After The Loving. Кэрол Мортимер

between them.

      She put her hand protectively on her stomach. Her child.

      Dear God, how she wanted it!

      But she would lose Raff if she had the baby.

      She was losing him anyway.

      The last thought came unbidden, but she knew it was the truth even as she tried to deny it. Each day Raff faded a little more away from her, until eventually he would tell her it was over between them. She was only surprised he hadn’t already done so; she had lasted much longer than his affairs usually did.

      It still surprised her to realise she was the mistress of Raff Gallagher, a man who wielded much power in the City, both monetarily and personality-wise. The first moment she had seen him she had known he was a power to be reckoned with. But she certainly hadn’t expected to become his mistress within a matter of days!

      He wouldn’t want this child she carried, she had no doubt of that. Raff had made it clear from the first that he was offering her no more than any of the other women he had had in his life the last ten years: passion and consideration, and the truth when he no longer felt either of them for her any more.

      How could she tell the man who had made it clear he offered no commitment that they had made the biggest commitment of all, that of forming another life from their desire for each other? Once again she acknowledged that she couldn’t tell him. Which gave her only a matter of weeks with him before the child physically began to show on her slender figure.

      Why bother to count in weeks when she knew Raff could end it in days? Maybe even today.

      ‘So will you talk to Daddy about it?’

      Bryna blinked at the pretty girl who sat opposite her at the restaurant table. Lunch had been the last thing she had felt like after leaving the doctor’s surgery, but she had promised to have lunch with Kate, and somehow she had managed to drive herself to the restaurant. How, she didn’t know, not recalling the drive here at all, but she had already been seated at the table when Kate had breezed into the room five minutes ago, her hair a mass of glossy black curls, grey eyes gleaming with determination.

      It was that gleam of determination that warned Bryna she had better be more on her guard and pay closer attention to what Kate was saying; this young lady could be deviously charming when she chose to be! And lack of attention when Kate’s eyes were gleaming like this could have dire results. This young lady could be every bit as manipulative as her father when she was set on a course of action.

      ‘Talk to him about what?’ Bryna prompted guardedly, listening intently now.

      Irritation flickered in the dark grey depths. ‘What’s the matter with you today, Bryna? You haven’t heard a word I’ve said since I arrived!’

      Bryna gave a half-smile as Kate displayed another characteristic of her father: impatience with anyone who didn’t pay complete attention to what concerned them at any given moment. In the father it was part of his strength of character, in this eighteen-year-old girl it appeared merely petulant. But she didn’t doubt Kate would be every inch the matriarch in her later years.

      ‘Sorry. I—I’ve had a busy morning,’ she dismissed with a shrug.

      ‘Hm,’ Kate gave her a censorious look. ‘Well, I’d like you to talk to Daddy on my behalf about the idea of my sharing a flat with Brenda next term.’

      Bryna’s brow cleared at the explanation. ‘I thought you’d already discussed it with your father and he’d said no,’ she returned drily, knowing all about the conversation between father and daughter, also knowing the outcome would be inevitable.

      ‘Not a definite no-more-discussion-on-the-subject no.’ Kate sat forward eagerly. ‘I’m sure that if you told him you think it’s a good idea he might be more—open-minded.’

      Bryna wasn’t sure she did think it was a good idea. Oh, she understood Kate’s wish to leave the home she had shared with her family the last eighteen years, but she wasn’t altogether sure Kate was up to setting up home on her own just yet, especially with Brenda Sanders.

      Kate had become friends with the other girl when she had started college the previous term, but Brenda seemed to have a different boy in tow each time they met, and the one time Bryna had been to the flat Kate proposed sharing it had been very untidy, with a sleepy-eyed, completely naked young man emerging from Brenda’s bedroom. That way of life might be Brenda’s choice, but for all her outward sophistication she was sure Kate was still very much an innocent. And her father would like her to remain that way a little while longer!

      ‘I don’t think my opinion, favourable or otherwise, would make the slightest difference to his decision,’ she told the younger girl coolly, sipping her mineral water, having realised just in time before she ordered her drink from the waiter that she shouldn’t really drink alcohol in her condition.

      ‘Oh, but I’m sure—— Oh,’ Kate broke off as realisation dawned. ‘You aren’t saying that your affair with Daddy is almost over?’

      Candour, cruelly blunt or otherwise, was something neither of the Gallagher children lacked, neither Paul at twenty, or his young sister Kate. It was something Bryna had been made aware of the first time Raff had introduced her to his two children from his very young marriage and they had asked why she and Raff didn’t just live together and have an open affair, assuring them that they were both adult enough to accept the situation.

      They might well be, but neither she nor Raff had wanted that close a relationship, she because she liked having her own home and independence, Raff because he never became that intimate with the women he was involved with, and both of them were happy to continue as they were. Or they had been.

      ‘I don’t believe it,’ Kate dismissed before she could answer her. ‘You and Daddy have been together for over six months now; that’s at least three months longer than any of the others!’

      Tact and diplomacy seemed to be traits the Gallagher children hadn’t received when virtues were being given out!

      Bryna was well aware of the fact that her affair with Raff had lasted twice as long as they usually did, just as she had been aware of his increasing irritability the last month or so, knowing it was only a matter of time now before he ended things between them.

      Until today, until an hour ago, she had been grateful for each extra day she had lasted than his other women; now she knew she would have no choice but to end things herself if he didn’t do it soon.

      ‘All the more reason for him to feel enough is enough,’ she gave a tight smile.

      ‘I don’t believe it,’ his daughter scoffed. ‘Paul and I have been laying bets on how soon he would marry you!’

      Bryna gave the younger girl a pitying look. ‘You should both know better than that.’

      Grey eyes, so much like her father’s it was unnerving, looked Bryna over speculatively. ‘I somehow never expected the woman to turn Daddy down when he finally decided to take the plunge again.’

      She turned away. ‘One has to be asked in order to give a refusal.’

      ‘You’re so beautiful, Daddy is sure to ask you soon,’ the younger girl said with certainty.

      As if beauty had anything to do with it! Oh, she was well aware of her own looks, she had to be in the profession she had chosen to enter on leaving school eight years ago. She knew how well her long mane of white-blonde straight hair and wide, dark-lashed, violet-coloured eyes photographed, not to mention the slender length of her body.

      Her looks had been her stock-in-trade for six years, and could have continued to do so for many years after that, but two years ago she had decided to open her own modelling agency, where her looks and appearance were still very important, but she no longer had to watch everything she ate, or look anxiously in the mirror each morning as she searched for those tell-tale lines on her face that would tell her the choice was no longer hers to make.

      It