Читать книгу: «The Secret Valtinos Baby: The Secret Valtinos Baby»

CHAPTER ONE

THE GREEK BILLIONAIRE, Angel Valtinos, strode into his father’s office suite to find both his brothers waiting in Reception and he stopped dead, ebony brows skating up. ‘What is this? A family reunion?’

‘Or Papa is planning to carpet us for something,’ his Italian half-brother, Prince Vitale Castiglione, commented with perceptible amusement because they were all beyond the age where parental disapproval was a normal source of concern.

‘Does he make a habit of that?’ Zac Da Rocha demanded with a frown.

Angel met Vitale’s eyes and his jawline squared, neither passing comment. Zac, their illegitimate Brazilian sibling, was pretty much a wild card. As he was a new and rather mysterious addition to the family circle his brothers had yet to fully accept him. And trust came no more easily to the suspicious Angel than it did to Vitale.

Vitale grinned. ‘You’re the eldest,’ he reminded Angel. ‘You get top billing and first appearance.’

‘Not sure I want it on this occasion,’ Angel conceded, but he swiftly shrugged off the faint and comically unfamiliar sense of unease assailing his innately rock-solid confidence.

After all, Charles Russell had never played the heavy father in his sons’ lives, but even without exercising that authority he had still been a remarkably decent father, Angel conceded reflectively. Charles had not stayed married to either his or Vitale’s mother for very long but he had taken a keen interest post-divorce in fostering and maintaining a close relationship with his sons. Angel had often had cause to be grateful for his father’s stable approach to life and the shrewd business brain he suspected he had inherited from him. His mother was a thoroughly flighty and frivolous Greek heiress, whose attitude to childcare and education would have been careless without his father’s stipulations on his son’s behalf.

Charles Russell crossed his office to greet his eldest son. ‘You’re late,’ he told him without heat.

‘My board meeting ran over,’ Angel told him smoothly. ‘What’s this all about? When I saw Zac and Vitale in Reception I wondered if there was a family emergency.’

‘It depends what you call an emergency,’ Charles deflected, studying his very tall thirty-three-year-old eldest son, who topped him in height by several inches.

A son to be proud of, Charles had believed until very recently when the startling discovery of certain disquieting information had punctured his paternal pride. To be fair, Angel also carried the genes of a fabulously wealthy and pedigreed Greek family, more known for their self-destructiveness than their achievements. Even so, Charles had prided himself on Angel’s hugely successful reputation in the business world. Angel was the first Valtinos in two generations to make more money than he spent. A very astute high-achiever and a loyal and loving son, he was the very last child Charles had expected to disappoint him. Nonetheless, Angel had let him down by revealing a ruthless streak of Valtinos self-interest and irresponsibility.

‘Tell me what this is about,’ Angel urged with characteristic cool.

Charles rested back against his tidy desk, a still handsome man with greying hair in his early fifties. His well-built frame was tense. ‘When do you plan to grow up?’ he murmured wryly.

Angel blinked in bewilderment. ‘Is that a joke?’ he whispered.

‘Sadly not,’ his father confirmed. ‘A week ago, I learned from a source I will not share that I am a grandfather...’

Angel froze, his lean, extravagantly handsome features suddenly wiped clean of all animation, while his shrewd dark eyes hardened and veiled. In less than a split second, though, he had lifted his aggressive chin in grim acknowledgement of the unwelcome shock he had been dealt: an issue he had hoped to keep buried had been unexpectedly and most unhappily disinterred by the only man in the world whose good opinion he valued.

‘And, moreover, the grandfather of a child whom I will never meet if you have anything to do with it,’ Charles completed in a tone of regret.

Angel frowned and suddenly extended his arms in a very expansive Greek gesture of dismissal. ‘I thought to protect you—’

‘No, your sole motivation was to protect you,’ Charles contradicted without hesitation. ‘From the demands and responsibility of a child.’

‘It was an accident. Am I expected to turn my life upside down when struck by such a misfortune?’ Angel demanded in a tone of raw self-defence.

His father dealt him a troubled appraisal. ‘I did not consider you to be a misfortune.’

‘Your relationship with my mother was on rather a different footing,’ Angel declared with all the pride of his wealthy, privileged forebears.

A deep frown darkened the older man’s face. ‘Angel... I’ve never told you the whole truth about my marriage to your mother because I did not want to give you cause to respect her less,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘But the fact is that Angelina deliberately conceived you once she realised that I wanted to end our relationship. I married her because she was pregnant, not because I loved her.’

