He turned to face her and she could feel an annoying shiver of awareness but she quashed it. With a hostess-like air, she indicated that he should sit down and watched as he lowered his powerful frame into one of the worn velvet seats which the non-materialistic Dana Doyle had told her they’d had for years. And when she’d given him his coffee, just the way he liked it, Tara perched on a more upright chair opposite, not quite trusting her trembling fingers to hold the water she’d poured for herself.
‘So,’ she said, with a tight smile. ‘What is it that you want to speak to me about, Lucas?’
She was unprepared for the sudden darkness which crossed his rugged features, like a black cloud suddenly obscuring the face of the moon. And for a look of something she’d never seen in his eyes before, something which on anyone else she might have described as desolation. But Lucas didn’t do desolation and she wasn’t here to analyse his moods or to try to get inside his head. This was a matter-of-fact meeting and he probably wanted to discuss financial support for her and the baby.
He stared down at the inky brew in his cup and put it down untasted, before lifting his gaze to hers.
‘I took your advice,’ he said simply. ‘And went to Argentina.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘YOU WENT TO ARGENTINA,’ Tara repeated slowly.
He nodded. ‘I did.’
There was a momentary pause. ‘And what did you find there, Lucas?’
She was staring deep into his eyes, her expression as distant as ever he’d seen it, and Lucas wondered if coming here unannounced had been a crazy idea. But he owed her this. He owed her the knowledge which had first shocked and then saddened him. And he owed it to himself to discover whether he had messed everything up.
‘I found my brother there,’ he said simply.
‘You have a brother?’
‘I do. His name is Alej—Alejandro Sabato—and he has a family of his own. His wife is English and she’s called Emily and they have a young baby, Luis.’
‘That’s nice,’ she said stiffly.
He wanted to tell her about the terrible pain in his heart because he’d missed her so much, but old habits died hard and for the time being he sought refuge in facts. ‘He’d actually been trying to find me, but because I’d changed my name his investigators kept coming up with blanks. Anyway, he was able to fill me in on everything I needed to know.’
Her gaze was still steady. ‘Which is?’
He shrugged his shoulders, for there was no easy way to say this, no acceptable way of defining the harsh facts surrounding his conception. ‘My mother was a prostitute and my father was one of her clients,’ he bit out. ‘A drunken thief who used to spend long periods in prison, and when he was released he would come out, beat her up and make her pregnant.’
She licked her lips and he could see a swallowing movement in her throat. ‘So how did you come—?’
‘To be brought up in one of the most expensive parts of one of the most expensive cities in the world?’ he supplied, and she nodded. ‘My mother had given birth to Alej just a year earlier and she was having enough trouble feeding one child, let alone another. So she decided to sell me. I suppose it made perfect economic sense. She went to see someone in Buenos Aires—someone who put her in touch with a rich American heiress—’
‘Your mother?’ she interrupted breathlessly.
‘No!’ he negated viciously. ‘Wanda Gonzalez never earned the right to call herself that during her lifetime, so I’m damned sure I’m not going to honour her with that title now she’s dead.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘She had specified that she wanted a birth mother from Argentina, so that I would resemble my “father” as much as possible.’
‘And did you?’ she questioned curiously. ‘Resemble him, I mean?’
He shook his head. ‘Not really. We had the same hair colour, but that was about it—I was bigger, stronger, more powerful.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘And that’s how I came to be brought up amid such great wealth in Manhattan, while Alejandro lived a very different life in Argentina—that is, until he escaped from abject poverty to become one of the world’s greatest polo players.’
‘Alejandro Sabato,’ she ventured slowly, with a nod of her flame-bright hair. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of him.’
‘I’m sure you have. He was a bit of a poster-boy for the sport in his time. But I haven’t come here to talk about my brother, Tara.’
She became instantly alert. ‘No?’ she challenged.
He wanted her to make this easy for him. To soften her lips into a smile. To send him a soft, unspoken message with her eyes so he could get up and walk right over there. Pull her hungrily into his arms and kiss her as he’d dreamt of doing ever since she’d walked out of his New York apartment. Because if he started kissing her and they began to make love, surely it would blot away some of the pain.
But something stopped him and it was the sense that this was the biggest deal he’d ever tried to pull off and he couldn’t afford to get it wrong. Yet getting it wrong was a distinct possibility, even though he knew how to wheel and deal in a boardroom. When to talk and when to let silence work for you. He knew about joint venture capital, about leasing out cars or lorries which people couldn’t afford to buy themselves, but he knew nothing about telling a woman that he loved her. And wasn’t that the crux of what he really wanted to say to her? The most important thing.
No. First up he needed to acknowledge what she had done for him. To tell her some of the things he had felt. Still felt. ‘I wanted to be angry with my mother and to blame her for the life into which I was born,’ he whispered. ‘And for a while I was. But then I realised that she’d taken a bad situation and tried to make it better. It can’t have been easy to give me away, but she did. And she did it for me, so I wouldn’t starve—and so that Alej wouldn’t starve either. She probably thought she was giving me the best chance she could—she wasn’t to know that Wanda was weak and Diego was cruel.’
‘Lucas,’ she said, and for the first time he could hear a softening of her voice and saw concern pleating her brow, as if she had detected his pain and wanted to soothe it away.