His Child: The Mistress's Child / Nathan's Child / D'Alessandro's Child. Catherine Spencer

was going to end right here and now, she realised. For so long it had been just her and Tim—a unit which went together as perfectly as peaches and cream. No one else had been able to lay claim on him and, since her mother had died, she had considered herself to be his only living relation. He was hers. All hers—and now she was going to have to relinquish part of him to his father.

      A lump rose in the back of her throat and she swallowed it down.

      Philip was staring at her from between narrowed eyes. Did her eyes glitter with the promise of tears? ‘Are you okay?’

      ‘Of course I’m okay,’ she answered unconvincingly. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

      ‘Because you’ve gone so pale.’

      ‘I am pale, Philip—you know that.’ He had told her so that night in his arms. ‘Pale as the moon,’ he had whispered, as his lips had burned fire along her flesh. ‘Come with me,’ she said slowly.

      The two of them walked with exaggerated care towards the closed door with its hand-painted sign saying, ‘Tim’s Room’.

      Lisi pushed the door open quietly and tiptoed over to the bed, where a little hump lay tucked beneath a Mickey-Mouse duvet, and Philip was surprised by the clamour of a far-distant memory. So she still had a thing about Disney, did she?

      He went to stand beside her, and looked down, unprepared for the kick of some primitive emotion deep inside him. The sleeping child looked almost unbearably peaceful, with only one small lock of dark hair obscuring the pure lines of a flawless cheek. His lashes were long, he realised—as long as Lisi’s—and his mouth was half open as he took in slow, steady breaths.

      ‘So innocent,’ he said, very softly. ‘So very innocent.’

      It was such a loaded word, and Lisi felt a strange, useless yearning. He thought her the very antithesis of innocence, didn’t he? If only it could be different. But she knew in her heart that it never could. She nodded, gazing down with pride at the shiny-clean hair of her son. Their son. He looked scrubbed-clean and contented. Good enough to eat.

      She stole a glance at Philip, who was studying Tim so intently that she might as well not have existed. Strange now how his profile should remind her of Tim’s. Had that been because he had not been around to make any comparisons?How much else of Tim was Philip? she wondered. What untapped genetic secrets lay dormant in that sweet, sleeping form?

      Philip turned his head and their eyes made contact in a moment of strange, unspoken empathy. She read real sadness in his eyes. And regret—and wondered what he saw in hers.

      He probably didn’t care.

      She put her finger onto her lips and beckoned him back out. She did not want Tim to wake and to demand to know what this man was doing here. Again. She shut the door behind them and went back into the sitting room, where Philip stood with his back to the fire, looking to all intents and purposes as if he were the master of the house.

      But he never would be. She must remember that. In fact, it was almost laughable to try to imagine Philip Caprice living in this little house with her and Tim. The ceiling seemed almost too low to accommodate him, he was so tall. She tried to picture them all cramming into the tiny bathroom in the mornings and winced.

      ‘Would you like some more wine?’ she asked.

      He shook his head. ‘No, thanks. Coffee would be good, though.’

      She was glad of the opportunity to escape to the kitchen and busy herself with the cafetière. She carried it back in with a plate of biscuits to find him standing where she had left him, only now he was staring deep into the heart of the fire with unseeing eyes.

      He took the cup from her and gave a small smile of appreciation. ‘Real coffee,’ he murmured.

      At that moment she really, really hated him. Did he have any idea just how patronising that sounded? ‘What did you expect?’ she asked acidly. ‘The cheapest brand of instant on the market?’

      He shook his head, still dazed by the emotional impact of seeing his son. ‘You’re right—if anything was cheap it was my remark.’

      And what about the others? she wanted to cry out. The intimation that she had deliberately got pregnant. Wasn’t that the cheapest remark a man could ever make to a woman? He wasn’t taking those back, was he?

      ‘So who else knows?’ he demanded.

      Lisi blinked. ‘Knows what?’

      ‘About Tim,’ he said impatiently. ‘How many others are privy to the secret I was excluded from?

      She shook her head. ‘No one. No one knows.’

      ‘No-one at all?’ he queried disbelievingly.

      ‘No. Why should they? As far as anyone knew—we simply had a professional relationship. Even Jonathon thought that—and nobody was aware that I went up to your room at the hotel that night.’ She shuddered, thinking how sordid that sounded. She bit her lip. ‘The only person I told was my mother, just before she died.’

      ‘You told her the whole story?’ he demanded incredulously.

      Again, she shook her head. ‘I edited it more than a bit.’

      ‘Was she shocked?’

      Lisi shrugged. ‘A little, but I made it sound…’ She hesitated. She had made it sound as though she had been in love with him, and that bit she had found surprisingly easy. ‘I made it sound rather more than it had been.’ And her mother had pleaded with her to contact him. But then the bit she had omitted to tell her mother had been that Philip had already been married.

      He looked at her and gave a heavy smile. ‘My parents will want to meet him,’ he said, wondering just how he was going to tell his elderly parents that he, too, was a parent.

      ‘Your p-parents?’

      His eyes were steady. ‘But of course. What did you expect?’

      What had she expected? Well, for one thing—she had expected to live the rest of her life without ever seeing Philip again. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I haven’t really thought it through.’

      ‘He’s in my life now, too, Lisi,’ he said simply. ‘And I don’t come in a neat little box marked ‘‘Philip Caprice’’—to be opened up at will and shut again when it suits you. I have family who will want to get to know him. And friends, too.’

      And girlfriends? she wondered. Maybe even one particular girlfriend who was very special to him? Maybe even… She raised troubled aquamarine eyes to his. ‘Have you married, again, Philip?’ she asked quietly.

      ‘No.’

      She felt the fierce, triumphant leap of her heart and despaired at herself. Fool, she thought. Fool! ‘So where do we go from here?’

      He despised himself for the part of him which wanted to say, Let’s go to bed—because even though the distance between them was so vast that he doubted whether it could ever be mended, that didn’t stop him from being turned on by her. He shifted uncomfortably in the chair. Very turned on indeed. He met her questioning gaze with a look of challenge. ‘You tell Tim about me as soon as possible.’

      Her mouth fell open. ‘Tell him?’

      ‘Of course you tell him!’ he exploded softly. ‘I’m back, Lisi—and I’m staking my claim.’

      It sounded so territorial. So loveless. ‘Oh, I see,’ she said slowly.

      He narrowed his eyes. ‘Just how were you planning to explain to him about his father? If I hadn’t turned up.’

      ‘I honestly don’t know. It’s not something I ever gave much thought to. He’s so young, and whenever he asked I just said that Mummy and Daddy broke up before he was born and that I hadn’t seen you since.’ It had seemed easier to bury her head