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Contract Baby
LYNNE GRAHAM


Race to the altar—Maxie, Darcy and Polly are The HUSBAND Hunters!The terms of the will: Maxie, Darcy and Polly have each been left a share of their godmother's estate—if they marry within a year and remain married for six months…The hunter: Polly became a surrogate mother to pay for her mother's life-saving operation. Now she's discovered her pregnancy was fathered by handsome Venezuelan businessman Raul Zaforteza…The husband? Raul will do anything to keep his baby—he'll even marry Polly. But will she give in to the desire that burns between them to make this marriage more than in name only?












is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular and

bestselling novelists. Her writing was an instant

success with readers worldwide. Since her first

book, Bittersweet Passion, was published in 1987, she has gone from strength to strength and now has over ninety titles, which have sold more than thirty-five million copies, to her name.

In this special collection, we offer readers a

chance to revisit favourite books or enjoy that rare

treasure—a book by a favourite writer—they may

have missed. In every case, seduction and passion

with a gorgeous, irresistible man are guaranteed!







LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon


reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.


Contract Baby

Lynne Graham






www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


Title Page (#uc3e05c6b-4203-585a-9753-06a2aef9087e)CHAPTER ONE (#u8c92aa11-cd5b-5c6d-8082-10400cbe9ddb)CHAPTER TWO (#ua23e8f94-4c13-546c-92bd-d31211e6839a)CHAPTER THREE (#ub1634b9c-84bf-587e-8b43-05285b061229)CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)


CHAPTER ONE

FROM the slim document case clasped in one strong brown hand, Raul Zaforteza withdrew a large glossy photograph. ‘This is Polly Johnson. In six weeks’ time she will give birth to my child. I must find her before then.’

Somehow primed to expect a gorgeous blonde with a supermodel face and figure, Digby was disconcerted to find himself looking at a small, slim girl with a mane of hair the colour of mahogany, soulful blue eyes and an incredibly sweet smile. She looked so outrageously young and wholesome he just could not imagine her in the role of surrogate mother.

As a lawyer with a highly respected London firm, Digby Carson had dealt with some very difficult cases. But a surrogacy arrangement gone wrong? The surrogate mother on the run and probably determined to keep the baby? He surveyed his most wealthy and influential client with a sinking heart.

Raul Zaforteza’s fabled fortune was founded on gold and diamond mines. He was a brilliant business tycoon, a legendary polo player and, according to the gossip columns, a notorious womaniser. He was already prowling like a black panther ready to spring. Six feet two inches tall, with the sleek, supple build of a born athlete and the volatile temperament of his colourful heritage, he was an intimidating sight, even to a man who had known him from childhood.




Digby...I understood that my lawyer in New York had already briefed you on this situation,’ Raul drawled with barely concealed impatience.




He said the matter was far too confidential to discuss on the phone. And I hadn’t the slightest suspicion that you were planning to become a father through surrogacy,’ the older man admitted. ‘Why on earth did you embark on such a risky venture?’




Por Dios ... you watched me grow up! How can you ask me that?’ Raul countered.

Digby looked uncomfortable. As a former employee of Raul’s late father, he was well aware that Raul had had a pretty ghastly childhood. He might be rich beyond avarice, but he had not been anything like as lucky in the parent lottery.

His bronzed features taut, Raul expelled his breath in a slow hiss. ‘I decided a long time ago that I would never marry. I wouldn’t give any woman that amount of power over me or, even more crucially, over any child we might have!’ Fierce conviction roughened his rich, accented drawl. ‘But I’ve always been very fond of children—’

‘Yes...’ An unspoken but hovered in the tense silence.

‘Many marriages end in divorce, and usually the wife gets to keep the children,’ Raul reminded the lawyer with biting cynicism.


Surrogacy impressed me as the most practical way in which to father a child outside marriage. This wasn’t an impulsive decision, Digby. When I decided to go ahead, I went to a lot of trouble to ensure that I would choose a suitable mother for my child.’

‘Suitable?’ Digby was keen to hear what Raul, with his famed love of fast, glitzy society blondes, had considered ‘suitable’ in the maternal stakes.

‘When my New York legal team advertised for a surrogate mother, they received a flood of applications. I employed a doctor and a psychologist to put a shortlist of the more promising candidates through a battery of tests, but the responsibility for the final choice was naturally mine.’

The older man frowned down at the photograph of Polly Johnson. ‘What age is she?’




Twenty-one.’

Digby’s frown remained. ‘She was the only suitable candidate? ’

Raul tautened.


The psychologist did have some reservations but I decided to overlook them.’

Digby looked shaken.

‘Everything that the psychologist saw in Polly I wanted in the mother of my child,’ Raul stressed without a shade of regret.


It was a gut feeling and I acted on it. Yes, she was young and idealistic, but she had the right moral values. She wasn’t motivated by greed but by a desperate need to try and finance surgery which she hoped might extend her mother’s life.’




I wonder how that desperation affected her ability to make a rational decision about what she was getting involved in,’ Digby remarked.

‘Wondering is a pointless exercise now that she is pregnant with my child,’ Raul countered very drily. ‘But I will find her soon. Her background was exhaustively investigated. I now know that, just two months ago, she was at her godmother’s home in Surrey. I don’t yet know where she went from there. But before I do find her I need to know what my rights are in this country.’

Digby was in no hurry to break bad news before he had all the facts. British law frowned on surrogacy. If the mother wanted to keep the baby instead of handing it over, no contract was likely to persuade a British judge that taking that child from its mother was in the child’s best interests.

‘Tell me the rest of the story,’ he advised.

While running through the bare facts for the older man’s benefit, Raul stared unseeingly out of the window, grimly recalling his first sight of Polly Johnson through a two-way mirror in the New York legal office. She had reminded him of a tiny porcelain doll. Fragile, unusual and astonishingly pretty.

She had been brave and honest. And so impressively nice—not something Raul had ever sought in a woman before, but a trait he had found very appealing when he had considered all the positive qualities a mother might hand down to her child. Certainly Polly had been younger and less worldly wise than was desirable, but he had recognised her quiet inner strength as well as her essentially tranquil nature.

And the more Raul had watched Polly, the more he had learnt about Polly, the more he had wanted to meet Polly face to face, in the flesh, so that some day in the future he could comfortably answer his child’s curious questions about her. But his New York lawyer had said absolutely not. Strict anonymity would be his only defence against any form of harassment in later years. But Raul had always been a ruthless rule-breaker, with immense faith in his own natural instincts, nor had he ever hesitated to satisfy his own wishes...

And acting on that essential arrogance, he conceded grudgingly now, was how everything had begun to fall apart. Worst of all, he who prided himself on his intelligence and his shrewd perceptive powers had somehow failed to notice the warning signs of trouble on the horizon.

‘So once you knew that the girl had successfully conceived, you installed her in a house in Vermont with a trusted family servant to look after her,’ Digby recapped, because Raul had fallen silent again. ‘Where was her mother while all this was going on?’

‘As soon as Polly signed the contract her mother went into a convalescent home to build up her strength for surgery. She was very ill. The woman knew nothing about the surrogacy agreement. When Polly was only a couple of weeks pregnant, her mother had the operation. Polly had been warned that her mother’s chances of survival were at best only even. She died two days after surgery,’ Raul revealed heavily.




Unfortunate.’

Raul slung him a fulminating glance of scorn. Unfortunate? Polly had been devastated. And Raul had been uneasily conscious that her sole reason for becoming a surrogate had died that same day. Aware from the frustratingly brief reports made by the maid, Soledad, that Polly was deeply depressed, Raul had reached the point where he could no longer bear to stay at a supposedly sensible distance from the woman carrying his baby.

Understandably he had been concerned that she might miscarry. He had sincerely believed that it was his responsibility to offer her support. Isolated in a country that wasn’t her own, only twenty-one-years old, pregnant with a stranger’s baby and plunged deep into a grieving process that her optimistic outlook had not prepared her to face, the mother of his child had really needed a sympathetic shoulder.




So I finally made contact with her,’ Raul admitted tautly. ‘Since I could hardly admit that I was the father of her baby, I had to employ a certain amount of deception to make that contact.’

