Melting the Argentine Doctor's Heart. Meredith Webber

THREE

      FRUSTRATION reawoke his anger. Love-making would be the furthest thing from Caroline’s mind. She had come to shock him into doing what she wanted, come without warning. Come to ensure her daughter had a father.

      Could he do that?

      Be a father to the child?

      At least the questions diverted him from thoughts of Caroline’s motives and the impossibility of love.

      He had the greatest example of fatherhood in the world, his father having been behind him all his life, teaching him, encouraging him, backing him in all he wished to do, but most of all loving him with an uncritical and unstinting devotion. His father was the rock he’d clung to when he’d returned from hospital in France, broken both physically and emotionally.

      Everyone should have such a father!

      But could he emulate the man he loved—be as good a father to Ella as his father had been to him?

      Somewhere inside him a determination to do just that was beginning to grow, but weighed against it was the fact that involvement with Ella would mean involvement with Caroline, and if seeing her once had brought such chaos to his mind and body, how would he react to being with her on a regular basis?

      No, best he knocked the whole thing on the head right now. Caroline was beautiful. She’d find a man and marry, thus providing a father figure for Ella.

      Some other man being a father to his daughter? Guiding her through life, winning her love?

      A pain he barely understood shuddered through him.

      There had to be an answer, and it was up to him to find it, and soon, before gossip, which, although they were separated by hundreds of miles, inevitably reached his father. Once his father laid eyes on Ella, she would be his princess, the answer to all his dreams, the one gift he’d wanted so badly from his son but had accepted he might never be given.