Legally His Omnibus (6 page)

‘You mean like you did?’ Kate shot at him bitingly. ‘What
happened to her, Sean?’

‘She isn’t in my life any more. It was just a short-lived
fling.’

He sounded more irritated than concerned, and his response
added further fuel to Kate’s anger.

‘Clever her! She must have realised that ultimately you’d
probably betray her, just like you did me.’

Sean gave her a bitter look. ‘When it comes to betrayal, you
outclass me, Kate. You’ve committed the worst betrayal of all in trying to
pretend that another man’s child is mine!’

Kate’s face burned with anger. ‘I would never stoop to that
kind of deceit,’ she stormed furiously. ‘I can’t bear to think of what you’ve
done—not just to me but more importantly to Oliver! You’ve denied your child the
right to know his father and—’

Angrily Sean reached out and took hold of her wrist. ‘Oliver is
not my child!’

The harsh words echoed round the small kitchen, causing Kate to
try and pull away. ‘I hate you, Sean,’ she told him passionately. ‘You don’t
know how much I wish I’d never met you, how much I hate myself for letting
you—’

‘Letting me what?’ Sean stopped her.

Kate could feel the hard bite of his fingers in the soft flesh
of her upper arms as he dragged her body against the hard tense length of
him.

‘Letting me make you feel like this?’

His mouth possessed hers, its pressure bending her head back
and making her arch her spine. Anger and pride mingled turbulently inside her as
longing streaked scarlet trails of danger through her veins. She could feel the
fierce judder of reaction galvanise Sean’s body, and somehow, shockingly,
immediately and against all logic, she was swept back to another time and
another kiss.

A time when they had virtually only just met, and a kiss had
been taken fiercely from her in the concealing darkness when Sean had walked her
home from their first real date.

Then her body had thrilled with shocked and excited pleasure at
its recognition of his predatory male passion. She had been young; naïve, but
oh, so very, very passionately in love with Sean, and so very eager and
aroused.

Now she was...

But where did then end and now begin? Kate wondered with dizzy
fatality as the years rolled back and her body, her senses, her emotions were
those of that young girl again.

Kate heard the small whimper escaping her lips. Instantly the
hot, hard pressure of Sean’s mouth caught and answered it. His hands moved from
her arms to her back, no longer constraining her but caressing her, as though
something in that sound she had made had been a plea and not a protest.

She trembled as his hands cinched her waist, his thumbs
caressing its narrow curve, before sliding lower to cup the rounded flesh of her
behind and then urge her even more closely against his own body, holding her
tight and hard against the obvious thrust of his erection. Automatically and
instinctively Kate tilted her hips hungrily against him and moaned his name.

As she sobbed her arousal and need against his lips Kate felt
his hand move to her breast.

She was lost to time and place, to everything but Sean and her
need for him. A sound, a high, hot, female-hungry-for-her-mate sound of raw
sexual hunger slit the thickness of air, which was filled with the raggedness of
breath exhaled in mutual passion.

And Sean responded to it as though a door had swung open,
admitting him to a lost and long-sought magic kingdom.

Kate trembled as the hand he had raised to her breast began to
stroke and then massage it with familiar intimacy, arousing an equally familiar
sensation which spread from his touch through her stomach to the soft warmth
within her. A soft warmth that was rapidly turning into a tight, wet, aching
heat.

Unable to stop herself from answering the clamouring need, Kate
arched her whole body against his touch, moaning into his mouth as his hand
cupped her breast and his thumb and finger started to pluck sensually at the
hard peak of her nipple.

In a heartbeat of brief lucidity Kate was shockingly aware that
just the feel of his erection straining against her was as erotically arousing
as if she had still been a virginal teenager. But then Sean groaned, tugging
fiercely at her top, and she watched him tense as the pale, soft nakedness of
her breast, with the ripe swollen peak of her nipple, was revealed to his sight
and his touch. Her lucidity became a thing of the past, to be overwhelmed,
overturned by the flash-flood of her own response.

Would Sean remember how much she had liked to feel him stroke
the hard flesh of her aroused nipples with his fingertip? How it had made her
call out to him in shocked, excited arousal? Would he remember the way he had
driven her beyond the boundaries of her self-control with the slow touch of his
mouth?

