The Secret He Must Claim. Chantelle Shaw

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СКАЧАТЬ had landed on the orphanage. ‘If I’d had any inkling I would have told you.’

      Elin bit her lip as her brother strode across the library and flung open the door. ‘Jarek—where are you going?’ She carefully did not look at Cortez as she hurried past him, but she was conscious of his tall, brooding presence and the evocative spicy scent of his aftershave tugged on her senses.

      ‘You know why Ralph has done this, don’t you?’ Jarek said bitterly when Elin caught up with him in the entrance hall. ‘He blamed me for Mama’s death. And he was right. I should have saved her.’

      ‘There was nothing you could have done against an armed raider. It wasn’t your fault. Jarek...’ Elin’s hand fell from her brother’s arm as he spun away from her and grabbed his motorbike helmet from the hall table.

      ‘If I hadn’t tried to be a hero, Lorna would still be here. I took a gamble when I tackled the gunman, but the gamble failed. I understand why Ralph excluded me from his will but he had no reason to cut you out.’ Jarek opened the front door and turned to face her. ‘Do you know what I wish?’ he said rawly. ‘I wish that when we were held hostage in the raid on the jewellers the goddamned gunman had shot me instead of Mama. It’s obvious that’s what Ralph wished.’

      ‘Oh, please be careful.’ Elin wanted to go after her brother when he ran down the front steps and leapt onto his motorbike parked on the drive, but Peter Carstairs came out of the library and spoke to her.

      ‘Mr Ramos was kind enough to give me a lift here and I arranged for a taxi to collect me,’ he said as a car turned onto the driveway. ‘I’m sorry to have been the harbinger of bad news, my dear. This must all be a great shock.’

      The solicitor was the master of the understatement, Elin thought with a flash of macabre humour. ‘My father died from a brain tumour. Is it possible that he was not of sound mind when he made Cortez Ramos his heir? Do we even know for sure that Mr Ramos is Ralph’s son?’

      She tensed when she saw Cortez standing in the doorway of the library and realised he must have overheard her. Too bad, she thought grimly. She was fighting for her and her brother’s inheritance and, more importantly, for her son’s future.

      Harry was Cortez’s son.

      Oh, God, she couldn’t think about the implications now, or how she was going to break the news to the granite-faced stranger she’d had sex with one time that he had fathered a child. She heard Jarek’s motorbike roar off down the drive and a knot of fear for his safety tightened in her stomach.

      The solicitor shook his head. ‘Mr Saunderson was definitely of sound mind when he asked me to draw up a new will for him six months or so after his wife’s death. I believe he had suspected for some time that Mr Ramos could be his son and when a DNA test proved it, he invited his son here to Cuckmere Hall. He asked me to draw up the new will on the same day that Mr Ramos visited, on the third of March a year ago.’

      ‘The third of March is my birthday,’ Elin said faintly. The realisation that her adoptive father had written his extraordinary will, which effectively left her penniless, on her birthday, felt like a devastating betrayal. There was no possibility of her marrying within a year so that she could claim a fifty per cent share of Saunderson’s Wines.

      She felt bombarded by one shock after another, and on top of the worry about her future she was terrified that her brother would risk his life riding his motorbike dangerously fast. She felt the same sensation of being unable to breathe that she’d experienced two nights ago in a crowded nightclub. Her legs buckled beneath her, and as if from a long way off she heard Cortez swear.

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