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  A sense of desolation and loss rolled over her.

  ‘Who is Oliver’s father, Kate?’

  The way Sean was looking at her made Kate’s heart turn over inside her chest.

  What?

  Weakly Kate clung to the edge of her kitchen table as she battled with her shock, wondering wildly how on earth—and, more importantly, what on earth she could answer. And then suddenly she knew there was only one way, and that was to tell him the truth.

  Before she could lose her courage and change her mind, she took a deep breath and answered him quietly, ‘You are, Sean.’

  In the silence his face lost its entire colour, and then it burned with a dark tide that swept slowly over his skin until his cheekbones glowed with its heat.

  ‘No.’ He denied her words explosively.

  His denial ricocheted around the room, burst apart and then bounded back off the walls at her like a deadly missile. Kate’s hopes died under its onslaught.

  ‘No!’ Sean was repeating savagely, shaking his head. ‘No! You’re lying to me, Kate. I know I hurt you when I ended our marriage, and I can easily understand why you would have turned to someone else, but no way do I accept that I am Oliver’s father.’

  Someone else? Kate could taste the acid bitterness of her own anger as she listened to Sean rejecting his son. Beneath her anger, though, lay the bleakness of her own pain. What had she been expecting? Or could she answer her own question more easily if she asked herself what she had been hoping for?

  She’d wanted Sean to take her in his arms and tell her that he had made a mistake, that he still loved her. That in fact he loved her all the more because she had given him a son.

  ‘Yes, you did hurt me then, Sean,’ she agreed evenly. ‘But believe me that cruelty was nothing compared with what you’ve just done. You can hurt me as much as you like, but I will never, ever let you hurt Oliver.’

  As she forced herself to look into his eyes, her own emotion, her own pain was pushed to one side by the strength of her maternal need to protect her child. For Oliver she would sacrifice anything and everything, and if necessary even herself. She could not ignore or deny the fact that her love for Sean had never really died, but for Oliver’s sake she would control and banish that love. And somehow she would learn to live with the pain of having to do so.

  Everything about Sean’s reaction to her information that he was Oliver’s father confirmed the wisdom of her decision not to tell him originally that she had conceived his child. But at the same time everything about it tore at her heart until she could scarcely endure the pain.

  But it was her anger and contempt on behalf of her son that was glittering in her eyes now, motivating the scathing tone of her voice as she told him, ‘That’s right, Sean. Reject Oliver just like you rejected me. But that won’t alter the fact that he is your son.’

  It gave her a sense of almost anguished satisfaction, along with a feeling as if someone was turning a knife over inside her heart, to see the effect his efforts to rein in his temper were having on him. His face once more leached of colour, leaving it looking bone-white.

  ‘He can’t be mine,’ he insisted harshly.

  ‘Can’t be? Why not? Because you were sleeping with the woman you left me for when he was conceived? What happened to her, by the way, Sean? Did you get bored with her, just like you did with me?’ Too wrought up to wait for his reply, she threw at him furiously, ‘You can deny it all you like, but it won’t alter the truth. He is your child.’

  Kate shook her head angrily. ‘Don’t you think I wish that he wasn’t?’ she demanded passionately when he didn’t respond. ‘Don’t you think I wish that he had been fathered in love, with love, by a man who loved me? By a man who loved him? A man who wanted to share our lives and be there for both of us? You’ll never know how much I wanted those things, Sean—for Oliver and for myself. But unlike you I’ve faced up to the truth.’

  She was shaking from head to foot, Kate recognised, and she was humiliatingly close to tears.

  For a minute Sean was too shocked by Kate’s angry and contemptuous outburst to make any response. And then for a minute more he discovered that he actually wanted to be able to believe her. She was certainly doing a good job of believing herself, he recognised cynically. But all the cynicism in the world could not wipe away the strength of his immediate response to her emotional outburst. Pain, anger and unbelievably longing tore at him in equal proportions.

  What had happened to the self-control he had been so proud of? And what had happened to the honesty that had been such a strong part of Kate’s personality? Obviously it was something else for him to mourn, along with his other losses. It took him far too long to suppress his instinctive urge to go to her and take hold of her, but eventually he managed to do so, instead telling her brutally, ‘You’re wasting your breath. There’s no point in any of this. Oliver is not my child.’ He hesitated, deliberately turning away from Kate so that she would not see his expression. ‘And nothing you can say will ever make me acknowledge him as such.’

  Kate stared at him, angry colour burning her skin, her mouth compressing, but before she could say anything, Sean demanded harshly, ‘For God’s sake, Kate, don’t make it even worse than it has to be. I can just accept that you gave yourself to someone else after our marriage was over. I can even accept that if you gave yourself to someone else as an act of retribution against me, and that I deserved such an action, but I damn well can’t accept that you slept with someone else whilst we were still together.’

  ‘You mean like you did?’ Kate shot at him bitingly. ‘What happened to her, Sean?’