Angel was startled by that revelation but not shocked, for he had always been aware that his mother was spoilt and selfish and that she could not handle rejection. His luxuriant black lashes lifted on challenging and cynical dark golden eyes. ‘And marrying her didn’t work for you, did it? So, you can hardly be suggesting that I marry the mother of my child!’ he derided.

‘No, marrying Angelina Valtinos didn’t work for me,’ Charles agreed mildly. ‘But it worked beautifully for you. It gave you a father with the right to interfere and with your best interests always at heart.’

That retaliation was a stunner and shockingly true and Angel gritted his even white teeth at the comeback. ‘Then I should thank you for your sacrifice,’ he said hoarsely.

‘No thanks required. The wonderful little boy grew up into a man I respect—’

‘With the obvious exception of this issue,’ Angel interjected tersely.

‘You have handled it all wrong. You called in the lawyers, those Valtinos vulture lawyers, whose sole motivation is to protect you and the Valtinos name and fortune—’

‘Exactly,’ Angel slotted in softly. ‘They protect me.’

‘But don’t you want to know your own child?’ Charles demanded in growing frustration.

Angel compressed his wide, sensual mouth, his hard bone structure thrown into prominence, angry shame engulfing him at that question. ‘Of course, I do, but getting past her mother is proving difficult.’

‘Is that how you see it? Is that who you are blaming for this mess?’ the older man countered with scorn. ‘Your lawyers forced her to sign a non-disclosure agreement in return for financial support and you made no attempt at that point to show enough interest to arrange access to your child.’

Angel went rigid, battling his anger, determined not to surrender to the frustrating rage scorching through him. He was damned if he was about to let the maddening baby business, as he thought of it, come between him and the father he loved. ‘The child hadn’t been born at that stage. I had no idea how I would feel once she was.’

‘Your lawyers naturally concentrated on protecting your privacy and your wealth. Your role was to concentrate on the family aspect,’ Charles asserted with emphasis. ‘Instead you have made an enemy of your child’s mother.’

‘That was not my intention. Using the Valtinos legal team was intended to remove any damaging personal reactions from our dealings.’

‘And how has the impersonal approach worked for you?’ Charles enquired very drily indeed.

Angel very nearly groaned out loud in exasperation. In truth, he had played an own goal, getting what he’d believed he wanted and then discovering too late that it wasn’t what he wanted at all. ‘She doesn’t want me to visit.’

‘And whose fault is that?’

‘Mine,’ Angel acknowledged fiercely. ‘But she is currently raising my child in unsuitable conditions.’

‘Yes, working as a kennel maid while raising the next Valtinos heiress isn’t to be recommended,’ his father remarked wryly. ‘Well, at least the woman’s not a gold-digger. A gold-digger would have stayed in London and lived the high life on the income you provided, not stranded herself in rural Suffolk with a middle-aged aunt while working for a living.’

‘My daughter’s mother is crazy!’ Angel bit out, betraying his first real emotion on the subject. ‘She’s trying to make me feel bad!’

Charles raised a dubious brow. ‘You think so? Seems to be a lot of sweat and effort to go to for a man she refuses to see.’

‘She had the neck to tell my lawyer that she couldn’t allow me to visit without risking breaching the non-disclosure agreement!’ Angel growled.

‘There could be grounds for that concern,’ his father remarked thoughtfully. ‘The paparazzi do follow you around and you visiting her would put a spotlight on her and the child.’

Angel drew himself up to his full six feet four inches and squared his wide shoulders. ‘I would be discreet.’

‘Sadly, it’s a little late in the day to be fighting over parental access. You should have considered that first and foremost in your dealings because unmarried fathers have few, if any, rights under British law—’

‘Are you suggesting that I marry her?’ Angel demanded with incredulity.

‘No.’ Charles shook his greying head to emphasise that negative. ‘That sort of gesture has to come from the heart.’

‘Or the brain,’ Angel qualified. ‘I could marry her, take her out to Greece and then fight her there for custody, where I would have an advantage. That option was suggested at one point by my legal team.’

Charles regarded his unapologetically ruthless son with concealed apprehension because it had never been his intention to exacerbate the situation between his son and the mother of his child. ‘I would hope that you would not even consider sinking to that level of deceit. Surely a more enlightened arrangement is still possible?’

But was it? Angel was not convinced even while he assured his concerned father that he would sort the situation out without descending to the level of dirty tricks. But was an access agreement even achievable?

