Contracted: Corporate Wife. Jessica Hart

can you compromise about a baby?’ demanded Patrick. ‘Either you have one or you don’t. There are no halfway measures, no part-time options, on parenthood.’

      That would be news to Lawrie, Lou couldn’t help thinking. He seemed to think that he could drop in and out of his children’s lives whenever it suited him.

      ‘Plenty of fathers don’t have much choice but to see their children on a part-time basis,’ she said, struggling to sound fair. ‘It can work.’

      ‘I didn’t want to be a father like that,’ said Patrick flatly. ‘I don’t believe in half measures. Either you do something properly, or you don’t do it at all.’

      Not the king of compromise, then.

      CHAPTER TWO

      ‘YOU could say that about marriage too,’ said Lou, courage bolstered by all the champagne she had drunk.

      Patrick twisted a fork between his fingers, his expression bitter. ‘I would have stuck with our marriage no matter what, but Catriona wanted a divorce. So that’s what happened. We didn’t do it at all.’

      ‘What happened to Catriona?’

      ‘Oh, she met someone else. She got her children…three of them…but now she’s divorced again. Her husband ran off with his secretary for a more exciting and child-free life, I gather, so she’s on her own again.’

      ‘You know,’ he confided slowly, ‘Catriona always used to say that if only she could have a baby, she would never be unhappy again, but I still see her occasionally, and she doesn’t look very happy to me. She’s got the children she wanted, but she looks exhausted and worn down.’

      ‘I’m not surprised if her husband’s left her and she’s dealing with three children by herself,’ said Lou.

      ‘She’s got help,’ said Patrick unsympathetically. ‘She got the house and she’ll have someone to clean it and an au pair to take care of the kids. She doesn’t even have to work. And when it comes down to it, it was her choice.’

      ‘It’s tiring bringing up children,’ said Lou, although she was feeling less sympathetic since hearing about the cleaner and the au pair and the lack of a mortgage.

      A cleaner, imagine it! Imagine having a house with no rent or mortgage to pay. Even better. She’d hold on the au pair though. Grace would make mincemeat of the poor girl.

      ‘Kids can be very consuming,’ she said.

      ‘I know,’ said Patrick. ‘That’s precisely why I’ve chosen not to have them. You can keep all your dirty nappies and your grazed knees and your adolescent tantrums. I don’t want to be bothered with any of that.’

      ‘But are you any happier than Catriona?’

      ‘Of course I am!’

      Lou looked unconvinced. ‘You say she’s not happy, but I bet she is. I bet she doesn’t regret having those children for an instant. Of course it’s hard work. There are days when I’m so exhausted just getting through the day, and it all seems a never-ending battle, and then I’ll look at the back of Tom’s neck, or hear Grace laughing, and they’re so…miraculous…I feel like my heart’s going to stop with the sheer joy of them. Do you ever feel like that?’

      ‘I do when I look at my Porsche,’ said Patrick flippantly.

      ‘Enough to make up for a failed marriage and losing your wife?’

      ‘Look, I was bitter when Catriona left. Of course I was,’ he said, a slightly defensive edge to his voice. ‘I’m not going to pretend I’ve been ecstatically happy all the time, ever since, but I’ve moved on. I’ve been successful in a way I would never have dreamed of when I was married to Catriona. I’ve built up some great companies, and I’ve made lots of money while I was at it. I’ve worked hard and I’ve had a good life. And I’ve got the kind of car most men can only fantasise about.’

      ‘Oh, well, as long as you’ve got a nice car…’

      ‘You may mock, but it means a lot.’

      ‘I think you may need to be a man to understand that one,’ said Lou. Tom and Lawrie certainly would.

      ‘Let’s put it this way,’ said Patrick, pointing a fork at her for emphasis. ‘I can do what I want. I can go where I want, when I want, with whoever I want. You don’t think that makes me happy?’

      ‘Right.’ Lou nodded understandingly as she buttered another piece of bread. She hoped the food was coming soon. She was starving. ‘So when was the last time you went away? You certainly haven’t been anywhere in the last three months.’

      ‘I’ve been busy, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ said Patrick, thrown off balance by this new, combative Lou. ‘I had a company to save!’

      ‘Hey, we managed for years before you came along! We wouldn’t have fallen apart if you’d taken a long weekend. You didn’t even go away at Easter. Don’t you ever wish that you were working for something more than to make more money? That you had someone to go home to at the end of the day?’

      ‘Aren’t you trying to ask me if I ever get lonely?’ said Patrick sardonically.

      ‘Well, don’t you?’

      ‘I don’t need to be on my own if I don’t choose to. I’ve had plenty of relationships, and I’m not short of female company.’

      So Lou had gathered from the gossip columns.

      Perhaps it was just as well that the food arrived before she had time to frame a tart retort. Patrick had to watch while Lou went through her smiling routine again, and the waiter, this one old enough to have known better, fell over himself to serve her. He picked up her napkin, refilled both of her glasses, offered to fetch her more bread and ground pepper from an extremely suggestive-looking mill.

      Extraordinary, thought Patrick. He studied her across the table. She had taken off her jacket and was wearing a simple, silky sort of top with a scoop neck, its plainness set off by a striking silver necklace. OK, she was elegant in a classic way and she had a charming smile—it seemed to work on waiters and barmen, anyway—but there wasn’t anything particularly special about the rest of her.

      Well, she had nice eyes, he supposed, amending his opinion slightly, and all the assurance of an older woman, but there was no way you could describe her as beautiful. Not like Ariel, who had all the bloom and radiance of youth. Still, now that he was looking at her properly, he could see that she did have a certain allure with that dark hair and those dark eyes.

      Funny, this was the first time he had really been aware of her as a woman. He must have seen the line of her throat and the curve of her mouth almost every day for the last three months, and yet tonight was the first time he had noticed them at all.

      Patrick frowned slightly. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to start noticing things like that about Lou. There was something vaguely unsettling about thinking of her as a woman, warm and real, as opposed to the impersonal PA who ran his office so efficiently. About realising how oddly the generous curve of her lips sat with that air of cool competence or the ironic undertone in her voice sometimes.

      And there was something very unsettling about noticing the way that top shifted as she leant forward to pick up her glass. The material seemed to slither over her skin, and it was impossible not to wonder how it would feel beneath his hands, how warm and smooth her body would be underneath…

      Patrick looked abruptly away. Enough of that.

      ‘What about you?’ he said, struggling to remember what they had been talking about. She had been making him cross, and that was good. Anything was better than watching that top slip and slide as she breathed. ‘Are you Mrs Happy?’

      ‘I think I’m pretty happy,’ she said, swirling the wine in her glass