The Secret Spanish Love-Child - By Cathy Williams Page 0,18

good intentions to keep things cool, composed and adult. If she had had something heavy and breakable to hand, she would have flung it at his deceitful, arrogant head and hang the good intentions.

‘Would you mind repeating that?’ she asked in a tight, unnaturally high voice.

‘No man on the scene.’

‘No. Man. On. The. Scene. And yet it’s all right for you to have a fiancée on the scene, is it?

What were his expectations here? she wondered. Carry on with his life, get married and lock her up in a state of permanent celibacy because he didn’t want another man around his son? She was trembling with anger.

‘You’re overreacting.’

‘I am not overreacting!’

‘I am being honest. Isn’t that what you would want? The truth? And the truth is that I would not welcome anyone else having an influence over my son. What’s so difficult to understand about that?’

‘I don’t want to talk about this,’ Alex said tightly. ‘I don’t want to get into an argument with you. Now that you know about Luke, we can try and sort out…the practical stuff…’

‘Does he know who I am?’

‘No. I haven’t told him yet.’

The enormity of their situation struck Gabriel forcibly at that bald statement. He had an instant picture in his head of his son, all black curly hair and big drowsy eyes, and from nowhere sprang a crazy, confused feeling of time wasted.

‘I’m sorry,’ Alex said quietly, at which his expression became shuttered once again.

‘When do you intend to tell him?’

‘As soon as possible.’

‘Try again.’

‘Okay! Tomorrow! I’ll tell him tomorrow! He’s very inquisitive, anyway. He’ll probably wake up with a hundred questions about you.’ Her eyes skittered from Gabriel to the window behind him to the mantelpiece, on which sat a row of pictures of Luke at various stages of his young life. Gabriel followed her eyes and he slowly stood up and moved across to the mantelpiece, where he proceeded to hold and examine all of the pictures. All seven of them. From infancy to the one she had taken last month.

While he had been blithely pursuing his goals with the relentless drive that came so naturally to him, while he had been adding to his fortune, building his empire and congratulating himself on his well run, well oiled, no-unpleasant-surprises-life, his own flesh and blood had been growing up without him around. Frustration rocked him because it wasn’t as though he could blame her. Of course, she might have been lying. She might have never bothered trying to find his whereabouts, but he seriously doubted that. He would have been an instant and permanent meal ticket. Why would she have turned that down? He replaced the last of the photos and turned slowly round to look at her.

‘When are you going to…tell the people that you know? Your family? Your fiancée?’ she said awkwardly, to cover the silence.

‘Immediately.’

She breathed a little sigh of relief. Once that hurdle was over, once the shock was absorbed and the situation accepted by the people who mattered to him, they would be able to discuss arrangements for him to see his son. She wondered how Cristobel would receive the news. Not well, she anticipated, but it was hardly as though he had been unfaithful.

‘Then, maybe, when you’ve done that…well, and I will have told Luke about you, of course…we can try and sort stuff out…’

‘Sort stuff out…?’

‘Yes. You know. Visiting rights. I’m really happy for you to see Luke whenever you want to…’ She had stood up in preparation to seeing him to the door but now her voice trailed off because he wasn’t saying anything. And he was looking at her as though she had a screw missing. And neither of those things added up to a man on the verge of departure, having settled matters.

‘Visiting rights?’

Alex detected the odour of a trick question and she looked at him warily. ‘Yes? Visiting rights? You come to see Luke and take him somewhere for an afternoon?’

‘You don’t really think that that’s going to work, do you Alex?’

‘Not going to work?’ Alex repeated in dumb founded confusion. ‘Why wouldn’t it work? It’s what everyone else does when their relationship falls apart and there’s a child involved. Not that we ever had a relationship.’

‘Since when am I everyone else?’

She was struggling to get the gist of what he was saying but her mind wasn’t obliging. Had she misread all the signs and signals? Was he implying that his intention was to stroll out through her front door and