After the Loving
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Carole Mortimer
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CHAPTER ONE
‘CONGRATULATIONS, Bryna,’ Frank Stapleton beamed at her. ‘By my calculations you’re just nine weeks pregnant.’
The fingers that had been rebuttoning her blouse after the examination began to shake. Pregnant? My God, she thought, that possibility hadn’t even occurred to her when she had made the appointment to see the man who had been her doctor ever since she came to London eight years ago. Pregnant? She couldn’t be!
‘I’ll give you an initial prescription for the usual vitamins,’ her doctor continued briskly. ‘I’m sure you can be relied upon to be sensible during these early weeks—good diet, a healthy amount of exercise, are very important at this stage. You—’
‘Are you sure?’ Her voice broke with the tension his diagnosis had put her under. ‘I meant,’ she hurried on at his frowning look, ‘I always thought—well, I wouldn’t want to—to tell anyone unless I’m one hundred per cent sure.’ She hoped she didn’t look—or sound—as anxious as she felt to have him tell her he couldn’t be completely sure that his diagnosis was the right one. At any other time in her life she would have been overjoyed with the news, and she knew Frank was aware of that, but she couldn’t be pregnant now.
Frank gave her a reassuring smile. ‘Believe me, Bryna, there’s no doubt. It’s amazing how many women ask me the same thing when I tell them the good news,’ he teased. ‘Even though they’re usually pretty certain of what my diagnosis will be before they come here.’
The last was said cajolingly, but she hadn’t known, hadn’t even guessed that the results of the tests the doctor had taken the previous week would reveal that this was the reason her body had decided to play tricks on her. All the experts claimed that emotional tension could cause the same result, and God knows she had been through enough of that recently!
‘Now as soon as you can I want you to get along and see a good obstetrician,’ her doctor advised. ‘I can give you the name of one if you would prefer—’
‘There’s no rush, is there?’ She was still too numb to think about things like that.
‘I shouldn’t leave it too long, Bryna,’ the doctor smiled, moving to sit on the edge of his desk. ‘You and the baby will need the best of care during the next seven months.’
Pregnant. It still didn’t seem real to her. It couldn’t be happening to her now!
She studiously finished buttoning her blouse so that the doctor shouldn’t see that he was more pleased by the news than she was, and picked up her bag ready to leave once she was fully dressed, a blush darkening her cheeks as the doctor raised surprised brows. She gave him a quick smile. ‘Unlike those other ladies who came to you, I have to admit to being a little—surprised,’ she revealed shakily. ‘You must realise why.’ She looked at him dazedly.
‘Of course I do,’ he patted her hand. ‘And as soon as you’re feeling a little less shocked I want you to give me a call so that we can talk about that. The only thing you need to know now is that you’re in excellent health and I’m sure you’re going to have a perfectly normal pregnancy.’
Nothing had been normal in her life the last few weeks, and her pregnancy could only make things worse. Its existence already did that.
‘Thank you.’ She swallowed hard. ‘I am a little dazed,’ she admitted tremulously. ‘I—I’ll call you later today,’ she added shakily, clutching her bag in front of her. As if a few hours were going to make any difference to the shock she had just received!
Frank nodded, smiling warmly. ‘I’m sure you’re bursting to tell someone your good news.’
By ‘someone’ she knew he meant the baby’s father. And that was where the problem lay.
‘Yes,’ she gave a tight smile. ‘Well, thank you, and—’
‘Don’t thank me, Bryna,’ he gave her a teasing smile. ‘I had nothing to do with this miracle, you and the baby’s father managed this all on your own!’
The trembling hadn’t stopped by the time she had walked through the reception area and waiting-room, across the car park, unlocked her car door, and sat inside, her head resting on the steering-wheel.
Pregnant! Years ago she had dreamt about this day, of knowing her child was growing inside her. Then her parents had broken the news that, owing to an emergency operation during puberty, she would probably never be able to have a child of her own.
