Love Islands…The Collection

Chapter Two

FOR SOME REASON her baby’s father was standing there looking taller and more imposing than she remembered. He was wearing a medium grey tailored suit, white shirt open at the neck—the only concession to the setting. The bespoke tailoring was almost as inappropriate as the tight ache low in her pelvis. Yet somehow he made her feel as if she were the one dressed inappropriately or at least inadequately.

Screamingly self-conscious of every inch of exposed skin, Lily called on all her rusty acting skills and lifted her chin acknowledging his presence with a tiny lift of her hand and an expression of small world surprise. Only it wasn’t, it was a massive world and he was here. Hard to believe that meant anything good. Pushing through the moment of panic, she forced herself to leave the shallows; the sense of impending doom remained.

Counselling herself sternly not to assume the worst, she took a tiny grain of comfort from the fact that Emmy was safely at home. She wished she were there too as her eyes made an unscheduled covetous sweep up the long, lean length of him. It was pretty hard to pretend to be composed when your stomach felt as if you’d just stepped off a cliff.

But it was sand, not air, beneath her feet and she made herself walk towards him. Lily was so focused on controlling herself and taking that next step that she got within a few feet of Ben before registering the clenched rigidity of his stance. Anger—it radiated off him in waves, and it was all aimed at her. Anger was actually too mild a word for the volcanic aura of antagonism he was vibrating. He pinned her with a stare that was as hard and unforgiving as tempered steel.

Hampered by guilt, fear, a racing heart and a skin-crawling self-consciousness, Lily pushed away the image of her daughter’s face and struggled to return the glare with some degree of composure. Beneath her carefully schooled expression her brain was firing off scenarios to explain his presence, all carefully avoiding the most obvious.

He knew!

Fighting the increasingly urgent compulsion to swim back out to sea, she straightened her shoulders and speared her hands into her long drenched hair before shaking it back from her face. Unable to maintain contact with the accusing blue glare for more than a second, she cleared her throat and broke the tense, explosive silence.

‘Hello.’ She discovered her voice sounded weirdly normal.

Hello...?

She didn’t even have the grace to look guilty, she just looked... The muscles in his brown throat worked as he dragged his wandering gaze up the slim length of her sinuous pale curves. The fury he could barely contain mingled with a large dollop of desire. He couldn’t deny his reaction when his body still thrummed with the testosterone-fuelled heat that had immobilised him with lust as she’d emerged from the waves like some mythical goddess.

But, in his defence, Lily Gray was the sort of woman who could stop traffic wearing a bin sack. And right now she was wearing very little at all. His eyes made another unscheduled dip. The black bikini consisted of a few triangles of cloth tied together with tiny metallic loops, three in total, one rested between her glorious breasts, the others low on each hip bone. The colour emphasised the creamy, opalescent pallor of her glistening skin. It was every bit as incredible as he remembered it, he thought, hungrily devouring the details. Her body might be lusher than it had been three years ago—in a very good way—but he would still be able to span her waist with his hands.

He looked at them and now realised he still had hold of her towel. The muscles around his jaw tightened as he felt a fresh blast of scalding self-disgust at his lack of control over his emotions. He thrust the towel at her with a grunt.

‘Thank you.’ Under the cover of a stiff automatic smile, her swirling thoughts raced as she wrapped the soft fabric sarong-wise across her breasts and waited, with a sense of fatalism that approached a Zen-like calm, for him to speak.

When he didn’t, she flung a rope of wet hair over her shoulders. She was amazed that her hands were still steady, despite the fact that under the calm, pulses of fear continued to pound through her body and her knees felt ready to give way.

She was living her worst nightmare. If the ground had opened up at her feet, she would have gladly jumped into the black hole.

No obliging hole appeared, so she met his hostile stare with as much composure as she could summon.

‘This is a surprise. So what are you doing here?’

‘Have a guess?’ he ground back, tearing his eyes from the small trickle of sea water running down the curve of her pale, creamy shoulder.

‘I was never very good at guessing games,’ she blurted, her voice a low driven undertone almost drowned by the low hiss of waves breaking on the shore. ‘If you have something to say...?’ The tense silence stretched. ‘Well, if you’ll excuse me I’m late for my massage.’ She made to move past him but he blocked her path. The sheer menace of his physical presence would have made her pause if his next words hadn’t frozen her to the spot.

‘Oh, well, when you can fit me into your schedule, I thought we might have a conversation. One like—oh, I don’t know... How about: Ben, it totally slipped my mind, but I had your baby a few years back...?’

She closed her eyes and thought, Oh, hell... Well, maybe now was as good a time as any to get this over with. Sucking in a short, tense breath, every muscle in her body taut, she turned and looked him in the face and nodded.

‘Sorry.’ Then because it crossed her mind he might think she was sorry she’d had Emmy she tacked on hastily, ‘That you found out about it in the way—’ She stopped. She didn’t know how he’d found out, but she supposed the significant bit was it hadn’t been from her. ‘This way.’

He clenched his jaw and ground out grimly, ‘So you’re not even going to deny it?’