Unseen, Digby winced. Raul should have avoided any form of personal involvement. But then Raul Zaforteza was a disturbingly complex man. He was a merciless business opponent and a very dangerous enemy. More than one woman had come to grief on the rocks of his innate emotional detachment. But Raul was also a renowned philanthropist, the most genuine of friends to a chosen few and a male still capable of powerful emotional responses.

Raul compressed his firm lips.


I took a weekend place near where she was staying and ensured that our paths crossed. I didn’t conceal my identity; I didn’t need to... the Zaforteza name meant nothing to her. Over the following months, I flew up there regularly and called on her. I never stayed long...she just needed someone to talk to.’ Radiating tension now, in spite of that studiously nonchalant explanation, Raul shrugged, his accented drawl petering out into another brooding silence.




And?’

‘And nothing!’ As he swung round from the window, Raul’s hard, dark eyes were sardonic in their comprehension.


I treated her like a little sister. I was a casual visitor, nothing more.’

Digby restrained himself from pointing out that since Raul was an only child he could only have the vaguest notion of how one treated a little sister. And Digby had three daughters, every one of whom swooned at the mere mention of Raul’s name. Indeed, the last time he had taken Raul home for dinner it had been a downright embarrassing experience, with all three daughters dressed to kill and competing for Raul’s attention. Even his wife said that Raul Zaforteza might well have been packaged by the devil specifically to tempt the female sex.

He pictured a lonely young woman who might only have faced up to what surrogacy really meant in the aftermath of her mother’s death. When that nice, naive young woman had suddenly found herself entertaining a member of the international jet set as self-assured, sophisticated and charismatic as Raul, what effect had it had on her?

‘When did she go missing?’ Digby prompted.




Three months ago. She disappeared one day... Soledad went out shopping and left her alone,’ Raul confided grimly. ‘Do you realize that in three months I have hardly slept a night through? Day and night I have been worried sick—’

‘I suppose there is a strong possibility that she may have gone for a termination—’

‘Por Dios...’ Raul dealt the older man a smouldering look of reproof. ‘Polly wouldn’t abort my child!’

Content to have issued that warning, Digby didn’t argue.

‘Polly’s very soft, very feminine, very caring...she would never choose that option!’ Raul continued to argue fiercely.

‘You asked about your rights.’ Digby breathed in deep, straightening his shoulders to brace himself for the blow he was about to deliver. ‘I’m afraid unmarried fathers don’t have any under British law.’

Raul stared back at him with rampant incredulity. ‘That isn’t possible.’

‘You couldn’t argue that the girl would make a bad mother either. After all, you chose her,’ the older man pointed out ruefully. ‘You described a respectable girl, drawn into a surrogacy agreement only because she was trying to help her mother. As the rich foreigner who used his wealth to tempt her into making a decision which she later regretted, you wouldn’t look good in court—’

‘But she has reneged on a legal contract,’ Raul spelt out harshly. ‘Dios mio! All I want is the right to take my own child back to Venezuela. I haven’t the slightest desire to take this into a courtroom! There has to be some other way in which I can get custody.’

Digby grimaced. ‘You could marry her...’

Raul gave him a forbidding look. ‘If that was a joke, Digby...it was in the worst possible taste.’

Henry pulled out a chair for Polly to sit down to her evening meal. His mother, Janice Grey, frowned at the young woman’s shadowed blue eyes and too prominent cheekbones. At eight months pregnant, Polly looked drawn and ill.

‘You should be resting at this stage of your pregnancy,’ Janice reproved. ‘If you married Henry now, you could give up work. You could take things easy while he helped you get your godmother’s will sorted out.’

‘It would be the best move you could make.’ Solid and bespectacled, with thinning fair hair, Henry nodded in pompous agreement. ‘You’ll have to be careful that the Inland Revenue doesn’t take too large a slice of your inheritance. ’

‘I really don’t want to marry anybody.’ Beneath her wealth of rich, reddish brown hair, Polly’s delicate features were becoming stiff and her smile strained.

An awkward silence fell while mother and son exchanged meaningful glances.

Polly focused on her nicely cooked meal with a guilty lack of appetite. It had been a mistake to take a room in Janice’s comfortable terraced home. But how could she ever have guessed that her late godmother’s trusted housekeeper had had an ulterior motive for offering her somewhere to stay?

Janice and her son knew the strange terms of Nancy Leeward’s will. They knew that Polly would inherit a million pounds if she found a husband within the year and stayed married for at least six months. Janice was determined to persuade Polly that marrying her son would magically solve her every problem.

And, to be fair to Janice, calculating she might be, but she saw such a marriage as a fair exchange. After all, Polly was an unmarried mum-to-be and couldn’t claim her godmother’s money without a husband. Henry was single, and in a job he loathed. Even a small share of a million pounds would enable Henry to set up as a tax consultant in a smart office of his own. Janice would do just about anything to further Henry’s prospects, and Henry wasn’t just attached to his widowed mother’s apron strings, he was welded to them.

‘Babies can be very demanding,’ Janice pointed out when her son had left the room. ‘And, talking as someone who has done it, raising a child alone isn’t easy.’

‘I know.’ But at the mere mention of the word ‘baby’ a vague and dreamy smile had formed on Polly’s face. There was nothing practical or sensible about the warm feeling of anticipation which welled up inside her.

Janice sighed. ‘I’m only trying to advise you, Polly. You’re not in love with Henry, but where did falling in love get you?’

Polly’s blissful abstraction was cruelly punctured by that reminder. ‘Nowhere,’ she conceded tightly.

‘I’ve never liked to pry, but it’s obvious that the father of your child took off the minute you got pregnant. Unreliable and irresponsible,’ the older woman opined thinly. ‘You certainly couldn’t call my Henry either of those things.’

Polly considered Henry’s joyless and stolid outlook on life and suppressed a sigh.

‘People don’t always marry for love. People get married for all sorts of other reasons,’ Janice persisted. ‘Security, companionship, a nice home.’

‘I’m afraid I would need more.’ Polly got up slowly and heavily. ‘I think I’ll lie down for a while before I go to work.’

Breathless from climbing the stairs, Polly lay down on her bed in the prettily furnished spare room. She grimaced. Never in a million years would she marry Henry just to satisfy the terms of Nancy Leeward’s will and inherit that money.

She was too shamefully conscious that a craving for money had reduced her to her present predicament. Her late father, a strongly religious man, had been fond of saying that money was the root of all evil. And, looking back to the twisted, reckless decision she had made months earlier, Polly knew that in her case that pronouncement had proved all too true.

Her mother had been dying. But Polly had refused to accept the reality that the mother she had grown up without and had barely had time to get to know again could be dying: she hadn’t believed the hand of fate could be that cruel. Armed by that stubborn belief, Polly had gone that extra mile that people talked about, but she had gone that extra mile in entirely the wrong direction, she acknowledged wretchedly.

How could she ever have believed that she would find it possible to give her baby up to strangers? How could she ever have imagined that she could surrender all rights, hand over her own flesh and blood and agree never, ever to try and see her own child again? She had been incredibly stupid and immature. So she had run away from a situation which had become untenable, knowing even then that she would be followed and eventually traced...

As the ever-present threat of being found and called to account for her behaviour assailed Polly, her skin turned clammy with fear. In her own mind she was no better than a criminal. She had signed a contract in which she had promised to give up her baby. She had sat back while an unbelievably huge amount of money was expended on her mother’s medical care and then she had fled. She had broken the law, yet she had been wickedly and savagely deceived into signing that contract...but what proof did she have of that fact?

Sometimes she woke from nightmares about being extradited to the USA and put on trial, her baby taken from her and parcelled off to a life of luxury with his immoral and utterly unscrupulous father in Venezuela. Even when she didn’t have bad dreams, it was becoming increasingly hard to sleep. She was at that point in pregnancy when she couldn’t get comfortable even in bed, and she was often wakened by the strong, energetic movements of her baby.

And in her mind’s eye then, when she was at her weakest, she would see Raul. Raul Zaforteza, dark, devastating and dangerous. What a trusting and pathetic victim she had been! For she had fallen in love with him, hopelessly, helplessly, blindly in love for the first time in her life. She had lived only from one meeting to the next, frantically counting the days in between, agonised if he didn’t turn up and always tormented by the secret she had believed she was still contriving to keep from him. A jagged laugh was torn from her lips now. And all the time Raul had known she was pregnant. After all, he was the father of her baby...

