This Is My Child

Cover Page

Excerpt

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Copyright

“I Never Understood My Son For A Moment,”

Giles said at last.

“As long as you understand him now—” Melanie began.

“But I don’t. The only thing I have to hold on to is you. From the first moment, you’ve known what to. say and do. It’s strange—as though you and David were connected by an invisible thread.”

Melanie tensed as he came so near her secret. But there was nothing but warmth in the smile he turned on her, and her heart gave the same disturbing lurch it had given before.

Dear Reader,

We all know that Valentine’s Day is the most romantic holiday of the year. It’s the day you show that special someone in your life—husband, fiancé…even your mom!—just how much you care by giving them special gifts of love.

And our special Valentine’s gift to you is a book from a writer many of you have said is one of your favorites, Annette Broadrick. Megan’s Marriage isn’t just February’s MAN OF THE MONTH, it’s also the first book of Annette’s brand-new DAUGHTERS OF TEXAS series. This passionate love story is just right for Valentine’s Day.

February also marks the continuation of SONS AND LOVERS, a bold miniseries about three men who discover that love and family are the most important things in life. In Reese: The Untamed by Susan Connell, a dashing bachelor meets his match and begins to think that being married might be more pleasurable than he’d ever dreamed. The series continues in March with Ridge: The Avenger by Leanne Banks.

This month is completed with four more scintillating love stories: Assignment: Marriage by Jackie Merritt, Daddy’s Choice by Doreen Owens Malek, This Is My Child by Lucy Gordon and Husband Material by Rita Rainville. Don’t miss any of them!

So Happy Valentine’s Day and Happy Reading!

Lucia Macro

Senior Editor

Please address questions and book requests to:

Silhouette Reader Service

U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

This is My Child

Lucy Gordon

LUCY GORDON

met her husband-to-be in Venice, fell in love the first evening and got engaged two days later. After twenty-three years they’re still happily married and now live in England with their three dogs. For twelve years Lucy was a writer for an English women’s magazine. She interviewed many of the world’s most interesting men, including Warren Beatty, Richard Chamberlain, Sir Roger Moore, Sir Alec Guinness and Sir John Gielgud.

In 1985 she won the Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award for Outstanding Series Romance Author. She has also won a Golden Leaf Award from the New Jersey Chapter of RWA, was a finalist in the RWA Golden Medallion contest in 1988 and won the 1990 RITA Award in the Best Traditional Romance category for Song of the Lorelei.

One

Melanie sat in the hallway of Giles Haverill’s luxurious house, and hated him.

She’d hated him for eight years, but never so much as at this moment, when she was about to meet him for the first time. She tried to fight down the feeling, knowing that the next few minutes would be the most crucial of her life. She must smile and say the things that would persuade this man to take her into his home. And he must never suspect that beneath her quiet exterior she was burning with hate.

The door to his study was pulled open and an unseen voice said curtly, “You can come in now, Miss Haynes.”

She went inside and there was her enemy, reseating himself behind an oak desk strewn with papers. He was a large man, broad shouldered and dark haired, with a lean, handsome face set in a frown. Tension radiated from him. He looked her quickly up and down out of dark eyes that seemed to take in everything in one glance. Melanie trembled, afraid that he might look right into her heart and read her secret. But he merely grunted in a way that might have indicated approval of her neat clothes and pinned-back hair. He nodded her to a chair and put away some papers.

While he was occupied, she glanced around at the room. It was the office of a rich man, of plain if expensive tastes. The waste bin was made of steel, as was the lamp that hung over the desk. Where the walls weren’t covered with steel shelving they were white, and bare except for two stark, modern paintings in vivid colors. The carpet was gray, and the most notable object in the room was a large sofa of soft black leather that exactly matched the seat behind the desk. The total effect was of a kind of austere beauty, but the room was chiefly functional, and it fitted her mental picture of Giles Haverill.

