‘Oh, ye of little faith.’
‘Nobody can,’ she insisted bleakly. The alcohol had broken down all the defensive walls she’d built up with a resounding bang. Without lifting her head to look at him, she laid it against the wide expanse of chest that was suddenly conveniently close to hand. Eyes tight closed, hardly aware of what she was doing, she brought her fist down once, twice, three times hard against his shoulder.
At some deep subconscious level that dealt with things beyond her immediate misery her brain was storing irrelevant information like the level of hard toughness in his body and the nice, musky, warm scent that rose from his skin.
‘I can’t bear to lose him. I just can’t bear it, Rafe!’ she sobbed in a tortured whisper.
Her distress made him feel helpless. Helpless and a rat! Tess was putting herself quite literally in his hands, displaying a trust and confidence she had every right to expect if he was any sort of friend. It made the response of his body to the soft, fragrant female frame plastered against it all the more of a betrayal!
‘Lose who? Your vet…?’ he prompted. He took her by the shoulders and gave her an urgent little shake.
‘You can’t lose what you never had and furthermore don’t want! Don’t you ever listen?’ she demanded hotly.
‘Then who or what have you lost?’
‘Lost my inhibitions—it must be the wine.’
‘Stop laughing.’
Fine! If he preferred tears, he could have them! ‘Lose Ben!’
‘You’re not going to lose Ben,’ he soothed confidently.
Rafe always did think he knew everything—well, not this time! Angrily she lifted her head; tears sparkled on the ends of her spiky dark eyelashes.
‘I am. Chloe wants him!’ she wailed.
Rafe looked at her blankly. She wasn’t making sense at all…maybe she had an even lower tolerance for alcohol than he’d thought.
‘I know Chloe gets what she wants,’ he observed drily,
‘but on this occasion I don’t think you’re obliged to say yes. You really shouldn’t drink, Tess…’
‘You don’t understand!’
Rafe shook his head and didn’t dispute her claim as haunted, anguish-filled emerald eyes fixed once more on his face.
‘I’m not Ben’s mother, Chloe is…’ Sobbing pitifully, she collapsed once more against Rafe’s chest, leaving him to digest the incredible information she’d just hit him with.
If it was true, and he couldn’t for the life of him think why she’d lie about something like that, it was a hell of a lot to take in.
When Tess had taken leave of absence from her job as a high-powered commodities trader, he’d been as shocked as her other friends when she’d returned afterwards complete with a baby. Compared to that, the shock had been relatively mild when she’d walked away from the job she’d loved after a brief, unsuccessful attempt to combine motherhood with a demanding career and moved into the cottage she’d inherited from her grandmother.
Now she was saying she wasn’t Ben’s mother! She wasn’t anyone’s mother!
It was a good ten minutes before Tess was capable of continuing their discussion. Looking at her stubborn, closed-in expression as she sat with primly folded arms in the old rocking-chair, Rafe could see that talking to him was the last thing she wanted to do.
‘Why?’
‘Morgan and Edward were out of the country, some jungle or other,’ Tess recalled dully, speaking of her elder sister and brother-in-law who were both brilliant, but unworldly palaeontologists of international renown. They might be the first people everybody thought of consulting when a prehistoric skull was unearthed, but when it came to a pregnant daughter they wouldn’t have been high on anybody’s list.
‘Besides which they would have been worse than useless even if they had been around.’
Tess chose to ignore this accurate summing-up. ‘Chloe was five months gone before she realised and absolutely distraught when she was told it was too late to…’ Tess paused and looked self-consciously uncomfortable.
‘She wanted to be rid of it.’ Rafe shrugged. ‘That figures. She always was a selfish, spoilt brat.’
Honesty prevented Tess disputing this cruel assessment. Her elder sister and her husband always had either indulged or ignored their only child, and the product of this upbringing had turned into a stunningly beautiful but extremely self-absorbed young woman.
‘A scared spoilt brat back then,’ Tess snapped sharply.
‘She didn’t want anyone to know about it; she made me promise. So I took her away.’
‘Isn’t that a bit…I don’t know, Victorian melodrama…?’
‘You’ve not the faintest idea of how weird she was acting.’ Tess had been genuinely worried that Chloe might have done something drastic. ‘I thought a change of scene, away from people that knew her, might help. I imagined,’ she recalled, ‘that after the birth she’d…’
‘Be overcome by maternal instincts.’ Rafe gave a scornful snort.
‘People are,’ Tess retorted indignantly.
‘A classic case of optimism overcoming what’s right under your nose. Chloe was never going to give up partying to stay at home and baby-sit. I can’t believe you were that stupid.’
‘Why?’ she asked, roused to anger by his superior, condescending attitude. It was easy for him to condemn—he hadn’t been there; he couldn’t possibly understand what it had been like. ‘You don’t usually have any problem believing I’m an idiot!’ She shook her head miserably.
‘I don’t know why I’m even telling you all this. It won’t make any difference. The fact is, Chloe is his mother and if she wants him there’s nothing, short of skipping the country, that I can do about it! I wish now I’d adopted him legally myself when she suggested it,’ she ended on a bleak note of self-condemnation.
‘Don’t worry,’ she added, slanting him a small, bitter smile. ‘I haven’t got the cash to skip the country.’
That was another thing that had been nagging away at him. Tess had lived a starkly simple life since she’d moved here, she owned this place outright, had no debts that he was aware of, and she must have made a tidy pile during her brief but successful career. Yet this place needed a lick of paint. In fact it needed a lot of things—not big things, but…And when had she stopped running a car? He couldn’t remember; it hadn’t seemed important at the time. But covering the primaries in the States had been? In light of Tess’s distress there was a big question mark hanging over his priorities.
‘I could lend it to you.’
Just as well he didn’t know how tempting she found his offer, even though she knew it was meant as a joke. “‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be,”’ she quoted sadly.
‘I can’t believe you’ve fooled everyone all this time.’ Rafe was looking at her as though he were seeing her for the first time. It had taken him long enough to get his head around the idea that she was a mother—now he’d have to unlearn something that had been surprisingly hard for him to accept in the first place.
‘It wasn’t intentional, it just sort of happened,’ she replied, knowing her explanation sounded lame.
‘You didn’t just sort of happen to give up a great job you loved. You didn’t just sort of happen to spend over a year of your life bringing up someone else’s child.’
‘I