It had been a bitter blow, days of crying, weeks of cursing fate for doing this to her, months of self-recrimination as she tried desperately to convince herself she was still a woman worth loving, years of telling herself she could still live a full life, her years as a model doing a lot for her self-esteem. And now, somehow, when she had only fleetingly glimpsed the happiness she could have, she found she was pregnant. With Raff’s child.
Raff. He was the last person she could tell about the life they had created between them.
She put her hand protectively on her stomach. Her child.
Dear God, how she wanted it!
But she would lose Raff if she had the baby.
She was losing him anyway.
The last thought came unbidden, but she knew it was the truth even as she tried to deny it. Each day Raff faded a little more away from her, until eventually he would tell her it was over between them. She was only surprised he hadn’t already done so; she had lasted much longer than his affairs usually did.
It still surprised her to realise she was the mistress of Raff Gallagher, a man who wielded much power in the City, both monetarily and personality-wise. The first moment she had seen him she had known he was a power to be reckoned with. But she certainly hadn’t expected to become his mistress within a matter of days!
He wouldn’t want this child she carried, she had no doubt of that. Raff had made it clear from the first that he was offering her no more than any of the other women he had had in his life the last ten years: passion and consideration, and the truth when he no longer felt either of them for her any more.
How could she tell the man who had made it clear he offered no commitment that they had made the biggest commitment of all, that of forming another life from their desire for each other? Once again she acknowledged that she couldn’t tell him. Which gave her only a matter of weeks with him before the child physically began to show on her slender figure.
Why bother to count in weeks when she knew Raff could end it in days? Maybe even today.
* * *
‘So will you talk to Daddy about it?’
Bryna blinked at the pretty girl who sat opposite her at the restaurant table. Lunch had been the last thing she had felt like after leaving the doctor’s surgery, but she had promised to have lunch with Kate, and somehow she had managed to drive herself to the restaurant. How, she didn’t know, not recalling the drive here at all, but she had already been seated at the table when Kate had breezed into the room five minutes ago, her hair a mass of glossy black curls, grey eyes gleaming with determination.
It was that gleam of determination that warned Bryna she had better be more on her guard and pay closer attention to what Kate was saying; this young lady could be deviously charming when she chose to be! And lack of attention when Kate’s eyes were gleaming like this could have dire results. This young lady could be every bit as manipulative as her father when she was set on a course of action.
‘Talk to him about what?’ Bryna prompted guardedly, listening intently now.
Irritation flickered in the dark grey depths. ‘What’s the matter with you today, Bryna? You haven’t heard a word I’ve said since I arrived!’
Bryna gave a half-smile as Kate displayed another characteristic of her father: impatience with anyone who didn’t pay complete attention to what concerned them at any given moment. In the father it was part of his strength of character, in this eighteen-year-old girl it appeared merely petulant. But she didn’t doubt Kate would be every inch the matriarch in her later years.
‘Sorry. I—I’ve had a busy morning,’ she dismissed with a shrug.
‘Hm,’ Kate gave her a censorious look. ‘Well, I’d like you to talk to Daddy on my behalf about the idea of my sharing a flat with Brenda next term.’
Bryna’s brow cleared at the explanation. ‘I thought you’d already discussed it with your father and he’d said no,’ she returned drily, knowing all about the conversation between father and daughter, also knowing the outcome would be inevitable.
‘Not a definite no-more-discussion-on-the-subject no.’ Kate sat forward eagerly. ‘I’m sure that if you told him you think it’s a good idea he might be more—open-minded.’
Bryna wasn’t sure she did think it was a good idea. Oh, she understood Kate’s wish to leave the home she had shared with her family the last eighteen years, but she wasn’t altogether sure Kate was up to setting up home on her own just yet, especially with Brenda Sanders.
