Contract Baby

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.