the Sabbides Secret Baby (2010)

Author:Baird, Jacqueline [Jacqueline, Baird,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin Mills and Boon Ltd.
Published: 2011-01-14T19:20:00.437000+00:00

Chapter Seven

PHOEBE barely slept, and when she did a tall dark man haunted her dreams. She awoke with a start to find Ben standing by the bed. She glanced at the clock—six-thirty in the morning. Watching Ben scramble up on to the bed, demanding she get up, she laughed and gave him a cuddle—but inside she was worried sick at the thought of how his young life might change with the arrival of Jed Sabbides.

As for her life—the very idea of Jed sweeping in and out of it for heaven knew how long didn’t bear thinking about. Having to see him on a regular basis visiting Ben was not something she looked forward too, but after a long, restless night she realised she would eventually have to give Jed more than supervised visiting rights to his son. Subjecting Ben to a custody battle was a pointless exercise. As his mother, she had no doubt she would win full custody, but the courts would certainly give Jed partial rights anyway. The only alternative offered—to marry the man—was completely out of the question. She had trusted Jed once with her heart and soul, and he had destroyed her trust. A marriage might work without love if there was respect and friendship between the couple, but without trust there was no hope.

Phoebe would never trust Jed again, and she could think of no hell on earth worse than being married to a man her own innate honesty forced her to admit she had little to no power to resist on a sexual level. That was something else she had learned last night as she awoke from a dream, her body hot and throbbing with frustration.

For years, sex or the lack of it had not bothered her—yet Jed in no time at all had reduced her to a sensually needy female with an ease that scared her. No way was she putting her head in that noose again.

In that moment Phoebe made her decision. She would tell Jed she was willing to amend the conditions on his visiting rights and allowing him to see Ben. At first it would be in her presence, but later, once Ben was comfortable with him, on his own. It was a big concession on her part, which meant eventually gifting Jed a modicum of trust, but not yet—and she wasn’t going to tell him today…

Today she was going to take Ben to the caravan they owned at a holiday park on the edge of Weymouth Bay. They spent all their holidays there and Ben loved the place. They could pick up the wallpaper for his bedroom in the home decor shop in Weymouth, and over the weekend go searching for fossils at Lyme Regis before closing the caravan up for the winter. The autumn half term holiday was usually the last time they used the caravan until the next year. She wasn’t really running away…

Maybe it was cowardly, Phoebe admitted, but she did not feel like facing Jed again quite so soon—not after so helplessly falling apart in his arms last night.

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