Kate had become friends with the other girl when she had started college the previous term, but Brenda seemed to have a different boy in tow each time they met, and the one time Bryna had been to the flat Kate proposed sharing it had been very untidy, with a sleepy-eyed, completely naked young man emerging from Brenda’s bedroom. That way of life might be Brenda’s choice, but for all her outward sophistication she was sure Kate was still very much an innocent. And her father would like her to remain that way a little while longer!
‘I don’t think my opinion, favourable or otherwise, would make the slightest difference to his decision,’ she told the younger girl coolly, sipping her mineral water, having realised just in time before she ordered her drink from the waiter that she shouldn’t really drink alcohol in her condition.
‘Oh, but I’m sure—Oh,’ Kate broke off as realisation dawned. ‘You aren’t saying that your affair with Daddy is almost over?’
Candour, cruelly blunt or otherwise, was something neither of the Gallagher children lacked, neither Paul at twenty, or his young sister Kate. It was something Bryna had been made aware of the first time Raff had introduced her to his two children from his very young marriage and they had asked why she and Raff didn’t just live together and have an open affair, assuring them that they were both adult enough to accept the situation.
They might well be, but neither she nor Raff had wanted that close a relationship, she because she liked having her own home and independence, Raff because he never became that intimate with the women he was involved with, and both of them were happy to continue as they were. Or they had been.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Kate dismissed before she could answer her. ‘You and Daddy have been together for over six months now; that’s at least three months longer than any of the others!’
Tact and diplomacy seemed to be traits the Gallagher children hadn’t received when virtues were being given out!
Bryna was well aware of the fact that her affair with Raff had lasted twice as long as they usually did, just as she had been aware of his increasing irritability the last month or so, knowing it was only a matter of time now before he ended things between them.
Until today, until an hour ago, she had been grateful for each extra day she had lasted than his other women; now she knew she would have no choice but to end things herself if he didn’t do it soon.
‘All the more reason for him to feel enough is enough,’ she gave a tight smile.
‘I don’t believe it,’ his daughter scoffed. ‘Paul and I have been laying bets on how soon he would marry you!’
Bryna gave the younger girl a pitying look. ‘You should both know better than that.’
Grey eyes, so much like her father’s it was unnerving, looked Bryna over speculatively. ‘I somehow never expected the woman to turn Daddy down when he finally decided to take the plunge again.’
She turned away. ‘One has to be asked in order to give a refusal.’
‘You’re so beautiful, Daddy is sure to ask you soon,’ the younger girl said with certainty.
As if beauty had anything to do with it! Oh, she was well aware of her own looks, she had to be in the profession she had chosen to enter on leaving school eight years ago. She knew how well her long mane of white-blonde straight hair and wide, dark-lashed, violet-coloured eyes photographed, not to mention the slender length of her body.
Her looks had been her stock-in-trade for six years, and could have continued to do so for many years after that, but two years ago she had decided to open her own modelling agency, where her looks and appearance were still very important, but she no longer had to watch everything she ate, or look anxiously in the mirror each morning as she searched for those tell-tale lines on her face that would tell her the choice was no longer hers to make.
It had been a successful move, both financially and personally, and she had also met Raff through the agency. But while her beauty might have attracted his attention initially, it certainly wasn’t enough to hold his interest for any length of time; there had been too many beautiful women before her for her to ever believe that.
‘I don’t think so, Kate,’ she dismissed as gently as she could, liking the young girl for all her brashness. How could she not like the daughter who looked so much like the man she loved!
No ties, no commitment, they had said at the start of their affair, and Bryna had meant to keep to those rules. But it had been impossible for her not to fall in love with Raff, although she had taken care not to let him even guess at the emotion, knowing it would precipitate the end of their relationship. She had broken all the rules, but Raff had kept to every one of them, and she had no illusions why.
Would the child she carried look like him as Kate did? They were both tall, so the child was sure to inherit that trait from one of them, but Raff was so dark against her blondeness, and surely that would be the more dominant of the two. How strange to look at her child and see Raff in every glance!
