Czytaj książkę: «The Husband Hunters»

CHAPTER ONE

FROM the slim document case clasped in one strong brown hand, Raul Zaforteza withdrew a large glossy photograph. ‘This is Polly Johnson. In six weeks’ time she will give birth to my child. I must find her before then.’

Somehow primed to expect a gorgeous blonde with a supermodel face and figure, Digby was disconcerted to find himself looking at a small, slim girl with a mane of hair the colour of mahogany, soulful blue eyes and an incredibly sweet smile. She looked so outrageously young and wholesome he just could not imagine her in the role of surrogate mother.

As a lawyer with a highly respected London firm, Digby Carson had dealt with some very difficult cases. But a surrogacy arrangement gone wrong? The surrogate mother on the run and probably determined to keep the baby? He surveyed his most wealthy and influential client with a sinking heart.

Raul Zaforteza’s fabled fortune was founded on gold and diamond mines. He was a brilliant business tycoon, a legendary polo player and, according to the gossip columns, a notorious womaniser. He was already prowling like a black panther ready to spring. Six feet two inches tall, with the sleek, supple build of a born athlete and the volatile temperament of his colourful heritage, he was an intimidating sight, even to a man who had known him from childhood.

Digby...I understood that my lawyer in New York had already briefed you on this situation,’ Raul drawled with barely concealed impatience.

He said the matter was far too confidential to discuss on the phone. And I hadn’t the slightest suspicion that you were planning to become a father through surrogacy,’ the older man admitted. ‘Why on earth did you embark on such a risky venture?’

Por Dios ... you watched me grow up! How can you ask me that?’ Raul countered.

Digby looked uncomfortable. As a former employee of Raul’s late father, he was well aware that Raul had had a pretty ghastly childhood. He might be rich beyond avarice, but he had not been anything like as lucky in the parent lottery.

His bronzed features taut, Raul expelled his breath in a slow hiss. ‘I decided a long time ago that I would never marry. I wouldn’t give any woman that amount of power over me or, even more crucially, over any child we might have!’ Fierce conviction roughened his rich, accented drawl. ‘But I’ve always been very fond of children—’

‘Yes...’ An unspoken but hovered in the tense silence.

‘Many marriages end in divorce, and usually the wife gets to keep the children,’ Raul reminded the lawyer with biting cynicism. Surrogacy impressed me as the most practical way in which to father a child outside marriage. This wasn’t an impulsive decision, Digby. When I decided to go ahead, I went to a lot of trouble to ensure that I would choose a suitable mother for my child.’

‘Suitable?’ Digby was keen to hear what Raul, with his famed love of fast, glitzy society blondes, had considered ‘suitable’ in the maternal stakes.

‘When my New York legal team advertised for a surrogate mother, they received a flood of applications. I employed a doctor and a psychologist to put a shortlist of the more promising candidates through a battery of tests, but the responsibility for the final choice was naturally mine.’

The older man frowned down at the photograph of Polly Johnson. ‘What age is she?’

Twenty-one.’

Digby’s frown remained. ‘She was the only suitable candidate? ’

Raul tautened. The psychologist did have some reservations but I decided to overlook them.’

Digby looked shaken.

‘Everything that the psychologist saw in Polly I wanted in the mother of my child,’ Raul stressed without a shade of regret. It was a gut feeling and I acted on it. Yes, she was young and idealistic, but she had the right moral values. She wasn’t motivated by greed but by a desperate need to try and finance surgery which she hoped might extend her mother’s life.’

I wonder how that desperation affected her ability to make a rational decision about what she was getting involved in,’ Digby remarked.

‘Wondering is a pointless exercise now that she is pregnant with my child,’ Raul countered very drily. ‘But I will find her soon. Her background was exhaustively investigated. I now know that, just two months ago, she was at her godmother’s home in Surrey. I don’t yet know where she went from there. But before I do find her I need to know what my rights are in this country.’

Digby was in no hurry to break bad news before he had all the facts. British law frowned on surrogacy. If the mother wanted to keep the baby instead of handing it over, no contract was likely to persuade a British judge that taking that child from its mother was in the child’s best interests.

‘Tell me the rest of the story,’ he advised.

While running through the bare facts for the older man’s benefit, Raul stared unseeingly out of the window, grimly recalling his first sight of Polly Johnson through a two-way mirror in the New York legal office. She had reminded him of a tiny porcelain doll. Fragile, unusual and astonishingly pretty.