An hour later, Polly headed to work. It was a cool, wet summer evening. She walked past the bus stop. She was presently struggling to save every penny she could. Soon she wouldn’t be able to work any more, and once she had the baby she would need her savings for all sorts of things.

The supermarket where she worked shifts was a bright beacon of light and activity in the city street. As Polly disposed of her coat and her bag in the rest room, the manageress popped her head round the door and frowned. ‘You look very tired, Polly. I hope that doctor of yours knows what he’s doing when he tells you that it’s all right for you to be still working.’

Polly flushed as the older woman withdrew again. She hadn’t actually seen a doctor in two months, but at her last visit she had been advised to rest. How could she rest when she had to keep herself? And if she approached the social services for assistance they would ask too many awkward questions. So she lived in a state of permanent exhaustion, back aching, ankles swollen, and if she pushed herself too hard she got blinding headaches and dizzy spells.

By the end of her shift on one of the checkouts Polly was very tired, and really grateful that she was off the next day. Tomorrow, she decided, she would pamper herself. Shouldering her bag, she left the shop. The rain had stopped. The street lights gleamed off the wet pavements and cars swished by splashing the kerbs.

Polly didn’t even try to close her coat. Only a tent would have closed round her swollen stomach, and the weight of her own body contributed to her fatigue. Not long now, she consoled herself. She felt as if she had been pregnant for ever, but soon she would be getting to know her baby as a separate little person.

Engaged in her thoughts of the near future, head downbent, Polly didn’t register the existence of a large obstacle in her path. Only at the last possible moment, when she almost cannoned into the impossibly tall and solidly built male blocking her passage, did she notice the presence of another human being and seek to sidestep him.

As she teetered dangerously off balance, a cry of dismay escaping her, a pair of strong hands shot out to catch her by the shoulders and steady her. Heart pounding with fright, she reeled as he held her there, her head tipping back from a view of her rescuer’s silver-grey silk tie to look up.

Raul Zaforteza gazed down at her from his great height, his facial muscles locking his staggeringly handsome features into a bronze mask of impassivity that was uniquely chilling.

In severe shock, Polly trembled, soft mouth opening and closing again without sound, a look of pure panic in her gaze as she collided with eyes that had the topaz golden brilliance of a tiger ready to claw the unwary to the bone.

‘There is no place in this whole wide world where you could hope to stay hidden from me,’ Raul spelt out in a controlled tone of immense finality, his rich, accented vowel sounds tingling in her sensitive ears, throwing up a myriad of despoilt memories that could only torment her. ‘The chase is over.’


CHAPTER TWO

‘LET me go, Raul!’ Polly gasped convulsively, her heart thudding like a trapped animal’s behind her breastbone, nervous perspiration beading her short upper lip.

‘How can I do that?’ Raul countered with level emphasis. ‘You’re expecting my baby. What sort of a man could walk away?’

Without warning, pain flashed in a scorching burst across Polly’s temples, provoking a startled moan from her parted lips. Her hand flew up to press against her throbbing brow. Nausea stirred nastily in her stomach as the overpowering dizziness washed over her.

‘Por Dios ... what is the matter with you?’ Raul tightened his hold on her as she swayed like a drunk, straining with every sinew to stay upright and in control.

In another moment he bent and swept her up into his arms, cradling her easily into the strength and heat of his big, powerful frame. As the street light shone on the greyish pallor of her upturned face, Raul emitted a groan and said something hoarse in Spanish.

‘Put me down...’ Polly was not too ill to appreciate the cruel irony of Raul getting that physically close to her for the very first time.

Ignoring her, chiselled profile aggressively clenched, Raul jerked his imperious dark head and the limousine parked across the street filtered over to the kerb. The chauffeur jumped out and hurried to open the passenger door. Raul settled her down on the squashy leather back seat, but before he could climb in beside her Polly took him by surprise and lurched half out again, to be violently sick in the gutter. Then she sagged back on the seat, pressing a tissue to her tremulous lips and utterly drained.

As she lay slumped on her side, a stunned silence greeted her. Momentarily, a dull gleam of amusement touched her. Raul Zaforteza had probably got to the age of thirty-one without ever having witnessed such a distasteful event. And she hated him for being there to witness her inability to control her own body. Although she was the kind of person who automatically said sorry when other people bumped into her, a polite apology would have choked her.

‘Do you feel strong enough to sit up?’

As she braced a slender hand on the seat beneath her, Raul took over, raising her and propping her up like a rag doll. Involuntarily she breathed in the elusive scent of him. Clean, warm male overlaid with a hint of Something more exotic.

‘So you finally ran me to earth,’ Polly acknowledged curtly, refusing to look at him, staring into space with almost blank blue eyes.

‘It was only a matter of time. I went first to the house where you’re staying. Janice Grey wasn’t helpful. Fortunately I was already aware of where you worked,’ Raul imparted flatly.

She could feel the barrier between them, high and impenetrable as toughened frosted glass, the highwire tension splintering through the atmosphere, the restive, brooding edge of powerful energy that Raul always emanated. But she felt numb, like an accident victim. He had found her. She had made every possible effort to remain undetected—moved to London, even lied to friends so that nobody had a contact address or phone number for her. And all those endeavours had been in vain.

As a spasm of pain afflicted her, she squeezed her eyes tight shut.

‘What is it?’ Raul demanded fiercely.

‘Feel like my head’s splitting open,’ she mumbled sickly, forcing her eyes open again.

Raul was now studying the pronounced swell of her stomach with a shaken fascination that felt deeply, offensively intrusive.

In turn, Polly now studied him, pain like a poisonous dart piercing her bruised heart. His hair—black as midnight now, but blue-black in sunlight—the strong, flaring ebony brows, the lean, arrogant nose, the magnificent high cheekbones and hollows, the wide, perfectly modelled mouth so eloquent of the raw sensuality that laced his every movement. A devastatingly attractive male, so staggeringly good-looking he had to turn heads wherever he went, and yet only the most audacious woman would risk cornering him. There was reinforced steel in those hard bones, inflexible control in that strong jawline.

The baby kicked, blanking out her mind, making her wince.

His incongruously long and lush black lashes swept up, and she was pinned to the spot by glinting gold eyes full of enquiry.

‘May I?’ he murmured almost roughly.

And then she saw his half-extended hand, those lean brown fingers full of such tensile strength, and only after a split second did she register in shock the source of his interest. His entire attention was on the giant mound of her stomach, a strangely softened expression driving the tension from his firm lips.

‘May I feel my child move?’ he clarified boldly.

Polly gave him a stricken look of condemnation, and with shaking, frantic hands tried somewhat pointlessly to try and yank her coat over herself. ‘Don’t you dare try to touch me!’

‘Perhaps you are wise. Perhaps touching is not a good idea.’ Nostrils flaring, Raul flung himself back in the corner of the seat, hooded eyes betraying only a chilling glint of intent gold, his bronzed face cold as a guillotine, impassive now in icy self-restraint.

And yet Polly was reminded of nothing so much as a wild animal driven into ferocious retreat. He had never looked at her like that in Vermont, but she had always sensed the primal passion of the temperament he restrained. Then, as now, it had exercised the most terrifying fascination for her—a male her complete opposite in nature, an outwardly civilised sophisticate in mannerism, speech and behaviour, but at heart never, ever cool, predictable or tranquil.

‘Take me home,’ she muttered tightly. ‘I’ll meet you tomorrow to talk.’

He lifted the phone and spoke in fluid Spanish to his driver. Polly turned away.

She remembered him in Vermont, addressing Soledad in Spanish. She remembered the maid’s nervous unease, her undeniable servility. When Raul had been around, Soledad had tried to melt into the woodwork, too unsophisticated a woman to handle the cruel complexity of the situation he had unthinkingly put her in. In his eyes she had only been a servant after all. Raul Zaforteza was not a male accustomed to taking account of the needs or the feelings of lesser beings...and in Soledad’s case he had paid a higher price than he would ever know for that arrogance.

The powerful car drew away from the kerb and shot Polly’s flailing and confused thoughts back to the present. While Raul employed the car phone to make a lengthy call in Spanish, she watched him helplessly from below her lashes. She scanned the width of his shoulders under the superb fit of his charcoal-grey suit, the powerful chest, lean hips and long muscular thighs that not the most exquisite tailoring in the world could conceal.

