Legally His Omnibus by Penny Jordan Read Free Book Online Page A

marriage. What was more, she’d had to make the best of it for Oliver’s sake. Her love was going to be the only parental love he was going to have.
    She had discovered she was pregnant two months after Sean had announced that he wanted a divorce and walked out on her. She had fainted in a store, exhausted by the brutality of her grief.
    Until then she hadn’t cared if she lived or died. No, that was not true. Given the choice, she would have preferred death. She hadn’t been able to imagine how she could go on living without Sean, whose callous words—‘You’ll soon get over me and meet someone else and start producing those bloody babies you want so much’—had cut her to the heart. The only man whose babies she had wanted was his. But he no longer loved her. The house they had shared was empty and she’d been living—existing—in rented accommodation, fiercely refusing to take any money from Sean. She had had no idea where he was living. And then she had found out that she was having his child. The child he had told her he did not want!
    It was in that knowledge that she had made her decision not to let Sean know she was pregnant. He had rejected her and the pain had almost destroyed her. She wasn’t going to inflict that kind of pain on her baby.
    She had promised herself that she would find a way to stop loving Sean, and when Oliver had been born she had thought that she had. Until now.
    She had to get away from Sean. She had believed that she had stopped loving him, but now she was desperately afraid that she had been wrong. A pain that was not all pure pain, but part helpless longing was unfurling slowly inside her. No matter what Sean might threaten to do she had to leave here, and she was going to tell him so...right now!
    Agitatedly she got up and hurried to her office door, dragging it open and hurrying towards the office which had once been John’s and which Sean was now using whilst he familiarised himself with the day-to-day running of the business.
    There was no one in the outer office, and, too wrought-up for formalities, Kate rushed into the inner office, only to stare around it in dismay when she saw that it was empty.
    Or at least she had thought it was empty. The door to a small private room which contained a changing room and shower facilities was half open, and she could hear someone moving about inside it. Someone? It could only be Sean.
    Taking a deep breath, Kate walked purposefully towards it and then hesitated, her hand on the door handle. A part of her wasn’t ready for another confrontation, but another part of her just wanted to get the whole thing over and done with.
    Clearing her throat nervously, she took a deep breath and called out, ‘Sean—are you in there? Only, there’s something I need to speak to you about...’
    In the empty silence that followed Kate began to lose her courage. Perhaps she had been wrong. Perhaps Sean wasn’t even here...
    She started to turn away, stiffening with shock when the door was wrenched back and Sean was standing there naked, apart from the water running over his skin and the towel he was still wrapping around his hips.
    For half a dozen seconds she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t do anything other than stare at him whilst her eyes widened and her face burned.
    ‘Oh. You were having a shower!’ Was that really her voice—that soft, breathy, almost awed thread of sound?
    ‘I was ,’ Sean agreed dryly, emphasising the past tense of his statement.
    As she fought down the aching feeling that was spreading through her body Kate seized on anger as her main weapon of defence, telling herself fiercely that Sean should have done more to cover his nudity than simply drape—well, not even drape, really, simply hold, Kate decided, before hurriedly dragging her traitorous gaze away—the smallest of towels around his hips.
    It was whilst she was doing battle with her suddenly rebellious sense of sight—and coming close to