‘Bryna? Bryna!’ Kate repeated impatiently at her second lapse into unattentiveness. ‘Are you sure? I mean—’
‘I’m sure. And I accept it,’ she huskily assured the young girl. ‘Now let’s order lunch, shall we?’ she added briskly as the waiter approached their table. ‘It hasn’t happened yet, and until it does we can enjoy each other’s company.’
She was well aware that when her affair with Raff ended he wouldn’t be the only one to leave her life, that, fond as she had become of Kate and Paul, they could hardly keep up a friendship with one of their father’s ex-mistresses!
Kate gave her a frowning look once they had ordered their meal. ‘You don’t seem exactly heartbroken.’
Bryna gave rueful grimace. ‘Would it do any good if I screamed and shouted?’
‘Well … no,’ Kate admitted moodily. ‘But it might make you feel better.’
‘Believe me, it wouldn’t,’ Bryna drawled.
‘You’re always so cool and controlled,’ the girl rebuked. ‘Don’t you care for Daddy at all?’
Her heart felt heavy at the irony of that. ‘I don’t think you really want me to answer that—’
‘But I do,’ Kate insisted earnestly. ‘Daddy tells me that I shouldn’t even think about going to bed with someone unless I’m absolutely sure I’m in love with them, and yet Daddy isn’t in love with the women he goes to bed with.’
Bryna picked uninterestedly at the prawns she had chosen as her appetiser. ‘It doesn’t seem very fair, does it?’ she acknowledged, her cheeks pale beneath their light dusting of blusher.
‘He told me there’s a certain type of woman a man would never contemplate marrying,’ Kate added with a bitchiness unusual for her.
Bryna swallowed hard, recognising the accusation for what it was. Except that she knew Raff didn’t mean her. He had been her first and only lover.
After her parents had told her she could never have a child she had deliberately set out to attract men to the sensuous sway of her body, always drawing back before any physical commitment had been made, believing they would realise she wasn’t a complete woman if they ever made love to her. By the time she realised that wasn’t true she had earned herself the reputation of being icy and aloof. And the ice hadn’t begun to melt until she met Raff. If he had been surprised to find her virginity intact he had never said so.
The bitchy comment hadn’t been worthy of Kate, with her forthright manner and lack of guile. Bryna guessed that the girl was fond of her too, and would miss her when the time came.
‘He was right,’ she told the younger girl.
Only six years separated them in age, and yet at eighteen Bryna had already been mature beyond her years, scarred by what she believed to be her inadequacy. God, how she wished she could share the life growing within her with someone! Preferably Raff.
But that was out of the question. Her parents, then. She didn’t doubt for a moment that they would be overjoyed by the news, whether she had a husband or not; as Bryna was an only child they had given up any idea of ever becoming grandparents. Maybe instead of telephoning them she would go up to Scotland at the weekend and tell them in person; the look on their faces might be worth the long journey!
‘I’m sorry, Bryna.’ Kate gave a self-disgusted sigh at her intention to wound. ‘You aren’t what Daddy meant at all.’ She picked up her fork to eat her salmon. ‘I’m disappointed, that’s all,’ she grimaced. ‘I thought you would make a great stepmother.’
Raff had lost his wife, and Kate and Paul their mother, over ten years ago, but Raff gave the impression that the marriage he had entered into at only eighteen had ceased to be a complete success years before that. But both parents were devoted to the children, and while their marriage didn’t exactly sparkle it hadn’t been unpleasant either.
Paul and Kate obviously had very warm memories of their mother, and it warmed Bryna to know that Kate, at least, would have had no objection to her taking that place in her father’s life. If the situation had ever arisen. Which it never would.
‘Thank you,’ she accepted briskly. ‘Now, as a friend, would you hurry up and eat your lunch; I have to get back to work.’ She smiled brightly in the face of Kate’s pain at the deliberate snub; she couldn’t allow Kate to live under the misapprehension that there would ever be a happy-ever-after between Raff and herself. Raff was thirty-nine years old, with a grown-up family, and the thought of having to go through night-time feeds, teething, crawling, walking, the terrible-twos, and so on and so on, with another child, would throw even the self-confidently arrogant Raff Gallagher into a panic! It threw her into a panic!