‘I can’t touch you but every look you give me is a visual assault,’ Raul derided in a whiplash aside as he replaced the phone. ‘I’d eat you for breakfast, little girl!’

Her temples throbbed and she closed her eyes, shaken that he could speak to her like that. So many memories washed over her that she was cast into turmoil. Raul, tender, laughing, amber eyes warm as the kiss of sunlight, without a shade of coldness. And every bit of that caring concern aimed at the ultimate well-being of the baby in her womb, at the physical body cocooning his child not at Polly personally. She had never existed for him on any level except as a human incubator to be kept calm, content and healthy. But how could she ever have guessed that shattering truth?

‘You look terrible,’ Raul informed her tautly. ‘You’ve lost a lot of weight and you were very slim to begin with—’

‘Nobody could ever accuse me of that now.’

‘Your ankles are swollen.’

Polly rested her pounding head back wearily, beyond caring about what she must look like to him now. It scarcely mattered. She had been ten times more presentable in Vermont and he had not been remotely attracted to her, although she had only recognised that humiliating reality in retrospect. ‘You’re not getting my baby,’ she warned him doggedly. ‘Not under any circumstances.’

‘Calm yourself,’ Raul commanded deflatingly. ‘Anxiety won’t improve your health.’

‘It always comes first, right?’ Polly could not resist sniping.

‘Desde luego...of course,’ Raul confirmed without hesitation.

She winced as another dull flash of pain made her very brain ache. She heard him open a compartment, the hiss of a bottle cap released, liquid tinkling into a glass, and finally another unrecognisable sound. And then she jerked in astonishment when an ice-cold cloth was pressed against her pulsing brow.

‘I will take care of you now. Did I not do so before? And look at you now, like a living corpse...’ Raul condemned, his dark drawl alive with fierce undertones as he bent over her. ‘I wanted to shout at you. I wanted to make you tremble. But how can I do that when you are like this?’

Her curling lashes lifted. Defenceless in pain, she stared up into frustrated and furious golden eyes so nakedly at variance with the compassionate gesture of that cool, soothing cloth he had drenched for her benefit. Being kind to her was killing him. She understood that. Suffering that grudging kindness was killing her.

‘You taught me to hate,’ she whispered, with a sudden ferocity alien to her gentle nature until that moment.

The stunning eyes veiled to a slumberous gleam. ‘There is nothing between us but my baby. No other connection, nada más...nothing more,’ he stressed with gritty exactitude. ‘Only when you can detach yourself from your emotional mindset and recall that contract will we talk.’

Hatred flamed like a shooting star through Polly. She needed it. She needed hatred to race like adrenalin through her veins. Only hatred could swallow up and ease the agonizing pain Raul could inflict.

‘You bastard,’ Polly muttered shakily. ‘You lying, cheating, devious bastard...’

At that precise moment the limo came to a smooth halt. As the chauffeur climbed out, Polly gaped at the well-lit modern building with its beautifully landscaped frontage outside which the car had drawn up. ‘Where are we?’ she demanded apprehensively.

A uniformed nurse emerged from the entrance with a wheelchair.

In silence Raul swung out of the limo and strode round the bonnet to wave away the hovering chauffeur. He opened the door beside her himself.

‘You need medical attention,’ he delivered.

Her shaken eyes widened, filling with instantaneous fear. Not for nothing had she visited the library to learn all she could from newspapers about Raul Zaforteza’s ruthless reputation. ‘You’re not banging me up in some lunatic asylum!’ she flung in complete panic.

‘Curb your wild imagination, chica. I would do nothing to harm the mother of my child. And don’t you dare try to cause a scene when my only concern is for your well-being! ’ Raul warned with ferocious bite as he leant in and scooped her still resisting body out of the luxurious car as if she weighed no more than a feather.

‘The wheelchair, sir,’ the nurse proffered.

‘She weighs nothing. I’ll carry her.’ Raul strode through the automatic doors, clutching her with the tense concern of someone handling a particular fragile parcel. The mother of his child. Cue for reverent restraint, she reflected bitterly. Restraint and concern that the human incubator should be proving less than efficient. But, weak and sick from pain, even her vision blurring, she rested her head down against a broad shoulder.

‘Hate you,’ she muttered nonetheless, and would have told him that with her last dying breath because it was her only defence.

‘You’re not tough enough to hate,’ Raul dismissed as a grey-haired older man in a white coat moved towards them.

Raul addressed him in a flood of Spanish. Scanning her with frowning eyes, the doctor led the way into a plush consulting room on the ground floor.

‘Why does nobody speak English? We’re in London,’ Polly moaned.

‘I’m sorry. Rodney Bevan is a consultant who worked for many years in a clinic of mine in Venezuela. I can talk faster in my own language.’ Raul laid her down carefully on a comfortable treatment couch.

‘Go away now,’ Polly urged him feverishly.

Raul stayed put. The consultant said something quiet in Spanish. Raul’s blunt cheekbones were accentuated by a faint line of dark colour. He swung on his heel and strode out to the waiting area, closing the door behind him.

‘What did you say?’ Polly was impressed to death.

As the waiting nurse moved forward to help Polly out of her coat, the older man smiled. ‘You’re the star here, not him.’

The nurse took her blood pressure. Why were their faces so solemn? Was there something wrong with her blood pressure? Her body felt like a great weight pulling her down.

‘You need to relax and keep calm, Polly,’ the doctor murmured. ‘I want to give you a mild sedative and then I would like to scan you. Is that all right with you?’

‘No, I want to go home,’ she mumbled fearfully, knowing she sounded like a child and not caring, because she didn’t feel she could trust anybody so friendly with Raul.

The voices went away. Raul’s rich, dark drawl broke into her frantic barely half-formed thoughts. ‘Polly...please let the medics do what they need to do,’ he urged.

She forced her eyes open, focusing on him with difficulty, seeing those lean bronzed features through a blur. ‘I can’t trust you...or them...you know him!’

And even in the state she was in she saw him react in shock to that frightened accusation. Raul turned pale, the fabulous bone structure clenching hard. He gripped her hand, brilliant eyes shimmering. ‘You must trust him. He’s a very fine obstetrician—’

‘He’s a friend of yours.’

‘Si, pero...yes, but he is also a doctor,’ Raul stressed with highly emotive urgency.

‘I don’t want to go to sleep and wake up in Venezuela... Do you think I don’t know what you’re capable of when you’re crossed?’ Polly managed to frame with the last of her energy.

‘I’ve never broken the law!’

‘You would to get this baby,’ Polly told him.

The silence smouldered, fireworks blazing under the surface.

Raul stared down at her, expressive eyes veiled, but she knew she had drawn blood.

‘You’re not well, Polly. If you will not believe my assurances that you can trust the staff here, then at least think of the baby’s needs and put those needs first,’ he breathed, not quite levelly.

A pained look of withdrawal crossed her exhausted face. She gave a jerky nod of assent, but turned her head to the wall. A minute later she felt a slight prick in her arm and she let herself float, and would have done anything to escape that relentless pounding inside her skull and forget that unjust look of cruel reproach she had seen in Raul’s gaze.

As she drifted like a drowning swimmer, all the worst moments of her life seemed to flash up before her.

Her earliest memory was of her father shouting at her mother and her mother crying. She had got up one morning at the age of seven to find her mother gone. Her father had flown into a rage when she’d innocently tried to question him. Soon after that she had been sent to stay with her godmother. Nancy Leeward had carefully explained. Her mother, Leah, had done a very silly thing: she had gone away with another man. Her parents were getting a divorce, but some time, hopefully soon, when her father gave permission, her mother might come to visit her.

Only Leah never had. Polly had got her mothering from her godmother. And she had had to wait until she was twenty years old and clearing out her father’s desk, days after his funeral, to discover the pitiful wad of pleading letters written by the distraught mother who had to all intents and purposes abandoned her.

Leah had gone to New York and eventually married her lover. She had flown over to England half a dozen times. at an expense she could ill afford, in repeated attempts to see her daughter, but her embittered ex-husband had blocked her every time—not least by putting Polly into boarding school and refusing to say where she was. Polly had been shattered by what she’d uncovered, but also overjoyed to realise that her mother had really loved her, in spite of all her father’s assertions to the contrary.

