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An hour later, having showered and changed, he lay sprawled on a sofa in one of the living rooms. There were eight in total, but this was the one he preferred. He let out a long, slow breath. Outside it was raining, and through the window all he could see was the dark glimmer of water and the occasional crooked outline of antlers as the red deer moved silently across the lawns.
The deer had come with Lamerton House, the Jacobean mansion and forty-acre estate that he used as a stopover when he was meeting bankers and investors in London. His gaze narrowed. They were less tame than reindeer, but the grazing herd still reminded him of home.
Home—that word again.
He stared irritably out of the window into the darkness. Normally it was a word that just didn’t register in his day-to-day vocabulary, but this was the second time in as many hours that he’d thought it. His refocused his eyes on his reflection—only it wasn’t his face he could see in the glass but his daughter’s, so like his own and already so essential to him.
He might only have discovered her existence forty-eight hours earlier, but his feelings about Sóley were clear. She deserved a home—somewhere safe and stable. Somewhere she could flourish.
His fingers clenched against the back of the sofa. If only his feelings about Lottie were as straightforward. But they weren’t.
At first he’d wanted to blame her for so carelessly unbalancing his life, and then for keeping the truth from him, only how could he? He was as much to blame on both counts. Nor could he blame her for resenting his heavy-handed offer of money. Having managed alone for the best part of two years, of course she’d feel insulted.
But acknowledging his own flaws didn’t absolve hers. She was stubborn and inconsistent and irrational. His mouth thinned. Sadly acknowledging her flaws didn’t change the facts. Being near Lottie made his body swell with blood and his head swim. He had felt it—that same restless, implacable hunger that had overtaken him that night. A hunger he had spent his life condemning in others and was now suppressing in himself...
Six hours later he stood watching the dark blue saloon move smoothly along the driveway towards the house. From the upper floor window he watched as his driver John opened the door. His heart started a drumroll as Lottie slid from the car and, turning, he made his way downstairs.
As he reached the bottom step she turned and gazed up at him.
There was a moment of silence as he took in her appearance. She was wearing jeans and a baggy cream jumper. Her cheeks were flushed and her hair was tied back with what looked like a man’s black shoelace. For no accountable reason he found himself hoping profoundly that the owner of the shoe in question was her brother. Raising his eyes, he turned towards John and dismissed him with a nod, so that his voice wouldn’t give away the sharp, disconcerting spasm of jealousy that twisted his mouth.
‘You made good time,’ he said.
She nodded, her soft brown eyes locking with his—except they weren’t soft, but tense and wary. ‘Thank you for sending the car. It was very kind of you.’ Her gaze moved past him and then abruptly returned to his face. ‘So what happens next?’
It wasn’t just her voice that upped his heartbeat. Her words reverberated inside his head, pulling at a memory he had never quite forgotten.
So what happens next?
Twenty months ago she had spoken the exact same sentence to him in the street outside that restaurant, and briefly he let his mind go back to that moment. He could picture it precisely. The tremble of her lips, the way her hair had spilled over the collar of her coat, and then the moment when he had lowered his mouth to hers and kissed her.
His body tensed. It had been so effortless. So natural. She had melted into him, her candid words, warm mouth and curving limbs offering up possibilities of an intimacy without the drama he had lived with so long. But of course he’d been kidding himself. Whatever it was that had caused that flashpoint of heat and hunger and hope, it had been contingent on the preordained shortness of its existence.
With an effort he blocked out an image of her body gleaming palely against the dark, crumpled bedding...
‘We talk,’ he said simply. ‘Why don’t we go and get something to drink?’
In the kitchen, his housekeeper Francesca had left tea and coffee and some homemade biscuits on the granite-topped breakfast bar.
‘Take a seat.’ He gestured towards a leather-covered bar stool. ‘Tea or coffee? Do you have a preference?’
‘Tea. Please. And I prefer it black.’
He held out a cup and, giving him a small, stiff smile, she took it from him.
She took a sip, her mouth parting, and he felt his body twitch in response. It felt strange—absurdly, frustratingly strange—to be handing her a cup of tea when part of him could still remember pulling her into his arms. And another part was hungry still to pull her into his arms again.
He cleared his throat. ‘So, shall we get on with it?’
He heard the shift in her breathing.
‘I accept that Sóley is my daughter, but obviously that isn’t going to satisfy my lawyers, so I’m afraid I need to establish paternity. It’s quite simple—just a sample from me and you and Sóley.’
There was a short silence, and then she nodded. ‘Okay.’
‘Good.’ His gaze held hers. ‘Long-term I’ll be looking at establishing custody rights, but initially I just want to spend a bit of time with my daughter.’ And provide a structure and a stability that he instinctively knew must be lacking in her life.
‘Meaning what, exactly?’
