The Secret Spanish Love-Child (5 page)

‘I’m going to give him a bath and settle him down,’ she said quietly. ‘You can leave if you want to or you can wait for me in the kitchen. I won’t be much longer than half an hour.’

Gabriel could no sooner leave than he could have grown wings and flown through the window. His brain, while taking in everything and already working out a series of consequences, was not functioning at all on another level. He was a father. In what could only be classified as a complete screwup, he was a father, because there was no doubting paternity. Yes, he could make a song and dance about dates and times
and then request a DNA test because he was nothing if not suspicious by nature, but the proof of his genetic link to the child was glaringly obvious. He could have been looking at a picture of himself aged four and a half.

He remained frozen to the spot for a few minutes after she had disappeared up the tiny staircase. He was aware of noises drifting down. Very slowly, he made his way to the kitchen and this time, when he inspected his surroundings, it was with renewed interest.

He had a child. And his child was being brought up in conditions that were, if not completely basic, then certainly bordering on it.

He felt the slow build of anger and brought all his formidable willpower into play to stamp on it. From where he was sitting, life as he knew it was over but he would still have to deal with the consequences.

All the paraphernalia of a young child imprinted itself in his head like a tattoo. There was some kind of booster seat gadget attached to one of the kitchen chairs and various plastic utensils on the draining board. He walked across to the fridge and examined the infantile drawings randomly spaced under fruit magnets.

Happy family drawings that ostensibly did not include any father figure.

So there was no guy in her life. When she had talked about her involvement with someone else, she had been referring to her son.
Their
son. He barely deciphered the strangely proportioned pictures he was staring at or the spidery writing underneath. In his head, his eyes were still locked in unwilling fascination on his son’s.

There were a thousand questions pounding through his head. In short, he couldn’t wait for her to return.

O
F COURSE
he wasn’t going to leave. Alex had given him the option but she had no doubt that Gabriel would be waiting for her when, after forty minutes, she eventually made her way down the stairs. Luke, sensing tension in the air, had played up, demanding story after story and finally holding her to ransom by extracting a promise of ice cream for the following day before he grudgingly consented to close his eyes.

Without her son as a physical barrier between her and Gabriel, preventing any displays of anger, she felt naked and vulnerable and fairly terrified as she made her way quietly down the stairs to the kitchen.

She reminded herself that she was no longer the impressionable teen she had been years ago when she had fallen under his spell. Then, she would have done anything he asked. She was the puppet and he the puppet master. When he had walked away from her she had fallen to pieces but pregnancy and having a baby, making her way in life as a single mother, moving to London so that she could build a career for herself, which had been nigh on impossible at home, with her family in Ireland, had toughened her up. She might be scared of his reaction but she wasn’t going to cower.

Those bracing sentiments were nearly blown to smithereens as she walked into the kitchen to find him sitting on one of the chairs. There was a half drunk glass of orange juice in front
of him and he had swivelled the kitchen chair away from the table so that he was facing the door. Waiting for her like an executioner.

‘Would you like something hot to drink?’ she said, opting for some semblance of politeness before open warfare began. ‘Tea? Coffee? Or more orange juice?’

‘Is that all you have on offer? What about some whisky? Or gin? I think I’m in need of something a little stronger than tea or coffee.’ Faced with the unthinkable, Gabriel could feel himself descending into that unknown territory known as The Emotional Response. It was a route to be avoided at all costs. He had been presented with a problem and the problem would not go away because of his reaction to it.

‘I have some wine. It’s not very good but it’s the best I can do.’ Alex poured them both a glass and suggested they sit in the lounge. His silence as they walked there was even more unnerving than if he had been bellowing in her wake. In fact, it sent shivers racing up and down her spine.

‘So,’ he said once he was seated, ‘when were you going to tell me? Or were you going to bother to tell me at all?’

Alex gulped down some wine and then nursed her glass as she stared with a wildly beating heart at the rug on the floor, given to her courtesy of her parents, who had campaigned against her moving to London but, having finally bitten the bullet, had proceeded to kit her small house out with stuff they vaguely labelled
unwanted bits and pieces
but which she knew had been bought new. She visibly jumped when he repeated his question in a voice with icy bite.

‘When did you find out?’ Gabriel changed tack, enraged by her silence. Was he supposed to feel sorry for her? Her drawn face and miserable, sagging demeanour suggested it but, having had his foundations rocked to their core, his sympathy levels were non-existent. He had never considered the whole issue of children but, when he had, it had been in an
abstract way. They would come along at some point in time, as yet undecided. He was engaged to be married but not once had he considered Cristobel as a mother, although he would have been hard pressed to analyse why. If pushed, he would have said that he just wasn’t into kids. He would be a father because that would have been the expectation.

