‘I suppose it makes sense to have the DNA test as soon as possible,’ she said. ‘I can be ready to leave in an hour.’
Cortez gave her a speculative look but fortunately he did not ask why she had suddenly changed her mind. ‘Make it half an hour,’ was all he said as he walked over to the door.
Truly he was the most self-centred man she’d ever met. She was tempted to wipe that smug look from his face before she remembered his threat last night when she had been goaded beyond endurance and had tried to slap him. To her eternal shame, an image came into her mind of being held across his knee while he administered a spanking, and the warmth that flared on her face was almost as hot as the molten sensation pooling between her legs.
Elin was shocked by the intensity of her sexual arousal. It had taken her body many weeks to recover from giving birth, and the effort of looking after a baby, the night feeds, lack of sleep and a fog of hormones clouding her brain meant that sex simply had not been on her radar. But one look at Cortez and it was all she could think about. She realised he was giving her an odd look and prayed he could not read her mind.
‘You’ve obviously never had anything to do with babies,’ she muttered. ‘Taking a small child anywhere with all the paraphernalia they need is like a military operation.’
His dark eyes bored into her. ‘I haven’t witnessed you taking care of your son on either of my visits to Cuckmere Hall. Maybe you find motherhood boring compared to your exciting social life. It seems to me that you leave Harry with his nanny most of the time.’
* * *
Forty-five minutes later, Elin was still seething over Cortez’s comments when he drove them to London in his car. During the journey she maintained a frosty silence and he seemed preoccupied with his own thoughts. The nanny, who was sitting in the back of the car next to Harry in his baby seat, made a couple of attempts at conversation but soon gave up.
Elin had asked Barbara to accompany them to London, thinking she might need the nanny to look after Harry while she searched for her brother in the bars near to his home in Notting Hill, where he was a regular customer. She was relieved when she received a text message from Jarek saying he was on a flight to Japan. It was one thing less to worry about. She suggested that Barbara might like to take the afternoon off to visit her daughter who lived in Greenwich. Cortez pulled over outside a Tube station to drop Barbara off, before driving on to the private clinic in central London.
It did not take long for the samples to be collected which would be analysed for the DNA test, and afterwards they drove to the townhouse in Kensington. Cortez had decreed that they would stay in London overnight while they waited for the result of the paternity test.
Walking into the house, Elin was swamped by memories of when she had slept with Cortez on her birthday a year ago. She was agonisingly aware of him as he carried Harry in his baby seat from the car. Her lips felt tender from where he had kissed her earlier, and when she flicked her tongue over them she could still taste him.
She was glad when he opened his laptop and told her that he intended to get on with some work. Her head was pounding, and although Harry was usually a placid baby he was fretful all afternoon and she couldn’t settle him. As she paced up and down the nursery with the inconsolable baby in her arms she decided that she must be a bad mother, as Cortez had implied.
‘Why does he keep crying?’ Cortez asked when he walked into the kitchen and found her struggling to make up a bottle of baby formula with one hand while she jiggled Harry on her hip. ‘Could he be ill?’
‘He’s just a bit colicky. Babies cry because it’s their only way of communicating,’ she said shortly. She felt her tension ratchet up another notch as she tried to feed Harry and he refused to take the teat into his mouth.
‘You don’t feed him from your breast?’ Cortez commented.
‘I wasn’t able to.’ It was another failure that weighed on her conscience but she was in no mood to explain that she had been fighting for her life immediately after Harry’s birth. Although she had tried to breastfeed him when she’d come out of Intensive Care, her body hadn’t produced enough milk.
‘I didn’t realise you were an expert in childcare,’ she said to Cortez sarcastically. ‘It’s a pity you weren’t around when Harry was born and you could have helped to look after him.’
To her relief Harry finally stopped crying and took his feed. When he finished his bottle she carried him up to the nursery and placed him in his cot. Her headache was worse and she had developed a severe pain in her lower back as well as a high temperature. A phone call to her GP in Sussex confirmed her suspicion that she had all the symptoms of another kidney infection, and she was advised to start the course of antibiotics which she’d been prescribed to treat a recurring infection.
Thankfully, she had brought the antibiotics with her. She swallowed one of the pills and a strong painkiller before she called the nanny’s mobile number and explained that she was feeling unwell.
‘Do what the doctor said and start the course of antibiotics immediately,’ Barbara instructed. ‘I’ll leave my daughter’s right away and I should be in Kensington by the time Harry wakes up from his afternoon nap.’
Elin was shivering, but when she glanced in the mirror she saw that her face was flushed and her hair was damp with sweat. Hopefully, the high-strength medication would halt the infection before it got too bad, she thought, as she climbed into bed fully dressed and burrowed beneath the duvet in an attempt to get warm. When she’d suffered previous kidney infections the antibiotics had made her feel as unwell as the illness.
She fell into a fitful, feverish sleep. One minute she was hot and the next freezing cold and, as she tossed and turned, her mind was taken over by terrifying hallucinations. Distantly she was aware of Harry crying, and she knew she must go to him, but her limbs felt heavy and uncoordinated. She thought she heard a man’s deep voice talking to her but she couldn’t make sense of what he said. Some time later she felt herself being lifted and carried in a pair of strong arms, but maybe she dreamed it. After that she remembered nothing.
CORTEZ GAVE UP trying to concentrate on a financial report for Saunderson’s Bank after he’d read it three times and still had no idea what it said. Business had been his life since he’d graduated from university with a first class degree and a determination to succeed. His new role as chairman of the prestigious private bank was more proof that he had come a long way from picking grapes at his mother’s small vineyard in Jerez. But waiting to learn if he was the father of Elin’s child dominated his thoughts and he drummed his fingertips on the coffee table and glanced at his watch for the hundredth time.
When his phone rang and he recognised the number of the paternity test clinic on the screen he took a deep breath before he answered the call. Moments later he ran an unsteady hand across his face.
Santa Madre! He had a son.
Conflicting emotions stormed through him. A fierce joy and pride in his beautiful son, but anger when he thought of the child’s mother. Elin had lied about Harry’s date of birth and Cortez was furious, knowing that if he had not insisted on a DNA test she might have disappeared with the baby and he would never have known he was a father.
He lurched to his feet. He felt drunk although he had not had a drop of alcohol. He was in shock, he realised. When he’d seen Harry’s black hair and dark eyes he had wondered if the baby could be his. But he was unprepared for the overwhelming emotions that poured through him. Driven by a need to see his child, he strode out of the room and quickly climbed the stairs. He heard Harry crying and a feeling he could not begin to describe welled inside him, a fundamental desire to protect his son.
Following the sound of Harry’s cries, he located the