After all, how could he be sure of anything in that line? Merry Armstrong had foiled him, blocked him and denied him while subjecting him to a raft of outrageous arguments rather than simply giving him what he wanted. Angel was wholly unaccustomed to such disrespectful treatment. Every time she knocked him back he was stunned by the unfamiliarity of the experience.

All his life he had pretty much got what he wanted from a woman whenever he wanted it. Women, usually, adored him. Women from his mother to his aunts to his cousins and those in his bed worshipped him like a god. Women lived to please Angel, flatter him, satisfy him: it had always been that way in Angel’s gilded world of comfort and pleasure. And Angel had taken that enjoyable reality entirely for granted until the very dark day he had chosen to tangle with Merry Armstrong...

He had noticed her immediately, the long glossy mane of dark mahogany hair clipped in a ponytail that reached almost to her waist, the pale crystalline blue eyes and the pink voluptuous mouth that sang of sin to a sexually imaginative male. Throw in the lean, leggy lines of a greyhound and proximity and their collision course had been inevitable from day one in spite of the fact that he had never before slept with one of his employees and had always sworn not to do so.

* * *

Merry’s fingers closed shakily over the letter that the postman had just delivered. A tatty sausage-shaped Yorkshire terrier gambolled noisily round her feet, still overexcited by the sound of the doorbell and another voice.

‘Quiet, Tiger,’ Merry murmured firmly, mindful that fostering the little dog was aimed at making him a suitable adoptee for a new owner. But even as she thought that, she knew she had broken her aunt Sybil’s strict rules with Tiger by getting attached and by letting him sneak onto her sofa and up onto her lap. Sybil adored dogs but she didn’t believe in humanising or coddling them. It crossed Merry’s mind that perhaps she was as emotionally damaged as Tiger had been by abuse. Tiger craved food as comfort; Merry craved the cosiness of a doggy cuddle. Or was she kidding herself in equating the humiliation she had suffered at Angel’s hands with abuse? Making a mountain out of a molehill, as Sybil had once briskly told her?

Sadly the proof of that pudding was in the eating as she flipped over the envelope and read the London postmark with a stomach that divebombed in sick dismay. It was another legal letter and she couldn’t face it. With a shudder of revulsion laced with fear she cravenly thrust the envelope in the drawer of the battered hall table, where it could stay until she felt able to deal with it...calmly.

And a calm state of mind had become a challenge for Merry ever since she had first heard from the Valtinoses’ lawyers and dealt with the stress, the appointments and the complaints. Legally she seemed mired in a never-ending battle where everything she did was an excuse for criticism or another unwelcome and intimidating demand. She could feel the rage building in her at the prospect of having to open yet another politely menacing letter, a rage that she would not have recognised a mere year earlier, a rage that threatened to consume her and sometimes scared her because there had been nothing of the virago in her nature until her path crossed that of Angel Valtinos. He had taught her nothing but bitterness, hatred and resentment, all of which she could have done without.

But he had also, although admittedly very reluctantly, given her Elyssa...

Keen to send her thoughts in a less sour direction, Merry glanced from the kitchen into the tiny sitting room of the cottage where she lived, and studied her daughter where she sat on the hearth rug happily engaged with her toys. Her black hair was an explosion of curls round her cherubic olive-toned face, highlighting striking ice-blue eyes and a pouty little mouth. She had her father’s curls and her mother’s eyes and mouth and was an extremely pretty baby in Merry’s opinion, although she was prepared to admit that she was very biased when it came to her daughter.

In many ways after a very fraught and unhappy pregnancy Elyssa’s actual birth had restored Merry to startling life and vigour. Before that day, it had not once occurred to her that her daughter’s arrival would transform her outlook and fill her to overflowing with an unconditional love unlike anything she had ever felt before. Nowadays she recognised the truth: there was nothing she would not do for Elyssa.

A light knock sounded on the back door, announcing Sybil’s casual entrance into the kitchen at the rear of the cottage. ‘I’ll put on the kettle...time for a brew,’ she said cheerfully, a tall, rangy blonde nearing sixty but still defiantly beautiful, as befitted a woman who had been an international supermodel in the eighties.

Sybil had been Merry’s role model from an early age. Her mother, Natalie, had married when Merry was sixteen and emigrated to Australia with her husband, leaving her teenaged daughter in her sister’s care. Sybil and Merry were much closer than Merry had ever been with her birth mother but Sybil remained very attached to her once feckless kid sister. The sanctuary had been built by her aunt on the proceeds of the modelling career she had abandoned as soon as she had made enough money to devote her days to looking after homeless dogs.

