The Italian's Secret Baby by Kim Lawrence

Author:Kim Lawrence [Lawrence, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2004-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

‘THERE is no doubt about it. Sam is my son, there’s no question.’

Scarlet shook her head and, hand pressed to her mouth, ran towards the bathroom. ‘Excuse me!’ she gulped, polite to the end, and then she bolted.

She was in too much of a hurry to close the door behind her and Roman heard the sound of her painful retching. It was several minutes later when she returned, paler and graver, but her composure was obviously paper-thin.

‘If you think you can take him off me…I know you’ve got money.’

Roman could almost see the sinister plan he hadn’t made to snatch the child away from her forming in her mind.

‘Don’t be melodramatic.’

‘I’ll run away and you’ll never find us,’ she threatened wildly. Now that makes me sound like stable, responsible parent material.

‘I can see you’ve cast me in the role of evil villain to your wilting heroine.’

‘I’ve never wilted in my life.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. I can’t abide a clingy female.’ He reached out and took her shoulders. When there was no resistance he drew her gently towards him. ‘I’m not going to take Sam off you. I just want to be part of his life.’

And he had a right to be part of his life, but what sort of upheaval would that cause for Sam, not to mention herself. Scarlet didn’t feel capable of working out the implications of this; she no longer knew which way was up, let alone what was a lie or the truth!

Scarlet, totally focused on convincing him she wasn’t going to let him take Sam, didn’t even feel the pain as her neatly trimmed nails gouged into the soft flesh of her palms.

‘Sam’s life is with me,’ she asserted loudly.

Roman inhaled sharply and his hands fell from her shoulders. ‘He is my son. This will be much easier, Scarlet, if we work together. If we’re friends.’

‘Friends? Even if none of this had happened we could never be friends,’ she asserted hotly.

On this at least Scarlet could be totally confident. How could you be friends with someone whose way of life was a total anathema to you, someone with whom you didn’t have anything in common and someone who, furthermore, made your hormones act in an indiscriminate and mortifying manner?

Irritation showed in his deep-set shadowed eyes as he heard her out.

‘A little bit of give and take here—would it be too much to ask?’ he wondered, dragging his hand wearily through his already disordered hair.

Scarlet experienced an irrational urge to smooth down those disordered locks. ‘Me give Sam, and you take him! Sam is three—where were you when he had chicken pox? Were you there to hold his hand when they stitched up his head when he fell off his bike?’

‘I didn’t know I had a son.’

So far he’d only thought about the changes having a son was going to make to his life. For the first time he paused to consider the things he had already missed out on, things he would never see, like the child’s first steps.

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