Fatherhood. The realization sank in a little deeper.
Damon turned to stare across the water in the direction of Auckland’s cityscape, the first glimmer of evening lights visible in the distance. Somewhere across the water existed a child who, in a profound, unassailable way, belonged to him.
Just beyond the breaking waves a sleek gannet arrowed into the water, then surfaced with a silvery fish in its beak. Damon drew in a lungful of cold air as he struggled with imperatives that were as opposite as black and white. He had long ago decided that fatherhood was not for him, but fate had intervened and he was caught and held as fast as the small, flapping fish. He could not turn his back on his child.
The sun was sinking fast, the last burnished glow infusing the clear winter air with rose and gold. The sea breeze had dropped, leaving the water glassily smooth.
He did not understand why Zara had chosen to cut him out of his child’s life, but that would soon change. In the methodical way of his mind, Damon began to formulate a plan to meet with Zara and discover what he could about the child. Although the practical to-do list seemed cold and antiseptic when he considered exactly what it meant—confronting his ex-lover about the child they had made together. And he knew exactly when that had happened—the first time they had made love.
As Damon climbed the steep cliff path to his house, memories flickered, vivid and irresistible.
Torrential rain pounding down as he held his jacket over Zara’s head to shelter her as he dropped her home after a late business dinner. He shook out the wet jacket in the dimness of her porch. She laughed as she swept soaked hair back from her forehead. With her dark hair gleaming with moisture, her cheeks flushed, suddenly she was quite startlingly beautiful.
There was a moment when he bent his head, a split second before their mouths touched, when she could have stepped away and didn’t. Instead, her breath hitched, her fingers closed on the lapels of his jacket and she lifted up on her toes for his kiss.
He caught the scent of her skin and desire closed around him like heated manacles. Sensation shuddered through him in waves as they kissed for long, spellbinding minutes. They made it to her bedroom, just.
He used a condom the first and even the second time, but in the hour before dawn, waking to Zara making slow, exquisite love to him, and caught in that strange halfway state between dream and reality, he did not.
The unprotected lovemaking had happened with blinding speed, over almost before he realized it, but that did not negate his responsibility. Zara’s pregnancy had been his fault.
Damon climbed the steps to his house and paused in the shelter of the heavy stone portico, which protected the entryway from the wind. Peeling out of his wet shoes, he pushed open the heavy, ancient door made of thick oak and bands of iron that he had imported from Medinos and headed for his shower. After drying off, he pulled on soft, faded jeans with the fluid economy of movement he had learned during his years with the military in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
Not bothering with a shirt, Damon padded into his cavernous bedroom, found his laptop and keyed in the GPS program his firm used as a security measure for the company’s top executives. He typed in his brother’s phone number. Instantly a map materialized along with a tracking icon, which indicated that Ben was over the Pacific Ocean, just northeast of Auckland. It was somehow typical that Ben, with his utter disinterest in all things to do with Magnum Security, had been careless enough to forget that his phone could be tracked.
Damon checked the time then rang Walter, his head of security and one of his most trusted employees. Minutes later, Ben’s flight details were confirmed. He was headed for the island of Medinos, and would, no doubt, be staying in the clifftop fortress Tyler had left to him and Ben jointly.
Retrieving his cell, he found the only number for Zara that he had, her employment agency. After a moment of hesitation, he dialed. In the past two months, ever since he had discovered that Zara had opened her own agency, apart from picking up his initial call, he had invariably found himself shunted through to her answering service. His jaw compressed when, as usual, the call went straight through to voice mail. He left a terse message and set the phone down on his bedside table.
Stepping out onto his balcony, he studied the gray clouds building overhead, blotting out the first scattering of stars. Ben had been right in pointing out the irony that Damon specialized in designing hardware and software to collect, unlock and decode information, and yet he could not unlock the mystery of the woman who had shared his bed and then attempted to disappear with all the skill of a master spy.
Cold droplets spattered Damon’s broad shoulders as he turned from the darkening view, strolled through to the kitchen and lifted the lid on the casserole Walter’s wife, Margot, had left for him. Not for the first time, he was keenly aware of the utter emptiness of his house.
For years he had been living in a kind of deep freeze. Just over a year ago, when Zara had strolled into his office in a beige jacket and skirt that on most women would have looked shapeless and boring, but on her had somehow looked sexy, the thaw had been instant and profound.
He had wanted her. If he was ruthlessly honest, that was also the reason he had reconnected with Zara again when he found out she had opened her own employment agency. To date, he had resisted what he’d come to view as a fatal attraction, but that was about to change. The knowledge that Zara had had his child had kicked away some invisible barrier. They were linked in the most primal, intimate way a man and woman could be linked and he was no longer prepared to tolerate the distance she seemed to prefer.
From now on, they were playing by his rules.
He had not forgotten Ben. As Ben’s only close relative and the trustee of Ben’s inheritance, Damon’s course of action was clear. He needed to retrieve his brother before Ben did something completely irresponsible, like get married to a woman he had only known for a few weeks.
The retrieval of Ben, as luck would have it, dovetailed with Damon’s need to gain access to his child. Zara Westlake stood at the center of both issues, which meant that, whether she liked it or not, she would have to meet with him face-to-face.
Out of the murk of the first two objectives, a third emerged. Despite Zara’s betrayal, despite the grip the past still had on his life, he needed one more thing.
Zara Westlake back in his bed.
A soft chime, indicating that a much-needed client had just opened the door of Zara’s fledgling employment agency, diverted her attention from her four-month-old baby, Rosie. Thankfully, after a marathon effort to get Rosie to nap, her tiny daughter had finally drifted into a restless slumber.
Anxious to snag her client before he or she lost interest and decided to take their very valuable business elsewhere, Zara tiptoed out of the smallest interview room, which today doubled as Rosie’s makeshift nursery. Makeshift, because normally, when Zara was working, Rosie was in day care. But, because Rosie had been a little off-color, the center hadn’t wanted to take her, so Zara had planned to work from home while she kept an eye on her daughter. However, that arrangement had crashed and burned when her assistant, Molly, had called in sick at the last minute, meaning that Zara had been forced to bring Rosie to the office.
It wasn’t until she had gently closed the door behind her that Zara realized she had left her high heels, which she had slipped out of while she had fed and changed Rosie, behind her desk. Added to that, her hair, once smoothed into an immaculate French pleat, was now disheveled from the playful grip of Rosie’s fingers.