She quivered as she felt his hand on her naked breast—waiting,
yearning, needing.

‘Kathy...’

The raw sound of her name seemed to have been dredged up from
somewhere deep and hidden inside Sean, and Kate tensed immediately in response
to it.

Kathy! But she wasn’t Kathy any more. She was Kate. She was
Kate—and Sean wasn’t the man who loved her, he was the man who had betrayed her!
The man who refused to accept that he had fathered her child. Sickness rolled
through her. How could she feel the way she had, behave the way she had, when
she knew...?

She froze as the kitchen door was pushed open and she saw
Oliver standing staring at them.

CHAPTER FIVE

S
EAN
’
S
REACTION
HAD
been quicker than hers, and to her shock Kate realised that she was looking at her son from behind Sean’s sheltering body. Hot-faced with shock and guilt, she straightened her clothes and moved to go to Oliver, but he was oblivious to her, instead heading straight for Sean.

Frantically Kate tried to stop him, unable to bear the rejection her little boy was going to suffer, but to her disbelief Sean stepped past her, scooping Oliver up as her son held out his arms to him.

Holding Kate’s child in his arms, Sean felt a pain like none other he had ever experienced—not even when his mother had left him, not even when he had heard that he could not father a child himself, not even when he had locked Kate out of his life, he acknowledged as he fought down his own anguish and torment.

The small head tilted back and solemn eyes looked into his. Sean felt as though someone had slid a knife into his ribs poisoned with longing, jealousy and despair. Longing for Oliver to be his; jealousy because Kate had given herself to another man; despair because of the situation he was now in.

Abruptly he thrust Oliver into Kate’s waiting arms and turned towards the back door.

As he reached it he stopped and turned round, shadows cloaking the pain in his eyes as he demanded, ‘When was he born?’

Kate tightened her arms around Oliver, who had already fallen back to sleep, in the way that small children could in just a few seconds, and she told him the date.

After the smallest of pauses, Sean grated, ‘So he was conceived two weeks after we separated, then?’

The air in the kitchen felt so heavy and sour with the weight of their combined emotions that Kate felt as though it might choke her.

‘He was two weeks overdue.’ She answered Sean’s unspoken accusation despairingly. Shaking her head, she added huskily, ‘They wanted to induce me but I asked them to wait. I...I wanted him to be born naturally.’

Kate closed her eyes and turned away, not wanting to be reminded that she had held out until the last possible minute, clinging desperately and stubbornly to her hope that there would be a miracle and that somehow Sean would be there with her to witness the birth of their child.

But he hadn’t been, and in the end there had been no one other than the hospital staff to share her awed and exhausted delight at the birth of her son.

She came out of her reverie to hear the back door closing. Sean had left. But he had already left her life and Oliver’s a long time ago, she reminded herself.

Somehow that reminder wasn’t as comforting as it should have been. Her pain was too sharp and strong to be so easily soothed.

She could, of course, have challenged Sean to let her prove that Oliver was his son by demanding a DNA test. Kate dropped her cheek onto Oliver’s soft springy curls. But proving that Sean was Oliver’s father would mean nothing if Sean refused to be that father. No way was she going to expose Oliver to that kind of pain—not even to prove to Sean that she had not, as he had accused, shared her body with another man as he had shared his with another woman!

The pain hadn’t changed at all. It was still as strong as it had always been. Where was her pride? Why wasn’t it rescuing her from her own vulnerability by reminding her of what Sean had done? How dared he make accusations regarding her when he had told her openly that he had taken another woman to bed?

Oliver was still asleep in her arms, which meant that she did not have to hold back any longer the slow, painful tears burning the back of her eyes. It hadn’t just been her that Sean had betrayed, he had betrayed Oliver as well!

* * *

Sean grimaced as he accidentally nicked his skin, and put down his razor. ‘It’s your own damned fault,’ he muttered to his reflection as he stanched the small wound. But it wasn’t the cut he was talking about, and it wasn’t his own face he could see in the mirror—it was Oliver’s.

Cursing, he tried to banish his thoughts—but it was too late.

He had seen in Kate’s eyes just how she felt about his refusal to accept that Oliver was his child. But no matter how much she had managed to persuade herself that Oliver was his, Sean knew that he could not be.