Now, faced with the reality of his own child, he was outraged that he was five years late in having any input. During that time, had there been any men on the scene? Of course there would have been! She might not be all curves, but she was as sexy as hell. Any guy with two eyes in his head would see that.

‘Well?’ he asked in a clipped voice, keeping his unwanted thoughts about other men well to the back of his mind. ‘Are you going to answer me or are you going to sit there in silence and expect me to mind read?’

‘You’re making me nervous!’

‘You deserve to
feel
nervous.’

‘Why would that be?’ She raised angry eyes to him and clenched her hands into tense fists. ‘You’re the one who did the vanishing act because you didn’t want to be tied down to a foreigner you met in passing! You’re the one who lied about his identity so that when I found out I was pregnant and tried tracing you I kept running into a brick wall!’ Suddenly the room seemed way too small and she stood up and walked across to the window ledge, perching on it and gripping the wood so tightly that her knuckles were white. She felt as though she had to put a little distance between them because the closer she was to him, the less capable she was of thinking rationally. It was like being eighteen all over again and she didn’t like the feeling. Being held hostage by her emotions once could be called an excusable error of judgement. Being held hostage by her emotions a second time would definitely come under the heading of suicidal.

‘I was nearly four months pregnant when I found out and already back in England. In fact, at university. Thinking that my life could carry on as normal after…after Spain.’ She could remember the shock of finding out as though it had happened only yesterday. The dawning awareness that she hadn’t seen her period, always erratic, in a while. The home testing pregnancy kit. The horrible feeling of the whole world falling away from under her feet when that telltale little line had appeared. And then everything that came afterwards.

Gabriel flushed darkly. Mistakes, he acknowledged, had been made. Not wilfully, but even so. They would have to be rectified. That was life.

‘I tried to contact you.’ With a sigh, she resumed her place on the flowered upholstered chair facing him. She couldn’t quite meet his eyes so instead she stared at the pattern on the sofa, also flowered. Both generous gifts from her parents, who had dug deep into their savings to help her out.
They
were the ones who had been there for her. Not the guy sitting opposite, who had cleared off with no forwarding address.

‘Of course that was impossible.’ Her huge brown eyes were bitter. ‘I asked at that hotel you were supposed to be working at and they had never heard of a
Lucio
, never mind a
Lucio
with no surname. Hardly surprising since
Lucio
had never existed. I tried describing you, but naturally they would never have put two and two together and come up with the big shot owner of the hotel.’

Guilt found its way through his iron-clad defence system. ‘No one could have anticipated this situation,’ he said grimly.

‘We should have been more diligent with the contraception. More careful.’ The Pill had not agreed with her. Instead, they had relied on barrier protection and there had been times when spontaneity had got in the way of common sense. Like a complete idiot, she had airily imagined that there would be
no consequences. Her periods had always been irregular. She had vaguely concluded that pregnancy would therefore be less likely than in someone with a tip-top menstrual cycle.

‘There is no point going down the
what if
road…’ But another stab of guilt penetrated his austerity. At the time, he had told himself that walking away from her had been in her best interests. She had been young, only just out of school, as he had discovered along the way. Definitely not experienced enough to take on or even need any sort of committed relationship, especially with a guy like him. A guy she didn’t even really know. She was a free spirit, about to begin her journey through life. He was already marching upwards, an only child programmed to adhere to unspoken expectations.

But, with malign treachery, the image in his head of her, young and frightened, had wormed its way in and was refusing to budge.

‘If it is any consolation, I put my hands up and admit that my little white lies may not have been one hundred per cent justifiable.’

‘Oh, well, thanks very much for that belated apology.’ Alex’s voice was laced with sarcasm. She had never been the sarcastic sort. Funny how experience had a way of changing a person.

‘My family were very good. I hid out there for a while but in the end I knew that I had to follow the jobs and London was the most likely place for me to get one so I moved in with a friend and then got this place.’ She was pleased at how this dispassionate rattling off of the past few traumatic years of her life managed to sound so
ordered
when in fact she had lived in a semi-permanent state of stress and exhaustion.

‘And then you happened to run into me.’ He was making a determined effort to stay away from the emotive topic of
his son being in a house that was barely big enough for one person. This was not going to do. But he would bide his time for the present.

‘It was a shock.’ She glanced across at him warily. ‘You seem to be taking all this very well,’ she ventured hesitantly. ‘I thought you’d be furious.’

