The Baby Scandal

“Would you ever have told me?

“Or would you have allowed my child to be born into this world,” Franco continued quietly, “without ever knowing the identity of its father?”

Ruth felt her mouth go dry. “I thought I was doing the right thing.”

“The right thing? Surely, as a vicar’s daughter, you must know that the last thing you were doing was the right thing!”

“All right, then, the best thing. For…everyone…”

Relax and enjoy our fabulous series about couples whose passion results in pregnancies…sometimes unexpected! Of course, the birth of a baby is always a joyful event, and we can guarantee that our characters will become besotted moms and dads—but what happened in those nine months before?

Share the surprises, emotions, drama and suspense as our parents-to-be come to terms with the prospect of bringing a new life into the world. All will discover that the business of making babies brings with it the most special love of all….

Our next arrival will be

Her Secret Pregnancy

by

Sharon Kendrick

Harlequin Presents #2198

The Baby Scandal

Cathy Williams

MILLS & BOON

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ONE

RUTH heard the sound of footsteps striding up the staircase towards the offices and froze with a bundle of files in one hand. The wooden flooring, which was the final word in glamour, unfortunately had an annoying tendency to carry sound, and now, with the place completely deserted except for her, the amplified noise travelled with nerve-shattering precision straight to her wildly beating heart.

This was London.

She had laughed off all her parents’ anxious concerns about the need to be careful in The Big Bad City, but now every word came flooding back to her with nightmarish clarity.

Muggers. Perverts. Rapists.

She cleared her throat and wondered whether she should gather up some courage and confront whoever had sneaked into the empty two-storey Victorian house, which had been tastefully converted one year ago to accommodate a staff of fifteen.

Courage, however, was not her forte, so she timidly stood her ground and prayed that the bloodthirsty, drug-driven maniac would see that there was nothing to steal and leave the way he had come.

The footsteps, which seemed to know precisely where they wanted to go, materialised into a dark shadow visible behind the closed glass door of the office. The corridor light had been switched off and, although it was summer, autumn was just around the corner, and at a little after seven-thirty night was already drawing in.

Now, she thought frantically, would be a very appropriate time to faint.

She didn’t. Just the opposite. The soles of her feet appeared to have become glued to the floor, so that not only could she not collapse into a convenient heap to the ground, she couldn’t even move.

The shadow pushed open the glass door and strode in with the typical aggressive confidence of someone with foul intent on his mind.

Some of her paralysed facial muscles came to life and she stuck her chin out bravely and said, in a high-pitched voice, ‘May I help you?’

The man approaching her, now that she could see him clearly in the fluorescent light, was tall and powerfully built. He had his jacket slung over one shoulder and his free hand was rammed into the pocket of his trousers.

He didn’t look like a crazed junkie, she thought desperately. On the other hand, he didn’t look like a hapless tourist who had wandered accidentally into the wrong building, thinking it was a shop, perched as it was in one of the most exclusive shopping areas in London, between an expensive hat shop and an even more over-priced jeweller’s.

In fact, there was nothing remotely hapless-looking about this man at all. His short hair was black, the eyes staring at her were piercingly blue and every angle of his face and body suggested a sort of hard aggression that she found overwhelming.

‘Where is everyone?’ he demanded, affording her a brief glance and then proceeding to stroll around the office with proprietorial insolence.

Ruth followed his movements helplessly with her eyes.

‘Perhaps you could tell me who you are?’

‘Perhaps you could tell me who you are?’ he said, pausing in his inspection of the assortment of desks and computer terminals to glance over his shoulder.

‘I work here,’ she answered, gathering up her failing courage and deciding that, since this man obviously didn’t, then she had every right to be as curt with him as she wanted.

Unfortunately curt, like courage, was not in her repertoire. She was gentle to the point of blushingly gauche, and that was one of the reasons why she had moved to London. So that some of its brash self-confidence might somehow rub off on her by a mysterious process of osmosis.

