Contract Baby

She winced.

‘Jorge?’

She pulled a face.

‘Emilio?’

She sighed.

‘Luis?’

A faint, drowsy smile curved her lips.

‘Luis...Zaforteza,’ Raul sounded thoughtfully.

Polly went to sleep.

Polly studied the four confining walls of her room and smiled. Tomorrow she was leaving the clinic. Her smile faded, her eyes apprehensive. They were to spend a couple of days in Raul’s apartment and then fly to Venezuela. Pulling on a luxurious thin silk wrap, she left her room. Every day Luis went to the nursery for a while to allow her to rest. Repossessing her son had become the highlight of her afternoon.

A slight frown line drew her brows together. The day Luis was born, Raul had seemed so concerned for her, so approachable, she reflected ruefully. But over the past five days the barriers had gone up again.

Raul’s fascination with his son was undeniable. Yet what she had believed might bring them closer together seemed instead to have pushed them further apart. Why was it that when Raul visited she often felt like a superfluous but extremely well-paid extra? Was it the fact that Raul never came through the door without some outrageously extravagant gift, which he carelessly bestowed on her in the manner of a rather superior customer bestowing a tip?

Day one, a diamond bracelet. Day two, a half-dozen sets of luxurious nightwear. Day three, a watch from Cartier. Day four, a magnificent diamond ring. It had become embarrassing. Raul was rich. Raul was now her husband. But it felt very strange to be receiving such lavish presents from a male so cool and distant he never touched her in even the smallest way.

As she turned the corner into the corridor where the nursery was, Polly was dismayed to see Raul talking with Digby Carson outside the viewing window. Neither man having heard her slippered approach, she ducked into an alcove out of sight. She was too self-conscious to join them when she was so lightly clad, and was thoroughly irritated that vanity had made her set aside her more sedate but shabby dressing gown.

‘So how do you feel about this...er...development?’ the older man was saying quietly, only yards away from her ignominious hiding place.

‘Deliriously happy, Digby.’

‘Seriously, Raul—’

That was sarcasm, not humour, Digby. My little bride is much smarter than the average gold-digger,’ Raul breathed with stinging bitterness. ‘She used my son as a bargaining chip to blackmail me into marriage!’

Rigid with shock at that condemnation, P

olly pushed her shoulders back against the cool wall to keep herself upright.

‘But whatever happens now I will keep my son,’ Raul completed with harsh conviction.

There was a buzzing sound in Polly’s ears. She heard the older man say something but she couldn’t pick out the words. Dizzily, she shook her head as the voices seemed to recede. When she finally peered out, the corridor was empty again.

Without even thinking about what she was doing, she fled back to the privacy of her room. A gold-digger...a blackmailer. Trembling with stricken disbelief at having heard herself described in such terms, Polly folded down on the bed, no longer sure her wobbly knees would support her.

The pain went deep and then deeper still. Raul despised her. ‘Whatever happens now I will keep my son.’ A cold, clammy sensation crawled down Polly’s spine. What had he meant by that? And this was the husband she was hoping to make a new life with in Venezuela? A husband who obviously loathed and resented her? In her turmoil, only one fact seemed clear. She could no longer trust Raul... and she couldn’t possibly risk taking her son to Venezuela without that trust.

Minutes later, a nurse wheeled in Luis’s crib. Seeing Polly already wearing her wrap and slippers, she smiled. ‘I see you were just about to come and collect him. Your husband said you were still asleep when he looked in on you earlier, but I know you like to feed Luis yourself.’

Alone with her child again, Polly drew in a shivering, steadying breath. Fear still etched in her shaken eyes, she gazed down at her son’s innocent little face, and then she got up in sudden decision.

From the cabinet by the bed she extracted her address book. Leafing frantically through it, she found the phone number her friend Maxie had insisted on giving her when they had parted after the reading of Nancy Leeward’s will. ‘Liz always knows where I am,’ she had promised.

Using the phone by the bed, Polly rang Liz Blake. As soon as the older woman had established who she was, she passed on Maxie’s number. When she heard Maxie’s familiar husky voice answering her call, Polly felt weak with relief.

‘It’s Polly...’ she muttered urgently. ‘Maxie, I need somewhere to stay...’

An hour after that conversation, having left a note of explanation addressed to Raul, Polly walked out of the clinic with Luis in her arms and climbed into the taxi waiting outside. The receptionist was too busy checking in new patients to notice her quiet exit.