He looked up from his papers. “I was rather surprised to receive your call, Miss Haynes. It’s true I was thinking of employing someone to care for my son, but I hadn’t advertised yet.”

“Somebody mentioned it at Ayleswood School,” she said. “I’m working there at the moment.”

“So you told me on the phone.” He gave her a sharp look. “There are eighty pupils at that school. Would you have applied to look after any of the others?” he demanded abruptly.

“No-”

“Then why David?”

“I couldn’t help noticing him—”

“Considering that he’s been in trouble constantly for the last few months, that isn’t surprising.”

“I don’t believe David is a naughty child,” Melanie said quickly. “Just unhappy. Of course I know that his mother isn’t here anymore—”

“His mother left me a year ago, for another man. She—didn’t choose to take her son. I’m glad of that for my own sake, but it’s had an unfortunate effect on David.”

“I can imagine,” Melanie said in a low voice.

“I wonder if you can picture just how bad it is.” Giles Haverill’s mouth twisted wryly. “Truancy, petty theft, lying—all the things that lead to delinquency later on if they’re not curbed now.”

“I should rather say, if they’re not cured now.”

Giles shook his head. “My son isn’t ill, and I don’t believe unhappiness excuses wrongdoing. I want to do everything I can to make him a happy child again, but that doesn’t include turning a blind eye when he does things he shouldn’t. No son of mine is going to grow up badly behaved because I didn’t lift a finger to prevent it.”

Melanie gripped her hands together out of sight, wondering how long she could conceal her dislike of this man with his harsh judgments. He spoke of making his child happy, but there was no love in his voice, just an iron determination to arrange things in the way he wanted.

“Did you know David was adopted?” Giles Haverill shot the question at her.

“The—school records didn’t mention it,” Melanie replied.

If he noticed her cautious choice of words he gave no sign. “My wife couldn’t have children,” he said. “Perhaps that’s why she left him behind.”

“Does he know he’s adopted?”

“Yes. We told him as soon as he could understand. It seemed best for him to grow up knowing it naturally. But it adds to the problem now. He feels he’s lost two mothers—if you can dignify the first one with the name of ‘mother.’ A woman who gives up her newborn child is beneath contempt. Don’t you agree?”

“I—surely you should hear her side of it?” Melanie stammered.

“I don’t think there can be any justification. However, let that pass. I must also tell you about Mrs. Braddock. She’s a welfare worker who’s taken far too close an interest in David since he’s been misbehaving. She’s been writing reports talking about how ‘disturbed’ he is, and how he needs to be ‘closely observed.’” A sudden cloud of black anger transformed his face, and he said swiftly, “To dare say that my son—my son…”

Melanie stared, appalled at the rage that had distorted his handsome features. He looked cruel and ruthless, capable of anything. He saw her looking at him and recovered his composure. “She’s started hinting about taking David into care, putting him with foster parents who could ‘give him a normal home,’ as she puts it.”

“But he’s used to you,” Melanie protested. “Surely this woman can’t think it will be good for him to lose you, as well as your wife?”

“That’s what I said to her. But, as she pointed out, I haven’t been around too much. I have a large business to run, and I’ve mostly left the care of David to Zena. When she left I thought I could manage, but it wasn’t that easy.” He saw her wry face and said sharply, “I’m not a ‘New Man,’ Miss Haynes. I don’t pretend to be. I’ve tried to raise David as my father raised me, to have a sense of responsibility, and be able to take on the task of running Haverill & Son. It’s a very big job and it needs a man trained virtually from the cradle.”

“I see.”

“I wonder if you do,” he responded, quick to pick up the chilly note in her voice. “I made sure he had the best education money could buy because he’s going to need it, and he justified my faith in him. Right from the start he was ahead of the class. In his nursery school he could read while the others were playing in the sand pit.”

“I expect he knew there’d be hell to pay if he couldn’t,” Melanie couldn’t resist saying.