‘Name?’

‘R-Ruth Jacobs,’ Ruth stammered, forgetting that he had no business asking her anything at all, since he was a trespasser on the premises.

‘Mmm. Doesn’t ring any bells.’ He had stopped inspecting the office now and was inspecting her instead, perched on the edge of one of the desks. ‘You’re not one of my editors. I have a list of them and your name isn’t on it.’

Ruth was no longer terrified now. She was downright confused, and it showed in the transparent play of emotions on her smooth, pale face.

‘Who are you?’ she finally asked, lowering her eyes, because something about his blatant masculinity was a little too overpowering for her liking. ‘I don’t believe I caught your name.’

‘Probably because I didn’t give it,’ he answered drily. ‘Ruth Jacobs, Ruth Jacobs…’ He tilted his head to one side and proceeded to stare at her with leisurely thoroughness. ‘Yes, you could do…very well indeed…’

‘Look…I’m in the process of locking up for the day…perhaps you could make an appointment to see Miss Hawes in the morning…?’ It finally occurred to her that she must look very odd in this immobile position, with her hand semi-raised and holding a stack of files in a death-like grip. She unglued her feet from the ten-inch square they had occupied since the man entered the room, and darted across to Alison’s desk for her appointment book.

‘What’s your job here?’

Ruth stopped what she was doing and took a deep breath. ‘I refuse to answer any more questions until you tell me who you are,’ she said in a bold rush. She could feel the colour redden her cheeks and, not for the first time, cursed her inability to dredge up even the remotest appearance of savoir faire. At the age of twenty-two, she should surely have left behind all this ridiculous blushing.

‘I’m Franco Leoni.’ He allowed a few seconds for his name to be absorbed, and when she continued to stare at him in bewilderment, he added, with a hint of impatience, ‘I own this place, Miss Jacobs.’

“Oh,’ Ruth said dubiously.

‘Doesn’t Alison tell you anything? Bloody awful man-management. How long have you been here? Are you a temp? Why the hell is she allowing a temp the responsibility of locking up? This is damned ridiculous.’

The rising irritation in his voice snapped her out of her zombie-like incomprehension.

‘I’m not a temp, Mr Leoni,’ she said shortly. ‘I’ve been here virtually since it was taken over, eleven months ago.’

‘Then you should know who I am. Where’s Alison?’

‘She left about an hour ago,’ Ruth admitted reluctantly. She was frantically trying to recognise his name, and failing. She knew that the magazine, which had been a small, money-losing venture, had been taken over by some conglomerate or other, but the precise names of the people involved eluded her.

‘Left for where? Get her on the line for me.’

‘It’s Friday, Mr Leoni. Miss Hawes won’t be at home. I believe she was going out with…with…with her mother to the theatre.’

The small white lie was enough to bring another telling wash of colour to her face, and she stared resolutely at the bank of windows behind him. By nature she was scrupulously honest, but the convoluted workings of her brain had jumped ahead to some obscure idea that this man, whether he owned the place or not, might not be too impressed if he knew that her boss was on a dinner date with another man.

Alison, tall, vivacious, red-haired and thoroughly irreverent, was the sort of woman who spent her life rotating men and enjoying every minute of it. The last thing Ruth felt equipped to handle at seven-thirty on a Friday evening was a rotated boyfriend. And this man looked just the sort to appeal to her boss. Tall, striking, oozing sexuality. The sort of man who would appeal to most women, she conceded grudgingly, if you liked that sort of obvious look.

And if you were the type who didn’t view basic good manners as an essential part of someone’s personality.

‘Then I suppose you’ll just have to believe me when I tell you that I’m her boss, won’t you?’ He smiled slowly, watching her face as though amused by everything he could read there. ‘And, believe it or not, I’m very glad that I bumped into you.’ A speculative look had entered his eyes which she didn’t much care for.

‘I really need to be getting home…’

‘Parents might be worried?’