She had been brave and honest. And so impressively nice—not something Raul had ever sought in a woman before, but a trait he had found very appealing when he had considered all the positive qualities a mother might hand down to her child. Certainly Polly had been younger and less worldly wise than was desirable, but he had recognised her quiet inner strength as well as her essentially tranquil nature.

And the more Raul had watched Polly, the more he had learnt about Polly, the more he had wanted to meet Polly face to face, in the flesh, so that some day in the future he could comfortably answer his child’s curious questions about her. But his New York lawyer had said absolutely not. Strict anonymity would be his only defence against any form of harassment in later years. But Raul had always been a ruthless rule-breaker, with immense faith in his own natural instincts, nor had he ever hesitated to satisfy his own wishes...

And acting on that essential arrogance, he conceded grudgingly now, was how everything had begun to fall apart. Worst of all, he who prided himself on his intelligence and his shrewd perceptive powers had somehow failed to notice the warning signs of trouble on the horizon.

‘So once you knew that the girl had successfully conceived, you installed her in a house in Vermont with a trusted family servant to look after her,’ Digby recapped, because Raul had fallen silent again. ‘Where was her mother while all this was going on?’

‘As soon as Polly signed the contract her mother went into a convalescent home to build up her strength for surgery. She was very ill. The woman knew nothing about the surrogacy agreement. When Polly was only a couple of weeks pregnant, her mother had the operation. Polly had been warned that her mother’s chances of survival were at best only even. She died two days after surgery,’ Raul revealed heavily.

Unfortunate.’

Raul slung him a fulminating glance of scorn. Unfortunate? Polly had been devastated. And Raul had been uneasily conscious that her sole reason for becoming a surrogate had died that same day. Aware from the frustratingly brief reports made by the maid, Soledad, that Polly was deeply depressed, Raul had reached the point where he could no longer bear to stay at a supposedly sensible distance from the woman carrying his baby.

Understandably he had been concerned that she might miscarry. He had sincerely believed that it was his responsibility to offer her support. Isolated in a country that wasn’t her own, only twenty-one-years old, pregnant with a stranger’s baby and plunged deep into a grieving process that her optimistic outlook had not prepared her to face, the mother of his child had really needed a sympathetic shoulder.

So I finally made contact with her,’ Raul admitted tautly. ‘Since I could hardly admit that I was the father of her baby, I had to employ a certain amount of deception to make that contact.’

Unseen, Digby winced. Raul should have avoided any form of personal involvement. But then Raul Zaforteza was a disturbingly complex man. He was a merciless business opponent and a very dangerous enemy. More than one woman had come to grief on the rocks of his innate emotional detachment. But Raul was also a renowned philanthropist, the most genuine of friends to a chosen few and a male still capable of powerful emotional responses.

Raul compressed his firm lips. I took a weekend place near where she was staying and ensured that our paths crossed. I didn’t conceal my identity; I didn’t need to... the Zaforteza name meant nothing to her. Over the following months, I flew up there regularly and called on her. I never stayed long...she just needed someone to talk to.’ Radiating tension now, in spite of that studiously nonchalant explanation, Raul shrugged, his accented drawl petering out into another brooding silence.

And?’

‘And nothing!’ As he swung round from the window, Raul’s hard, dark eyes were sardonic in their comprehension. I treated her like a little sister. I was a casual visitor, nothing more.’

Digby restrained himself from pointing out that since Raul was an only child he could only have the vaguest notion of how one treated a little sister. And Digby had three daughters, every one of whom swooned at the mere mention of Raul’s name. Indeed, the last time he had taken Raul home for dinner it had been a downright embarrassing experience, with all three daughters dressed to kill and competing for Raul’s attention. Even his wife said that Raul Zaforteza might well have been packaged by the devil specifically to tempt the female sex.

He pictured a lonely young woman who might only have faced up to what surrogacy really meant in the aftermath of her mother’s death. When that nice, naive young woman had suddenly found herself entertaining a member of the international jet set as self-assured, sophisticated and charismatic as Raul, what effect had it had on her?

‘When did she go missing?’ Digby prompted.

Three months ago. She disappeared one day... Soledad went out shopping and left her alone,’ Raul confided grimly. ‘Do you realize that in three months I have hardly slept a night through? Day and night I have been worried sick—’

‘I suppose there is a strong possibility that she may have gone for a termination—’

‘Por Dios...’ Raul dealt the older man a smouldering look of reproof. ‘Polly wouldn’t abort my child!’

Content to have issued that warning, Digby didn’t argue.