In New York, she had had a tearful, wonderful reunion with Leah, whose second husband had died the previous year. Her mother had been weak, breathless, and aged far beyond her years. The gravity of her heart condition had been painfully obvious. She had been living on welfare, what health insurance she had had exhausted. The harassed doctor at the local clinic had reluctantly told Polly under pressure that there was an operation performed by a worldfamous surgeon which might give her mother some hope, but that it would take a lottery win to privately finance such major surgery.

Up, down—too much down in her life recently, and not enough up, she thought painfully as she wandered through her own memories.

And then she saw Raul, strolling through the glorious Vermont woods where she had walked every day, escaping from Soledad’s kind but fussing attentions to cry in peace for the mother she had lost. Raul, garbed in faultlessly cut casual clothes, smart enough to take Rodeo Drive by storm and so smooth, so impressively natural in his surprise at stumbling on her that it was a wonder he hadn’t cut himself with his own clever tongue.

And she had met those extraordinary eyes of amber and bang...crash...pow. She had been heading for a down that would take her all the way to hell, even though she had naively felt she was on an up the instant he angled that first smouldering smile at her.

Polly woke up the following morning wearing a hideous billowing hospital gown. She had a room to herself with a private bathroom. Her head no longer hurt, but tiredness still filled her with lethargy.

The nurse who came in response to the bell cheerfully ran through routine checks, efficiently helped her to freshen up and neatly side-stepped most of her anxious questions. She consulted her chart and informed Polly that she was to have complete bedrest. Mr. Bevan would be in around lunchtime, she confided, just as breakfast was delivered.

A couple of hours later Raul’s chauffeur arrived, like an advance party before him. He settled down a suitcase that Polly recognised because it was her own. The case bulged with what struck her as very probably every possession she had last seen in her room at the Greys’. A maid in an overall came in and helped her change into one of her own nighties. Polly then retrieved a creased brown envelope from the jumble of items in the foot of her case. It was time to confront Raul with the worst of the deceptions practised on her.

By the time mid-morning arrived, Polly was sitting bolt upright with wide, angrily impatient eyes and, had she but known it, the first healthy colour in her cheeks for weeks. She raked restive fingers through the silky mahogany hair tumbling round her shoulders and focused on the door expectantly, like someone not only preparing to face Armageddon but overwhelmingly eager to meet it.

The ajar door finally spread wide, framing Raul.

Her breath caught in her throat.

Sleek and powerful, in a summerweight double-breasted beige business suit, he looked sensationally attractive, supremely poised and shockingly self-assured. Polly lost her animated colour, ashamed of that helpless flare of physical response to those dark good looks and that lithe, lean, muscular physique. He was a ruthless and unashamed manipulator.

Black eyes raked over her, black eyes without any shade of warm gold. Emotionless, businesslike, not even a comforting hint of uncertainty about his stance. ‘You look better already,’ he remarked levelly.

‘I feel better,’ Polly was generous enough to admit. ‘But I can’t stay here—’

‘Of course you can. Where else could you be so well cared for?’

‘I’ve got something here I want you to explain,’ Polly delivered tautly.

His attention dropped to the envelope clutched between her tense fingers. ‘What is it?’

A shaky little laugh escaped Polly. ‘Oh, it’s not real proof of the manipulative lies I was fed...you needn’t worry about that! Your lawyer was far too clever to allow me to retain any original documents, but I took photocopies—’

Raul frowned at her. ‘Dios mio, cut to the base line and tell me what you’re talking about,’ he incised impatiently. ‘You were told no lies at any time!’

‘Off the record lies,’ Polly extended tightly. ‘It was very clever to give me the impression that I was being allowed a reassuring glimpse at highly confidential information.’

Raul angled back his imperious dark head. ‘Explain yourself.’

Polly tossed the envelope to the foot of the bed. ‘How you can look me in the face and say that I will never know.’

Raul swept up the envelope with an undaunted flourish. ‘And don’t try to pretend you didn’t know about it. When I was asked to sign that contract, I said I couldn’t sign until I was given some assurances about the couple who wanted me to act as surrogate for them.’

The...couple?’ Raul queried flatly, ebony brows drawing together as he extracted the folded pages from the envelope.

‘Your lawyer said that wasn’t possible. His clients wanted complete anonymity. So I left. Forty-eight hours later, I got a phone call. I met up in a café with a young bright spark from your lawyer’s office. He said he was a clerk,’ Polly related jerkily, her resentment and distaste blatant in her strained face as she recalled how easily she had been fooled. ‘He said he understood my concern about the people who would be adopting my child, and that he was risking his job in allowing me even a glance at such confidential documents—’

‘Which confidential documents?’ Raul cut in grittily.

‘He handed me a profile of that supposed couple from an accredited adoption agency. There were no names, no details which might have identified them...’ Tears stung Polly’s eyes then, her voice beginning to shake with the strength of her feelings. ‘And I was really moved by what I read, by their own personal statements, their complete honesty, their deep longing to have a family. They struck me as wonderful people, and they’d had a h-heartbreaking time struggling to have a child of their own...’

‘Madre mía...’ Raul ground out, half under his breath, scorching golden eyes pinned to her distraught face with mesmeric force.

‘And you see,’ Polly framed jaggedly, ‘I really liked that couple. I felt for them, thought they would make terrific parents, would give any child a really loving home...’ As a strangled sob swallowed her voice, she crammed a mortified hand against her wobbling mouth and stared in tormented accusation at Raul through swimming blue eyes. ‘How could you sink that low?’ she condemned strickenly.

Raul gazed back at her, strikingly pale now below his olive skin, so still he might have been a stone statue, a stunned light in his piercing dark eyes.

With the greatest difficulty, Polly cleared her throat and breathed unevenly. ‘I asked the clerk to let me have an hour reading over that profile and I photocopied it without telling him. That afternoon, I went in and signed the contract. I thought I was doing a really good thing. I thought I would make that couple so happy... I was inexcusably dumb and shortsighted!’

The heavy silence stretched like a rubber band pulled too taut. And then Raul unfroze. In an almost violent gesture, he shook open the pages he still held. He strode over to the window, his broad back turned to her, his tension so pronounced it hummed like a force field in a room that now felt suffocatingly airless.

Polly sank wearily back against the pillows and fought to get a grip on the tears still clogging her aching throat.

Timeless minutes later, Raul swung back, his darkly handsome features grim and forbidding. ‘This abhorrent deception was not instigated by me,’ he declared, visibly struggling to contain the outrage blazing in his eyes, the revealing rawness to that harshened plea in his own defence. ‘I had no knowledge of your request for further information or of your initial reluctance to sign that contract.’

‘How am I supposed to believe anything you say?’

‘Because the guilty party will be called to account,’ Raul asserted with wrathful bite. ‘At no stage did I give any instruction which might have implied that I would countenance such a deception. There was no need for me to stoop to lies and manipulation. There were other far less scrupulous applicants available—’

‘Were there?’ Polly breathed, not best pleased to realise that she had featured as one of many.

He was shocked and furious, so furious there was a slight tremor in his fingers as he refolded the pages she had given him. His sincerity was fiercely convincing.

‘So now I know why you have no faith in my word. It wasn’t only my decision to conceal my identity as the father of your child in Vermont that made you change your mind about fulfilling the contract.’

It was an unfortunate reminder. He only had to mention that cruel masquerade to fill Polly with savage pain and resentment. She surveyed him with angry, bitter eyes. ‘I would never, ever have agreed to a single male parent for my child, and when I found out who you really were, I was genuinely appalled—’

Raul skimmed a startled glance at her. ‘Dios mio... “appalled”? What an exaggeration—’

‘No exaggeration. I wouldn’t give a man with your reputation a pet rabbit to keep, never mind an innocent, helpless baby!’ Polly fired back at him.

Raul gazed back at her with complete incredulity. ‘What is wrong with my reputation?’

‘Read your own publicity,’ Polly advised with unconcealed distaste, thinking about the endless string of glamorous women who had been associated with him. There was nothing stable or respectable about Raul’s lifestyle.

Outrage sizzled round Raul Zaforteza like an intimidating aura. He snatched in a deep shuddering breath of restraint. ‘What right do you have to stand in judgement over me? So subterfuge was employed to persuade you into conceiving my child—I deeply regret that reality, but nothing will alter the situation we’re in now. That child you carry is still my child!’

