he could see the validity of her question.
‘No. There’s no little lady keeping the home fires burning. As for women … I’ll naturally strive to ensure that a difficult situation isn’t made even more difficult.’
‘So there is someone.’ She tried desperately to take it in her stride, because it really wasn’t very surprising. He was sinfully gorgeous, and now wealthy beyond belief. He would be a magnet for any footloose and single woman—and probably for a good few who weren’t footloose and single.
‘I don’t think we should get wrapped up in matters that don’t really have much to do with this … situation. We just need to discuss what the next step should be.’
‘Come upstairs and see him. I can’t have this conversation with you when you don’t even know the child you’re talking about. This isn’t a business deal that needs to be sorted out.’ She stood up abruptly and Raoul, put on the spot, followed suit.
‘He’s sleeping. I wouldn’t want you to wake him.’ Raoul was more nervous than he could ever remember being—more nervous than when he had chased, and closed, his first major deal. More nervous than when he had been a kid and he had stared up at the forbidding grey walls of the foster home that would eventually become his residence.
‘Okay. I won’t. But you still have to see him, or else he’s just going to be a problem that needs solving in your head.’
‘Since when did you get so bossy?’ Raoul muttered under his breath, and Sarah spun around to find him looming behind her.
Standing on the first stair, she could almost look him in the eye. ‘Since I ended up being responsible for another human being,’ she said. ‘I know it’s not your fault that you weren’t aware of the situation …’ Although it was, because if he had only just given her a contact number she would have been able to get in touch with him. ‘But it was terrifying for me when I discovered that I was pregnant. I kept thinking how nice it would be if you had been around to support me, and then I remembered how you had dumped me because you had plans and they didn’t include me, and that if you had been around my pregnancy would have been your worst nightmare.’
‘My plans didn’t include anyone, Sarah. I did you a favour.’
‘Oh, don’t be so arrogant! If you’d cared enough about me you would have kept in touch.’ She was breathing heavily as all the remembered pain and bitterness and anger surged through her, but staring into the depths of his fabulous dark eyes was doing something else to her—making her whole body tingle as though someone had taken a powerful electrical charge to it.
Raoul clocked her reaction without even consciously registering it. He just knew that the atmosphere had become taut with an undercurrent that had nothing to do with what they had been talking about. It was a type of non-verbal communication that sent his body into crazy overdrive.
‘I don’t know why I’m bothering to tell you any of this.’ She jerked her hand in clumsy dismissal, but he caught her wrist. The heat of physical contact made her draw in her breath sharply, although he wasn’t hurting her—not at all. He was barely circling her wrist with his long fingers. Still … she was appalled to find that she wanted to sink against him.
That acknowledgment of weakness galvanised her into struggling to free herself and he released her abruptly, although when she could have turned around and stalked up the stairs she continued to stare at him wordlessly.
‘I know it must have been a bad time for you …’
‘Well, that’s the understatement of the decade if ever there was one! I felt completely lost and alone.’
‘You had your parents to help you.’
‘That’s not the same! Plus I’d left for my gap year thinking that I was at the start of living my own life. Do you know what it felt like to go back home? Yes, they helped me, and I couldn’t have managed at all without them, but it still felt like a retrograde step. I never, ever considered having an abortion, and I was thrilled to bits when Oliver was born, but I was having to cope with seeing all my dreams fly through the window. No university, no degree, no teaching qualification. You must have been laughing your head off when you saw me cleaning floors in that bank.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘No? Then what was going through your head when you looked down at me? With a damp cloth in one hand and a cleaning bottle in the other, dressed in my overalls?’
‘Okay. I was stunned. But then I started remembering how damned sexy you were, and thinking how damned sexy you still were—never mind the headscarf and the overalls …’
His words hovered in the air between them, a spark of conflagration just waiting to find tinder. To her horror, Sarah realised that she wanted him to repeat what he had just said so she could savour his words and roll them round and round in her head.
How could she have forgotten the way he had treated her? He might justify walking out on her as doing her a favour, but that was just another way of saying that he hadn’t cared for her the way she had cared for him, and he hadn’t been about to let a meaningless holiday romance spoil his big plans.
‘I’ve come to realise that sex is very overrated,’ Sarah said scornfully, and then flushed as a slow smile curved his beautiful mouth.
‘Really?’
‘I don’t want to talk about this.’ But she heard the telltale tremor in her voice and wanted to scream in frustration. ‘It certainly has nothing to do with what’s … what’s happening now. If you follow me, I’ll show you to Oliver’s room.’
Raoul let the conversation drop. He was as astounded as she had been by his own genuine admission to her, and he was busily trying to work out how a woman he hadn’t seen in years—a woman who, in the great scheme of things, had not really been in his life for very long—could still exercise such a powerful physical hold over him. It was as though the years between them had collapsed and disappeared.
But of course they hadn’t, he reminded himself forcefully. Proof of that was currently asleep in a bedroom, just metres away from where they had been standing.
Upstairs, if anything, seemed more cramped than downstairs, with two small bedrooms huddled around a tiny bathroom which he glimpsed on his way to the box room on the landing.
She pushed open the door to the only room he had seen so far that bore the hallmark of recent decoration. A night-light revealed wallpaper with some sort of kiddy theme and basic furniture. A small bed, thin patterned curtains, a circular rug tucked half under the bed, a white chest of drawers, snap-together furniture, cheap but functional.
Raoul unfroze himself from where he was standing like a sentinel by the doorway and took a couple of steps towards the bed.
Oliver had kicked off the duvet and was curled around a stuffed toy.
Raoul could make out black curly hair, soft chubby arms. Even in the dim light he could see that his colouring was a shade darker than his mother’s—a pale olive tone that was all his.
In the grip of a powerful curiosity, he took a step closer to the bed and peered at the small sleeping figure. When it shifted, Raoul instantly took a step back.
‘We should go—just in case we wake him,’ Sarah whispered, tiptoeing out of the bedroom.
Raoul followed her. The palms of his hands felt clammy.
She had been right. He had a son. There had been no mistaking those small, familiar signs of a likeness that was purely inherited. He wondered how he could ever have sat in his office and concluded that he would deal with the problem with the cold detachment of a mathematician completing a tricky equation. He had a child. A living, breathing son.
The cramped condition of the house in which he was living now seemed grossly offensive. He would have to do something about that. He would have to do something