The Paternity Claim. Sharon Kendrick

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       CHAPTER THREE

      AS SOON as the front door had shut behind them, Paulo let go of Isabella’s elbow and she found herself missing its warmth and support immediately.

      ‘The car is a little way up the street,’ he said, still in that same flat tone which she’d never heard him use before.

      He’d parked it there deliberately. Just in case. He had not known what he expected to find. Or who. He hadn’t known if she would come willingly. And how he would’ve coped, had she refused. Because some instinct had told him even then, that he would not be leaving without her.

      Isabella walked beside him towards the car, suspecting that he’d slowed his normal pace down in order for her to keep pace with him. She got out of breath so easily these days. ‘Where are you taking me?’

      ‘Taking implies force,’ he corrected, looking down at her dark head, which only reached up to his shoulder. She seemed much too tiny to be bursting ripe with pregnancy. ‘And you seem to be accompanying me willingly enough.’

      What woman wouldn’t? she thought, with another wistful pang. ‘Where?’ she repeated huskily.

      A plane droned overhead, and he briefly lifted his face to stare at it. ‘For now, you will have to come home with me—’ He sent her a searing glance as if he anticipated her objection. ‘Think about it before you say anything, Bella. It makes the most sense.’

      If anything could be said to make sense at that precise moment, then yes, she supposed that it did. And hadn’t that been her first choice? Before she’d seen him prowling half-naked around his own territory—like some sleek and beautiful cat? Gato. Before she’d seen the beautiful woman who’d frozen her out so effectively. Before she’d decided that she could not face him with her terrible secret.

      ‘Doesn’t it?’

      Isabella nodded, wondering what Judy was going to say this time. ‘I suppose so.’

      ‘As to what happens after that…’ A silky pause. ‘There are a number of options open to you.’

      ‘I’m not going back to Brazil!’ she declared quietly. ‘And you can’t make me!’

      He let that one go. For the moment. ‘Here’s my car.’

      A midnight-blue sports car was parked with precision close to the kerb, and Isabella stared at the low, gleaming bodywork in dismay.

      ‘What’s the matter?’

      She glanced up to find that the black eyes were fixed intently on her face. He must have noticed her hesitation. She gestured to her stomach, placing her hands on either side of her bump, to draw his attention to it. ‘Look—’

      ‘I’m looking,’ he replied, taken aback by the sudden hurl of his heart as one of her hands strayed dangerously close to the heavy swell of her breast.

      ‘I’m so big and so bulky, and your car is so streamlined.’

      He held the door open for her. ‘You think you won’t fit?’

      ‘Look away,’ she said. ‘It won’t be a graceful sight.’

      She began to ease her legs inside and his face grew grim as he turned back to look at the house they had just left—where two small boys forlornly watched them from an upstairs window. He did not know what lay ahead, beyond offering her temporary refuge, but already he suspected that his loyalties might be torn. How could they not be?

      He’d known Isabella’s father for years—ever since he was a boy himself. And for the last ten summers since his wife’s death had accepted Luis’s hospitality for both himself and his son.

      Eddie had been just a baby when his mother had died so needlessly and so tragically in a hit-and-run accident that had produced national revulsion, but no conviction. The man—or woman—who had killed Elizabeth remained free to this day. In the lonely and insecure days following her death, it had seemed vital to Paulo that Eddie should know something of his South American roots.

      As a father himself, Paulo felt duty-bound to inform Luis Fernandes what was happening to his daughter. But Isabella was not a child. Far from it. Would she expect him to collude with her? To keep quiet about the baby? And for how long?

      He waited until they’d eased away from the kerb, before jerking his head back in the direction of the house.

      ‘How long were you planning to stay there?’

      ‘I don’t know.’ She stared at the road ahead. ‘I just took it day by day. Mrs Stafford said that I could work the baby into my routine.’

      Paulo’s long fingers dug into the steering wheel. ‘But you must have some idea, Isabella! Until the baby was…what…how old? Six months? A year? Would you then have returned to Brazil with a grandchild for your father to see? Or were you planning to keep it hidden from him forever?’

      ‘I told you,’ she answered tiredly, wishing that he wouldn’t keep asking her these questions—though she noted that he’d refrained from asking the most fundamental question of all. ‘I honestly don’t know. And not because I hadn’t thought about it, either. Believe me, I’d thought about it so much that the thoughts seemed to just go round and round inside my head, until sometimes I felt like I would burst—’

      Paulo’s mouth hardened. Hadn’t he felt exactly like that after Elizabeth’s death? When the world seemed to make no sense at all? He stole a glance at her strained, white face and felt an unwilling surge of compassion. ‘But the more you thought about СКАЧАТЬ