And he knew for a very good reason.

He closed his eyes and swallowed against the sick taste of his own self-loathing and humiliation.

That reason was that it was medically impossible for him to father a child.

He hadn’t known that when he had married Kate, of course. If he had done then he would never have married her, knowing how important having children was to her.

He thought back to the medical appointment which had been responsible for the destruction of his marriage and his life.

‘There is one thing I do have to mention,’ the doctor had begun. ‘One of the tests we ran was a sperm count. I’m afraid I have to tell you that it’s highly unlikely you will be able to father a child.’

Even now he still had bad dreams about those words and that meeting with his doctor at which the announcement had been made.

He hadn’t been able to take it in at first. How could it not be possible for him to father a child? He was a fit, healthy man in the prime of life. He had protested that the doctor must be wrong, that there must be some mistake, and all the time he had been aware of the humiliating pity in the other man’s eyes as he shook his head. The doctor might be twenty years his senior, small, balding, and with a paunch, but suddenly he had become the one who was the virile potent male whilst Sean had been reduced to a mere pathetic apology for a man, at least in his own eyes.

Real men, in the culture of the rough, fight-to-survive world in which Sean had grown up, were not unable to father children.

Inside his head Sean had heard a brief snatch of stored conversation, between his mother and one her friends. They had been talking about a man they both knew, and Sean could remember the mockery in his mother’s laughter as she had told her friend, ‘He’s a poor thing, by all accounts. Hasn’t fathered a child yet, nor likely to, and in my book that means he isn’t a man at all.’

Not a man at all—just like him.

Another memory surfaced.

‘Oh, Sean, I just can’t wait for us to have children.’

Now it was Kate’s voice haunting him, and he swore savagely beneath his breath.

‘I’d hate to have the kind of marriage that didn’t include a family, like my aunt and uncle’s.’

He could still see the way she had shuddered, as though in revulsion.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll give you as many as you want,’ he had boasted, already aroused at the thought of how he would give her the children they both wanted so much.

And each and every time he had made love with her that feeling had been there, that surge of atavistic male pride in the knowledge that he had the power to create a new life within her.

Only he had not had that power. Not according to what his doctor had told him.

It hadn’t been just his present and his future the doctor’s words had destroyed; it had been his own belief and pride in himself as well. Suddenly he was not the man he had always thought himself to be. Suddenly he was not, in his own opinion, very much of a man at all.

Holding Oliver had brought back with savage intensity all that he could never have, and yet he couldn’t hate the little boy—far from it, in fact. Instead of wanting to reject the child another man had given the woman he loved, he had actually felt drawn towards him.

If only Kate knew just how much he wished that Oliver
was
his child! And Kate herself still his wife?

After she had betrayed him by sleeping with another man? A bitter smile twisted Sean’s lips.

Kate might have thought that hurling his infidelity at him was a powerful weapon, but instead it was just his own lie to her. His supposed affair had been a lie, made up to expedite the speedy ending of their marriage so that he could set Kate free.

And since the reason he’d been so grimly determined to set her free had been so that she could find another man to father the children he knew were so important to her, it was illogical for him to feel the way he did about the fact that she had done so.

Whoever the man was, he was a fool as well as a scoundrel for abandoning Kate and his son—and for throwing away Kate’s love.

The savagery and immediacy of his own pain felt like a hammer-blow against his heart.

* * *

‘Everyone’s surprised that our new boss is spending so much time here,’ Laura confided chattily to Kate on Thursday, as she came into her office shortly after lunch. ‘I mean, he has two other companies. Do you suppose it means that we can all stop worrying about being made redundant?’ she asked hopefully. ‘I mean, if he wasn’t planning on keeping this place going he wouldn’t be spending so much time here, would he? Kate?’ she prompted when Kate didn’t make any response. ‘Other things on your mind?’ Laura guessed.

‘Sorry—I didn’t get much sleep last night,’ Kate answered. It was the truth after all.

‘You do look a bit peaky,’ Laura acknowledged as she studied her.

Peaky! Kate grimaced to herself. She felt as though her emotions had been ripped apart and devoured by a pack of scavengers, and that now all that was left of them was the dead bones.