  ‘She isn’t in my life any more. It was just a short-lived fling.’

  He sounded more irritated than concerned, and his response added further fuel to Kate’s anger.

  ‘Clever her! She must have realised that ultimately you’d probably betray her, just like you did me.’

  Sean gave her a bitter look. ‘When it comes to betrayal, you outclass me, Kate. You’ve committed the worst betrayal of all in trying to pretend that another man’s child is mine!’

  Kate’s face burned with anger. ‘I would never stoop to that kind of deceit,’ she stormed furiously. ‘I can’t bear to think of what you’ve done—not just to me but more importantly to Oliver! You’ve denied your child the right to know his father and—’

  Angrily Sean reached out and took hold of her wrist. ‘Oliver is not my child!’

  The harsh words echoed round the small kitchen, causing Kate to try and pull away. ‘I hate you, Sean,’ she told him passionately. ‘You don’t know how much I wish I’d never met you, how much I hate myself for letting you—’

  ‘Letting me what?’ Sean stopped her.

  Kate could feel the hard bite of his fingers in the soft flesh of her upper arms as he dragged her body against the hard tense length of him.

  ‘Letting me make you feel like this?’

  His mouth possessed hers, its pressure bending her head back and making her arch her spine. Anger and pride mingled turbulently inside her as longing streaked scarlet trails of danger through her veins. She could feel the fierce judder of reaction galvanise Sean’s body, and somehow, shockingly, immediately and against all logic, she was swept back to another time and another kiss.

  A time when they had virtually only just met, and a kiss had been taken fiercely from her in the concealing darkness when Sean had walked her home from their first real date.

&nb
sp; Then her body had thrilled with shocked and excited pleasure at its recognition of his predatory male passion. She had been young; naïve, but oh, so very, very passionately in love with Sean, and so very eager and aroused.

  Now she was...

  But where did then end and now begin? Kate wondered with dizzy fatality as the years rolled back and her body, her senses, her emotions were those of that young girl again.

  Kate heard the small whimper escaping her lips. Instantly the hot, hard pressure of Sean’s mouth caught and answered it. His hands moved from her arms to her back, no longer constraining her but caressing her, as though something in that sound she had made had been a plea and not a protest.

  She trembled as his hands cinched her waist, his thumbs caressing its narrow curve, before sliding lower to cup the rounded flesh of her behind and then urge her even more closely against his own body, holding her tight and hard against the obvious thrust of his erection. Automatically and instinctively Kate tilted her hips hungrily against him and moaned his name.

  As she sobbed her arousal and need against his lips Kate felt his hand move to her breast.

  She was lost to time and place, to everything but Sean and her need for him. A sound, a high, hot, female-hungry-for-her-mate sound of raw sexual hunger slit the thickness of air, which was filled with the raggedness of breath exhaled in mutual passion.

  And Sean responded to it as though a door had swung open, admitting him to a lost and long-sought magic kingdom.

  Kate trembled as the hand he had raised to her breast began to stroke and then massage it with familiar intimacy, arousing an equally familiar sensation which spread from his touch through her stomach to the soft warmth within her. A soft warmth that was rapidly turning into a tight, wet, aching heat.

  Unable to stop herself from answering the clamouring need, Kate arched her whole body against his touch, moaning into his mouth as his hand cupped her breast and his thumb and finger started to pluck sensually at the hard peak of her nipple.

  In a heartbeat of brief lucidity Kate was shockingly aware that just the feel of his erection straining against her was as erotically arousing as if she had still been a virginal teenager. But then Sean groaned, tugging fiercely at her top, and she watched him tense as the pale, soft nakedness of her breast, with the ripe swollen peak of her nipple, was revealed to his sight and his touch. Her lucidity became a thing of the past, to be overwhelmed, overturned by the flash-flood of her own response.

  Would Sean remember how much she had liked to feel him stroke the hard flesh of her aroused nipples with his fingertip? How it had made her call out to him in shocked, excited arousal? Would he remember the way he had driven her beyond the boundaries of her self-control with the slow touch of his mouth?

  She quivered as she felt his hand on her naked breast—waiting, yearning, needing.

  ‘Kathy...’

  The raw sound of her name seemed to have been dredged up from somewhere deep and hidden inside Sean, and Kate tensed immediately in response to it.

  Kathy! But she wasn’t Kathy any more. She was Kate. She was Kate—and Sean wasn’t the man who loved her, he was the man who had betrayed her! The man who refused to accept that he had fathered her child. Sickness rolled through her. How could she feel the way she had, behave the way she had, when she knew...?

  She froze as the kitchen door was pushed open and she saw Oliver standing staring at them.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SEAN’S REACTION HAD been quicker than hers, and to her shock Kate realised that she was looking at her son from behind Sean’s sheltering body. Hot-faced with shock and guilt, she straightened her clothes and moved to go to Oliver, but he was oblivious to her, instead heading straight for Sean.