In the later stages of her pregnancy, Merry had worked at the centre doing whatever was required and had lived with her aunt in her trendy barn conversion, but at the same time Merry had been carefully making plans for a more independent future. A qualified accountant, she had started up a small home business doing accounts for local traders and she had a good enough income now to run a car, while also insisting on paying a viable rent to Sybil for her use of the cottage at the gates of the rescue centre. The cottage was small and old-fashioned but it had two bedrooms and a little garden and perfectly matched Merry and Elyssa’s current needs.

In fact, Sybil Armstrong was a rock of unchanging affection and security in Merry’s life. Merry’s mother, Natalie, had fallen pregnant with her during an affair with her married employer. Only nineteen at the time, Natalie had quickly proved ill-suited to the trials of single parenthood. Right from the start, Sybil had regularly swooped in as a weekend babysitter, wafting Merry back to her country home to leave her kid sister free to go out clubbing.

Natalie’s bedroom door had revolved around a long succession of unsuitable men. There had been violent men, drunk men, men who took drugs and men who stole Natalie’s money and refused to earn their own. By the time she was five years old, Merry had assumed all mothers brought different men home every week. In such an unstable household where fights and substance abuse were endemic she had missed a lot of school, and when social workers had threatened to take Merry into care, once again her aunt had stepped in to take charge.

For nine glorious years, Merry had lived solely with Sybil, catching up with her schoolwork, learning to be a child again, no longer expected to cook and clean for her unreliable mother, no longer required to hide in her bedroom while the adults downstairs screamed so loudly at each other that the neighbours called the police. Almost inevitably that phase of security with Sybil had ended when Natalie had made yet another fresh start and demanded the return of her daughter.

It hadn’t worked, of course it hadn’t, because Natalie had grown too accustomed to her freedom by then, and instead of finding in Merry the convenient little best friend she had expected she had been met with a daughter with whom she had nothing in common. By the time Keith, who was younger than Natalie, had entered her life, the writing had been on the wall. Keen to return to Australia and take Natalie with him, he had been frank about his reluctance to take on a paternal role while still in his twenties. Merry had moved back in with Sybil and had not seen her mother since her departure.

* * *

‘Did I see the postman?’ Sybil asked casually.

Merry stiffened and flushed, thinking guiltily of that envelope stuffed in the hall table. ‘I bought something for Elyssa online,’ she fibbed in shame, but there was just no way she could admit to a woman as gutsy as Sybil that a letter could frighten and distress her.

‘No further communication from He Who Must Not Be Named?’ Sybil fished, disconcerting her niece with that leading question, for lately her aunt had been very quiet on that topic.

‘Evidently we’re having a bit of a break from the drama right now, which is really nice,’ Merry mumbled, shamefacedly tucking teabags into the mugs while Sybil lifted her great-niece off the rug and cuddled her before sitting down again with the baby cradled on her lap.

‘Don’t even think about him.’

‘I don’t,’ Merry lied yet again, a current of self-loathing assailing her because only a complete fool would waste time thinking about a man who had mistreated her. But then, really, what would Sybil understand about that? As a staggeringly beautiful and famous young woman, Sybil had had to beat adoring men off with sticks but had simply never met one she wanted to settle down with. Merry doubted that any man had ever disrespected Sybil and lived to tell the tale.

‘He’ll get his comeuppance some day,’ Sybil forecast. ‘Everyone does. What goes around comes around.’

‘But it bothers me that I hate him so much,’ Merry confided in a rush half under her breath. ‘I’ve never been a hater before.’

‘You’re still hurting. Now that you’re starting to date again, those bad memories will soon sink into the past.’

An unexpected smile lit Merry’s heart-shaped face at the prospect of the afternoon out she was having the following day. As a veterinary surgeon, Fergus Wickham made regular visits to the rescue centre. He had first met Merry when she was offputtingly pregnant, only evidently it had not put him off, it had merely made him bide his time until her daughter was born and she was more likely to be receptive to an approach.

She liked Fergus, she enjoyed his company, she reminded herself doggedly. He didn’t give her butterflies in her tummy, though, or make her long for his mouth, she conceded guiltily, but then how important were such physical feelings in the overall scheme of things? Angel’s sexual allure had been the health equivalent of a lethal snakebite, pulling her in only to poison her. Beautiful but deadly. Dear heaven, she hated him, she acknowledged, rigid with the seething trapped emotion that sent her memory flying inexorably back sixteen months...