The Secret He Must Claim

Before Mr Carstairs could reply, a voice spoke from the back of the room. A deep voice with a husky accent that Elin had heard too often in her dreams in the past year. ‘Ralph did not have a legitimate natural son, but he had a bastard.’ The voice became harsh. ‘I am Ralph Saunderson’s biological son and heir.’

Elin felt her stomach twist. This can’t be happening, she thought, prayed. If I turn my head, he won’t be there and this whole nightmare will have been a dream. She jerked her head round and her heart juddered to a standstill. At her birthday party a year ago she’d thought him the most beautiful man she’d ever seen, but Cortez was even more stunning than her memories of him.

‘So it was you I saw in the church,’ she choked. ‘I thought I’d recognised you, but there was no reason why you should be there...or so I believed.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper as the shock of seeing him stole her breath from her lungs.

Jarek had leapt up from the sofa. He looked at Cortez and back to Elin. ‘Do you know this man?’

She swallowed, desperately trying to block out the images in her mind of Cortez’s naked, powerfully muscular body poised above her as she lay sprawled on her bed at the house in Kensington. His dark olive skin a stark contrast to her paleness as he pushed her dress up around her waist and nudged her thighs apart. A bold conquistador laying claim to his prize. At least all that sleek, hard beauty was clothed today, but the formality of his charcoal-grey suit that he wore with a black shirt and tie did not lessen the impact of his raw masculinity.

‘We...we met once,’ she managed. The gold flecks in Cortez’s dark eyes gleamed with what Elin furiously recognised was amusement. Never had she been more grateful for her reserved English upbringing with its emphasis on controlling her emotions. ‘It was an unmemorable event,’ she said coolly.

Her brother frowned. ‘Did you know of his alleged relationship to Ralph?’

‘Of course not.’ The faint suspicion in Jarek’s eyes felt like a knife in her heart. She owed her life to her brother. If it hadn’t been for him, God knew what would have happened to her when Sarajevo had been attacked and a bomb had landed on the orphanage. ‘If I’d had any inkling I would have told you.’

Elin bit her lip as her brother strode across the library and flung open the door. ‘Jarek—where are you going?’ She carefully did not look at Cortez as she hurried past him, but she was conscious of his tall, brooding presence and the evocative spicy scent of his aftershave tugged on her senses.

‘You know why Ralph has done this, don’t you?’ Jarek said bitterly when Elin caught up with him in the entrance hall. ‘He blamed me for Mama’s death. And he was right. I should have saved her.’

‘There was nothing you could have done against an armed raider. It wasn’t your fault. Jarek...’ Elin’s hand fell from her brother’s arm as he spun away from her and grabbed his motorbike helmet from the hall table.

‘If I hadn’t tried to be a hero, Lorna would still be here. I took a gamble when I tackled the gunman, but the gamble failed. I understand why Ralph excluded me from his will but he had no reason to cut you out.’ Jarek opened the front door and turned to face her. ‘Do you know what I wish?’ he said rawly. ‘I wish that when we were held hostage in the raid on the jewellers the goddamned gunman had shot me instead of Mama. It’s obvious that’s what Ralph wished.’

‘Oh, please be careful.’ Elin wanted to go after her brother when he ran down the front steps and leapt onto his motorbike parked on the drive, but Peter Carstairs came out of the library and spoke to her.

‘Mr Ramos was kind enough to give me a lift here and I arranged for a taxi to collect me,’ he said as a car turned onto the driveway. ‘I’m sorry to have been the harbinger of bad news, my dear. This must all be a great shock.’

The solicitor was the master of the understatement, Elin thought with a flash of macabre humour. ‘My father died from a brain tumour. Is it possible that he was not of sound mind when he made Cortez Ramos his heir? Do we even know for sure that Mr Ramos is Ralph’s son?’

She tensed when she saw Cortez standing in the doorway of the library and realised he must have overheard her. Too bad, she thought grimly. She was fighting for her and her brother’s inheritance and, more importantly, for her son’s future.

Harry was Cortez’s son.

Oh, God, she couldn’t think about the implications now, or how she was going to break the news to the granite-faced stranger she’d had sex with one time that he had fathered a child. She heard Jarek’s motorbike roar off down the drive and a knot of fear for his safety tightened in her stomach.

The solicitor shook his head. ‘Mr Saunderson was definitely of sound mind when he asked me to draw up a new will for him six months or so after his wife’s death. I believe he had suspected for some time that Mr Ramos could be his son and when a DNA test proved it, he invited his son here to Cuckmere Hall. He asked me to draw up the new will on the same day that Mr Ramos visited, on the third of March a year ago.’

‘The third of March is my birthday,’ Elin said faintly. The realisation that her adoptive father had written his extraordinary will, which effectively left her penniless, on her birthday, felt like a devastating betrayal. There was no possibility of her marrying within a year so that she could claim a fifty per cent share of Saunderson’s Wines.

She felt bombarded by one shock after another, and on top of the worry about her future she was terrified that her brother would risk his life riding his motorbike dangerously fast. She felt the same sensation of being unable to breathe that she’d experienced two nights ago in a crowded nightclub. Her legs buckled beneath her, and as if from a long way off she heard Cortez swear.

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