The Holiday Escapes Collection. Sandra Marton

eyes and said, ‘I’m not married…’

      ‘Where is the child’s father?’

      She bit her lip. She couldn’t tell him like this. ‘I have to go, Damon. We can talk some other time. Please.’

      ‘You are in no fit state to drive,’ he said, reaching for his coat. ‘Give me your keys. I will take you.’

      ‘No, you don’t know your way around the city and I’ll be much quicker on my own.’

      He took her arm again and this time there was no hope of escaping. ‘Then we will go by cab, which will be even quicker. You will not have to worry about parking.’

      It made good sense to Charlotte, although she knew there would be a price to pay for accepting his help. But she was beyond caring. She had to get to the hospital to see what was wrong with Emily.

      Guilt struck at her from every angle. She should never have left her daughter tonight. For days now Emily had seemed unusually clingy, but she’d put it down to her being over-tired. And now her little girl was in hospital, all because of her neglect.

      The cab trip was mercifully swift but, although Charlotte did her best to resist any attempts at conversation with Damon, he was not so easily put off.

      ‘Shouldn’t you be contacting her father?’ he asked.

      She huddled herself into the corner of the cab. ‘No.’

      ‘What do you mean, no? Surely her father should know of this emergency?’

      ‘He doesn’t even know she exists.’

      He stared across at her in the semi-darkness of the cab’s interior. ‘What do you mean, he does not know? Why have you not told him? Surely every man, no matter what the circumstances, has the right to know he has fathered a child.’

      She gave him a resigned look, as if the world had finally caught up with all of her frantic attempts to escape from it. ‘Actually, I did tell him but he chose not to believe me.’

      Damon felt as if someone had just struck him in the chest with a blunt object. Surely it couldn’t be true?

      It wasn’t possible.

      A niggling doubt crept into his mind, like a curl of smoke finding its way under a locked door. He had thought she’d been lying to save her pride, but what if he’d got it wrong?

      They had used protection, he reminded himself. But the doubt tapped him on the shoulder again as he recalled those last few times before he had sent her away…

      His passion for her had been uncontrollable. He had surged into her warmth, relishing the intoxicating experience of feeling her silk against his steely strength without a barrier.

      ‘I’m her father?’ he croaked.

      She answered him with a tiny nod.

      ‘I do not believe you.’ He regretted the words as soon as they left his lips but there was no way he could take them back. He saw the way they wounded her, the hunch of her shoulders as if protecting herself from further pain, the stiffness of her limbs and the set of her mouth making him realise how hard she was trying to cope.

      ‘Well, that’s to be expected, of course,’ she said with bitterness sharpening every word to a dagger-point. ‘You have never believed me before, so I don’t expect you to do so now.’

      He finally found his voice, although it didn’t really sound like his when he finally spoke. ‘Why did you not tell me?’

      Her blue eyes were brimful of resentment. ‘I did tell you, but you refused to accept the possibility that I was carrying your child. You accused me of theft. It was clear from what you said that you thought I was lying to get you to do something you weren’t prepared to do, like give my child a name—your name.’

      The cold hard vice of guilt pressed against him. He felt it in every part of his body. His chest felt so constricted he could hardly breathe and his stomach was churning with a nauseating dread that he had somehow got it wrong.

      He had sent her packing with the threat of exposure and immediate deportation. He had been so convinced of her guilt that he hadn’t even bothered to look for another suspect.

      But there were no other suspects, he reminded himself, not unless he was prepared to lay the blame at his mother or sister’s feet.

      But what if Charlotte had planned this? A few sculptures were nothing compared to this. As revenges went this was surely up there with the best. She had kept his child from him all this time, not once trying to resume contact after those first few times.

      ‘I have a daughter…’ The words felt strange on his lips, like a language he had never learned to speak but, to his surprise, was now suddenly fluent in it.

      ‘I called her Emily Alexandrine,’ she said into the taut silence.

      He swivelled his tortured gaze back to hers. ‘You gave her the name of my mother?’

      Her eyes were still shining with tears. ‘I thought it was the least I could do. Your mother had been so kind to me in offering me a job at the gallery…’

      Damon turned away to look at the glittering lights of the highway as the cab made its way to the hospital he could see in the near distance, his throat closing over with pain.

      His daughter was within the structures of that concrete and glass building. A daughter he had never realised existed until this moment, a daughter who connected him with Charlotte in the most intimate way possible, the combination of their blood flowing through her tiny veins.

      ‘How old is she?’ he asked, his voice sounding hollow.

      ‘She turned three years old three months ago—her birthday is the fifteenth of April.’

      Damon closed his eyes against the rush of emotion her words evoked. He had missed out on so much. Her entire babyhood had gone and he hadn’t seen a thing. She would be walking and talking and yet he had never held her as an infant, had never changed her nappy, had never seen her first smile or first tooth or first anything. He could have walked past her on the street and would never have known she was his child.

      ‘How could you have done this to me?’ His words fell into the silence like a solid weight against a fragile glass surface.

      Charlotte flinched beside him. ‘I had no choice. You believed me to be a thief. You sent me packing with your threats ringing in my ears. I tried to tell you so many times.’

      His eyes met hers in the subdued lighting of the cab as it pulled into the emergency bay of the hospital. ‘But you are a thief, Charlotte.’ His voice was tight with anger, each word hardbitten. ‘You have stolen from me my daughter and I swear to God you will not get away with it this time. I let you off lightly when you betrayed my family’s trust the last time, but not now. A few ancient sculptures are nothing to the value of my own flesh and blood. You will regret not telling me of my child’s existence—I guarantee it.’

      Charlotte stumbled from the cab with his words reverberating in her pain-racked body as she made her way to the reception desk to find out where her daughter was being held. She had tried Caroline’s mobile in the cab but it had frustratingly gone to message service each time.

      ‘Emily Woodruff?’ The hospital receptionist looked through the long list of patients on her computer. ‘I’m sorry, but there’s no patient of that name who has been admitted up until the last hour. Have you tried Accident and Emergency? She might still be being assessed.’

      Damon took Charlotte’s elbow as they made their way through the endlessly long corridors to the Accident and Emergency bay on the ground floor.

      Charlotte pressed the security button and quickly explained the situation to the receptionist who appeared at the window.

      ‘Oh, yes, the little girl—she’s being assessed right now,’ the woman said, releasing the door. ‘Come on through.’

      There