Polly turned her head away. ‘And mine.’

‘The Judgement of Solomon. Are you about to suggest that we divide him or her into two equal halves? Let me tell you now that I will fight to the end to prevent that obnoxious little nerd I met last night raising my child!’ Raul delivered with sudden explosive aggression.

Polly blinked. ‘What little nerd?’

‘Henry Grey informed me that you’re engaged to him,’ Raul imparted with a feral flash of white teeth. ‘And you may believe that that is your business, but anything that affects my child’s welfare is also very much my business now!’

Stunned to realise that Henry should have claimed to be engaged to her, Polly surveyed the volatile male striding up and down the room, like a prowling tiger lashing his tail at the confines of a cage. Why did she want to hold Raul in her arms and soothe him? she asked herself with a sinking heart.

‘I think you should leave, Raul.’ As that dry voice of reproof cut through the electric atmosphere, Polly tore her mesmerised attention from Raul. In turn, Raul swung round. They both focused in astonishment on the consultant lodged in the doorway.

‘Leave?’ Raul stressed in unconcealed disbelief.

‘Only quiet visitors are welcome here,’ Rodney Bevan spelt out gravely.

Dressed in an Indian cotton dress the same rich blue as her eyes, Polly turned her face up into the sun and basked, welded to the comfy cushioning on the lounger. The courtyard garden at the centre of the clinic was an enchanting spot on a summer day. Even Henry’s unwelcome visit couldn’t detract from her pleasure at being surrounded by greenery again.

Henry gave her an accusing look. ‘Anybody would think you were enjoying yourself here!’

‘It’s very restful.’

Until Polly had escaped Henry and his mother for three days, she hadn’t appreciated just how wearing their constant badgering had become. She was tired of being pressurised and pushed in a direction she didn’t want to go. Now that Raul had found her, she was no longer in hiding. After she had sorted out things with Raul, she would be able to take control of her own life again.

‘Mother thinks you should come home,’ Henry told her with stiff disapproval.

‘You still haven’t explained why you told Raul we were engaged.’

Henry frowned. ‘I should’ve thought that was obvious. I hoped he’d go away and leave us alone. What’s the point of him showing up now? He’s just complicating things, swanning up in his flash car and acting like he owns you!’

Strange how even a male as insensitive as Henry had recognised that Raul behaved as if he owned her. Only it wasn’t her, it was the baby he believed he owned. Dear heaven, what a mess she was in, Polly conceded worriedly. There was no going back, no way of changing anything. Her baby was also Raul’s baby and always would be.

‘It was kind of you to call in, Henry,’ she murmured quietly. ‘Tell your mother that I really appreciate all her kindness, but that I won’t be coming back to stay with you—’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Henry had gone all red in the face.

‘I just don’t want to marry you...I’m sorry.’

‘I’ll visit later in the week, when you’re feeling more yourself.’

As Henry departed, Polly reflected that she was actually feeling more herself than she had in many weeks. Stepping off the treadmill of exhaustion had given her space to think.

As she slowly, awkwardly raised herself, Raul appeared through a door on the far side of the courtyard. He angled a slashing, searching glance over the little clusters of patients taking the fresh air nearby. Screened by the shrubbery, Polly made no attempt to attract his attention.

His suit was palest grey. He exuded designer chic. In the sunlight, his luxuriant hair gleamed blue-black. His lean, strong face possessed such breathtaking sexy symmetry that her breathing quickened and her sluggish pulses raced. Raul radiated raw sexuality in virile waves. The media said that men thought about sex at least once a minute. One look at Raul was enough to convince her.

But a feeling of stark inadequacy and rejection now threatened her in Raul’s radius. How the heck had she ever believed that a male that gorgeous was interested in her? How wilfully blind she had been in Vermont! If a woman excited Raul, he probably pounced on the first date, or maybe he got pounced on, but he had never made a pass at her, or even tried to kiss her. At first he had made her as nervous as a cat on hot bricks. But before very long his exquisite manners and flattering interest in her had soothed her inexperienced squirmings in his presence and given her entirely the wrong impression.

Incredibly, she had believed that one of the world’s most notorious womanisers was actually a cautious and decent guy, mature enough to want to get to know a woman as a friend before trying to take the relationship any further. Remembering that fact now made Polly feel positively queasy. She had thought Raul was perfect; she had thought he was wonderful; she had thought he was really attracted to her because he continued to seek out her company...

Far from impervious to Raul’s cool exasperation when he finally espied her, lurking behind the shrubbery, Polly dropped her head, her shining fall of mahogany hair concealing her taut profile.

‘What are you doing out of bed?’ Raul demanded the instant he got within hailing distance. ‘I’ll take you back up to your room.’

‘I’m allowed out for fresh air as long as I don’t overdo it,’ Polly said thinly.

‘We’ll go inside,’ Raul decreed. ‘We can’t discuss confidential business here.’

Polly swung her legs off the lounger and got up. ‘Business? I’ve learnt the hard way that my baby is not a piece of merchandise.’

‘Do you really think I feel any different?’ Raul breathed with a raw, bitter edge to his rich, dark drawl. ‘Do you really think you’re the only one of us to have learnt from this mess?’

She couldn’t avoid looking at him in the lift. He stood opposite her, supremely indifferent to the two nurses in the corner studying him with keen female appreciation. He stared at Polly without apology, intense dark eyes welded broodingly to her heart-shaped face and the heated colour steadily building in her cheeks.

She had one question she desperately wanted to ask him. Why did a drop-dead gorgeous heterosexual male of only thirty-one feel the need to hire a surrogate mother to have his child? Why hadn’t he just got married? Or, alternatively, why hadn’t he simply persuaded one of his innumerable blonde bimbo babes into motherhood? Why surrogacy?

The minute Polly settled herself down on the sofa in her room, Raul breathed with a twist of his expressive mouth, ‘You’re still angry with me about Vermont. We should deal with that and get it out of the way...it’s clouding the real issues at stake here.’

At that statement of intent, Polly stiffened, and her skin prickled with shrinking apprehension. ‘Naturally I’m still angry, but I see no point in talking about it. That’s in the past now.’

Raul strolled over to the window. He dug a lean brown hand into the pocket of his well-cut trousers tightening the fit of the fine fabric over his narrow hips and long, muscular thighs. Polly found herself abstractedly studying a part of the male anatomy she had never in her life before studied, the distinctively manly bulge of his manhood. Flushing to the roots of her hair, she hurriedly looked away.

But it was so peculiar, she thought bitterly. So peculiar to be pregnant by a man she had never slept with, never been intimate with in any way. And Raul Zaforteza was all male, like a walking advertisement for high testosterone levels and virility. Why on earth had he chosen to have his child conceived by an anonymous insemination in a doctor’s surgery?

‘If I’m really honest, I wanted to meet you and talk to you right from the moment you signed the contract,’ Raul drawled tautly, interrupting her seething thoughts.

‘Why, for heaven’s sake?’

‘I knew my child would want to know what you were really like.’

A cold chill of repulsion trickled down Polly’s spine. So impersonal, so practical, so utterly unfeeling a motivation.

‘After your mother died, I was aware that you were in considerable distress,’ Raul continued levelly. ‘You needed support... who else was there to provide that support? If you hadn’t discovered that I was the baby’s father, you wouldn’t have been so upset. And isn’t it time you told me how you did penetrate that secret?’

In her mind’s eye, Polly pictured Soledad and all the numerous members of her equally dependent family being flung off the ancestral ranch the older woman had described in Venezuela. She gulped. ‘You gave yourself away. Your behaviour...well, it made me suspicious. I worked the truth out for myself,’ she lied stiltedly.

‘You’re a liar...Soledad told you,’ Raul traded without skipping a beat, shrewd dark eyes grimly amused by her startled reaction. ‘A major oversight on my part. Two women stuck all those weeks in the same house? The barriers came down and you became friendly—’

‘Soledad would never have betrayed you if you hadn’t come into my life without admitting who you were!’ Polly interrupted defensively. ‘She couldn’t cope with being forced to pretend that she didn’t know you.’

‘I was at fault there,’ Raul acknowledged openly, honestly, taking her by surprise. ‘I’m aware of that now. Vermont was a mistake...it personalised what should have remained impersonal and compromised my sense of honour.’

