‘That’s what we call the window we get after an accident—leave it too long and—’ As he saw Kate shudder he checked himself and looked uncomfortable, realising he had said too much.

In Accident and Emergency a nurse took Oliver from Kate’s numb arms whilst Sean was rushed past them on a trolley.

‘I want to go with him—’ Kate began, but the nurse stopped her firmly.

‘We’ve got to get him ready for the duty surgeon to see him. You wouldn’t want to watch us cutting off those good clothes he’s wearing, would you? Now, let’s have a little look at this young man, shall we?’

Distractedly, Kate tried to focus on what she was saying.

Miraculously Oliver had sustained little more than some grazes and bruises—no, not miraculously, Kate recognised. Because Sean had risked his life to save him.

A huge lump rose in her throat. Sean was right. It did take more than fathering a child to be a father, and he had proved that today. And he had proved, too, just how much he loved Oliver.

* * *

The medical staff were kind, but nothing could really alleviate the anguish and fear Kate experienced as she waited to hear how Sean was.

To her horror, a neurologist had to be called in to examine Sean and check for brain damage.

An hour passed, and then another. Oliver fell asleep in her arms and Kate’s eyes prickled dryly with the weight of her unshed tears. After what felt like a lifetime, a consultant strode into the waiting area and came across to her.

Numbly Kate focused on the spotted bow tie he was wearing. ‘My husband?’ she begged anxiously.

‘He’s sustained a broken leg, and some cuts and bruises, and for a while we were concerned that the bump on his head might turn out to be rather nasty.’ When he saw Kate’s expression he gave her a kind look. ‘Fortunately it’s nothing more than a bad bump, but we had to make sure. I’m sorry that you’ve had to wait so long, but you’ll understand that we had to be certain...’

Tears of overwrought emotional relief were pouring down Kate’s face.

‘We’ve had to mess him around rather a lot, and we’ve had to operate on his leg. We’ve still got a few samples to take, but he’s fully conscious now. He won’t accept that his son—Oliver, is it?—is all right until he has seen him. Susie will take you through,’ he told Kate kindly, waving a hand towards a nurse waiting next to him.

But Kate didn’t move. She couldn’t. An idea...a hope...was burning on her tongue.

‘The samples you have to take,’ she began in a fierce rush. ‘Would you—could you...?’ Taking a deep breath, she told him helplessly, ‘Sean won’t believe that Oliver is his son, but he is. If you could do a DNA test—’

The consultant was frowning. ‘That would be most irregular.’

‘Sean already loves Oliver,’ Kate told him desperately. ‘He risked his own life to save him.’

‘How sure are you that the child is his?’ the consultant asked bluntly.

‘Totally sure,’ Kate answered him.

‘I’m afraid that I can’t do as you ask without the patient’s permission,’ the consultant told her, adding quietly as her face fell, ‘However, I believe it is possible to have such tests conducted via certain Internet websites, should a person deem it necessary to do so.’

‘But how—?’ Kate began helplessly.

‘All that is required is a small sample—a snippet of hair, for instance.’

Kate swallowed hard. ‘You think I should...?’

‘What I think is that anyone doing such a thing should be guided by their own conscience,’ the consultant told her seriously.

Biting her lip, Kate turned to follow the nurse down the corridor.

Sean was in a small private room, surrounded by a heart-stoppingly serious-looking battery of medical equipment, and when Kate saw the ‘bump’ on his head the consultant had referred to she almost cried out loud.

It looked as though the side of his head had been dragged along the road—which it most probably had, she acknowledged shakily.

‘Look, Sean, we’ve brought Oliver to see you, like we promised,’ said the nurse.

As Sean turned his head Kate had to fight the compulsion to hand Oliver to the nurse and run to his side, to take Sean in her arms.

How could such a big man look so frail? Her heart turned over as she whispered his name—but Sean wasn’t looking at her. His whole attention was concentrated on Oliver.

‘Daddy!’ Oliver exclaimed, suddenly waking up and holding out his arms to him.

‘Give him to me,’ Sean demanded in a hoarse croak.

Uncertainly Kate looked at the nurse, who nodded her head briefly. Gently Kate carried Oliver over to the bed, but instead of handing him to Sean she sat down on the bed next to Sean, keeping hold of Oliver, afraid that her son might inadvertently hurt his father.

‘He’s all right?’ Sean asked Kate as he lifted his hand and touched his son.

‘He’s perfectly all right—thanks to you,’ Kate replied, her voice trembling.

It wasn’t Oliver she wanted to hold and protect right now, she recognised achingly, it was Sean himself. But she knew that he wanted neither her comfort nor her love.

‘Gently, Oliver,’ she protested automatically as Oliver leaned forward to give his father a big smacking kiss.

* * *

‘There’s no need for you to keep visiting me twice a day like this, Kate,’ Sean announced curtly as Kate opened the door to his private room.

Suppressing her hurt, Kate forced herself to smile. ‘Mr Meadows says that you’ll be coming home tomorrow.’

Sean frowned.

‘Oliver can’t wait,’ Kate told him.

Immediately the frown disappeared.

‘He’s been pining for you, Sean.’

Ruefully Kate decided that she wasn’t going to tell him what she had done to try to alleviate her son’s longing for his father—he would discover the new addition to their household for himself soon enough. Kate had to admit that she had been pleasantly surprised at how quickly Rusty, as Oliver had decided to call his new puppy, had become housetrained.

‘Did you get the neurologist to check that absolutely no damage had been done when he...?’

Every time she visited him Sean demanded to know how Oliver was, and even though she kept telling him that he was fine he still persisted in worrying. Kate suspected that he wouldn’t be reassured until he was home and could observe Oliver’s excellent and boisterous good health for himself.

‘I spoke to my solicitor this morning,’ he announced abruptly. ‘He says you’re refusing to sign the adoption papers.’

Kate poured herself a glass of water from the jug at
Sean’s bedside in an attempt to quell the feeling of nausea the hospital smell was giving her.

‘I’m not refusing, Sean, I...’ Crossing her fingers behind her back, she said quickly, ‘Your adoption of Oliver is such an important and...and special thing, I didn’t want it to be purely businesslike and clinical. I thought if we waited until you came home we could have a little celebration.’

‘So it isn’t because you’re having second thoughts, then?’ Sean cut across her hesitant excuse.

The temptation to tell him emotionally that the only time she could have had second thoughts about his role as Oliver’s father had been nine months before Oliver’s birth was something she had to stifle before she could give it voice.

Deep down inside she still felt guilty about that little snippet of hair she had cut from his head whilst he had been sleeping. As the consultant had hinted, she had found a website offering the kind of service she had needed and Sean’s hair, together with a lock of Oliver’s, had been sent to it. She had no doubts, of course, as to the result she would receive back.

Automatically her hand dropped to her stomach and rested there.

So far as Sean’s accident was concerned, the consultant had told her cheerfully that she was worrying for nothing, that Sean was a fit, healthy man with a skull thick enough to protect him from its contact with the road and a broken leg that was healing extremely well. But Kate knew that as long as Sean was here in this hospital she would continue to feel that he was vulnerable and needed to be treated with care.