‘Polly’s very soft, very feminine, very caring...she would never choose that option!’ Raul continued to argue fiercely.

‘You asked about your rights.’ Digby breathed in deep, straightening his shoulders to brace himself for the blow he was about to deliver. ‘I’m afraid unmarried fathers don’t have any under British law.’

Raul stared back at him with rampant incredulity. ‘That isn’t possible.’

‘You couldn’t argue that the girl would make a bad mother either. After all, you chose her,’ the older man pointed out ruefully. ‘You described a respectable girl, drawn into a surrogacy agreement only because she was trying to help her mother. As the rich foreigner who used his wealth to tempt her into making a decision which she later regretted, you wouldn’t look good in court—’

‘But she has reneged on a legal contract,’ Raul spelt out harshly. ‘Dios mio! All I want is the right to take my own child back to Venezuela. I haven’t the slightest desire to take this into a courtroom! There has to be some other way in which I can get custody.’

Digby grimaced. ‘You could marry her...’

Raul gave him a forbidding look. ‘If that was a joke, Digby...it was in the worst possible taste.’

Henry pulled out a chair for Polly to sit down to her evening meal. His mother, Janice Grey, frowned at the young woman’s shadowed blue eyes and too prominent cheekbones. At eight months pregnant, Polly looked drawn and ill.

‘You should be resting at this stage of your pregnancy,’ Janice reproved. ‘If you married Henry now, you could give up work. You could take things easy while he helped you get your godmother’s will sorted out.’

‘It would be the best move you could make.’ Solid and bespectacled, with thinning fair hair, Henry nodded in pompous agreement. ‘You’ll have to be careful that the Inland Revenue doesn’t take too large a slice of your inheritance. ’

‘I really don’t want to marry anybody.’ Beneath her wealth of rich, reddish brown hair, Polly’s delicate features were becoming stiff and her smile strained.

An awkward silence fell while mother and son exchanged meaningful glances.

Polly focused on her nicely cooked meal with a guilty lack of appetite. It had been a mistake to take a room in Janice’s comfortable terraced home. But how could she ever have guessed that her late godmother’s trusted housekeeper had had an ulterior motive for offering her somewhere to stay?

Janice and her son knew the strange terms of Nancy Leeward’s will. They knew that Polly would inherit a million pounds if she found a husband within the year and stayed married for at least six months. Janice was determined to persuade Polly that marrying her son would magically solve her every problem.

And, to be fair to Janice, calculating she might be, but she saw such a marriage as a fair exchange. After all, Polly was an unmarried mum-to-be and couldn’t claim her godmother’s money without a husband. Henry was single, and in a job he loathed. Even a small share of a million pounds would enable Henry to set up as a tax consultant in a smart office of his own. Janice would do just about anything to further Henry’s prospects, and Henry wasn’t just attached to his widowed mother’s apron strings, he was welded to them.

‘Babies can be very demanding,’ Janice pointed out when her son had left the room. ‘And, talking as someone who has done it, raising a child alone isn’t easy.’

‘I know.’ But at the mere mention of the word ‘baby’ a vague and dreamy smile had formed on Polly’s face. There was nothing practical or sensible about the warm feeling of anticipation which welled up inside her.

Janice sighed. ‘I’m only trying to advise you, Polly. You’re not in love with Henry, but where did falling in love get you?’

Polly’s blissful abstraction was cruelly punctured by that reminder. ‘Nowhere,’ she conceded tightly.

‘I’ve never liked to pry, but it’s obvious that the father of your child took off the minute you got pregnant. Unreliable and irresponsible,’ the older woman opined thinly. ‘You certainly couldn’t call my Henry either of those things.’

Polly considered Henry’s joyless and stolid outlook on life and suppressed a sigh.

‘People don’t always marry for love. People get married for all sorts of other reasons,’ Janice persisted. ‘Security, companionship, a nice home.’

‘I’m afraid I would need more.’ Polly got up slowly and heavily. ‘I think I’ll lie down for a while before I go to work.’

Breathless from climbing the stairs, Polly lay down on her bed in the prettily furnished spare room. She grimaced. Never in a million years would she marry Henry just to satisfy the terms of Nancy Leeward’s will and inherit that money.

She was too shamefully conscious that a craving for money had reduced her to her present predicament. Her late father, a strongly religious man, had been fond of saying that money was the root of all evil. And, looking back to the twisted, reckless decision she had made months earlier, Polly knew that in her case that pronouncement had proved all too true.