‘I don’t live with my parents, actually,’ Ruth informed him coldly. After nearly a year and a quarter, the novelty of having her own place, small and nondescript though it might be, was still a source of pleasure for her. She had been the last of her friends to fly the family nest and she had only done so because part of herself knew that she needed to.

She adored her parents, and loved the vicarage where she had lived since she was a child, but some obscure part of her had realised over the years that she had to spread her wings and sample what else the big world had to offer, or else buckle down to the realisation that her life would remain neatly parcelled up in the small village where she had grown up, surrounded by her cosy circle of friends all of whose ambitions had been to get married and have big families and never mind what else there was out there.

‘No?’ He didn’t sound as though he believed that, and she glared at him.

‘No. I’m twenty-two years old and I live in a flat in Hampstead. Now, do you want to make an appointment to see Miss Hawes in the morning or not?’

‘You keep forgetting that I own this company. I’ll see her in the morning, all right, but there’s no need for me to make an appointment.’

Arrogant. That had been the word she’d been searching for to describe this man. She folded her arms and stared at him.

‘Fine. Now perhaps you could see yourself to the door…?’

‘Have you eaten?’

‘What?’

‘I said…’

‘I heard what you said, Mr Leoni. I just wondered what you meant by it.’

‘It means that I’m asking you to have dinner with me, Miss Jacobs.’

‘I beg your pardon? I’m afraid…I couldn’t possibly…I don’t usually…’

‘Accept dinner invitations from strangers?’

Yes, of course he had known what she had been thinking. She didn’t have the knack of dissembling.

‘That’s right,’ Ruth informed him, bristling. ‘I know that must seem a little unusual to you, but I…’ Where was she going with this one? A long monologue on her sheltered life? An explanation on being a vicar’s daughter? Hadn’t she come to London in the hope of gaining a bit of sophistication?

‘I don’t bite, Miss Jacobs.’ He pushed himself away from the edge of the desk and she looked at him guardedly. If he was trying to make her believe that he was as harmless as the day was long, then he was living on another planet. Innocent and naïve she might be, but born yesterday she was not.

‘You’re my employee. Call it maintaining good relations with someone who works for me. Besides…’ The assessing look was back on his face, sending little tingles of apprehension racing down her spine. ‘I’d like to find out a bit more about you. Find out what you do in the company… And in case you still don’t believe who I am…’ He sighed and withdrew his wallet from his pocket, flicked it open and produced a letter to Alison, with his name flamboyantly emblazoned in black at the bottom, and his impressive title typed underneath.

Ruth scanned the letter briefly, noting in passing that it implied, with no attempts to beat around the bush, that the magazine had not accumulated enough sales and that it was time to get to the drawing board and sort it out. Presumably the very reason he had made an appearance at the ridiculous hour of seven-thirty on a Friday evening.

‘There now,’ he said, without the slightest trace of remorse that he had allowed her to wallow in nightmarish possibilities when he could have eliminated all that by simply identifying himself from the beginning. ‘Believe me?’

‘Thank you. Yes.’

‘What do you do here?’

‘Nothing very important,’ Ruth said hastily, just in case he got it into his head that he could quiz her on the details of running a magazine. ‘I’m an odd-job man…woman…person…I do a bit of typing, take calls, fetch and carry…that’s all…’

‘Tell me all about it over dinner.’ His hand brushed hers as he retrieved his letter and rammed it back into his pocket, and she could feel something inside her shrinking away from him. She had never met anyone quite like him before. Her boyfriends, all three of them, had been from her town, and they had been nice boys, the sort who were quite happy to trundle through life with modest aspirations and no great appetite for taking life by its head and felling it.

Franco Leoni looked the sort who relished challenges of that sort, thrived on them.