A mistake? A gracious admission of fault, an apology underwritten. Gulping back a spurt of angry revealing words, Polly swallowed hard. He was so smooth, so reasonable and controlled. She wanted to scratch her nails down the starkly handsome planes of those high cheekbones to make him feel for even one second something of what she had suffered!

‘So, now that you know how I found out, are Soledad and her family still working for you?’ Polly enquired stiffly.

Raul dealt her a wry smile. ‘Her family is, but Soledad has moved to Caracas to look after her grandchildren while her daughter’s at work.’

A light knock at the door announced the entry of a maid, bearing Polly’s afternoon tea. Raul asked for black coffee, it not occurring to him for one moment that as a visitor he might not be entitled to refreshment. Blushing furiously, the maid literally rushed to satisfy his request.

Cradling the coffee elegantly in one lean hand, Raul sank down lithely into the armchair opposite her. ‘Are you comfortable here?’

‘Very.’

‘But obviously it’s a challenge to fill the empty hours. I’ll get a video recorder sent in, some tapes, books...I know what you like,’ Raul asserted with complete confidence. ‘I should’ve thought of it before.’

‘I’m not happy with what this place must be costing you,’ Polly told him in a sudden rush. ‘Especially as I am not going to honour that contract.’

Raul scanned her anxious blue eyes. A slight smile momentarily curved his wide, sensual mouth. ‘You need some time and space to consider that decision. Right now, I have no intention of putting pressure on you—’

‘Just having you in the same room is pressure,’ Polly countered uncomfortably. ‘Having you pay my bills makes it even worse.’

‘Whatever happens, I’m still the father of your baby. That makes you my responsibility.’

‘The softly, softly, catchee monkey routine won’t work with me... I’m so fed up with people telling me that I don’t know what I want, or that I don’t know what I’m doing.’ Polly raised her small head high and valiantly clashed with brilliant black eyes as sharp as paint. ‘The truth is that I’ve grown up a lot in the last few months...’

Raul held up a fluid and silencing hand in a gesture that came so naturally to him that she instinctively closed her lips. ‘In swift succession over the past year or so you have lost the three people you cared about most in this world. Your father, your mother and your godmother. That is bound to be affecting your judgement and your view of the future. All I want to do is give you another possible view.’

Setting aside his empty coffee cup, he rose gracefully upright again. Polly watched him nervously, the tip of her tongue stealing out to moisten the dry curve of her lower lip.

Raul’s attention dropped to the soft, generous pink curve of her mouth and lingered, and she felt the oddest buzzing current in the air, her slight frame automatically tensing in reaction. Raul stiffened, the dark rise of blood emphasising the slashing line of his hard cheekbones. Swinging on his heel, he strode over to the window and pushed it wider.

‘It’s stuffy in here... As I was saying, an alternative view of the future,’ he continued flatly. ‘You can’t possibly want to marry that little jerk Henry Grey—’

Taken aback, Polly sat up straighter. ‘How do you know?’

His chiselled profile clenched into aggressive lines. ‘He’s just being greedy...he wouldn’t look twice at a woman expecting another man’s child unless she was an heiress!’

Polly flinched at that revealing assertion. ‘So you found out about my godmother’s will...’

‘Naturally...’ Raul skimmed an assured glance in her direction. ‘And the good news is that you don’t have to marry Henry to inherit that money and make a new start. You’re only twenty-one; you have your whole life in front of you. Why clog it up with Henry? He’s a pompous bore. I’m prepared to give you that million pounds to dump him!’

In sheer shock, Polly’s lips fell open. She began to rise off the sofa. ‘I b-beg your pardon?’ she stammered shakily, convinced he couldn’t possibly have said what she thought he had said.

Raul swung fluidly round to face her again. ‘You heard me. Forget that stupid will, and for the present forget the baby too...just ditch that loser!’

Her blue eyes opened very wide. She gaped at him, and then she took a step forward, fierce anger leaping up inside her. ‘How dare you try to bribe me into doing what you want me to do? How dare you do that?’

Raul’s cool façade cracked to reveal the cold anger beneath. He sent her a sizzling look of derision. ‘Caramba! Surely you’d prefer to stay rich and single when Henry’s the only option on offer?’

Without an instant of hesitation, Polly snatched up the water jug by the bed with a feverish hand and slung the contents at him. ‘That’s what I think of your filthy offer! I’m not for sale this time and I never will be again!’

Soaked by that sizeable flood, and astonished by both her attack and that outburst, Raul stood there dripping and downright incredulous. As his lean fingers raked his wet hair off his brow, his dark eyes flamed to a savage golden blaze.

‘I’m not sorry,’ Polly admitted starkly.

Raul slung her a searing look of scantily leashed fury. ‘Por Dios...I am leaving before I say or do something I might regret!’ he bit out rawly.

The door snapped shut in his imperious wake. Polly snatched in a slow steadying breath and realised that even her hands were shaking. She had never met with a temper that hot before.


CHAPTER THREE

A VIDEO recorder arrived, complete with a whole collection of tapes, and was installed in Polly’s room by lunchtime the following day.

As a gesture, it was calculated to make her feel guilty. That evening, Polly sat in floods of tears just picking through titles like The Quiet Man and Pretty Woman and Sabrina. All escapist romantic movies, picked by a male who knew her tastes far too well for comfort. She grabbed up another tissue in despair.

Raul Zaforteza unleashed a temper she hadn’t known she had. He filled her to overflowing with violent, resentful and distressingly confused emotions. She hated him, she told herself fiercely. He was tearing her apart. She hated him even more when she felt herself react to the humiliating pull of his magnetic sexual attraction.

Worse, Raul understood her so much better than she understood him. In Vermont, she had trustingly revealed too many private thoughts and feelings, while he had been coolly evaluating her, like a scientist studying something curious under a microscope. Why? He had answered that straight off the top of his head and without hesitation.

So that he could answer her child’s questions about her in the future.

Polly shivered at the memory of that admission, chilled to the marrow and hurt beyond belief. It wasn’t possible to get more detached than that from another human being. But how many times had Raul already emphasised that there was nothing but that hateful surrogate contract between them? And why was she still torturing herself with that reality?

He had coolly, contemptuously offered her a million pounds to dump Henry and stay single. And why had he done that? Simply because he felt threatened by the idea of her marrying. Why hadn’t she grasped that fact sooner? If she married, Raul would be forced, whether he liked it or not, to stand back while another man raised his child. So why hadn’t she told him she wasn’t planning to marry Henry?

Polly was honest with herself on that point. She hadn’t seen why she should tell him the truth. What business was it of his? And she had been prepared to hide behind a pretend engagement to Henry, a face-saving pretence that suggested her life had moved on since Vermont. Only Raul had destroyed that pretence. Acquainted as he was with the intricacies of her godmother’s will, he had realised that that inheritance was the only reason Henry was willing to marry her. It mortified Polly that Raul should have guessed even that. In his presence, she was beginning to feel as if she was being speedily stripped of every defence.

But then what did she know about men? It was laughable to be so close to the birth of her own child and still be so ignorant. But her father had been a strict, puritanical man, whose rules and restrictions had made it impossible for her to enjoy a normal social life. It had even been difficult to hang onto female friends with a father who invariably offended them by criticising their clothing or their behaviour.

She had had a crush on a boy in her teens, but he had quickly lost interest when her father refused to allow her to go out with him. When she had started the university degree course that she’d never got to finish, she had lived so close to the campus she had had to continue living at home. She had kept house for her father, assisted in his many church activities and, when his stationery business began to fail, helped with his office work.

She had sneaked out to the occasional party. Riven with guilt at having lied to get out, she had endured a few overenthusiastic clinches, wondering what all the fuss was about while she pushed away groping, over-familiar hands, unable to comprehend why any sane female would want to respond to such crude demands.

She had met another boy while studying. Like his predecessors, he had been unwilling to come to the house and meet her father just to get permission to take her out at night. At first he had thought it was a bit of laugh to see her only during the day. Then one lunchtime he had taken her back to his flat and tried to get her to go to bed with him. She had said no. He had ditched her there and then, called her ‘a pathetic, boring little virgin’ and soon replaced her with a more available girl who didn’t expect love and commitment in return for sex.

It had taken Raul Zaforteza to teach Polly what she had never felt before... a deep, dark craving for physical contact as tormenting to endure as a desperate thirst...

