After The Loving. Кэрол Мортимер

there had been too many beautiful women before her for her to ever believe that.

      ‘I don’t think so, Kate,’ she dismissed as gently as she could, liking the young girl for all her brashness. How could she not like the daughter who looked so much like the man she loved!

      No ties, no commitment, they had said at the start of their affair, and Bryna had meant to keep to those rules. But it had been impossible for her not to fall in love with Raff, although she had taken care not to let him even guess at the emotion, knowing it would precipitate the end of their relationship. She had broken all the rules, but Raff had kept to every one of them, and she had no illusions why.

      Would the child she carried look like him as Kate did? They were both tall, so the child was sure to inherit that trait from one of them, but Raff was so dark against her blondeness, and surely that would be the more dominant of the two. How strange to look at her child and see Raff in every glance!

      ‘Bryna? Bryna!’ Kate repeated impatiently at her second lapse into unattentiveness. ‘Are you sure? I mean——’

      ‘I’m sure. And I accept it,’ she huskily assured the young girl. ‘Now let’s order lunch, shall we?’ she added briskly as the waiter approached their table. ‘It hasn’t happened yet, and until it does we can enjoy each other’s company.’

      She was well aware that when her affair with Raff ended he wouldn’t be the only one to leave her life, that, fond as she had become of Kate and Paul, they could hardly keep up a friendship with one of their father’s ex-mistresses!

      Kate gave her a frowning look once they had ordered their meal. ‘You don’t seem exactly heartbroken.’

      Bryna gave rueful grimace. ‘Would it do any good if I screamed and shouted?’

      ‘Well … no,’ Kate admitted moodily. ‘But it might make you feel better.’

      ‘Believe me, it wouldn’t,’ Bryna drawled.

      ‘You’re always so cool and controlled,’ the girl rebuked. ‘Don’t you care for Daddy at all?’

      Her heart felt heavy at the irony of that. ‘I don’t think you really want me to answer that——’

      ‘But I do,’ Kate insisted earnestly. ‘Daddy tells me that I shouldn’t even think about going to bed with someone unless I’m absolutely sure I’m in love with them, and yet Daddy isn’t in love with the women he goes to bed with.’

      Bryna picked uninterestedly at the prawns she had chosen as her appetiser. ‘It doesn’t seem very fair, does it?’ she acknowledged, her cheeks pale beneath their light dusting of blusher.

      ‘He told me there’s a certain type of woman a man would never contemplate marrying,’ Kate added with a bitchiness unusual for her.

      Bryna swallowed hard, recognising the accusation for what it was. Except that she knew Raff didn’t mean her. He had been her first and only lover.

      After her parents had told her she could never have a child she had deliberately set out to attract men to the sensuous sway of her body, always drawing back before any physical commitment had been made, believing they would realise she wasn’t a complete woman if they ever made love to her. By the time she realised that wasn’t true she had earned herself the reputation of being icy and aloof. And the ice hadn’t begun to melt until she met Raff. If he had been surprised to find her virginity intact he had never said so.

      The bitchy comment hadn’t been worthy of Kate, with her forthright manner and lack of guile. Bryna guessed that the girl was fond of her too, and would miss her when the time came.

      ‘He was right,’ she told the younger girl.

      Only six years separated them in age, and yet at eighteen Bryna had already been mature beyond her years, scarred by what she believed to be her inadequacy. God, how she wished she could share the life growing within her with someone! Preferably Raff.

      But that was out of the question. Her parents, then. She didn’t doubt for a moment that they would be overjoyed by the news, whether she had a husband or not; as Bryna was an only child they had given up any idea of ever becoming grandparents. Maybe instead of telephoning them she would go up to Scotland at the weekend and tell them in person; the look on their faces might be worth the long journey!

      ‘I’m sorry, Bryna.’ Kate gave a self-disgusted sigh at her intention to wound. ‘You aren’t what Daddy meant at all.’ She picked up her fork to eat her salmon. ‘I’m disappointed, that’s all,’ she grimaced. ‘I thought you would make a great stepmother.’

      Raff had lost his wife, and Kate and Paul their mother, over ten years ago, but Raff gave the impression that the marriage he had entered into at only eighteen had ceased to be a complete success years before that. But both parents were devoted to the children, and while their marriage didn’t exactly sparkle it hadn’t been unpleasant either.

      Paul and Kate obviously had very warm memories of their mother, and it warmed Bryna to know that Kate, at least, would have had no objection to her taking that place in her father’s life. If the situation had ever arisen. Which it never would.

      ‘Thank you,’ she accepted briskly. ‘Now, as a friend, would you hurry up and eat your lunch; I have to get back to work.’ She smiled brightly in the face of Kate’s pain at the deliberate snub; she couldn’t allow Kate to live under the misapprehension that there would ever be a happy-ever-after between Raff and herself. Raff was thirty-nine years old, with a grown-up family, and the thought of having to go through night-time feeds, teething, crawling, walking, the terrible-twos, and so on and so on, with another child, would throw even the self-confidently arrogant Raff Gallagher into a panic! It threw her into a panic!

      Who would have guessed when she had walked into a restaurant very similar to this one six short months ago that this would happen?

      She had been meeting Courtney Stevens, to discuss the use of six of her models to promote a new line he was introducing to his chain of fashion stores throughout Europe and America for the winter. He had proved every bit as charming as the advertising agency she was working with had told her he was.

      Or warned her. She and Janet Parker had worked together before, and when the cynical Janet described a man as ‘charming’ it was like any other woman saying he was lethally attractive!

      Courtney Stevens—or Court, as he had insisted she call him as they introduced themselves—was a blond giant of a man with a devilish charm glinting in deep blue eyes that were guaranteed to seduce even the most hardened of women. Bryna was charmed almost from the first moment, almost forgetting what she was there for as he deftly centred the conversation on her rather than the business she had come here to discuss.

      ‘We have to decide what models you would like to use,’ she had finally laughingly protested.

      ‘Well, we’re going to use the family pile,’ he dismissed drily. ‘For some reason my father bought himself a manor house in Kent and left it to me in his will; I’ve never had reason to use it until now. So as it means the crew will have to stay overnight down there, how about making one of the models a tall violet-eyed silver-blonde?’ He looked at her expectantly.

      She couldn’t possibly feel insulted by the intimacy of the suggestion, and she laughed huskily. ‘I no longer work as a model myself.’

      ‘Couldn’t you make this the exception?’ His large hand covered her much slenderer one.

      Her eyes glowed. ‘I’m afraid not.’

      ‘No?’ He looked as if she had dealt him a wounding blow. ‘Then how about joining me for——’

      ‘Would you like to introduce us, Court?’ interrupted a harshly rasping voice.

      Court frowned his irritation up at the other man. ‘Not now, Raff,’ he protested.

      ‘Exactly now,’ the other man drawled.

      ‘Bryna, Raff Gallagher.