“I’ve always let him know that my expectations of him were high. I think children respond to that. And he did respond—until recently. Now it’s a story of truancy and idleness and frankly—”

“Frankly you feel he’s letting you down,” Melanie challenged him.

He looked at her hard for a moment. “Yes.”

She’d meant to play it cool, but her temper was seething out of control. “Then I don’t know why you don’t let Mrs. Braddock have him. Unsatisfactory goods, to be returned.”

“Because he’s mine,” he asserted bluntly.

“But he isn’t, is he? Not by blood.”

“Blood has nothing to do with it,” he said, dismissing the whole of nature with an arrogant sweep of his hand. “He’s mine because I say he’s mine, because I’ve made him mine. And I don’t let go of what’s mine.”

Their eyes met for a long moment. Then Giles Haverill recollected himself with a start, realizing that he’d come perilously close to defending and explaining himself. It was his rule never to do either of these things, but this young woman had lured him out from behind his protective barriers in a few minutes. He had two contradictory impulses: to get rid of her before she troubled him further, and to confide in her the hell of confusion and misery in which he was living. He found that he couldn’t choose between them, which alarmed him even more, because indecisiveness was foreign to his nature.

“Coffee?” he asked, retreating to safety.

The abrupt change of subject caught her off guard. “Thank you—er—yes—”

“I should have offered you some when you came in, but I’m so distracted these days that I forget my manners.” He went to a percolator by the wall and poured her some. “Milk? Sugar?”

“Milk, no sugar, thank you.”

“Tell me about yourself,” he said when he’d served her and sat down. “You said in your letter that you left school at sixteen. No university?”

“It didn’t attract me. I have two sisters and a brother, who all went.”

“But you were the odd one out? I wonder why.” He gave a sudden grin, which illuminated his face, giving it a mocking look that was unexpectedly pleasing. “Black sheep?”

“Yes,” she said impulsively. “I was the naughty child of the family. Everyone said so.”

“So you and David have something in common. Careful! Don’t choke.”

“I’m sorry,” she gasped. “Went down—wrong way.”

He waited until she was calm again. “What was the matter? Did you mind my saying you and David had something in common?”

She flinched from his penetrating eyes, afraid lest they discern just how much in common she had with his son. “Not at all,” she said quickly. “I’m glad of it. I think David needs just the kind of understanding that I can give him. I know how naughtiness grows out of misery.”

“Was your childhood as unhappy as that?”

“It’s no fun being the black sheep.”

“But that’s all in the past. I’m sure your parents are proud of you now.”

There was a long pause before Melanie said, “I’m not in touch with my family anymore—not for some years.”

He waited to see if she would elaborate on this, but she didn’t. He sat considering her for some moments, a frown darkening his face. Then he said abruptly, “I can’t see you properly there. Come over here.”

He rose and went to the big bay window. She followed him and stood in the light while he studied her. She too could see better now. He was in his mid-thirties, with a stern face that seemed made for authority. His mouth surprised her, being well made and mobile, a mouth that many women would have found attractive. It was relaxed now as he looked at her, and both from his mouth and his dark eyes, she gained an impression that this was an unhappy man. But she had no pity for him. He’d contributed too much to her own unhappiness for that.

“Take your hair down,” he commanded.

“What?” She stared at him. “What difference does my hair make?”

“I don’t make pointless requests. Please do as I ask.”

She pulled the pins from her fair hair, letting it tumble in waves around her shoulders, and stared at him defiantly. He laid his hand on it, taking a strand between his fingers, savoring its silkiness. “It’s lovely hair,” he said quietly.

“I don’t see what my physical attributes have to do with anything,” she snapped.

“I think you do. That’s why you pinned your hair back, to hide its beauty. That’s why you don’t wear makeup, because you want to look severe and professional. It doesn’t work. You’ve got a lovely, delicate face, wonderful green eyes and a figure that must keep the men chasing after you.” He said this in a cool, appraising voice that robbed the words of any tinge of flattery. “And you know as well as I do why I can’t possibly employ you.”