It was the dry grittiness of her eyes that made her want to blink, not something stupid like crying, she assured herself fiercely. After all, she had done enough of that during the night, hadn’t she? With her face buried in her pillow so that she wouldn’t wake Oliver.

She was still in shock, Kate admitted to herself, and the cause of that shock was her discovery of just how vulnerable she still was to Sean!

‘Oh, no! Look at the time! I’d better go.’ Kate hurried past Laura as she made her exit.

Behind her shock and pain lay a huge, deep dam of pent-up anger. How dared Sean refuse to believe that Oliver was his child? How dared he be such a hypocrite as to accuse her of sleeping with someone else?

Thinking of her son made her turn anxiously to her silent mobile. Oliver had complained that his tummy hurt again at breakfast time, but to her relief when she had taken his temperature it had been normal and so she had taken him to school.

* * *

Sean drummed his fingers irritably on his desk. Pushing back his chair, he stood up, raking his hair with one hand, and paced the floor as he mentally practised what he intended to say to Kate.

Halfway through the carefully chosen words he stopped abruptly and asked himself angrily what the hell was wrong with him. All he had to say to Kate was that he wanted her to have the money she had refused to accept when they had divorced. Hell, if need be he could tell her that his accountants were insisting it was handed over otherwise he would invoke some kind of tax penalty. His decision had nothing whatsoever to do with Oliver, other than the fact that he hated seeing Kate have to struggle—especially when she had a small child to support.

A small child who wasn’t his.

Opening his office door, he instructed his secretary to tell Kate he wanted to see her.

* * *

‘Jenny rang down to say that you wanted to see me?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Sean confirmed, turning away to look out of his office window. ‘You must have found it hard to make time to study for your Master’s?’

‘Yes, in some ways I did,’ Kate agreed warily, wondering why he had sent for her and what this was leading up to.

‘I imagine that it would have been difficult with Oliver,’ Sean pressed her.

‘Yes, it was,’ Kate confirmed.

‘Why didn’t you ask his father for financial support?’

When she didn’t answer, Sean swung round. The light streaming in through the large window highlighted the tension in his face, and for a moment Kate almost weakened. He had been everything to her after all. As she was now everything to Oliver, she reminded herself immediately, before taking a deep breath and asking sharply, ‘What are you trying to do? Trap me? You’re wasting your time, Sean.
You
are Oliver’s father. Nothing and no one—not even you—can alter that fact.’

Her stomach churned as she saw Sean’s expression hardening with rejection.

‘You are the one who is wasting your time, Kate. Oliver is not my son. He can’t be—’ Sean tensed and stopped speaking, taking a deep breath before he continued tersely, ‘He can’t be foisted off on me!’

His heart was hammering against his ribs. It was a sign of the effect Kate was having on him that he had come so close to blurting out the truth! Fortunately he had just managed to stop himself in time!

Kate clenched her hands as she caught the underlying and suppressed violence in Sean’s voice, her dismay giving way to shock as she heard him adding grimly, ‘What I wanted to talk to you about was—’ He stopped speaking as the abrupt shrill of Kate’s mobile cut across his words. Red-faced, she fished it out of her bag, her embarrassment forgotten as she saw that the call was from Oliver’s nursery.

‘He’s been sick and he’s asking for me?’ Kate couldn’t keep the anxiety out of her voice as she repeated what the other woman was telling her. ‘He wasn’t very well this morning,’ she admitted. ‘But he didn’t have a temperature then...’

Even though Kate tried to turn away from Sean she knew that he could hear the conversation she was having with the nursery school teacher.

‘I...I’ll try to—’ she began, only to find that Sean was spinning her round to face him.

His expression was grim as he took the mobile from her and said tersely into it, ‘She’s on her way.’

‘You have no right—’ Kate said angrily, but Sean had ended the call and his hand was on her arm, urging her towards the door.

‘We’ll go in my car,’ he told her. ‘For one thing we’ll get there faster, and for another you’ll be worrying too much to drive safely.’

Kate opened her mouth to protest, but they were already in the car park and heading for Sean’s car. He held the passenger door open for her and reluctantly she got in.

‘Did the nursery say exactly what’s wrong with him? Have they called a doctor?’ Sean asked as he slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine.