‘I don’t want your money,’ she said, as clearly as she could while her knees were shaking.
She wasn’t scared of him, she told herself staunchly. This was just a reaction to everything that had happened in the last few minutes, and hours, and days and weeks. It felt as if all her hopes and fears, all her dreams and all her nightmares, were centred in this one room, concentrated on this one man—and, for better or worse, she had to come out on top in this battle of wills or she would lose everything that mattered to her.
Unfortunately, she had never been the sunny, flirtatious, irresistible sister. That had always been Darcy. Darcy with her sweet smile and her effervescent laugh and her determination to always see the best in people, even the father who had discarded them both to start another family. And Alexei Blackstone, who Darcy had been convinced had fallen madly in love with her, even if all the evidence from their one-night stand and its aftermath had suggested the opposite.
Alexei Blackstone had used Darcy. He’d been nothing more than a billionaire playboy who had hooked up with her sister for a night in Monaco, while her sister had been working at the casino bar and he’d been touring the tables. After a moonlit drive in his new sports car, he’d seduced her hopelessly romantic sister over champagne and canapés in the Blackstone Villa on the Côte D’Azur. He’d taken her virginity and then discarded her the next day. Darcy had lost her job and returned to London, confused and heartbroken, but when she’d found out she was pregnant, contacting Alexei had been impossible. He’d never responded to any of the frantic messages Darcy had left him. And then Lukas had appeared in London a few days later, his limousine taking Darcy to a private meeting at the Blackstone Park Lane. There he’d tried to bully and blackmail Darcy into having an abortion, which Darcy had been convinced had all been Lukas’s idea.
Bronte wasn’t convinced that Alexei wasn’t the one who had set his big brother on Darcy and told him to bribe her into silence, but Darcy wouldn’t hear of it.
Alexei Blackstone was as much of a creep as his brother to Bronte’s way of thinking—just a more charming one. But when Darcy had spoken of him that last time, months after his death, her eyes glazed with fever and love, an hour after Nico’s birth, Bronte had simply nodded, having lost the desire to destroy her sister’s comforting delusions.
‘Promise me you won’t tell Alexei’s brother I didn’t have the abortion. Lukas must never know about Nico.’
Bronte’s mind stalled, the fog of exhaustion burned away by the flash fire of memory. She flexed her fingers, feeling Darcy’s weak grip tightening on her hand as the sharp sickly smell of morphine and disinfectant clogged Bronte’s lungs. And the words that had haunted her and driven her for three years whispered across her consciousness.
‘I promise, Darcy. I’ll look after Nico. And Lukas Blackstone will never know he exists.’
She’d only been eighteen when Nico had come into her life and the double whammy of responsibility and Darcy’s death had cut her carefree existence off at the knees. The newborn baby had been nothing but a burden at first, especially in the depths of her grief, when just getting out of bed each morning had felt like an endeavour on a par with building the Taj Mahal singlehanded.
But eventually Nico, such a sweet, smiley baby boy, had become Bronte’s salvation, yanking her out of her grief and back into the world. She’d found a secure job as a nightclub cleaner and worked her backside off to raise Nico alone. And eventually she and Nico had found a rhythm. A rhythm which suited them. They’d weathered the highs and the many lows together. They were a team. And she’d kept her promise to Darcy. Until Nico’s paediatrician Dr Patel had told her two days ago—in her bright airy office at Westminster Children’s Hospital—that Bronte wasn’t the donor they needed for Nico’s treatment. And maybe they should look for a donor in his father’s family.
Unlike Darcy, Bronte had always been a realist, a pragmatist, the one who knew people rarely, if ever, were as good as they appeared to be on the surface. And if she’d ever been an optimist she wasn’t one any more. But if the paediatrician had believed the devil himself was Nico’s best hope she would have tracked him down—and forced him to cooperate. But having to dig deep and find a way to charm Lukas Blackstone now she’d found him felt impossible somehow—probably because her experience of charming any man was precisely zilch.
Just concentrate on the now. And get through this. For Nikky and Darcy.
Lukas’s brows drew down, making his harsh, brooding face look even more forbidding.
‘If you don’t want money,’ he said, the cynical note a clear indication he was humouring her with that supposition, ‘then why did you gatecrash this event?’
‘I told you why,’ Bronte snapped, then wished she could bite off her tongue. But he didn’t seem particularly fazed by her show of temper. Probably because he held all the cards. ‘Because I need to talk to you about Nico,’ she continued. ‘Who is your brother Alexei’s son.’
Lukas’s eyes flickered with an intense emotion she couldn’t name. But then the tiny reaction was gone, and the look he sent her could only be described as scathing. And dismissive.
She pushed against the despair threatening to engulf her. Had coming here been a terrible mistake?
‘Nico is your nephew,’ she reiterated, even though admitting the connection between this cynical, indifferent man and that innocent, funny, beautiful little boy made her stomach hurt. ‘He’s only three years old and he’s very ill—his only hope is an experimental stem cell treatment. We need at least a partial donor match but, with both his biological parents dead, Dr Patel says his best hope of finding a match is you—because you’re his father’s identical twin.’
Her voice trailed off because his face had remained impassive. Except for the tiny tic of a muscle in his jaw. Exactly how inhuman was he, that the plight of a child—his brother’s child—wouldn’t move him, even in the slightest?
But then his frown became more pronounced, as if he were considering what she’d said. Had he heard her? Would he at least consider helping?
‘If there even is such a child,’ he said, his tone laced with scepticism now as well as barely concealed contempt, ‘and he is actually sick, I think we both know there is no chance I will be a suitable donor.’
‘No, we don’t. How could we? If you haven’t been tested.’
‘Because there is no possible way Alexei could have fathered this boy. Something your sister knew when she tried to claim the same thing four years ago.’
‘Why are you saying that?’ she asked, confused now as well as frightened. ‘You knew Alexei was the father, or you wouldn’t have given my sister fifty thousand dollars to have an abortion.’
His eyebrows rose then, and for the first time she could see she’d surprised him. ‘Is that what your sister told you?’
‘Yes, and I believed her—she would never have lied to me.’ Darcy had never had a single duplicitous or greedy bone in her body. She’d taken this man’s blood money, yes, but only for the sake of her child—to put a down payment on the tiny basement flat where they lived in Hackney, East London.
‘How melodramatic,’ he said. ‘I didn’t tell her to have an abortion, for the simple reason that I didn’t believe her story about being pregnant. And if she was pregnant I knew damn well the child wasn’t Alexei’s. If she thought that was what the money was for, that was her interpretation. I simply told her I was paying her the money to rid myself and Alexei of the problem she presented.’
‘But she was pregnant and Alexei is the father...’
‘I met your sister exactly once,’ Lukas interrupted, the contempt