“I don’t like him,” the little girl murmured, glaring at Blake as she spoke for the first time. She thrust her lower lip out and moved closer to the lawyer, clinging to his trouser leg. She had green eyes. That fact registered almost immediately—that and her high cheekbones. Blake had high cheekbones, too.
“Now, now.” The tall, bespectacled man cleared his throat. “We mustn’t be naughty, Sarah.”
“My wife,” Blake said coldly, “left me five years ago to take up residence with an oilman from Louisiana. I haven’t seen or heard from her since.”
“If I might come in, Mr. Donavan…?”
He ignored the attorney’s plea. “We only cohabited for a month—just long enough for her to find out that I was up to my neck in legal battles. She cut her losses and got out quick with her new lover.” He smiled crookedly. “She didn’t expect me to win. But I did.”
The lawyer glanced around at the elegant, columned front porch, the well-kept gardens, the Mercedes in the driveway. He’d heard about the Donavan fortune and the fight Blake Donavan had when his uncle died and left him fending off numerous greedy cousins.
“The problem, you see,” the attorney continued, glancing worriedly at the clinging child, “is that your ex-wife died earlier this month in an airplane crash. Understandably her second husband, from whom she was estranged, didn’t want to assume responsibility for the child. Sarah has no one else,” he added on a weary sigh. “Your wife’s parents were middle-aged when she was born, and she had no brothers or sisters. The entire family is dead. And Sarah is your child.”
Blake stared down at the little girl half-angrily. He hadn’t even kept a photograph of Nina to remind him of the fool he’d been. And now here was her child, and they expected him to want her.
“I don’t have room in my life for a child,” he said curtly, furious at the curve fate had thrown him. “She can be put in a home somewhere, I suppose….”
And that was when it happened. The child began to cry. There wasn’t a sound from her. She went from belligerence to heartrending sorrow in seconds, with great tears rolling from her green eyes down her flushed round cheeks. The effect was all the more poignant because of her silence and the stoic look on her face, as if she hated giving way to tears in front of the enemy.
Blake felt a stirring inside that surprised him. His mother had died soon after he was born. She hadn’t been a particularly moral woman, according to his uncle, and all he knew about her was what little he’d been told. His uncle had taken him in and had adopted him. He, like Sarah, had been an extra person in the world, unwanted by just about everyone. He had no idea who his father was. If it hadn’t been for his very wealthy uncle, he wouldn’t even have a name. That lack of love and security in his young life had turned him hard. It would turn Sarah hard, too, if she had nobody to protect her.
He looked down at the little girl with a headful of angry questions, hating those tears. But the child had grit. She glared at him and abruptly wiped the tears away with a chubby little hand.
Blake lifted his chin pugnaciously. Already the kid was getting to him. But he wasn’t going to be taken in by some scam. He trusted no one. “How do I know she’s mine?” he demanded to the lawyer.
“She has your blood type,” the man replied. “Your ex-wife’s second husband has a totally different blood group. As you know, a blood test can only tell who the father wasn’t. It wasn’t her second husband.”
Blake was about to remark that it could have been any one of a dozen other men, but then he remembered that Nina had married him for what she thought was his soon-to-be-realized wealth. He reasoned that Nina was too shrewd to have risked losing him by indulging in a fling. And after she knew what a struggle it was going to be to get that wealth, she hadn’t wanted her newest catch to know she was already pregnant.
“Why didn’t she tell me?” Blake asked coldly.
“She allowed her second husband to think the child was his,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t until she died and Sarah’s birth certificate was found that he discovered she was yours. Nina had apparently decided that Sarah had a right to her own father’s name. By then her second marriage was already on the rocks, from what I was told.” He touched the child’s dark hair absently. “You have the resources to double-check all this, of course.”
“Of course.” He stared down his broken nose at the little girl’s face. “What’s her name again? Sarah?”
“That’s right. Sarah Jane.”
Blake turned. “Bring her inside. Mrs. Jackson can feed her and I’ll engage a nurse for her.”
Just that quickly, he made the decision to keep the child. But, then, he’d been making quick decisions for a long time. When his uncle had attempted to link him with Meredith Calhoun, Blake had quickly decided to marry Nina. And as a last effort to force Blake into marrying Meredith, his uncle had left Meredith twenty percent of the stock in the real-estate conglomerate Blake was to inherit.
That had backfired. Blake had laughed at Meredith, in front of the whole family gathered for the reading of the will. And he’d told them all, his arm protectively around a smiling Nina, that he’d rather lose his inheritance and a leg than marry a skinny, plain, repulsive woman like Meredith. He was marrying Nina and Meredith could take her stock and burn it, for all he cared.
His heart lay like lead in his chest as he remembered the harsh words he’d used that day to cut Meredith down. She hadn’t even flinched, but he’d watched something die in her soft gray eyes. With a kind of ravished dignity, she’d walked out of the room with every eye on her straight back. That had been bad enough. But later she’d come to offer him the stock and he’d been irritated by the faint hunger in her soft eyes. Because she disturbed him, he’d kissed her roughly, bruising her mouth, and he’d said some things that sent her running from him. He regretted that most of all. He planned to marry Nina, but despite his feeling for her, Meredith had been a tiny thorn in his side for years. He hadn’t really meant to hurt her. He’d only wanted to make her go away. Well, he had. And he hadn’t seen her since. She’d become internationally famous with her women’s novels, one of which had been adapted for television. He saw her books everywhere these days. Like Meredith, they haunted him.
It hadn’t been until after Nina had left him that he’d found out the reason for Meredith’s haste in getting away. She’d been in love with him, his uncle’s attorney had told him ruefully as he handed Blake the documents to sign that would give him full control of the Donavan empire. His uncle had known it and had hoped to make Blake see what a good catch she was.
Blake remembered vividly the day he’d discovered his hunger for Meredith. It had shocked them both. His uncle had come into the stable just in time to break up what might have been a disastrous confrontation between them. Blake had lost control and frightened Meredith, although she’d been so sweetly responsive at first that he hadn’t seen her fear until the sound of a car driving up had brought him to his senses. Even a blind man couldn’t have missed the faint swell of Meredith’s mouth, the color in her cheeks and the way she was trembling. That was probably when the old man got the idea about the stock.
What irony, Blake thought, that what he’d wanted most in life was just a little love. He’d never had his mother’s. He’d never known his father. And his uncle, though fond of him, was a manipulative man interested in the survival of his empire through Blake. Blake had actually married Nina because she’d flattered him and played up to him and sworn that she loved him. Now, looking back, he could see that she’d loved his money, not him. Once there was any possibility of the fortune being lost, she’d walked out on him. But Meredith had genuinely loved Blake, and he’d been cruel to her. That had haunted him all these years—that he’d hurt the one human being on earth who’d ever wanted to love him.
Meredith’s father had worked for Blake’s uncle, but the two men were good friends, as