A bit late now. ‘I’m not a good liar.’

His lip curled. ‘Oh, I think you’re a very good liar.’

‘I didn’t lie, I just decided not to—’

‘Burden me with the truth?’

She winced at the acid sarcasm and began to resent his occupation of the moral high ground as she jerked her eyes up to meet his intense blue glare.

‘Or were you just not sure who the father was?’

The insult, because there was no doubt he intended it as such, drew a wobbly little laugh from her aching throat. She clamped her teeth over it and lifted her chin. It was an irony she had no intention of sharing with him. She could at least retain that much pride. Having him know she’d thought their one-night stand was the start of something special would have been too cringingly humiliating; she’d prefer he think she was some sort of bed-hopping tart.

‘Oh, there was never any doubt about that,’ she said quietly.

‘Because I’m curious,’ he said, his control straining at the leash. ‘Did you ever intend to tell me?’

‘I thought about it.’ Lily didn’t register the hissing sound her admission wrenched from his clenched teeth. Her eyes glazed as her thoughts drifted backwards. After the initial shock had worn off she had thought about little else. The tipping point had been the article his ex had written. It had seemed like fate that she’d picked it up in the waiting room before her first appointment with the midwife.

It turned out Ben had only been engaged for five minutes before he’d got cold feet and dumped the poor woman. Commitment phobic, the gorgeous ex-model had explained, but the real breaking point, she had confided, had been his refusal to have a family.

You had to admire the woman. She’d have been perfectly justified, in Lily’s opinion, if she’d chosen to stick the knife in. But instead she’d displayed a really healthy attitude focusing on the future, her career change and plugging her new cookery book that was to hit the shelves soon.

That had sealed the deal for Lily. She’d known then that she couldn’t tell him.

‘But I knew how you’d react,’ she continued.

He arched a sardonic brow and ground his teeth in reaction to this claim of psychic abilities. ‘And how is that?’

Lily studied his face, her heart clenched in her chest. Even mad, he was beautiful. She spread her hands in an expressive gesture. ‘Pretty much like this.’

Before she had become pregnant Lily had never asked herself if she wanted to be a mother. Unlike Ben, who it turned out had decided never to be a father. A man who broke off an engagement because having children was a deal breaker was not going to be happy to learn he was about to be a dad by a one-night stand.

‘So how did you find out?’

‘How did I find out?’ He shook his head and looked at her as though she were insane. ‘I saw her, I saw me...’ he ground out, shaking his dark head in an incredulous motion from side to side. ‘Your mother doesn’t know?’

She swallowed, thinking of all the occasions when she had been tempted to confide in someone, wishing she could.

‘Not Mum, not... You can relax, I didn’t tell anyone.’ Not even her twin actually. Especially not her married twin, who was desperate to get pregnant and not having any luck. Having always been able to confide in Lara, Lily found it hard to deal with this new reality. She just hoped that the wall that had built up between them would be removed when Lara finally got pregnant.

‘Relax!’

Lily could feel the anger rolling off him in waves. She struggled to show she was not intimidated by it, but it was not easy when it was buffeting her like a storm-force wind. She bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself physically retreating from his anger, focusing on the metallic taste of blood on her tongue.

‘No one else needs to know, nothing needs to change,’ she assured him earnestly.

Lily could hear his white teeth grind as he closed his eyes and muttered under his breath. He opened them again and she staggered from the contemptuous blast of his deep blue eyes. ‘It already has changed.’

She opened her mouth to contradict him and her glance connected with his relentless stare. Lily was the first to look away.

‘How the hell is it possible for your mother—for everyone—not to see?’

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. On this one point they were on the same page. ‘It’s always seemed obvious to me but no one else seemed to notice. So I thought why—’

‘Bother?’ He cut across her, his voice a furious growl. ‘I am a father!’

‘Biologically.’ She lowered her lashes to hide the hurt and sadness that surfaced when she thought of her little girl, who deserved a father who loved her.

Ben flicked her a look of incredulous scorn and lashed back accusingly, ‘You don’t think a child needs a father?’

Lily almost laughed, but she felt suddenly like crying. ‘It depends on the father.’ Better her baby had no father, than one who didn’t want her.

Lily knew that her own dad had loved her and her twin, but the argument she had overheard the night before he’d died still haunted her. Looking back with adult eyes, she was able to see it for what it had been—a couple with money problems fighting, saying things they didn’t mean. But she still remembered how it had felt when her dad had yelled, Why do you think we’ve got no money? You’re the one who wanted to keep them.

Lily shook herself free from her silent depressing reverie. At her sides her hands clenched. No. She would protect her baby from ever feeling unwanted.

Just the baby?

Hadn’t there been the smallest hint of self-preservation in her decision? Having Ben in her life, a constant reminder of her romantic self-delusion, would not have been easy to deal with.

It would have been agony. Just looking at him, she thought it was! She was no longer naïve enough to call it love, but the primal reaction she had to him was not something she could control, even if it was just sex.

