Jack moved from the door and walked to his desk while saying, “This isn’t something we’re discussing. It’s something I’ll discuss with Belle.” He paused, put his phone and pen on the desk and turned, leaning a thigh against the side, his hand on the top. “Or my solicitors will discuss it with hers.”
“I knew by the way you and your brother behaved you were a bastard but nobody is this much of a bastard,” Lila snapped then clamped her mouth shut when Jack’s lethal gaze sliced to her.
“This conversation is over,” Jack announced.
“Please don’t do this,” Rachel begged and Lila shot her a furious look but Rachel ignored it. “Belle’s under enough stress as it is.”
“Then I suggest you encourage her to speak with me,” Jack replied instantly regardless of the fact that he felt more than a vague sense of disquiet at Rachel’s earnest words. “Tell her Saturday afternoon, three o’clock at The Point.”
“If she decides to come, and that’s a big ‘if’,” Lila proclaimed, “then we’ll be with her.”
Jack extended his head and murmured, “By all means.”
Rachel and Lila glanced at each other before Lila declared, “I do not have a good feeling about this and usually my feelings are spot on.”
Jack didn’t comment.
Neither did Rachel.
The two women stood staring at him, perhaps hoping he’d relent.
He didn’t.
Lila put her hand to the doorknob saying, “We’ve done enough damage to Bellerina. Let’s go, Rachel, before we do any more.”
“This wasn’t my idea,” Rachel replied.
“Well, it wasn’t mine,” Lila retorted.
“If I remember correctly, it was,” Rachel said.
They kept squabbling as Lila led the way out but Jack saw Rachel turn at the door and call, “We’ll see you Saturday.”
Then Rachel closed the door behind them.
Jack stared at it.
Belle Abbot was pregnant with his child.
One of the three indisputably magnificent times he f**ked her (Jack knew he couldn’t put that down to romantic idiocy), he’d made her pregnant.
Belle, thin and wan, if the pictures in the paper were anything to go by, had been pregnant with his child for three months.
And she wasn’t going to tell him.
She was going to keep his child from him.
If her mother and grandmother hadn’t intervened, he might never have learned not only that he was going to be a father but that his child existed on the planet.
On this thought, it took an extreme effort of will not to pick up the expensive phone Yasmin had given him and throw it across the room.
Instead, he picked up the desk phone and dialled Olive’s extension.
He put it to his ear and when she answered, he said, “Get me everything you can on Belle Abbot. I want her home address, phone numbers, e-mail and work address by the end of the day. You have two weeks to compile a complete history.”
“What’s going on?” Olive asked in his ear but he didn’t reply.
He put the phone down, put Belle and her family out of his mind and went back to his meeting.