‘What would be the point of that?’ Gabriel questioned with chilling self-control. ‘Would it change anything? My son would still be upstairs sleeping and life as I know it would still have ceased to exist.’

If at any point in time she had daydreamed about a happy-ever-after ending, some surprise meeting which might have concluded with joyous exclamations of love, then those words conclusively put any such fantasy to rest.

For Gabriel, the knowledge that he was a father meant that
life as he knew it would cease to exist
, and since his life had been very happy indeed without either her or their son in it, then he was looking at a bleak future and that hurt. Even after all these years.

‘Tell me something,’ he said in the same ultra-controlled voice. ‘Having quit your job, presumably because running away was the only solution you could come up with, having the dilemma of seeing me again, would you have made any effort to let me know that I was a father if I hadn’t sought you out? Or would you have disappeared off the face of the earth and watched my son grow up without my input in his life?’

Alex felt the colour rise to her cheeks. Would she have said anything? She would have years ago, when she had first discovered that she was carrying his child. And she really wanted to think that she was an honest enough person to have done the same now, but he was engaged. In love with another woman. On the brink of settling down and starting a family with Cristobel. She might have grown up over the past few years, but
that much
?

‘I see,’ Gabriel said softly, reading into her silence.

‘You don’t understand!’

‘Enlighten me.’

‘We…we’re in different places,’ she began weakly. No nod of agreement greeted this remark. She wished his eyes weren’t boring into her head. It was disconcerting because, underneath the ice, she could glimpse the seething, passionate core and just thinking about that did strange things to her body. ‘I…I’ve moved on since we knew each other…’

‘Moved on how?’ Instantly Gabriel was on red alert.
Moving on
was a phrase with which he was well acquainted and it usually indicated from one person to someone else. All of a sudden he was questioning his easy assumption that
the person in her life
, the person to whom she had vaguely referred before this whole bomb had detonated, was Luke. All of a sudden the notion that she might really have met someone else slammed into him with the force of a freight train. ‘Is there some guy in your life?’ he demanded, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees.

‘No!’

‘Good.’ He relaxed fractionally.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that, now I am aware of the situation, a boyfriend on the scene would be entirely inappropriate.’

Alex felt a red mist of anger envelop her like a cloud, smothering all her good intentions to keep things cool, composed and adult. If she had had something heavy and breakable to hand, she would have flung it at his deceitful, arrogant head and hang the good intentions.

‘Would you mind repeating that?’ she asked in a tight, unnaturally high voice.

‘No man on the scene.’

‘No. Man. On. The. Scene. And yet it’s all right for
you
to have a
fiancée
on the scene, is it?

What were his expectations here? she wondered. Carry on with his life, get married and lock her up in a state of permanent celibacy because he didn’t want another man around his son? She was trembling with anger.

‘You’re overreacting.’

‘I am
not
overreacting!’

‘I am being honest. Isn’t that what you would want? The truth? And the truth is that I would not welcome anyone else having an influence over my son. What’s so difficult to understand about that?’

‘I don’t want to talk about this,’ Alex said tightly. ‘I don’t want to get into an argument with you. Now that you know about Luke, we can try and sort out…the practical stuff…’

‘Does he know who I am?’

‘No. I haven’t told him yet.’

The enormity of their situation struck Gabriel forcibly at that bald statement. He had an instant picture in his head of his son, all black curly hair and big drowsy eyes, and from nowhere sprang a crazy, confused feeling of time wasted.

‘I’m sorry,’ Alex said quietly, at which his expression became shuttered once again.

‘When do you intend to tell him?’

‘As soon as possible.’

‘Try again.’

‘Okay! Tomorrow! I’ll tell him tomorrow! He’s very inquisitive, anyway. He’ll probably wake up with a hundred questions about you.’ Her eyes skittered from Gabriel to the window behind him to the mantelpiece, on which sat a row of pictures of Luke at various stages of his young life. Gabriel followed her eyes and he slowly stood up and moved across to the mantelpiece, where he proceeded to hold and examine all of the pictures. All seven of them. From infancy to the one she had taken last month.

While he had been blithely pursuing his goals with the relentless drive that came so naturally to him, while he had been adding to his fortune, building his empire and congratulating himself on his well run, well oiled, no-unpleasant-surprises-life, his own flesh and blood had been growing up without him around. Frustration rocked him because it wasn’t as though he could blame her. Of course, she might have been lying. She might have never bothered trying to find his whereabouts, but he seriously doubted that. He would have been an instant and permanent meal ticket. Why would she have turned that down? He replaced the last of the photos and turned slowly round to look at her.