Her mother had been dying. But Polly had refused to accept the reality that the mother she had grown up without and had barely had time to get to know again could be dying: she hadn’t believed the hand of fate could be that cruel. Armed by that stubborn belief, Polly had gone that extra mile that people talked about, but she had gone that extra mile in entirely the wrong direction, she acknowledged wretchedly.

How could she ever have believed that she would find it possible to give her baby up to strangers? How could she ever have imagined that she could surrender all rights, hand over her own flesh and blood and agree never, ever to try and see her own child again? She had been incredibly stupid and immature. So she had run away from a situation which had become untenable, knowing even then that she would be followed and eventually traced...

As the ever-present threat of being found and called to account for her behaviour assailed Polly, her skin turned clammy with fear. In her own mind she was no better than a criminal. She had signed a contract in which she had promised to give up her baby. She had sat back while an unbelievably huge amount of money was expended on her mother’s medical care and then she had fled. She had broken the law, yet she had been wickedly and savagely deceived into signing that contract...but what proof did she have of that fact?

Sometimes she woke from nightmares about being extradited to the USA and put on trial, her baby taken from her and parcelled off to a life of luxury with his immoral and utterly unscrupulous father in Venezuela. Even when she didn’t have bad dreams, it was becoming increasingly hard to sleep. She was at that point in pregnancy when she couldn’t get comfortable even in bed, and she was often wakened by the strong, energetic movements of her baby.

And in her mind’s eye then, when she was at her weakest, she would see Raul. Raul Zaforteza, dark, devastating and dangerous. What a trusting and pathetic victim she had been! For she had fallen in love with him, hopelessly, helplessly, blindly in love for the first time in her life. She had lived only from one meeting to the next, frantically counting the days in between, agonised if he didn’t turn up and always tormented by the secret she had believed she was still contriving to keep from him. A jagged laugh was torn from her lips now. And all the time Raul had known she was pregnant. After all, he was the father of her baby...

An hour later, Polly headed to work. It was a cool, wet summer evening. She walked past the bus stop. She was presently struggling to save every penny she could. Soon she wouldn’t be able to work any more, and once she had the baby she would need her savings for all sorts of things.

The supermarket where she worked shifts was a bright beacon of light and activity in the city street. As Polly disposed of her coat and her bag in the rest room, the manageress popped her head round the door and frowned. ‘You look very tired, Polly. I hope that doctor of yours knows what he’s doing when he tells you that it’s all right for you to be still working.’

Polly flushed as the older woman withdrew again. She hadn’t actually seen a doctor in two months, but at her last visit she had been advised to rest. How could she rest when she had to keep herself? And if she approached the social services for assistance they would ask too many awkward questions. So she lived in a state of permanent exhaustion, back aching, ankles swollen, and if she pushed herself too hard she got blinding headaches and dizzy spells.

By the end of her shift on one of the checkouts Polly was very tired, and really grateful that she was off the next day. Tomorrow, she decided, she would pamper herself. Shouldering her bag, she left the shop. The rain had stopped. The street lights gleamed off the wet pavements and cars swished by splashing the kerbs.

Polly didn’t even try to close her coat. Only a tent would have closed round her swollen stomach, and the weight of her own body contributed to her fatigue. Not long now, she consoled herself. She felt as if she had been pregnant for ever, but soon she would be getting to know her baby as a separate little person.

Engaged in her thoughts of the near future, head downbent, Polly didn’t register the existence of a large obstacle in her path. Only at the last possible moment, when she almost cannoned into the impossibly tall and solidly built male blocking her passage, did she notice the presence of another human being and seek to sidestep him.

As she teetered dangerously off balance, a cry of dismay escaping her, a pair of strong hands shot out to catch her by the shoulders and steady her. Heart pounding with fright, she reeled as he held her there, her head tipping back from a view of her rescuer’s silver-grey silk tie to look up.

Raul Zaforteza gazed down at her from his great height, his facial muscles locking his staggeringly handsome features into a bronze mask of impassivity that was uniquely chilling.

In severe shock, Polly trembled, soft mouth opening and closing again without sound, a look of pure panic in her gaze as she collided with eyes that had the topaz golden brilliance of a tiger ready to claw the unwary to the bone.

‘There is no place in this whole wide world where you could hope to stay hidden from me,’ Raul spelt out in a controlled tone of immense finality, his rich, accented vowel sounds tingling in her sensitive ears, throwing up a myriad of despoilt memories that could only torment her. ‘The chase is over.’