Her heart thundered. She recovered herself enough to say, “But I don’t know.”

“David needs stability. He needs a woman who’ll stay with him through thick and thin. I had in mind somebody middle-aged, a widow or divorcée, perhaps with grown-up children, even grandchildren. You’re a young, beautiful woman, which means you won’t stay long.”

“It doesn’t mean that at all—”

“Oh, come! At your age the natural sequence of events is to fall in love and get married. I don’t want you vanishing in a few months, just when he’s learned to trust you.”

“There’s no question of that,” Melanie said desperately.

“No question?” he echoed, with a satirical look that made her want to scream at him.

“No question whatever,” she said, trying to speak calmly.

“You don’t mean to tell me that there isn’t a man in your life this minute?”

“There isn’t.”

“I don’t believe you. The very gifts that nature gave you are an incitement. They don’t affect me because I’m armored, but other men aren’t. They must be around you like flies around a honey pot.”

“Possibly,” Melanie said, fighting to keep her temper. “But they don’t get invited in. Any of them. Like you, Mr. Haverill, I’m armored.”

“Oh, I see,” he said grimly. “It’s like that, is it?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“When a woman renounces love it usually means she’s suffering from a broken heart. Who is he? Is he going to come back and sweep you off?”

Melanie’s eyes glinted with anger. “Mr. Haverill, this really isn’t any of your business, but—”

“Everything is my business that I choose to make so.”

“But the only time I imagined myself in love was nine years ago. And it’ll be the last. You can count on it.”

There was a long silence. She guessed he wasn’t used to being answered back. Oh, God! she thought, don’t let him refuse!

At last he said, “I’ll have to take your word for that. I want someone who can make David feel safe and loved. Are you the woman who can do that?”

“Yes,” she said, looking at him steadily. “I can do that as nobody else can.”

He was startled by the intensity in her voice. Again he knew the inner prompting to get rid of her. She was dangerous. But he dismissed the notion as fanciful. “In that case,” he said, “let’s go and find him.”

He led her out into the hall, toward the wide staircase.

Careful, she thought. Don’t let Giles Haverill suspect that you’ve been in this house before, that you know your way up these very stairs—the right turn at the top toward the room at the end—it’s the same room, and the door’s shut against you as it was before…

A middle-aged woman in an apron was standing outside the closed door, arguing with someone inside. She looked up as they appeared. “I’m sorry, Mr. Haverill. David’s locked himself in his room again.”

He knocked hard on the door and called, “David, come out here at once. You know I won’t stand for this behavior.”

Melanie bit her lip. She wanted to cry out, “Don’t bully him. He’s only a hurt, confused child.” But she said nothing.

“David.”

Slowly the key turned in the lock and the door was opened. The little boy who stood there was fair and would have looked angelic but for the sullen defiance written on his face.

“This is Miss Haynes,” Giles said. “You’ve met her before at school. She’s to stay with us now, and look after you.”

There was no response. The child regarded her in a silence that held no friendliness.

“David—” Giles began with an edge on his voice.

“Never mind,” Melanie said. “There’ll be plenty of time.”

He sighed. “All right. We’ll discuss money in my office. When can you move in?”

“My job finishes in two days. I’ll come immediately after that.”

“Fine. I’ll have a room made ready for you.”

She smiled at the little boy. “Goodbye, David. I’ll be back soon, and then we can get to know each other properly.”

Still saying nothing, the child backed into his room, keeping his eyes fixed on her. They were the eyes of a stranger, cold, withdrawn. The eyes of her son.

Late that night, in the bleak little flat where she lived alone, Melanie took out a photograph and studied it. It was battered from long use, frayed around the edges and stained with her tears. It showed a week-old baby sleeping in its mother’s arms, and it was the only memento she had of the child she’d borne when she was sixteen.