Who would have guessed when she had walked into a restaurant very similar to this one six short months ago that this would happen?
She had been meeting Courtney Stevens, to discuss the use of six of her models to promote a new line he was introducing to his chain of fashion stores throughout Europe and America for the winter. He had proved every bit as charming as the advertising agency she was working with had told her he was.
Or warned her. She and Janet Parker had worked together before, and when the cynical Janet described a man as ‘charming’ it was like any other woman saying he was lethally attractive!
Courtney Stevens—or Court, as he had insisted she call him as they introduced themselves—was a blond giant of a man with a devilish charm glinting in deep blue eyes that were guaranteed to seduce even the most hardened of women. Bryna was charmed almost from the first moment, almost forgetting what she was there for as he deftly centred the conversation on her rather than the business she had come here to discuss.
‘We have to decide what models you would like to use,’ she had finally laughingly protested.
‘Well, we’re going to use the family pile,’ he dismissed drily. ‘For some reason my father bought himself a manor house in Kent and left it to me in his will; I’ve never had reason to use it until now. So as it means the crew will have to stay overnight down there, how about making one of the models a tall violet-eyed silver-blonde?’ He looked at her expectantly.
She couldn’t possibly feel insulted by the intimacy of the suggestion, and she laughed huskily. ‘I no longer work as a model myself.’
‘Couldn’t you make this the exception?’ His large hand covered her much slenderer one.
Her eyes glowed. ‘I’m afraid not.’
‘No?’ He looked as if she had dealt him a wounding blow. ‘Then how about joining me for—’
‘Would you like to introduce us, Court?’ interrupted a harshly rasping voice.
Court frowned his irritation up at the other man. ‘Not now, Raff,’ he protested.
‘Exactly now,’ the other man drawled.
‘Bryna, Raff Gallagher. Raff, Bryna Fairchild,’ Court made the introductions in a disgruntled voice. ‘A friend of mine,’ he told the other man pointedly.
‘I’m glad to meet you, Miss Fairchild.’ The man, who until that moment had only been a dark blue tailored suit, she could see out of the corner of her eye, and a rasping voice, lowered himself into the chair beside her.
For some reason just the sound of his voice as he cut in on their conversation had made her reluctant to look at him before, and as she glanced at him now she knew the reason why; it was like the moon eclipsing the sun. Court was the sun, open and uncomplicated, and Raff Gallagher was the moon, dark with secretive depths he allowed no one to enter.
She told herself she was being imaginative, and yet piercing grey eyes seemed to look into her very soul and see all that was Bryna Fairchild.
Raff couldn’t be called handsome, his features were too rugged for that, and yet he had something else that was even more effective, a compelling quality that overshadowed and obliterated every other man but him.
He appeared to be the same age as Court, in his late thirties, and yet the years had left their mark in the cynical twist of his mouth, the hardness of his eyes, and the grey wings of hair over each temple.
And from the moment she looked at him Court Stevens ceased to be anything but an attractively pleasant client.
‘Mr Gallagher,’ she greeted him coolly.
‘Please call me Raff,’ he invited gruffly. ‘I have every intention of calling you Bryna.’
Whether she liked it or not! she acknowledged ruefully. Of course she realised who he was now; anyone who was in business and hadn’t heard of Raff Gallagher was either a fool or doomed to fail. And she hoped she was neither of those things. This man was Midas, anything he touched, from property to industry, turning to gold.
‘Raff, why don’t you get lost?’ Court invited irritably. ‘Bryna and I have some business to discuss. Not that sort of business, you fool,’ he admonished as the other man raised disbelieving brows in Bryna’s direction. ‘Bryna runs the Fairchild Agency.’
