Keeping Secrets. Fiona Brand

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      Lily’s words when she had stormed out of their apartment came back to haunt him. I must have been out of my mind thinking I could live with a man who approaches marriage as if it’s some kind of business contract and who doesn’t want kids, ever!

      He took another deep breath but, even so, when he spoke his voice was raspy. “The baby’s...all right?”

      Ben said something short and flat. “You really didn’t know. Well, that takes the cake. You’re a security guru. You wrote the book on surveillance techniques and you produce software for half a dozen governments, and you don’t know when your ex-girlfriend has your child? I thought you didn’t want to know, because you don’t want kids. Lily said enough about the sub—”

      “Don’t bring Lily into this.” The response was automatic, because every thought was blasted away by the fact that Zara had given birth to his child.

      The one outcome he had taken care to avoid, except on one notable occasion, had happened.

      He was a father.

      A final boarding call echoed down the phone.

      “I’ve gotta go,” Ben muttered. “Look, I’m sorry about breaking the news about Zara and the baby like this. The fact was, I thought you did know but were...you know, avoiding the whole issue.” There was a rustling sound as if Ben was holding the phone awkwardly jammed to his ear as he surrendered his boarding pass. “Emily was fairly sure you didn’t know. She seemed to think it was more that you lack emotional intelligence...whatever that means.”

      There was a feminine yelp in the background along with a further rustling noise as if Ben had jammed the phone against his chest to muffle the sound for a few seconds.

      Ben’s voice came back, loud and clear. “Anyway, I think we both know that trying to turn me into an executive wasn’t working. I told you right from the start that the kind of locked-down life you lead isn’t for me. I want to travel and do something with my fine arts degree. Anything but add up soulless numbers all day and stare at computer code, which, by the way, I will never understand. Don’t try to find us. I’ll send a postcard...eventually.”

      A click signaled the call had been terminated.

      Damon slipped the phone back into the pocket of his sweatpants. There was no point in running after Ben now. The boarding calls meant that whatever flight Ben and Emily had booked, they would be airborne before he could pull the strings needed to either detain them or delay the flight. That was no doubt the reason Ben had rung just before the flight left. Damon guessed he was lucky that Ben, who had been kicking against Damon’s authority for the past year, had called at all.

      Feeling like an automaton, Damon went back over the conversation. Ben’s crack about his lack of emotional intelligence grated. Apparently, he had missed two major cues in his life, Ben’s utter lack of interest in Magnum Security and the fact that Damon had fathered a child, despite Zara assuring him there was no chance of a pregnancy.

      He tried to remember the exact words Zara had used immediately after they’d had crazy, passionate, unprotected sex. She had dragged on a robe and escaped to the bathroom, pausing to send him an irritatingly neutral smile, before assuring him that he had no need to worry.

      He had taken that to mean Zara had taken care of contraception. But now he knew it could also have meant that his assistant, in her usual brisk, efficient way, had been stating her intention to take full responsibility if there was a pregnancy.

      Cold water splashed his ankles and Damon became aware that the tide had advanced and water was now surging around his shoes. Still absorbed with his thoughts, he strolled up the beach and headed for his house. Perched on a headland, the large multilevel house seemed to grow from the dark cliffs, stark and spare and a little forbidding. Built of stone, it reminded him of the medieval fortress Tyler had owned on the Mediterranean island of Medinos and which Damon had spent his adolescence exploring.

      Fatherhood. The realization sank in a little deeper.

      Damon turned to stare across the water in the direction of Auckland’s cityscape, the first glimmer of evening lights visible in the distance. Somewhere across the water existed a child who, in a profound, unassailable way, belonged to him.

      Just beyond the breaking waves a sleek gannet arrowed into the water, then surfaced with a silvery fish in its beak. Damon drew in a lungful of cold air as he struggled with imperatives that were as opposite as black and white. He had long ago decided that fatherhood was not for him, but fate had intervened and he was caught and held as fast as the small, flapping fish. He could not turn his back on his child.

      The sun was sinking fast, the last burnished glow infusing the clear winter air with rose and gold. The sea breeze had dropped, leaving the water glassily smooth.

      He did not understand why Zara had chosen to cut him out of his child’s life, but that would soon change. In the methodical way of his mind, Damon began to formulate a plan to meet with Zara and discover what he could about the child. Although the practical to-do list seemed cold and antiseptic when he considered exactly what it meant—confronting his ex-lover about the child they had made together. And he knew exactly when that had happened—the first time they had made love.

      As Damon climbed the steep cliff path to his house, memories flickered, vivid and irresistible.

       Torrential rain pounding down as he held his jacket over Zara’s head to shelter her as he dropped her home after a late business dinner. He shook out the wet jacket in the dimness of her porch. She laughed as she swept soaked hair back from her forehead. With her dark hair gleaming with moisture, her cheeks flushed, suddenly she was quite startlingly beautiful.

       There was a moment when he bent his head, a split second before their mouths touched, when she could have stepped away and didn’t. Instead, her breath hitched, her fingers closed on the lapels of his jacket and she lifted up on her toes for his kiss.

       He caught the scent of her skin and desire closed around him like heated manacles. Sensation shuddered through him in waves as they kissed for long, spellbinding minutes. They made it to her bedroom, just.

       He used a condom the first and even the second time, but in the hour before dawn, waking to Zara making slow, exquisite love to him, and caught in that strange halfway state between dream and reality, he did not.

      The unprotected lovemaking had happened with blinding speed, over almost before he realized it, but that did not negate his responsibility. Zara’s pregnancy had been his fault.

      Damon climbed the steps to his house and paused in the shelter of the heavy stone portico, which protected the entryway from the wind. Peeling out of his wet shoes, he pushed open the heavy, ancient door made of thick oak and bands of iron that he had imported from Medinos and headed for his shower. After drying off, he pulled on soft, faded jeans with the fluid economy of movement he had learned during his years with the military in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

      Not bothering with a shirt, Damon padded into his cavernous bedroom, found his laptop and keyed in the GPS program his firm used as a security measure for the company’s top executives. He typed in his brother’s phone number. Instantly a map materialized along with a tracking icon, which indicated that Ben was over the Pacific Ocean, just northeast of Auckland. It was somehow typical that Ben, with his utter disinterest in all things to do with Magnum Security, had been careless enough to forget that his phone could be tracked.

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