Lily left you?”
For a vibrating moment Damon was confronted by a past he took great pains to avoid thinking about, because it highlighted the singular difficulty he had with relationships. There hadn’t been one thing wrong with Lily. She had been beautiful, intelligent and sweet-natured and he had liked her, all good reasons to choose her as his wife. Unfortunately, he had never been able to give Lily the two things she had decided she wanted from him after the wedding. First, that he would fall in love with her. Second, that he would give her the children she had decided were now a deal breaker.
There was a loaded pause. “Or is it because you slept with your assistant last year,” Ben asked softly, “and you’ve suddenly decided that’s a forbidden sin?”
Damon stopped dead in his tracks. Flashes of the stark, heated passion Zara had unlocked in him, and which he had constantly failed to control, rushed back at him, making his chest tighten. “How could you know about that?”
Zara had insisted they keep the liaison secret. She had made it clear she couldn’t work for him if people knew they were involved. Damon had complied even though he hadn’t liked the condition. It had smacked of his father’s illicit affairs. Emotion might be a no-go area, but Damon preferred to keep his sexual relationships straightforward and aboveboard.
Ben’s tone was impatient. “Zara is Emily’s agent. Emily put two and two together.”
Damon’s stomach tensed as more memories of Zara surfaced. In every way, Zara was his ex-wife’s polar opposite. Exactly the kind of woman he usually took care to avoid, because of the subtle, locked-down sensuality that was just a little too interesting. Zara had been dark and curvaceous, where Lily had been blonde, athletic and slender. The differences hadn’t stopped at physical appearance. From the first moment, Zara had been a vivid, fascinating mixture of efficiency, quirky humor and unexpected passion.
Their connection had blindsided them both.
“The two situations are not the same.”
“Right on to that. What Emily and I share is more than just convenient sex.”
An image of Zara lying in bed, dark satiny hair spread over the pillow, blue eyes veiled with mysteries and secrets, assaulted him. Convenient sex? There had been nothing convenient about it. The words that sprang to mind were more along the lines of hot, reckless.
Addictive.
The same brand of intense, unruly passion that had ruined his father and Tyler and which had kept Damon awake nights because he had vowed it would never control him.
A clarifying thought that made sense of Ben and Emily’s elopement suddenly occurred to Damon. He could kick himself for not thinking of it before. “Emily’s pregnant.”
Ben made a sound of disbelief. “Emily’s not the one who got pregnant.”
Not the one who got pregnant.
The words seemed to hang in the air. Suddenly, like a piece of a puzzle falling neatly into place, Zara’s abrupt exit from Damon’s life, her disappearance for months, made perfect sense.
She had left because she had been pregnant. With his child.
Damon sucked in a deep breath and tried to think, tried to orient himself. He felt like he’d been kicked in the chest.
If Zara had had a baby—and by now, over a year on, the baby would be four months old—why hadn’t she told him?
Admittedly, they hadn’t known each other long, six weeks in total.
Long enough to get messily involved and for Damon to break a whole list of personal rules.
Long enough that he’d had trouble forgetting her. That he’d broken his last intact rule, a rule that should have been inviolable. Instead of letting Zara go and regaining his equilibrium, his distance, when she left town, he had gone after her.
He had tracked her to a small cottage in the South Island city of Dunedin. On the verge of knocking on her front door, he had abruptly come to his senses. He had known that if he walked through that door they would be in bed within minutes. Added to that, if he continued an affair that had become dangerously irresistible, he risked becoming engaged to and marrying a woman who was the exact opposite of the kind of wife he needed. A passionate, addictive, unpredictable lover who had made it clear she had no interest in a committed relationship.
Disgusted with the obsession that had clearly gotten an unhealthy grip on him, he had walked away. The only problem was, he had not been able to stay away. Months later, when he had discovered Zara had opened her own employment agency in town, instead of steering clear, he had requested that his office manager ditch the large, established firm that usually fulfilled their employment needs and start using Zara’s agency.
His fingers tightened on the cell. “How long have you known that Zara had a baby?”
Ben made an exasperated sound. “Right at this moment I’m not sure if you’re burying your head in the sand out on that fortress island of yours or if you really didn’t know. If Emily was expecting my child, I wouldn’t be afraid of fatherhood.”
Fatherhood.
Damon stared bleakly at the misty line where sky met sea. Unwittingly, Ben had gone straight for the jugular, exposing a truth Damon had no wish to confront. The whole issue of fatherhood was something he usually avoided, because it entailed facing a past he had gone to a great deal of trouble to bury and forget. It meant coming to grips with another relationship for which he was not ready or equipped.
Lily’s words when she had stormed out of their apartment came back to haunt him. I must have been out of my mind thinking I could live with a man who approaches marriage as if it’s some kind of business contract and who doesn’t want kids, ever!
He took another deep breath but, even so, when he spoke his voice was raspy. “The baby’s...all right?”
Ben said something short and flat. “You really didn’t know. Well, that takes the cake. You’re a security guru. You wrote the book on surveillance techniques and you produce software for half a dozen governments, and you don’t know when your ex-girlfriend has your child? I thought you didn’t want to know, because you don’t want kids. Lily said enough about the sub—”
“Don’t bring Lily into this.” The response was automatic, because every thought was blasted away by the fact that Zara had given birth to his child.
The one outcome he had taken care to avoid, except on one notable occasion, had happened.
He was a father.
A final boarding call echoed down the phone.
“I’ve gotta go,” Ben muttered. “Look, I’m sorry about breaking the news about Zara and the baby like this. The fact was, I thought you did know but were...you know, avoiding the whole issue.” There was a rustling sound as if Ben was holding the phone awkwardly jammed to his ear as he surrendered his boarding pass. “Emily was fairly sure you didn’t know. She seemed to think it was more that you lack emotional intelligence...whatever that means.”
There was a feminine yelp in the background along with a further rustling noise as if Ben had jammed the phone against his chest to muffle the sound for a few seconds.
Ben’s voice came back, loud and clear. “Anyway, I think we both know that trying to turn me into an executive wasn’t working. I told you right from the start that the kind of locked-down life you lead isn’t for me. I want to travel and do something with my fine arts degree. Anything but add up soulless numbers all day and stare at computer code, which, by the way, I will never understand. Don’t try to find us. I’ll send a postcard...eventually.”
A click signaled the call had been terminated.
Damon slipped the phone back into the pocket of his sweatpants. There was no point in running after Ben now. The boarding calls meant