Equal Opportunities. PENNY JORDAN

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and so she had been forced to go out and comb the chain-stores in search of something more sensible.

      Half a dozen pairs of jeans, plus an assortment of sweatshirts, had been the ultimate answer. Knowing Michael’s propensity for covering them both in sticky mess, she no longer wondered at most young mothers’ apparent uniform of jeans and tops. Running a brush through her hair, she gathered it up in a ponytail and snapped a band round it, before pulling on her anorak.

      It wasn’t easy to manoeuvre the pushchair down the stone steps, but she had developed a knack for dealing with them now. The street was deserted and quite dark still, but that didn’t bother Kate; she liked the solitude of the early morning city, when most of its inhabitants were still in bed.

      In the park the ducks quacked in welcome, but she didn’t do more than pause to watch them. The object of the exercise was not just fresh air for Michael, but physical exercise for her as well, and that involved pushing the pram briskly ten times round the park and then back home.

      Once there, she would put Michael in his high chair and make them both breakfast. Michael would probably throw most of his on the floor, and she would be lucky if she could even manage to drink her coffee before it got cold.

      She was a dedicated career woman, with precious little security, a huge mortgage, a very new business to develop and no one to rely on but herself. Add to that the fact that she was solely responsible for a nine-month-old baby, the very last kind of responsibility she had ever wanted, and it seemed incredible to Kate that she should feel so absurdly happy. So happy, in fact, that once they had finished their exercise and she was heading back to the house, she stopped to blow kisses into the pram, causing Michael to laugh delightedly, and the man watching her from the other side of the road to frown.

      That must be the nanny, Garrick reflected, watching as Kate skilfully negotiated the steps and unlocked her front door.

      He had come here on impulse, a little surprised to discover it was so close to his own apartment.

      He had spent the previous evening studying the file David Wilder had given him. On the face of it there was no logical reason why Kate Oakley should refuse to hand the child over to him. She was a career woman first, second and third; that much was plain. The kind of woman who would never willingly saddle herself with a child, and he should know…

      His mouth twisted bitterly as he remembered Francesca. He had met her when he was twenty-three, and a very naïve twenty-three he had been, too.

      Fresh on the London scene and working for a firm of merchant bankers, he had met Francesca at a disco. They had dated for two months before they slept together. Although they had been the same age, it had disconcerted him to discover that her sexual experience was far greater than his own, but he had accepted it when she told him that she had had a previous long-standing relationship with someone else. A relationship that was now over.

      Six months later they were engaged. Six weeks after that Francesca had married someone else.

      It had been then that he discovered how much she had lied to him. There hadn’t been any long-standing relationship with someone, just a series of very brief affairs with a good many someone elses…men in the main much older and wealthier than Francesca herself.

      Calvin Harvey had been one of those previous lovers. A married man now divorced—an extremely wealthy, once married man, who now wanted as his second wife Garrick’s fiancée. And Francesca hadn’t hesitated.

      ‘But surely you understand, darling,’ she had pouted when Garrick, white-faced and disbelieving, had finally realised that she meant what she was saying. ‘It was fun with you and me, but marriage…Honestly, darling, can you see me as the wife of a poor man?’

      ‘I wanted you to be the mother of my children,’ Garrick had protested despairingly. He could hear her laughter still. Shrill and acid.

      ‘A mother? Oh, my poor dear Garrick, what an idiot you are! I shall never have children. Such a bore…and it ruins one’s figure. Don’t worry, darling, it needn’t end between us. Calvin has business interests abroad and he’s away an awful lot. I’ll ring you.’

      And so she had, but only once. By then he had realised the truth about her and he had told her in plain and blistering English exactly what she could do with her favours and her much-used body. It had given him some temporary relief to his heartache. What a fool man was that he could realise exactly what a woman was with his mind, and yet not stop wanting her with his body. But all that was behind him now.

      It had left its scars, though. Hence his determination not to marry, and his desire to take charge of his second cousin’s child.

      He himself had been an only child, but his mother had been baby mad. She had filled the house with the offspring of friends and neighbours. She and his father were retired now. They lived in Cornwall, where his mother painted and his father grew flowers.

      He couldn’t expect them to bring Michael up for him. He would need to find a reliable nanny. Perhaps even the girl that Kate Oakley employed. To judge from her behaviour, she seemed fond enough of the child. That shouldn’t be too difficult…But he was running ahead of himself. First he had to speak with Kate Oakley.

      He didn’t anticipate having any problems, but he had learned long ago that it was as well to be prepared for all eventualities. If she should refuse to hand over the baby…well, then he would need all the ammunition he could find to prove that she was unfit to have the charge of him.

      It had started to rain while he stood in the street, a fine November mizzle that soaked his thick black hair and made it curl. He hunched his shoulders against the damp, and wondered irately what had possessed David Wilder to behave so idiotically. Delegate…delegate…that was what he was always being told, and yet, the moment he did, look what happened!

      An early morning cyclist braked to a startled halt as Garrick stepped out into the road in front of him, muttering under his breath.

      Apologising grimly to him, Garrick crossed the road. He was thirty-five years old and a millionaire; once that had been said, what else was there to say? The woman who had been sharing his bed for the last three years had announced four months ago that the corporation that employed her was moving her out to New York. She would stay, she had intimated, if Garrick married her. He had told her crisply and incisively that he would not and why. And it had come as a slight shock to discover that he missed her sexually almost as little as he missed her emotionally…which was to say not at all. What was happening to him?

      He knew the answer. Life had lost its bite, its savour, its challenge.

      He had reached a time in his life when simply to succeed was not enough, and for some reason the thought of having a child, a cause, and perhaps at some later stage a companion as well as a successor, appealed tremendously to him.

      Of course, he knew there were any number of women who would be only too pleased to give him a son. But that was not what he wanted. Their children would come with strings attached…demands, both pecuniary and emotional, which he had no wish to bear.

      No, this child…this orphan would be ideal. And the child would benefit from their relationship, too. He would see to it. That Oakley woman would probably be all too pleased to give him up.

      He now knew all there was to know about Kate Oakley, and he would use that information with all the ruthlessness for which he was so notorious, if he had to.

      At eleven o’clock Kate’s doorbell rang and she went СКАЧАТЬ