Proof Of Their One-Night Passion. Louise Fuller

stark and shocking as the volcanic rock of his homeland.

      And he was almost unbearably like the daughter they shared. Only now it would appear that, just like her own father, Ragnar seemed to have already decided the terms of his relationship.

      ‘Money?’ She breathed out unsteadily. The word tasted bitter in her mouth. ‘I didn’t come here to talk to you about money. I came here to talk about our daughter.’

      Her heart felt suddenly too big for her chest. Why did this keep happening? Why did men think that they could reduce her life to some random sum of money?

      ‘Children cost money.’ He held her gaze. ‘Clearly you’ve been supporting her alone up until now and I want to fix that. I’ll need to talk to my lawyers, but I want you to know that you don’t need to worry about that anymore.’

      I’m not worrying, she wanted to scream at him. She wasn’t asking to be helped financially, or fixed. In fact she wasn’t asking for anything at all.

      ‘I’ve not been alone. My mother helps, and my brother Lucas lives with me. He works as a tattooist so he can choose his own hours—’

      ‘A tattooist?’

      Glancing up, she found his clear blue eyes examining her dispassionately, as if she was some flawed algorithm. She felt slightly sick—just as she had in those early months of the pregnancy. Only that had been a welcome sickness. A proof of new life, a sign of a strong pregnancy. Now, though, the sickness was down to the disconnect between the man who had reached for her so frantically in that hotel room and this cool-eyed stranger.

      She stared at him in silence.

      What made this strange, unnerving distance between them a hundred times harder was that she had let herself be distracted by his resemblance to Sóley. Let herself hope that the connection between Ragnar and his daughter would be more than it had been for her and her own father—not just bones and blood, but a willingness to claim her as his own.

      But the cool, dispassionate way he had turned the conversation immediately to money was proof that he’d reached the limit of his parental involvement.

      She cleared her throat. ‘I know you’re a rich man, Ragnar, but I didn’t come here to beg.’ She swallowed down her regret and disappointment. ‘This was a mistake. Don’t worry, though, it’s not one I’ll make again—so why don’t you get back to the thing that clearly matters most to you? Making money.’

      Ragnar reached across the table, but even before he’d got to his feet she had scraped back her seat and snatched up her coat, and he watched in disbelief as she turned and fled from the cafe.

      For a moment he considered chasing after her, but she was moving fast and no doubt would already have reached the underground station on the corner.

      He sat back down; his chest tight with an all too familiar frustration.

      Her behaviour—having a child with a complete stranger, keeping that child a secret, turning up unannounced to reveal the child’s existence and then storming off—could have come straight from his family’s playbook of chaos.

      Glancing down, he felt his pulse scamper forward as for the first time he looked at what she’d pushed across the table. It was a photo of a little girl.

      A little girl who looked exactly like him—Sóley.

      Reaching out, he touched her face lightly. She was so small, so golden, just like her name. And he was not going to let her grow up with no influence but her chaotic mother and whatever ragtag family she had in tow.

      He might love his own family, but he knew only too well the downside of growing up in the eye of a storm and he didn’t want that for his daughter.

      So arrangements would have to be made.

      Picking up the photo, he slid it into his wallet and pulled out his phone.