Louise Fuller – Proof Of Their One-Night Passion (страница 5)
Her mouth thinned. ‘No, I’m sure it comes very naturally to you.’
‘You’re twisting my words.’
She shook her head. ‘You mean like saying Steinn instead of Stone?’
Pressing his spine into the wall behind him, he felt a tick of anger begin to pulse beneath his skin.
‘Okay, I was wrong to lie to you—but if you care about the truth so much then why have you waited so long to tell me that I have a daughter? I mean, she must be what…?’ He did a quick mental calculation. ‘Ten, eleven months?’
‘Eleven months,’ she said stiffly. ‘And I did want to tell you. I tried looking for you when I was pregnant, and then again when she was born. But the only Ragnar Steinns I could track down weren’t you.’ She shifted in her seat again. ‘I probably would never have found you if you hadn’t been on the TV.’
He looked at her again, and despite the rush of righteousness heating his blood he could see that she was nervous, could hear the undertone of strain beneath her bravado.
But then it was a hell of a thing to do. To face a man and tell him he had a child.
His heart began to beat faster.
Years spent navigating through the maelstrom of his family’s dramas had given him a cast-iron control over his feelings, and yet for some reason he couldn’t stop her panic and defiance from getting under his skin.
But letting feelings get in the way of the facts was not going to help the situation. Nor was it going to be much use to his eleventh-month-old daughter.
Right now he needed to focus on the practical.
‘Fortunately you did find me,’ he said calmly.
‘Here.’ She was pushing something across the table towards him, but he carried on talking.
‘So I’m guessing you want to talk money?’
At that moment a group of young men and women came into the café and began noisily choosing what to drink. As the noise swelled around them Lottie thought she might have misheard.
Only she knew that she hadn’t.
Ever since arriving in London that morning she’d been questioning whether she was doing the right thing, and the thought of seeing Ragnar again had made her stomach perform an increasingly complicated gymnastics routine. Her mood had kept alternating between angry and nervous, but when he’d walked out into the street her mood had been forgotten and a spasm of almost unbearable hunger had consumed everything.
If she’d thought seeing him on TV had prepared her for meeting him again then she’d been wrong. Beneath the street lighting his beauty had been as stark and shocking as the volcanic rock of his homeland.
And he was almost unbearably like the daughter they shared. Only now it would appear that, just like her own father, Ragnar seemed to have already decided the terms of his relationship.
‘Money?’ She breathed out unsteadily. The word tasted bitter in her mouth. ‘I didn’t come here to talk to you about money. I came here to talk about our daughter.’
Her heart felt suddenly too big for her chest. Why did this keep happening? Why did men think that they could reduce her life to some random sum of money?
‘Children cost money.’ He held her gaze. ‘Clearly you’ve been supporting her alone up until now and I want to fix that. I’ll need to talk to my lawyers, but I want you to know that you don’t need to worry about that anymore.’
‘I’ve not been alone. My mother helps, and my brother Lucas lives with me. He works as a tattooist so he can choose his own hours—’
‘A tattooist?’
Glancing up, she found his clear blue eyes examining her dispassionately, as if she was some flawed algorithm. She felt slightly sick—just as she had in those early months of the pregnancy. Only that had been a welcome sickness. A proof of new life, a sign of a strong pregnancy. Now, though, the sickness was down to the disconnect between the man who had reached for her so frantically in that hotel room and this cool-eyed stranger.
She stared at him in silence.
What made this strange, unnerving distance between them a hundred times harder was that she had let herself be distracted by his resemblance to Sóley. Let herself hope that the connection between Ragnar and his daughter would be more than it had been for her and her own father—not just bones and blood, but a willingness to claim her as his own.
But the cool, dispassionate way he had turned the conversation immediately to money was proof that he’d reached the limit of his parental involvement.
She cleared her throat. ‘I know you’re a rich man, Ragnar, but I didn’t come here to beg.’ She swallowed down her regret and disappointment. ‘This was a mistake. Don’t worry, though, it’s not one I’ll make again—so why don’t you get back to the thing that clearly matters most to you? Making money.’
Ragnar reached across the table, but even before he’d got to his feet she had scraped back her seat and snatched up her coat, and he watched in disbelief as she turned and fled from the cafe.
For a moment he considered chasing after her, but she was moving fast and no doubt would already have reached the underground station on the corner.
He sat back down; his chest tight with an all too familiar frustration.
Her behaviour—having a child with a complete stranger, keeping that child a secret, turning up unannounced to reveal the child’s existence and then storming off—could have come straight from his family’s playbook of chaos.
Glancing down, he felt his pulse scamper forward as for the first time he looked at what she’d pushed across the table. It was a photo of a little girl.
A little girl who looked exactly like him—Sóley.
Reaching out, he touched her face lightly. She was so small, so golden, just like her name. And he was not going to let her grow up with no influence but her chaotic mother and whatever ragtag family she had in tow.
He might love his own family, but he knew only too well the downside of growing up in the eye of a storm and he didn’t want that for his daughter.
So arrangements would have to be made.
Picking up the photo, he slid it into his wallet and pulled out his phone.
HITCHING HER SLEEPING daughter further up on to her shoulder, Lottie glanced around the gallery.
Groups of people were moving slowly around the room, occasionally pausing to gaze more closely at the sketches and collages and sculpted resin objects before moving on again. It wasn’t rammed, but she was pleased—she really was. She was also exhausted.
‘Nearly over.’
She turned, eyes widening, and then began to smile as the woman standing beside her gave her a conspiratorial wink. Slim, blonde, and with the kind of cheekbones that grazed men’s eyes as they walked past, Georgina Hamilton was the gallery’s glamorous and incredibly competent co-owner, and despite the fact that she and Lottie were different in as many ways as it was possible to be, she had become an ally and fierce supporter.
Lottie screwed up her face. ‘Do I look that desperate?’
Her friend stared at her critically. ‘Only to me. To everyone else you probably just look artistically dishevelled.’ She glanced at the sleeping Sóley. ‘Do you want me to take her?’
Their eyes met and then they both began to giggle. They both knew that Georgina’s idea of hands-on childcare was choosing baby clothes in her cousin’s upmarket Chelsea boutique.
‘No, it’s okay. I don’t want to risk waking her.’ Lottie looked down at the top of her daughter’s soft, golden-haired head. ‘She’s been really unsettled the last couple of nights.’
And she wasn’t the only one.
Her cheeks were suddenly warm, and she tilted her head away from Georgina’s gaze. It was true that Sóley was struggling to fall asleep at night, but it was Ragnar who had actually been keeping her awake.
It wasn’t just the shock of seeing him again, or even his disappointingly predictable reduction of their daughter’s life to a financial settlement. It was the disconcerting formality between them.
She pressed her face into her daughter’s hair. The disconnect between her overtly erotic memories of the last time they’d met and his cool reserve in the coffee shop had made her feel as if she’d stepped through the looking glass. He had been at once so familiar, and yet so different. Gone was the passion and the febrile hunger, and in their place was a kind of measured, almost clinical gaze that had made her feel she was being judged—and found wanting.
Her heartbeat twitched. And yet running alongside their laboured conversation there had been something pulsing beneath the surface—a stirring of desire, something intimate yet intangible that had made her fingers clumsy as she’d tried to pick up her cup.
She blinked the thought away. Of course what had happened between them had clearly been a blip. After all, this was a man who had turned people’s need for intimacy into a global business worth billions—an ambition that was hardly compatible with empathy or passion.
Her jaw tightened. What was it he’d said about that night? Oh, yes, that it had been a ‘dummy run’ for his app. Well,