Contract Baby. Lynne Graham

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СКАЧАТЬ should leave, Raul.’ As that dry voice of reproof cut through the electric atmosphere, Polly tore her mesmerised attention from Raul. In turn, Raul swung round. They both focused in astonishment on the consultant lodged in the doorway.

      ‘Leave?’ Raul stressed in unconcealed disbelief.

      ‘Only quiet visitors are welcome here,’ Rodney Bevan spelt out gravely.

      Dressed in an Indian cotton dress the same rich blue as her eyes, Polly turned her face up into the sun and basked, welded to the comfy cushioning on the lounger. The courtyard garden at the centre of the clinic was an enchanting spot on a summer day. Even Henry’s unwelcome visit couldn’t detract from her pleasure at being surrounded by greenery again.

      Henry gave her an accusing look. ‘Anybody would think you were enjoying yourself here!’

      ‘It’s very restful.’

      Until Polly had escaped Henry and his mother for three days, she hadn’t appreciated just how wearing their constant badgering had become. She was tired of being pressurised and pushed in a direction she didn’t want to go. Now that Raul had found her, she was no longer in hiding. After she had sorted out things with Raul, she would be able to take control of her own life again.

      ‘Mother thinks you should come home,’ Henry told her with stiff disapproval.

      ‘You still haven’t explained why you told Raul we were engaged.’

      Henry frowned. ‘I should’ve thought that was obvious. I hoped he’d go away and leave us alone. What’s the point of him showing up now? He’s just complicating things, swanning up in his flash car and acting like he owns you!’

      Strange how even a male as insensitive as Henry had recognised that Raul behaved as if he owned her. Only it wasn’t her, it was the baby he believed he owned. Dear heaven, what a mess she was in, Polly conceded worriedly. There was no going back, no way of changing anything. Her baby was also Raul’s baby and always would be.

      ‘It was kind of you to call in, Henry,’ she murmured quietly. ‘Tell your mother that I really appreciate all her kindness, but that I won’t be coming back to stay with you—’

      ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Henry had gone all red in the face.

      ‘I just don’t want to marry you...I’m sorry.’

      ‘I’ll visit later in the week, when you’re feeling more yourself.’

      As Henry departed, Polly reflected that she was actually feeling more herself than she had in many weeks. Stepping off the treadmill of exhaustion had given her space to think.

      As she slowly, awkwardly raised herself, Raul appeared through a door on the far side of the courtyard. He angled a slashing, searching glance over the little clusters of patients taking the fresh air nearby. Screened by the shrubbery, Polly made no attempt to attract his attention.

      His suit was palest grey. He exuded designer chic. In the sunlight, his luxuriant hair gleamed blue-black. His lean, strong face possessed such breathtaking sexy symmetry that her breathing quickened and her sluggish pulses raced. Raul radiated raw sexuality in virile waves. The media said that men thought about sex at least once a minute. One look at Raul was enough to convince her.

      But a feeling of stark inadequacy and rejection now threatened her in Raul’s radius. How the heck had she ever believed that a male that gorgeous was interested in her? How wilfully blind she had been in Vermont! If a woman excited Raul, he probably pounced on the first date, or maybe he got pounced on, but he had never made a pass at her, or even tried to kiss her. At first he had made her as nervous as a cat on hot bricks. But before very long his exquisite manners and flattering interest in her had soothed her inexperienced squirmings in his presence and given her entirely the wrong impression.

      Incredibly, she had believed that one of the world’s most notorious womanisers was actually a cautious and decent guy, mature enough to want to get to know a woman as a friend before trying to take the relationship any further. Remembering that fact now made Polly feel positively queasy. She had thought Raul was perfect; she had thought he was wonderful; she had thought he was really attracted to her because he continued to seek out her company...

      Far from impervious to Raul’s cool exasperation when he finally espied her, lurking behind the shrubbery, Polly dropped her head, her shining fall of mahogany hair concealing her taut profile.

      ‘What are you doing out of bed?’ Raul demanded the instant he got within hailing distance. ‘I’ll take you back up to your room.’

      ‘I’m allowed out for fresh air as long as I don’t overdo it,’ Polly said thinly.

      ‘We’ll go inside,’ Raul decreed. ‘We can’t discuss confidential business here.’

      Polly swung her legs off the lounger and got up. ‘Business? I’ve learnt the hard way that my baby is not a piece of merchandise.’

      ‘Do you really think I feel any different?’ Raul breathed with a raw, bitter edge to his rich, dark drawl. ‘Do you really think you’re the only one of us to have learnt from this mess?’

      She couldn’t avoid looking at him in the lift. He stood opposite her, supremely indifferent to the two nurses in the corner studying him with keen female appreciation. He stared at Polly without apology, intense dark eyes welded broodingly to her heart-shaped face and the heated colour steadily building in her cheeks.

      She had one question she desperately wanted to ask him. Why did a drop-dead gorgeous heterosexual male of only thirty-one feel the need to hire a surrogate mother to have his child? Why hadn’t he just got married? Or, alternatively, why hadn’t he simply persuaded one of his innumerable blonde bimbo babes into motherhood? Why surrogacy?

      The minute Polly settled herself down on the sofa in her room, Raul breathed with a twist of his expressive mouth, ‘You’re still angry with me about Vermont. We should deal with that and get it out of the way...it’s clouding the real issues at stake here.’

      At that statement of intent, Polly stiffened, and her skin prickled with shrinking apprehension. ‘Naturally I’m still angry, but I see no point in talking about it. That’s in the past now.’

      Raul strolled over to the window. He dug a lean brown hand into the pocket of his well-cut trousers tightening the fit of the fine fabric over his narrow hips and long, muscular thighs. Polly found herself abstractedly studying a part of the male anatomy she had never in her life before studied, the distinctively manly bulge of his manhood. Flushing to the roots of her hair, she hurriedly looked away.

      But it was so peculiar, she thought bitterly. So peculiar to be pregnant by a man she had never slept with, never been intimate with in any way. And Raul Zaforteza was all male, like a walking advertisement for high testosterone levels and virility. Why on earth had he chosen to have his child conceived by an anonymous insemination in a doctor’s surgery?

      ‘If I’m really honest, I wanted to meet you and talk to you right from the moment you signed the contract,’ Raul drawled tautly, interrupting her seething thoughts.

      ‘Why, for heaven’s sake?’

      ‘I knew my child would want to know what you were really like.’

      A cold chill of repulsion trickled down Polly’s spine. So impersonal, СКАЧАТЬ