Polly was restless that evening. Aware that she wasn’t asleep, one of the nurses brought her in a cup of tea at ten, and thoughtfully lent her a magazine to read.

As always, during the night, her door was kept ajar to allow the staff to check easily and quietly on her. So when, out of the corner of her eye, Polly saw the door open wider, she turned with a smile for the nurse she was expecting to see and then froze in surprise when she saw Raul instead. Visiting time finished at nine, and it was now after eleven.

‘How did you get in?’ Polly asked in a startled whisper.

Raul leant lithely back against the door until it snapped softly shut. In a black dinner jacket and narrow black trousers, a bow tie at his throat, he exuded sophisticated cool. ‘Talked my way past the security guard and chatted up the night sister.’

Strolling forward, he set a tub of ice cream in front of her. ‘Peppermint—your favourite... my peace offering,’ he murmured with a lazy smile.

That charismatic smile hit Polly like a shot of adrenalin in her veins. Every trace of drowsiness evaporated. Her heart jumped, her mouth ran dry and burning colour started to creep up her throat. He lifted the teaspoon from the cup and saucer on the bed-table she had pushed away and settled it down helpfully on top of the tub.

‘Eat it before it melts,’ he advised, settling down on the end of the bed in an indolent sprawl.

It shook her that Raul should recall that peppermint was her favorite flavour. It shook her even more that he should take the trouble to call in with ice cream at this hour of the night when he had obviously been out somewhere.

With a not quite steady hand, Polly removed the lid on the tub. ‘Henry lied,’ she confided abruptly. ‘We’re not engaged. I’m not going to marry him.’

In the intimate pool of light shed by the Anglepoise lamp by the bed, a wolfish grin slashed Raul’s darkly handsome features. Polly was so mesmerised by it, she dug her teaspoon into empty air instead of the tub and only discovered the ice cream by touch.

‘You could do a lot better than him, cielita,’ he responded softly.

Polly’s natural sense of fairness prompted her to add, ‘Henry isn’t that bad. He was honest. It wasn’t like he pretended to fancy me or anything like that...’

Slumberous dark eyes semi-screened by lush ebony lashes, Raul emitted a low-pitched laugh that sent an odd little tremor down her sensitive spine. ‘Henry has no taste.’

The silence that fell seemed to hum in her eardrums.

Feeling that languorous heaviness in her breasts, the surge of physical awareness she dreaded, Polly shifted uneasily and leapt straight back into speech. ‘Why did you decide to hire a surrogate?’ she asked baldly. ‘It doesn’t make sense to me.’

His strong face tensed. ‘I wanted to have a child while I was still young enough to play with a child...’

‘And the right woman just didn’t come along?’ Polly assumed as the silence stretched.

‘Perhaps I should say that I like women but I like my freedom better. Let’s leave it at that,’ Raul suggested smoothly.

‘I’m so sorry I signed that contract.’ Troubled eyes blue as violets rested on him, her heart-shaped face strained. ‘I don’t know how I thought I could actually go through with it...but at the time I suppose I couldn’t think of anything but how sick my mother was.’

‘I should never have picked you. The psychologist said that he wasn’t convinced you understood how hard it would be to surrender your child—’

‘Did he?’

‘He said you were too intense, too idealistic.’

Polly frowned. ‘So why was I chosen?’

Raul lifted a broad shoulder in a slight fatalistic shrug that was very Latin. ‘I liked you. I didn’t want to have a baby with a woman I couldn’t even like.’

‘I was a really bad choice,’ Polly muttered ruefully. ‘Now I wish you’d listened to the psychologist.’

Raul vented a rather grim laugh. ‘I never listen to what I don’t want to hear. People who work for me know that, and they like to please me. That’s why you were fed lies to persuade you into signing the contract. A very junior lawyer got smart and set you up. He didn’t tell his boss what he’d done until after you’d signed. He expected an accolade for his ingenuity but instead he got fired.’

‘Did he?’ Polly showed her surprise.

‘Sí...’ Raul’s mouth tightened. ‘But my lawyer saw no reason to tell me what had happened. He had no idea that either of us would ever be in a position to find out.’

Polly ate the ice cream, lashes lowering as she savoured each cool, delicious spoonful. The seconds ticked by. Raul watched her. She was aware of his intent scrutiny, curiously satisfied by the attention, but extremely nervous of it too, as if she was a mouse with a hawk circling overhead. It was so quiet, so very quiet at that hour of the night, no distant buzzing bells, no quick-moving feet in the corridor outside.

And then Polly stiffened, a muffled little sound of discomfort escaping her as the baby chose that moment to give her an athletic kick.

Raul leant forward. ‘Que...what is it?’ he demanded anxiously.

‘The baby. It’s always liveliest at night.’ She met the question in his eyes and flushed, reaching a sudden decision. Setting down the ice cream, she pushed the bedding back the few necessary inches, knowing that she was perfectly decently covered in her cotton nightie but still feeling horrendously shy.

Raul drew closer and rested his palm very lightly on her stomach. As he felt the movement beneath his fingers, a look of wonder filled his dark, shimmering gaze and he smiled with sudden quick brilliance. ‘That’s amazing,’ he breathed. ‘Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl yet?’

‘Mr Bevan offered to tell me but I didn’t want to know,’ Polly admitted unevenly, deeply unsettled by that instant of intimate sharing but undeniably touched by his fascination. ‘I like surprises better.’

Raul slowly removed his palm and tugged the sheet back into place. His hands weren’t quite steady. Noting that, she wondered why. She could still feel the cool touch of his hand like a burning imprint on her own flesh. He was so close she could hardly breathe, her own awareness of him so pronounced it was impossible to fight. At best, she knew she could only hope to conceal her reaction, but though she was desperate to think of something to say to distract him her mind was suddenly a blank.

‘You can be incredibly sweet...’ Raul remarked, half under his breath.

Her intent gaze roamed over him, lingering helplessly on the glossy luxuriance of his black hair, the hard, clean line of his high cheekbones and the dark roughening of his jawline that suggested a need to shave twice a day. Reaching the wide, passionate curve of his mouth, she wondered as she had wondered so often before what he tasted like. Then, wildly flustered by that disturbing thought, her eyes lifted, full of confusion, and the dark golden lure of his gaze entrapped and held her in thrall.

‘And incredibly tempting,’ Raul confided huskily as he brought his sensual mouth very slowly down on hers.

She could have pulled back with ease; he gave her every opportunity. But at the first touch of his lips on hers she dissolved into a hot, melting pool of acquiescence. With a muffled groan, he closed his hand into the tumbling fall of her hair to steady himself and let his tongue stab deep into the tender interior of her mouth. And the whole tenor of the kiss changed.

Excitement so intense it burned flamed instantly through her, bringing her alive with a sudden shocking vitality that made her screamingly aware of every inch of her own humming body. And as soon as it began she ached for more, lacing desperate fingers into the silky thickness of his hair, palms sliding down then to curve over to his cheekbones. Only at some dim, distant, uncaring level was she conscious of the buzzing, irritating sound somewhere close by.

Raul released her with a stifled expletive in Spanish and sprang off the bed. With dazed eyes, Polly watched him pull out a mobile phone. And in the deep silence she heard the high-pitched vibration of a woman’s voice before he put the phone to his ear.

‘Dios...I’ll be down in a moment,’ Raul murmured curtly, and, switching the phone off, he dug it back into his pocket.

‘I’m sorry but I have to go. I have someone waiting in the car.’ He raked restive fingers through his now thoroughly tousled black hair, glittering golden eyes screened from her searching scrutiny, mouth compressed into a ferocious line. ‘I’ll see you soon. Buenas noches.’

The instant he left the room, Polly thrust back the bedding and scrambled awkwardly out of bed. She flew over to the window which overlooked the front entrance and pulled back the curtain. She saw the limo...and she saw the beautiful blonde in her sleek, short crimson dress pacing beside it. Then she watched the blonde arrange herself in a studied pose against the side of the luxury car so that she looked like a glamorous model at an automobile show.

Polly rushed back across the room to douse the lamp and then returned to the window. Raul emerged from the clinic. The blonde threw herself exuberantly into his arms Polly’s nerveless fingers dropped from the curtain. She reeled back against the cold wall and closed her arms round her trembling body, feeling sick and dizzy and utterly disgusted with herself.




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