Elizabeth Oldfield

Reluctant Father


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going to meet his son—now.

      Cass wheeled the buggy through the kitchen and, holding one of the swing doors aside, strode forward. She stopped dead. The table was empty. A sheaf of notes in payment for his meal was tucked beneath a saucer, but Gifford had gone.

      The prospect of coming face to face with his offspring must have been too much to take, so he had fled the restaurant. Was he also intending to flee from the bungalow and from the island? By the end of the day, would Gifford Tait be flying back to the States? She tossed her head. She could think of nothing which would suit her better.

       CHAPTER TWO

      THE hair stylist smiled down into the buggy. ‘Doesn’t your mama look as pretty as a princess?’ she enquired.

      The baby grinned, blue-grey eyes smiling and a dimple denting one round cheek, then he pursed his rosebud lips and blew a raspberry.

      Cass laughed. ‘He may not be too thrilled, but I think

      it’s a big improvement.’ She took a final, appraising look at herself in the mirror. Thanks a lot.’

      Gifford’s arrival the previous day had had one plus, she thought wryly as she steered the pushchair out of the salon and started off along the spacious marblefloored lobby of Club Sesel. The interruption had made her think twice about wielding the scissors.

      Past experience had shown that she was a ‘chopaholic’, so chances were her hair would have wound up looking as if it had been sheared by a lunatic with a chainsaw. Instead, her fringe was softly feathered, while the fall of burnished wheat-gold hair ended in a straight line at her shoulders. Cass tweaked at the silky black top which she wore with stone-coloured chinos. Today she looked stylish. Stylish enough to be mistaken for a hotel guest.

      Club Sesel—Sesel was the Creole word for the Seychelles—catered for the wealthy. Guests stayed in individual granite bungalows which were discreetly sited amidst landscaped hillside gardens full of tropical blooms, ate in a chandeliered dining hail and could browse in the designer outlets which lined the lobby. She swung a look around. The lobby and shops were currently deserted. In general, there seemed to be few guests.

      Reaching the gift shop, Cass stopped to study a window display which featured exclusive beachwear and mother-of-pearl jewellery arranged around a pair of polished coco de mer nuts. The huge nuts, which had a suggestively intimate female shape, were reputed to grow only in the Seychelles. These days restricted numbers were sold as expensive souvenirs, though in the past their kernels had been regularly ground up and used as an aphrodisiac.

      A shadow clouded her blue eyes. There had been no need for aphrodisiacs when she and Gifford had met. Like their emotional rapport, the sexual attraction had been instant and compelling. And when they had made love it had been a passionate explosion of feeling which—

      Her gaze swung sideways. A door bearing the word ‘Manager’ in gold letters had been opened, drawing her attention, but the man who had started to come out had swivelled and was disappearing inside again. As the door clicked shut behind him, Cass frowned. With wellgroomed fair hair, and wearing a silver-grey gabardine suit, he had looked suspiciously like Kirk Weber. She did not know where the South African stayed when he came to the island—nor had she been aware that he was here now—but Club Sesel would be handy for him.

      Setting off again, she negotiated the buggy down a couple of shallow steps and out into the dazzling sunshine of the paved forecourt. Could Kirk’s presence mean he was about to finalise his purchase of the Forgotten Eden? she wondered as she slid on her dark glasses. She crossed mental fingers. She hoped so.

      ‘Yoo-hoo, Cass!’ a voice shrilled, and when she turned she saw a woman with short, gel-slicked auburn hair and wearing a gold lamé swimsuit waving at her from the far side of the small kidney-shaped swimming pool.

      ‘Hello, Veronica,’ she called back, smiling, and waited as the redhead teetered towards her on high goldsandalled heels.

      Over the past two weeks, Veronica Milne had become a regular visitor to the Forgotten Eden. She would arrive in her hire-car around midday or in the evening, pick at her meal, then switch to sit at the bar where she would make eyes at Jules Adonis, the Seychellois barman who, with clean-cut looks, long, sun-lightened dreadlocks and a beguiling white smile, lived up to his surname. A surname which was surprisingly common in the islands.

      If the baby happened to be around, she also made a big fuss of him.

      A thin, twittery woman who talked non-stop, Veronica was hard going after the first five minutes—but Cass felt sorry for her. Behind the determinedly bright expression, she sensed a lost soul.

      ‘Just thought I’d tell you that I shall be along for lunch today,’ Veronica said. ‘Will Jules be there?’

      ‘He should be, though he has been known to sleep in and not wake up until it’s too late. Or forget which day it is,’ she said ruefully.

      ‘He’s such a heartthrob. Like this little fellow,’ the redhead declared, stretching down a hand to tickle the baby’s tummy.

      Jack wriggled and giggled.

      ‘Do you have children?’ Cass enquired.

      Veronica straightened. ‘No. I run my own fashion boutique—we sell only the best names-and there’s never been time to fit in a family. And now I’m divorced; the decree absolute came through last month. This is the first time I’ve been on holiday on my own. The first time I’ll go back to an empty house.’ She looked down at her noticeably denuded wedding-ring finger, though her other fingers were banded with rings of all shapes and sizes. ‘Of course, I could always marry again and have a baby. I’m only just into my forties, so it isn’t too late.’

      ‘I suppose not,’ Cass said, and hoped she did not sound doubtful.

      ‘I think Jules fancies me,’ Veronica declared, and lowered her voice into a giggly, conspiratorial whisper. ‘I fancy him, too.’

      Cass felt a stab of concern. The woman might sport a trendy elf-in-a-rainstorm hairstyle and wear glamorous clothes, but rather than ‘just into’ her forties she looked more in her mid-forties, if not heading towards fifty. Jules was twenty-five.

      He was also a happy-go-lucky Romeo who flirted with females—any female—out of habit and on autopilot. She had assumed this was glaringly obvious, but perhaps Veronica preferred not to see? Newly divorced, she could be feeling adrift and eager for male attention. Too eager.

      ‘Jules has a girlfriend,’ Cass said gently, not wanting her to get hurt. ‘In fact, he has several. I must go. I look forward to seeing you later. Goodbye.’

      ‘Bye, bye,’ Veronica trilled; but she was smiling at Jack and waving.

      Cass pushed the buggy up the hotel’s sloping drive and out onto the hard-baked red earth of the road. She had spent most of last night tossing and turning and thinking about Gifford, and as she set off for the Forgotten Eden her mind returned to him again.

      Yesterday, her reaction to his exit from the restaurant had been, Good riddance! But it had been a knee-jerk reaction. And he had not fled the island. A distant glimmer of lights from the bungalow the previous evening, plus the slam of a door this morning, had indicated that he remained in residence.

      She frowned. Whilst becoming a single parent had never featured in her scheme of things—heaven forbid!—she had coped with all the various traumas and got her life back on track. Plans had been made for the future. But now Gifford had appeared and thrown everything into confusion.

      ‘I was going to send your daddy photographs of you on your first birthday, she said, speaking to the baby who sat in the pushchair. ‘And if he didn’t reply I was going to send another batch when you reached two. Then, if that failed to produce a response, I intended to take you over to the States, plop you on the middle of his office desk and say, Hey, buster, I’d like to introduce