‘A tattooist?’
Glancing up, she found his clear blue eyes examining her dispassionately, as if she was some flawed algorithm. She felt slightly sick—just as she had in those early months of the pregnancy. Only that had been a welcome sickness. A proof of new life, a sign of a strong pregnancy. Now, though, the sickness was down to the disconnect between the man who had reached for her so frantically in that hotel room and this cool-eyed stranger.
She stared at him in silence.
What made this strange, unnerving distance between them a hundred times harder was that she had let herself be distracted by his resemblance to Sóley. Let herself hope that the connection between Ragnar and his daughter would be more than it had been for her and her own father—not just bones and blood, but a willingness to claim her as his own.
But the cool, dispassionate way he had turned the conversation immediately to money was proof that he’d reached the limit of his parental involvement.
She cleared her throat. ‘I know you’re a rich man, Ragnar, but I didn’t come here to beg.’ She swallowed down her regret and disappointment. ‘This was a mistake. Don’t worry, though, it’s not one I’ll make again—so why don’t you get back to the thing that clearly matters most to you? Making money.’
* * *
Ragnar reached across the table, but even before he’d got to his feet she had scraped back her seat and snatched up her coat, and he watched in disbelief as she turned and fled from the cafe.
For a moment he considered chasing after her, but she was moving fast and no doubt would already have reached the underground station on the corner.
He sat back down; his chest tight with an all too familiar frustration.
Her behaviour—having a child with a complete stranger, keeping that child a secret, turning up unannounced to reveal the child’s existence and then storming off—could have come straight from his family’s playbook of chaos.
Glancing down, he felt his pulse scamper forward as for the first time he looked at what she’d pushed across the table. It was a photo of a little girl.
A little girl who looked exactly like him—Sóley.
Reaching out, he touched her face lightly. She was so small, so golden, just like her name. And he was not going to let her grow up with no influence but her chaotic mother and whatever ragtag family she had in tow.
He might love his own family, but he knew only too well the downside of growing up in the eye of a storm and he didn’t want that for his daughter.
So arrangements would have to be made.
Picking up the photo, he slid it into his wallet and pulled out his phone.
CHAPTER TWO
HITCHING HER SLEEPING daughter further up on to her shoulder, Lottie glanced around the gallery.
Groups of people were moving slowly around the room, occasionally pausing to gaze more closely at the sketches and collages and sculpted resin objects before moving on again. It wasn’t rammed, but she was pleased—she really was. She was also exhausted.
‘Nearly over.’
She turned, eyes widening, and then began to smile as the woman standing beside her gave her a conspiratorial wink. Slim, blonde, and with the kind of cheekbones that grazed men’s eyes as they walked past, Georgina Hamilton was the gallery’s glamorous and incredibly competent co-owner, and despite the fact that she and Lottie were different in as many ways as it was possible to be, she had become an ally and fierce supporter.
Lottie screwed up her face. ‘Do I look that desperate?’
Her friend stared at her critically. ‘Only to me. To everyone else you probably just look artistically dishevelled.’ She glanced at the sleeping Sóley. ‘Do you want me to take her?’
Their eyes met and then they both began to giggle. They both knew that Georgina’s idea of hands-on childcare was choosing baby clothes in her cousin’s upmarket Chelsea boutique.
‘No, it’s okay. I don’t want to risk waking her.’ Lottie looked down at the top of her daughter’s soft, golden-haired head. ‘She’s been really unsettled the last couple of nights.’
And she wasn’t the only one.
Her cheeks were suddenly warm, and she tilted her head away from Georgina’s gaze. It was true that Sóley was struggling to fall asleep at night, but it was Ragnar who had actually been keeping her awake.
It wasn’t just the shock of seeing him again, or even his disappointingly predictable reduction of their daughter’s life to a financial settlement. It was the disconcerting formality between them.
She pressed her face into her daughter’s hair. The disconnect between her overtly erotic memories of the last time they’d met and his cool reserve in the coffee shop had made her feel as if she’d stepped through the looking glass. He had been at once so familiar, and yet so different. Gone was the passion and the febrile hunger, and in their place was a kind of measured, almost clinical gaze that had made her feel she was being judged—and found wanting.