‘Now, why don’t we lock up here and find ourselves something to eat?’ He was now so close to her that the hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end. Up close, he was even more disconcerting than he was with a bit of distance between them. Underneath the well-tailored clothes, every inch of his body spoke of well-toned, highly muscled power, and the impression was completed by his swarthy olive colouring, at odds with the strikingly light eyes.

She cautiously edged away and snatched her jacket from the hook on the wall and slipped it on.

‘Good girl.’ He opened the door for her and then watched as she nervously locked it behind her and shoved the jangling keyring into her bag.

‘My car’s just outside,’ he said, as they walked down the staircase, ‘and please, try not to wear that fraught expression on your face. It makes me feel like a sick old man who takes advantage of innocent young girls.’ There was lazy amusement in his voice when he said this, and she didn’t have to cast her eyes in his direction to know that he was laughing at her.

His car was a silver Jaguar. He opened the door for her, waited till she had shuffled inside, then strode to the driver’s seat. As soon as the door was shut, he turned to her and said, ‘Now, what do you fancy eating?’

‘Anything!’ Ruth said quickly. The darkness of the car made his presence even more stifling, and she cursed herself for having been railroaded into accepting his invitation. Yes, so he might well be the owner of the company she worked for, but that didn’t mean that he was trustworthy where the opposite sex was concerned.

She wryly recognised the outdated prudery of her logic and smiled weakly to herself. As an only child, and a girl on top of it, she had been cherished and protected by her parents from day one.

‘A girl without pretensions,’ he murmured to himself, starting the engine, ‘very refreshing. Don’t care what you eat. Do you like Italian?’

‘Fine. Yes.’

She could feel her heart pounding like a steam engine inside her as the car pulled smoothly away from the curb.

‘So, where do you fit into the scheme of things at Issues?’

‘If you own the magazine, how is it that you’ve never made an appearance there?’ Ruth blurted out curiously. She was pressed against the car door and was looking at him warily with her wide grey eyes.

‘The magazine is a very, very minor company of mine.’ He glanced in her direction. ‘Have I mentioned to you that I don’t bite? I’m not infectious either, so there’s no need to fall out of the car in your desperation to put a few more inches between us.’ He looked back to the road and Ruth shuffled herself into a more normal position. ‘I bought it because I thought it could be turned around and because I viewed it as a sort of hobby.’

‘A sort of hobby?’ Ruth asked incredulously. ‘You bought a magazine as a hobby?’ The thought of such extravagance was almost beyond comprehension. ‘What sort of life do you lead? I always thought that hobbies involved doing things like playing tennis, or squash or bird-watching…or collecting model railways…Your hobby is buying small companies just for the fun of it?”

‘There’s no need to sound quite so shocked,’ he said irritably, frowning as he stared ahead and manoeuvred the honeycomb of narrow streets.

‘Well, I am shocked,’ Ruth informed him, forgetting to be intimidated.

‘Why?’

‘Because, Mr Leoni…’

‘You can call me Franco. I’ve never been a great believer in surnames.’

‘Because,’ she continued, skipping over his interruption, ‘it seems obscene to have so much money that you can buy a company just for the heck of it!’

‘My little gesture,’ he pointed out evenly, although a dark flush had spread across his neck, ‘happens to have created jobs, and in accordance with the package I’ve agreed with all my employees, including yourself, you all stand to gain if the company succeeds.’

Ruth didn’t say anything, and eventually, he said abruptly, ‘Well? What have you got to say to that?’

‘I…nothing…’

He clicked his tongue in annoyance. ‘I…nothing…’ he mimicked. ‘What does that mean? Does it mean that you have an opinion on the subject? You had one a minute ago…’

‘It means that you’re my employer, Mr Leoni…

‘Franco!’

‘Yes, well…’

‘Say it!’ he said grimly.

‘Say what?’

‘My name!’

‘It means that you’re my employer, Franco…’ She went hot as she said that, and hurriedly moved on. ‘And discretion is the better part of valour.’ That was one of her father’s favourite sayings. He spent so much time listening to his parishioners that he had always lectured to her on the importance of hearing without judging, and taking the wise course rather than the impulsive, thoughtless one.