The dark brow cleared. ‘I’ve heard of it,’ Raff drawled, turning to Bryna. ‘I apologise for the assumption I made just now.’
Being a model, Bryna had received her fair share of insults over erroneous assumptions of what her profession actually entailed, but never before had a man presumed that about her without knowing a thing about her!
She turned to Court Stevens with frosty eyes. ‘I really do have to go,’ she snapped. ‘Perhaps you could give me a call and we could get together to discuss this another time.’ She was probably walking away from a contract that could mean even bigger things for her agency if Court Stevens was pleased with the work they did for him this time, but she wasn’t going to stay around and be insulted by a man who acted as if he owned half of London—and probably did!
‘Now look what you’ve done!’ Court turned accusing eyes on the other man. ‘Will you just get out of here?’
It was testament to how deep the friendship was between the two men that Raff Gallagher didn’t take exception to the way Court had been trying to get rid of him ever since he had interrupted them. But at that moment Bryna was too angry to care how close the two men were, as she stood up to leave.
‘Please stay, Miss Fairchild,’ Raff Gallagher drawled as he stood up, the formality deliberate, she was sure. ‘And please accept my apology for interrupting the two of you. Game of golf tomorrow, Court?’
‘OK,’ Court sighed unenthusiastically. ‘But you’re starting with a handicap.’
‘Don’t I always,’ the other man mocked. ‘Miss Fairchild,’ he nodded dismissively before strolling across the restaurant to join two men at a table who had obviously been waiting for him.
‘He always wins, too,’ muttered Court. ‘Sit down, Bryna. Please,’ he persuaded.
She did so slowly, pointedly turning her chair so that she didn’t have to look at Raff Gallagher.
‘We became friends in our first week of boarding school after he bowled me out at cricket and I hit him with my cricket bat in the changing room,’ Court sighed. ‘I broke his nose.’
Bryna had noticed that slight bump on the hawklike nose, laughing softly now as she envisaged the two little boys glaring at each other across a cricket bat, both taking their aggression at being away from home out on the other. ‘Stranger meetings have formed just as strong a friendship, I’m sure,’ she teased.
Court smiled, his eyes brimming with laughter. ‘It wasn’t the fight that caused the friendship,’ he assured her. ‘What did that was the fact that Raff told everyone he’d fallen over and hit his nose. If he hadn’t I would have been expelled in my first week of school!’
Two little boys who had bonded a lifetime friendship through resentment and pain. Maybe Raff Gallagher did have some redeeming qualities after all. One just had to dig deep to find them!
She made a point of not looking his way as she and Court got down to the serious business of discussing the models. Nevertheless, she was aware of the exact moment Raff Gallagher stood up to approach their table before leaving.
Grey eyes delved into her soul a second time. ‘We’ll meet again, Miss Fairchild,’ he murmured as he bent over the hand he had lifted to his mouth, his lips cool and yet moist.
‘Give me a chance, Raff!’ Court complained.
His friend chuckled huskily. ‘The choice will be Bryna’s,’ he said softly, meeting her gaze once again with compelling intensity before taking his leave.
‘It’s a no contest,’ groaned Court resignedly. ‘It always is.’
‘I can assure you Mr Gallagher holds no interest for me,’ Bryna dismissed primly.
When she got back to her office a box containing a single red rose lay on her desk. There was no card with it, but she guessed that it wasn’t from Court; he was the type of man who would sign his name with a flourish to the accompanying card if he found a woman attractive enough to send her flowers.
Half an hour later two more roses arrived, half an hour after that another three, then another three, and another three, until by four-thirty she had the round dozen.
Her secretary/receptionist, Gilly, was agog to know who had sent them. When the man himself arrived at five o’clock neither woman was in any doubt as to who the sender had been. When Raff courteously invited Bryna out to dinner she had breathlessly accepted, her earlier antagonism forgotten; she had never met anyone quite like this man before.
She still hadn’t met anyone like him, and even when he was long gone from her life, she knew she would never meet anyone like him again.
