‘Let me spell things out for you a little more clearly.’ His voice was suddenly very serious. ‘We have unfinished business, and I’m coming in whether you like it or not.’
‘Damon, it’s late and you’re scaring me.’
‘Good.’ He sounded cold and unyielding.
‘I’ll have to ring the police if you don’t go now,’ she threatened shakily.
‘By all means, you do that.’ For a second his eyes narrowed. ‘At least that way we can speed things up.’
‘Speed what things up?’
‘The legal side of things.’ He watched impassively as the colour drained from her face. ‘As you have so rightly pointed out, I’m in control of the Newland assets now. And according to company records no rent has been paid on this place for—oh, quite some time.’
‘That’s because the place belongs to me!’ she hissed furiously.
Damon shook his head. ‘No, it belongs to me,’ he corrected her quietly. ‘And I’m here to take stock of my belongings.’
‘Well, then, you’d better contact me through my solicitor.’
Damon smiled at that. ‘Oh, don’t worry, I will be doing that. Because I also want access to my son.’
The words dropped into the silence like a bombshell, and Abbie’s limbs suddenly felt as if they didn’t belong to her.
‘So are we going to do things the easy way or the hard way?’ he enquired silkily. ‘It’s up to you.’
She couldn’t answer him. Her hands dropped from the door, and as she momentarily lost her hold on the situation he took his opportunity and walked past her into the house.
His eyes swept over the lounge area, taking in the brown leather sofas, the polished wood floors and the huge stone fireplace. The place was very stylish, but it wasn’t what he had been expecting. The furniture, when you looked closely, was old, and everything had a slight air of faded opulence. But Damon wasn’t interested in décor; he was searching for telltale signs of something that interested him far more. He found what he was looking for as his eyes lighted on a box of toys by the far end of the sofa, and a discarded teddy bear on a chair. At the sight of those toys his insides knotted with a fierce anger.
‘So, where is he?’
As he rounded towards her again, Abbie sensed a seething fury that made her truly afraid. She could hardly think straight for a moment, never mind answer him.
‘Where is my son, Abbie? You may as well tell me now, because I will find him even if I have to go through every room in this house—or every house on this island.’
The determination in those words stunned her, but they also brought an inner answering strength welling up inside her. ‘You keep away from him, Damon. He is not a belonging listed under the company assets. He is a little person in his own right, and I won’t have you marching in here upsetting him.’
‘And what about his right to have a father—or doesn’t that count in your twisted logic?’
The question smote Abbie’s heart. It was something she had asked herself time and time again—something that had kept her awake long into the lonely nights when she had discovered she was pregnant. Yes, she wanted Mario to have a father—a loving father who would put his needs first. But Damon had left before she’d realised she was pregnant, and she hadn’t known where he had gone. She’d tried to track him down, but to no avail. She had consoled herself with the fact that he wouldn’t have been interested in his child anyway. Damon didn’t go in for commitment, he led a playboy lifestyle. He’d told her that when they’d first met.
But the strange thing was that when he’d held her in his arms she had imagined that his feelings for her were different, that what they had shared had meant something. But of course she had been fooling herself. That had been quite clear when he’d walked away from her.
The memory hurt so much that she wanted to tell Damon that the little boy upstairs was not his, and that he had a father in his life—a wonderful, loving father, a man who also loved her. She opened her mouth but the words refused to come.
When it came right down to it, she couldn’t lie about something as important as that.
‘Of course having a father counts,’ she said shakily instead.
‘Right—which, of course, is why you came to me and told me you were pregnant?’ Damon’s tone was scathing.
‘And if I had would you have wanted to stay around and play happy families? I don’t think so. We had had a few weeks together of wild sex—it meant nothing.’ Even as she said the words, the memories that flared inside her made her hot, made her voice tremble with suppressed feeling. ‘You said as much yourself—you said…’ She shook her head and pulled herself together before the tears could gather in her voice. ‘Anyway, all that is in the past and irrelevant. The truth is that I didn’t find out I was pregnant until after you’d gone. I didn’t know how to get in touch with you. You hadn’t left your address or contact numbers. I didn’t know where you were.’
‘You are good at making excuses.’ Damon shook his head. ‘No, Abbie, you didn’t tell me because your father held the purse strings and you thought I had nothing. That was a more important consideration for you at the time.’
‘That’s not true!’
‘Like hell it’s not. You forget, Abbie, that I know you exactly for what you are.’ Damon’s eyes raked contemptuously over her, but as they did so he couldn’t help noticing the sensational curves of her figure beneath the silk of the dressing gown. How come her beauty could still blow his mind? he wondered hazily. How come when he looked at her now after all this time he could still remember exactly how she had felt when he touched her—how she had tasted, how she had moved beneath him?
Back then she had been firm and pert and he had wanted her like crazy—but he could excuse that because he hadn’t known the truth about her then.
How come he could feel the same stirrings now?
‘We’re wasting time,’ he grated, furious with himself for being sidetracked even momentarily like this. ‘And I’ve already wasted enough of that.’
To Abbie’s horror Damon started to head towards the stairs with a look of determination.
‘You can’t go up there.’ She hurried to stand in his path, tried to grab hold of his arm, but he brushed her away as if she were an annoying fly and swept past her.
‘Damon, you have no right!’ Her voice caught on a sob as she raced after him, but he didn’t break his stride.
‘Actually, as the child’s father, I think you will find I have lots of rights.’
The words brought a strange kind of helplessness washing over Abbie. It was the same feeling she used to get when dealing with her father. It was the knowledge that someone more powerful than you could dictate your life, and there wasn’t anything you could do about it, because if you didn’t comply the consequences would be more than you could bear.
She watched as he pushed doors open along the landing into deserted bedrooms.
‘Stop it!’ The anguished whisper made him halt in his tracks to look back at her.
‘Don’t bother to try and turn on the false tears, Abbie, because it’s not going to work,’ he told her acerbically. ‘I don’t care how you feel—in fact I couldn’t give that—’ he clicked his fingers softly ‘—for your emotions.’
‘I know,’ she said softly. ‘I’ve always known that.’
Something about the way she said those words caught at him, and for a brief second he felt a tug of some long-forgotten emotion as he looked