Contract Baby

‘Venezuela?’ Polly exclaimed, wildly disconcerted at having that stunning suggestion flung at her in cool challenge.

‘I will set you up in a house there. You will have every comfort and convenience, and your child as well.’

Polly blinked, still attempting to absorb a staggering proposition that entailed moving to the other side of the world. ‘I couldn’t—’

‘Por Dios...ask yourself if you are being fair. If the child needs his mother, then he also needs his father. And that child will inherit everything I possess.’ Raul spelt out that reminder with imperious pride and impatience.

‘Money isn’t everything, Raul—’

‘Don’t be facile. I’m talking about a way of life that you have not the slightest conception of,’ Raul returned very drily, watching her flush. ‘At least be practical, Polly. My child needs to know that Venezuelan heritage, the language, the people, the culture. If you won’t come to Venezuela, what am I to do? With the claims on my time, I can’t possibly visit the UK often enough to form a close relationship with my child.’

Polly tried to picture living in Venezuela, with Raul picking up all her bills, walking in and out of her life with one blonde babe girlfriend after another and eventually taking a wife. No matter how he might feel now, she was convinced that he would succumb to matrimony sooner or later. In such a situation she would always be an outsider, an interloper, neither family nor friend, and a lot of people would simply assume that she was his discarded mistress. She knew she would never be able to cope with such a dependent, humiliating existence on the fringe of Raul’s world. She needed to get on with her own life. It was time to be honest about that reality.

‘Raul...I want to stay in the UK with my baby. I don’t want to live in Venezuela, having you oversee every move I make,’ Polly admitted, watching him bridle in apparent disbelief at that statement. ‘You have the right to be involved in your child’s future...but what you seem to forget is that that future is my life as well! Anyway, you may not think it now, but some day you’ll get married, have other children—’

Raul released his breath in a charged hiss of frustration. ‘I would sooner be dead than married!’

‘But you see...I don’t feel the same way,’ Polly shared with rueful honesty. ‘I would like to think that even as an unmarried mum I will get married eventually.’

‘Saying that to me is the equivalent of blackmail, Polly,’ Raul condemned, pale with anger beneath his golden skin, eyes hot as sunlight in that lean, dark, devastating face. ‘I do not want any other man involved in my child’s upbringing! ’

Temper stirred in Polly, and the more she thought about that blunt and unashamed declaration the angrier she became. Did Raul really believe that he had the right to demand that she live like a nun for the next twenty years? Lonely, unloved, celibate. She stared at him. Yes, that was what he believed and what he wanted, if he was not to have sole custody of their child.

Raising herself out of the armchair, Polly straightened her slight shoulders and stood up. ‘You are so incredibly selfish and spoilt!’ she accused fiercely.

Astonished by that sudden indictment, Raul strode across the room, closing the distance between them. ‘I can’t believe that you can dare to say that to me—’

‘I expect not...as you’ve already told me, you’re accustomed to people who want to please you, who are eager to tell you only what you want to hear!’ Polly shot back with unconcealed scorn. ‘Well, I’m not one of those people!’

His eyes blazed. ‘I have bent over backwards to be fair—’

‘At what personal sacrifice and inconvenience?’ Polly slung back, trembling with rage. ‘You are a playboy with a reputation as a womaniser. You enjoy your freedom, don’t you?’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Raul was unmoved by that angle of attack. ‘I don’t lie to the women who pass through my life. I don’t promise true love or permanency—’

‘Because you’ve never had to, have you? You know, listening to you, Raul...I despise my own sex. But I despise you most of all,’ Polly confessed, with hands knotting into furious fists by her side. ‘It’s one rule for you and another for me—a hypocritical sexist double standard the belongs in the Prehistoric ages with Neanderthals like you! You say you want this child, but you didn’t want a child badly enough to make a commitment like other men, did you? And what do you offer me—?’

‘The only two possible remedies to the mess we’re now in. I’m not about to apologise because you do not like the imperfect sound of reality,’ Raul delivered with slashing bite.

‘Reality? You call it “reality” to offer me a choice between giving up my child almost completely...and living like a nun in Venezuela?’

Raul flicked her a grimly amused glance. ‘You want the licence to sleep around?’

‘You know very well that’s not what I’m trying to say!’

‘But you wouldn’t want me to share your bed without all that idealistic love, commitment and permanency jazz... would you, querida?’ Raul breathed with sizzling golden eyes, watching her freeze in shock at that plunge into the more intimate and personal. ‘You see, what you want and what I want we can’t have, because we both want something different!’

Every scrap of colour drained from Polly’s face. ‘I don’t want you...like that,’ she framed jerkily.

Raul cast her a glittering appraisal that was all male and all-knowing. ‘Oh, yes, you do...that sexual hunger has been there between us from the moment we met.’

Polly backed away from him. She could not cope with having his knowledge of her attraction to him thrown in her teeth. ‘No—’

‘I didn’t take advantage of you because I knew it would end in your tears.’

‘Don’t kid yourself...I might’ve ditched you first!’ Polly told him with very real loathing, her pride so wounded she wanted to kill him. ‘And let me tell you something else too, I put a much higher price on myself than your interchangeable blonde babes do.’

‘I admire that...I really do,’ Raul incised with complete cool, his temper back under wraps again at disorientating, galling speed. ‘You have such rigid moral values, gatita. Well, warned in advance, I was careful to keep my distance in Vermont.’