In the Australian's Bed: The Passion Price / The Australian's Convenient Bride / The Australian's Marriage Demand. Miranda Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ home at the winery, he really enjoyed life at his city boarding-school. He’d been somewhat lonely as an only child, living on a country property.

      Located on Sydney’s lower North Side, St Francis’s College had come highly recommended, with a sensible balance of good, old-fashioned discipline and new-age thinking. Their curriculum included loads of sports and fun activities to keep their male students’ hormones and energy levels under control.

      This was Alex’s fourth year there and he was doing very well, both in the classroom and on the sports field. He played cricket in summer and soccer in winter, but swimming was his favourite sport. The shelves in his bedroom were chock-full of swimming trophies.

      ‘Good luck, then,’ Angelina said. ‘I’ll give you a ring after you’ve whipped their butts. Now I really must go, love. Ciao.’

      She hung up, then frowned. Cricket might distract Alex from his quest to find his father for the moment, but she didn’t like her chances of putting her son off till his birthday in November. That was nine long months away.

      Nine months…

      Angelina’s chest contracted at the thought that it was around this time sixteen years ago that she’d conceived. Late February. Alex’s birthday was the twenty-fourth of November.

      Today was the twenty-fourth, she realised with a jolt. And a Saturday as well. The anniversary of what had been the most earth-shattering day of her life.

      Angelina shook her head as she sank down on the side of her bed, her thoughts continuing to churn away. She did not regret having Alex. She loved him more than anything in the world. He’d given her great joy.

      But there’d been great misery to begin with. Misery and anguish. No one could understand what it had been like for her. She’d felt so alone, without a mother to comfort her, and with a father who’d condemned her.

      Antonio Mastroianni hadn’t come round till the day Alex had been born, the day he’d held Angelina’s hand through all the pain of childbirth and finally realised she wasn’t just a daughter who’d disappointed him, but a living, breathing human being who was going through a hell of her own.

      After that, things had been better between them, but nothing would change the fact that she’d become a single mother at the tender age of sixteen. By the time Alex had been born, she’d long left school, plus lost all her school friends. When she’d come home from the hospital, there had just been herself in the house all day with a crying, colicky baby and her father, who tried to help, but was pretty useless. Some days she’d wanted to scream at the top of her lungs. Instead, often, she’d just sat down and cried along with Alex.

      Meeting Jake Winters that summer sixteen years ago had sure changed her life forever. And the thought of meeting him again scared the living daylights out of her.

      Not because she felt in danger of falling in love with him again. Such an idea was ludicrous. But because of the danger of Alex falling under his father’s possibly bad influence. She hadn’t sacrificed her whole life to raise a secure, stable, happy boy, only to surrender him to someone she didn’t really know, and possibly couldn’t trust. Alex needed good male role models now that his grandfather wasn’t around to direct him, not some rebel-without-a-cause type.

      Angelina tried to imagine what Jake would be like today. Could he possibly have come good, or had he gone down the road to self-destruction? Was he even alive? Maybe she should start looking for him herself, do a preliminary reconnoitre. She didn’t have to hire anybody, not to begin with. She could ring all the J Winters in the Sydney phone book first.

      Yes, that was what she would do. She’d get on to that tomorrow. She would try in the evening. Most people were home on a Sunday evening.

      Another thought suddenly popped into her mind.

       What if he was married, with a wife and a family?

      Angelina knew the answer to that as surely and instinctively as Alex had known that his father was not in jail.

      No way!

      The Jake who’d chatted her up that summer had been a hater of all things traditional and conservative. Marriage would never be for him. Or family life. Or even falling in love. She’d grown up sufficiently now to see that Jake hadn’t cared about her one bit back then. All their intimate conversations whilst grape-picking together had been nothing but a way for him to get into her pants.

      Which he had. But only the once. And even that must have been an anticlimax, for want of a better word.

      Looking back, it was ironic that she hadn’t enjoyed the actual event that had ruined her life at the time. She might have borne the memory better if she’d been carried away on the wings of ecstasy to the very end.

      Jake’s lovemaking had promised well to begin with. He’d been more than a good kisser, actually. He was a great kisser. His hands had been just as effective, with a built-in road map to all her pleasure zones. Her breasts. Her nipples. And of course the white-hot area between her legs. Soon she’d been all for him going all the way, despite some last-minute panic over getting pregnant. But the sharp pain she experienced when he penetrated her had swiftly brought her back to earth. All she’d felt during the next ten seconds or so was a crushing wave of disappointment.

      Even if her father hadn’t watched over her after Jake like a hawk, Angelina had steadfastly refused to become one of those single mums whose son woke up to a different man in his mummy’s bed every other week. She’d made her bed, as her father had often told her, and she’d bravely resolved to lie in it. Alone.

      To be honest, however, her opportunities for having even a brief fling hadn’t exactly been thick on the ground to begin with. As the stay-home mother of a young child, she’d rarely been in the company of eligible men. Her weekly shopping trip to the nearby town of Cessnock had been her only regular outing. In fact, Angelina hadn’t been asked out by a single member of the opposite sex till three years ago.

      Two things had happened around that time to greatly change her life circumstances. Alex had gone off to boarding school and she’d enrolled in a computer course at the local technical college. She’d known she had to do something to fill the great hole in her life created by her precious son going off to school.

      Once she had some computer skills under her belt, Angelina had felt confident enough to try working on the reception desk at the resort. To her surprise, she’d taken to the service industry like a duck to water. Soon, she’d been also escorting groups of guests on tours of the property, serving in the cellar and helping out at the restaurant at lunchtime on the weekends, its busiest time. She just loved talking to people, and they seemed to like talking to her.

      Before this, she’d only done behind-the-scenes jobs around the resort such as cooking and cleaning, hardly esteem-building activities. Not that she’d had much self-esteem by then. Her stay-at-home years when Alex had been a baby and a toddler had gradually eroded her confidence and turned her from an outgoing girl into a reserved, almost shy woman.

      Now, suddenly, she had blossomed again, thoroughly enjoying the social interaction and yes, the admiration—however meaningless and fleeting—of the opposite sex.

      She’d begun taking care with her appearance again, exercising off some of the extra pounds which had crept on over the years and paying more attention to her hair, her clothes and her make-up.

      Of course, her father had noticed her transformation, СКАЧАТЬ