The Secret Spanish Love-Child by Cathy Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

upholstered chair facing him. She couldn’t quite meet his eyes so instead she stared at the pattern on the sofa, also flowered. Both generous gifts from her parents, who had dug deep into their savings to help her out. They were the ones who had been there for her. Not the guy sitting opposite, who had cleared off with no forwarding address.
    ‘Of course that was impossible.’ Her huge brown eyes were bitter. ‘I asked at that hotel you were supposed to be working at and they had never heard of a Lucio , never mind a Lucio with no surname. Hardly surprising since Lucio had never existed. I tried describing you, but naturally they would never have put two and two together and come up with the big shot owner of the hotel.’
    Guilt found its way through his iron-clad defence system. ‘No one could have anticipated this situation,’ he said grimly.
    ‘We should have been more diligent with the contraception. More careful.’ The Pill had not agreed with her. Instead, they had relied on barrier protection and there had been times when spontaneity had got in the way of common sense. Like a complete idiot, she had airily imagined that there would beno consequences. Her periods had always been irregular. She had vaguely concluded that pregnancy would therefore be less likely than in someone with a tip-top menstrual cycle.
    ‘There is no point going down the what if road…’ But another stab of guilt penetrated his austerity. At the time, he had told himself that walking away from her had been in her best interests. She had been young, only just out of school, as he had discovered along the way. Definitely not experienced enough to take on or even need any sort of committed relationship, especially with a guy like him. A guy she didn’t even really know. She was a free spirit, about to begin her journey through life. He was already marching upwards, an only child programmed to adhere to unspoken expectations.
    But, with malign treachery, the image in his head of her, young and frightened, had wormed its way in and was refusing to budge.
    ‘If it is any consolation, I put my hands up and admit that my little white lies may not have been one hundred per cent justifiable.’
    ‘Oh, well, thanks very much for that belated apology.’ Alex’s voice was laced with sarcasm. She had never been the sarcastic sort. Funny how experience had a way of changing a person.
    ‘My family were very good. I hid out there for a while but in the end I knew that I had to follow the jobs and London was the most likely place for me to get one so I moved in with a friend and then got this place.’ She was pleased at how this dispassionate rattling off of the past few traumatic years of her life managed to sound so ordered when in fact she had lived in a semi-permanent state of stress and exhaustion.
    ‘And then you happened to run into me.’ He was making a determined effort to stay away from the emotive topic ofhis son being in a house that was barely big enough for one person. This was not going to do. But he would bide his time for the present.
    ‘It was a shock.’ She glanced across at him warily. ‘You seem to be taking all this very well,’ she ventured hesitantly. ‘I thought you’d be furious.’
    ‘What would be the point of that?’ Gabriel questioned with chilling self-control. ‘Would it change anything? My son would still be upstairs sleeping and life as I know it would still have ceased to exist.’
    If at any point in time she had daydreamed about a happy-ever-after ending, some surprise meeting which might have concluded with joyous exclamations of love, then those words conclusively put any such fantasy to rest.
    For Gabriel, the knowledge that he was a father meant that life as he knew it would cease to exist , and since his life had been very happy indeed without either her or their son in it, then he was looking at a bleak future and that hurt. Even after all these years.
    ‘Tell me something,’ he said in the