The quiet rebuttal caused Ben to draw a breath. His smouldering gaze dropped, his lashes brushing the slashing angle of his cheek that hid the flicker of uncertainty in his blue eyes. He wondered, wasn’t she right?

His own father had been marginally more involved in his life than his mother, not because of any genuine fatherly feelings but only in the sense that he’d cared more about appearances.

Would he be any better?

Self-doubt was not something that kept Ben awake at night. He’d made his share of bad decisions. The secret was being prepared to take responsibility and live with the consequences of those flawed decisions, even life-changing ones.

But this hadn’t been his decision.

But it had happened, so deal with it, Ben!

‘So you decided to take me out of the equation.’ Just saying it out loud made his anger spike hotly. That it was an equation he had never wanted to be part of did not lessen his sense of outrage or his determination to do the right thing, for his daughter.

‘I didn’t think of it quite in those terms, but yes...if you like.’

‘And you were only thinking of Emily Rose?’

The underlying mockery in his voice brought her rounded chin up. ‘It’s my job.’

‘And you decided that her life would be better without me in it...?’

Not fooled by his light conversational tone, Lily didn’t react. She stood there watching him warily, determined not to let him see that his comment had slipped under her defences.

‘What about what she wants?’

She angled an uneasy look up at his lean face. ‘What do you mean?’

‘A child shouldn’t grow up feeling unloved or unwanted.’

‘She isn’t!’ Lily shot back, furious at the suggestion.

‘You were happy to let her think her father doesn’t love or want her. Did you pause when you were making your unilateral decision to think how she might feel a few years down the line thinking that her father had rejected her? How that might affect her emotional development, her future relationships? You’re willing to deprive her of what you had...what you took for granted... Well, I’m not.’

The statement had more impact because Ben clearly wasn’t canvassing for the sympathy vote; he was simply stating a fact. Despite this, or maybe because of it, Lily felt her own tender heart soften. A child herself at the time, it had never occurred to her to wonder why Ben had come to live with his grandfather. That he had been unwanted had not even crossed her mind.

‘I’m going to make damned sure that my daughter isn’t going to grow up thinking she’s to blame. She’ll have what every kid deserves. What I—’

Didn’t have, Lily completed silently as he paused for breath. She trawled her memory trying to think of a single occasion when she had seen Ben’s parents at Warren Court after Ben had moved in. She came up blank.

‘I’m sorry that you were an unhappy child, but—’

He pinned her with a cold blue stare. ‘This isn’t about me. It’s about what is best for our child. You may feel it’s some sort of badge of honour to struggle financially but—’

‘I don’t!’ she protested, smothering a dangerous wave of empathy along with the image of a sad, lonely little boy. Ben was not a little boy any more; he was a powerful man. A very angry, powerful man. And he was angry at her. ‘You never wanted children...’

‘And you wanted to put your career on hold just as it was taking off?’

‘That’s not the point!’

His brows lifted as his lips tugged into a triumphant smile. ‘Exactly. Even if I was the total rat you think I am, even if I had been given the option and chose not to be part of her life, I have a financial obligation at least.’

‘This isn’t about money!’

‘No, it’s about a hell of a lot more,’ he growled. ‘More than your selfish pride. So save me the poor and proud of it speech. My daughter is going to have all the advantages I can give her, so get used to it.’

‘You think you can just appear out of nowhere and take control?’ She managed to project scorn, but below the surface there was a strong steady pulse of fear feeding into her bloodstream.

He shrugged and gave a wolfish grin that left his blue eyes hard and cold. ‘Now you come to mention it, yes.’

Despite the sun beating down she shivered, suddenly icily cold. She recalled a recent article in which a rival had called Ben Warrender a ‘wolf in designer clothes, who wouldn’t even get a crease in his suit while he casually destroyed your life for profit’.

Even allowing for a certain degree of bias, there was no doubt that in the business world Ben was a predator. And not the sort of person who was accustomed to hearing people say no in his personal life either.

‘You’ve had a shock,’ she said, attempting to sound placatory. ‘You won’t mean any of this when you calm down—’

‘I know I’ve had a bloody shock! I don’t need you to tell me!’ His eyes narrowed as he added with bitter emphasis, ‘Except you didn’t, did you?’

‘I want nothing from you,’ she babbled, close to blind panic now. ‘We need nothing from you. What was the point in telling you? There was nothing to discuss then or now.’

Ben’s jaw clenched. ‘Did you hear nothing I just said?’

Her eyes flashed as she felt a sudden energising spurt of anger. He was acting as though it had been an easy choice, acting as if the thought of bringing up a child alone had not terrified her!

‘Yes, and the only thing you’re right about is that this is about Emmy and what is best for her. And a father who doesn’t want her isn’t.’ She’d reminded herself of this inescapable fact every time she’d found herself retreating into a fantasy happy-ever-after world where Ben would see his baby and be smitten; he would fall in love with her. Miracles happened—they’d made a baby and that was the greatest miracle of all.

‘It is not a question of wanting. It has happened.’

Lily found the awful grim tone of acceptance in his voice was a million times worse than his anger. ‘I didn’t do it on my own!’ she quivered back.