  Frantically Kate tried to stop him, unable to bear the rejection her little boy was going to suffer, but to her disbelief Sean stepped past her, scooping Oliver up as her son held out his arms to him.

  Holding Kate’s child in his arms, Sean felt a pain like none other he had ever experienced—not even when his mother had left him, not even when he had heard that he could not father a child himself, not even when he had locked Kate out of his life, he acknowledged as he fought down his own anguish and torment.

  The small head tilted back and solemn eyes looked into his. Sean felt as though someone had slid a knife into his ribs poisoned with longing, jealousy and despair. Longing for Oliver to be his; jealousy because Kate had given herself to another man; despair because of the situation he was now in.

  Abruptly he thrust Oliver into Kate’s waiting arms and turned towards the back door.

  As he reached it he stopped and turned round, shadows cloaking the pain in his eyes as he demanded, ‘When was he born?’

  Kate tightened her arms around Oliver, who had already fallen back to sleep, in the way that small children could in just a few seconds, and she told him the date.

  After the smallest of pauses, Sean grated, ‘So he was conceived two weeks after we separated, then?’

  The air in the kitchen felt so heavy and sour with the weight of their combined emotions that Kate felt as though it might choke her.

  ‘He was two weeks overdue.’ She answered Sean’s unspoken accusation despairingly. Shaking her head, she added huskily, ‘They wanted to induce me but I asked them to wait. I...I wanted him to be born naturally.’

  Kate closed her eyes and turned away, not wanting to be reminded that she had held out until the last possible minute, clinging desperately and stubbornly to her hope that there would be a miracle and that somehow Sean would be there with her to witness the birth of their child.

  But he hadn’t been, and in the end there had been no one other than the hospital staff to share her awed and exhausted delight at the birth of her son.

  She came out of her reverie to hear the back door closing. Sean had left. But he had already left her life and Oliver’s a long time ago, she reminded herself.

  Somehow that reminder wasn’t as comforting as it should have been. Her pain was too sharp and strong to be so easily soothed.

  She could, of course, have challenged Sean to let her prove that Oliver was his son by demanding a DNA test. Kate dropped her cheek onto Oliver’s soft springy curls. But proving that Sean was Oliver’s father would mean nothing if Sean refused to be that father. No way was she going to expose Oliver to that kind of pain—not even to prove to Sean that she had not, as he had accused, shared her body with another man as he had shared his with another woman!

  The pain hadn’t changed at all. It was still as strong as it had always been. Where was her pride? Why wasn’t it rescuing her from her own vulnerability by reminding her of what Sean had done? How dared he make accusations regarding her when he had told her openly that he had taken another woman to bed?

  Oliver was still asleep in her arms, which meant that she did not have to hold back any longer the slow, painful tears burning the back of her eyes. It hadn’t just been her that Sean had betrayed, he had betrayed Oliver as well!

  * * *

  Sean grimaced as he accidentally nicked his skin, and put down his razor. ‘It’s your own damned fault,’ he muttered to his reflection as he stanched the small wound. But it wasn’t the cut he was talking about, and it wasn’t his own face he could see in the mirror—it was Oliver’s.

  Cursing, he tried to banish his thoughts—but it was too late.

  He had seen in Kate’s eyes just how she felt about his refusal to accept that Oliver was his child. But no matter how much she had managed to persuade herself that Oliver was his, Sean knew that he could not be.

  And he knew for a very good reason.

  He closed h
is eyes and swallowed against the sick taste of his own self-loathing and humiliation.

  That reason was that it was medically impossible for him to father a child.

  He hadn’t known that when he had married Kate, of course. If he had done then he would never have married her, knowing how important having children was to her.

  He thought back to the medical appointment which had been responsible for the destruction of his marriage and his life.

  ‘There is one thing I do have to mention,’ the doctor had begun. ‘One of the tests we ran was a sperm count. I’m afraid I have to tell you that it’s highly unlikely you will be able to father a child.’

  Even now he still had bad dreams about those words and that meeting with his doctor at which the announcement had been made.

  He hadn’t been able to take it in at first. How could it not be possible for him to father a child? He was a fit, healthy man in the prime of life. He had protested that the doctor must be wrong, that there must be some mistake, and all the time he had been aware of the humiliating pity in the other man’s eyes as he shook his head. The doctor might be twenty years his senior, small, balding, and with a paunch, but suddenly he had become the one who was the virile potent male whilst Sean had been reduced to a mere pathetic apology for a man, at least in his own eyes.

  Real men, in the culture of the rough, fight-to-survive world in which Sean had grown up, were not unable to father children.

  Inside his head Sean had heard a brief snatch of stored conversation, between his mother and one her friends. They had been talking about a man they both knew, and Sean could remember the mockery in his mother’s laughter as she had told her friend, ‘He’s a poor thing, by all accounts. Hasn’t fathered a child yet, nor likely to, and in my book that means he isn’t a man at all.’

  Not a man at all—just like him.

  Another memory surfaced.