She hadn’t been married to the father. He’d vanished as soon as he learned of her pregnancy, but at that moment she hadn’t cared. Her love for Peter, her baby, had been immediate, passionate and total. She would spend hours holding him, looking down into his face, knowing total fulfillment. As long as Peter needed her, nothing else mattered.

Even at that age he was an individual. While she smiled at him he would stare back, as grave as a little old man. Then his smile would break suddenly, like sun coming from behind clouds, always taking her by surprise and filling her with joy. For a while only the two of them existed in all the world.

Then her mother had said coolly, “It’s time you decided to be sensible about this. Of course you can’t keep the baby. It’s a ridiculous idea.”

“He’s mine. I’m going to keep him,” she cried.

“My dear girl, how? That layabout who fathered it has gone—”

“Peter isn’t an ‘it,’” she protested fiercely. “He’s a person, and he’s my son.”

“Well, he wouldn’t have been if you’d had the common sense to have an abortion. But I thought at least now you’d see how impossible the whole thing is.”

“You could help me…” Melanie pleaded.

But her mother had raised four children and considered she’d ‘done her bit.’ Besides, she had a job now, one that she liked. She made it plain that her babyminding days were in the past.

“Then I’ll look after him by myself. I’ll get a flat—”

“Oh, yes, a flat—in some ghastly high-rise block with an elevator that never works and the stairs littered with syringes, living off welfare payments that aren’t enough. You say you love him. Is that the life you want for him?”

Dumbly Melanie shook her head while tears began to roll down her cheeks, and she held onto her child more tightly than ever. She hadn’t yielded at once, but the euphoria of the first few days was insidiously being replaced by postpartum depression.

In the blackness that seemed to swirl around her after that, only one thing remained constant, and that was her love for Peter. She breast-fed him, pouring out her adoration as she poured out her milk, clinging to the hope that something would happen to let her keep her baby.

But it didn’t. Instead there was the constant verbal battering from her family, always on the same theme, “If you loved him you’d give him up—a child needs two parents—a better life—if you loved him you’d give him up.”

At last, distraught, deep in depression, barely knowing what she was doing, she signed the papers and said goodbye to her child. For six months the conviction of doing the right thing supported her. And then, with brutal timing, the clouds lifted from her brain on the day after the adoption was finalized by the court, and with dreadful clarity she saw what she’d done.

The separation from her baby was an agony that wouldn’t heal. Her desperate pleas to be told where he was were met with bland official statements about confidentiality. All the legal processes had been completed. It was too late for her to change her mind.

Her last hope was a friend who worked for the council and who broke all the rules to give her the names, Mr. and Mrs. Haverill, and an address. Frantically she raced to their house to plead with them, only to find that Giles Haverill had already left the country to start a new firm in Australia, as part of the business empire he ran for his father. His wife, Zena, was in the middle of final packing. If Melanie had hoped to find an understanding maternal heart, she was bitterly disappointed. Zena Haverill was a strong-featured young woman with a cold voice, who had no intention of giving up what she considered hers.

“There are other babies,” Melanie pleaded.

“Other babies? My dear girl, do you know how hard it is to get a baby these days? Now I’ve got David, there’s no way I’m going to give him back.”

“His name’s Peter.”

“Giles, my husband, prefers David, after his own father. He’s a very rich man, you know. David will have the best of everything, and I daresay he’ll be better off than with an unmarried and—if you’ll pardon my saying so—rather unstable young woman. Look, I’ll lay it on the line because I’m tired of arguing. I can’t have children myself, and David is exactly what Giles wants.”

“Giles—Giles,” Melanie raged. “You don’t say that you want him.”

“There’s no need to discuss this,” Zena Haverill said coolly, and something in her voice told Melanie the terrible truth.

“You don’t want him, do you?” she accused. “Your husband wants an heir, that’s all it is. You don’t love him.”

“I see nothing to be gained by hysteria. David will have every advantage.”