‘Hang discretion!’

Ruth looked at him curiously. Was he getting hot under the collar? He hadn’t struck her as the sort of man who ever got hot under the collar.

‘Okay,’ she said soothingly, ‘I take your point that you’ve created jobs, and if it succeeds then we all succeed. It just seems to me that buying a company as a bit of fun is the sort of thing…’ She took a deep breath here and then said in a rush, ‘That someone does because they have too much money and might be…bored…’

‘Bored?’ he spluttered furiously, swerving the car into a space by the pavement as though only suddenly remembering the purpose of the trip in the first place had been to get them to a restaurant, which he appeared to have overshot. He killed the engine and turned his full attention on her.

Ruth reverted to her original position against the car door. Her shoulder-length vanilla-blonde hair brushed the sides of her face and her mouth was parted in anticipation of some horrendous verbal attack, full frontal, no holds barred. He certainly looked in the mood for it.

He inhaled deeply, raked his fingers through his hair and then shook his head in wonderment. ‘How long is it since I met you?’ He glanced at his watch while Ruth helplessly wondered where this was going. ‘Forty-five minutes? Forty-five minutes and you’ve managed to prod me in more wrong places than most people can accomplish in a lifetime.’

‘I’m—I’m sorry…’ Ruth stammered.

‘Quite an achievement,’ he carried on, ignoring her mumbled apology.

‘I don’t consider it much of an achievement to antagonise someone,’ she said, aghast at his logic.

‘Which is probably why you’re so good at it.’ He had regained his temporarily misplaced composure and clicked open his door. ‘I’m looking forward to dinner,’ he said, before he slid out of the driver’s seat. ‘This is the first time I’ve walked down a road and not known where it was leading.’

What road? Ruth thought, as she stepped out of the car onto the pavement. What was he talking about? She hoped that he didn’t expect her to be some kind of cabaret for him, because she had no intentions of fulfilling his expectations, employer or not.

The Italian restaurant was small and crowded and smelled richly of garlic and herbs and good food. It was also familiar to the man at her side, because he was greeted warmly by the door and launched into fluent Italian, leaving her a chance to look around her while her mind churned with questions about him.

‘You speak fluent Italian,’ she said politely, as they were shown to their table. ‘Have you lived in England long?’

They sat down and he stared at her thoughtfully. ‘You look much younger than twenty-two. Where are you from?’

Ruth had spent her life being told that she looked much younger than she was. She supposed that by the time she hit fifty she would be glad for the compliment, but right now, sitting opposite a man who bristled with worldly-wise sophistication, it didn’t strike her as much of a compliment.

‘A very small town in Shropshire,’ she said, staring at the menu which had been handed to her. ‘You wouldn’t have heard of it.’

‘Try me.’

So she did, and when he admitted that he had never heard of the place she gave her shy, soft laugh and said, ‘Told you so.’

‘So you came here to London…for excitement?’

She shrugged. ‘I fancied a change of scenery,’ she said vaguely, not wanting to admit that the search for a bit of excitement had contributed more than a little to her reasons for leaving.

‘And what were you doing before you moved here?’ He hadn’t bothered to look at the menu, and when the waiter came to take their orders, she realised that he already knew what he wanted. Halibut, grilled. Her choice of chicken in a wine and cream sauce seemed immoderate in comparison, but a lack of appetite was not something she had ever suffered from, despite her slight build. She had eaten her way through twenty-two years of her mother’s wonderful home cooking, including puddings that ignored advice on cholesterol levels, and had never put on any excess weight.

‘Secretarial work,’ she answered. ‘Plus I helped Mum and Dad a lot at home. Doing typing for Dad, going to see his parishioners…’

‘Your father’s a…priest?’ He couldn’t have sounded more shocked if she had said that her father manufactured opium for a living.