His One-Night Mistress(8)

Back home, the story was different: he'd been unable to forget that single, tumultuous night in Paris.

In the course of those few impassioned hours, had he fallen in love?  Surely not! If, as a much younger man, he'd sworn off having children,  he'd even more strongly vowed to avoid such romantic claptrap. Falling  in love was for teenagers. Not for a man like himself with a family  fortune and the driving ambition to quadruple that fortune.

To show his mother and father that he didn't need their money? Or their love?

Allan, his ineffectual, unhappy father, and Eleonore, his mother, with  her cold will of steel: Seth felt equally distant from both of them.

Eleonore wanted Seth married to a woman of her choice, someone who would  present no threat to her authority. His butterfly lover wouldn't do,  for sure. Too beautiful, too sexy, too intelligent and much too  strong-willed.

Not that Seth wanted to get married. He never had.

He wasn't in love. He was in lust. A very different thing. Instead of  mooning after the unattainable, he should start dating again. Find  himself a sophisticated blonde who'd demand nothing more of him than he  was willing to give.

Like the woman by the stock exchange?

She was the last woman he wanted.

Fuming inwardly, Seth took the granite steps of his broker's building  two at a time and for the next hour and a half focused his mind on the  risks of commodities and the vagaries of currency exchanges. Then he  went home to his brownstone near Central Park, and stripped off his work  clothes. He hauled on shorts and a tank top, lacing his sneakers with  vicious strength.

Enough, he thought, as he stepped on his treadmill and adjusted the  slope. He wasn't going to let a snip of a woman ruin his life. So she'd  vanished. Good riddance to her. If she'd gotten under his skin this much  in one night, imagine what she'd have done if he'd continued seeing  her. He was well rid of her.

He was going to get his life back on track and forget about her. If by  any chance he ever saw her again, he'd run like hell in the opposite  direction.

Not that he would see her. She'd made sure of that.

Holding fast to his anger, because he liked it a whole lot better than  the agonies of regret he'd been suffering ever since that night in a  Paris hotel, Seth turned up the speed on the treadmill and started to  jog. He was indeed back on track, he thought with a grim smile.

With the past where it belonged. In the past.

And the woman of mystery where she belonged. Out of his life.





Locking her fingers in her lap to control their trembling, Lia stared at  the thin blue line. It was the second time in as many days that she'd  used the pregnancy test, and it was the second time it had turned out  positive.

The first time, she'd convinced herself it was a false positive. She couldn't be pregnant. She just couldn't be.

But this evening she could no longer muster such certitude. The evidence was staring her in the face.                       
       
           



       

She was carrying Seth's baby.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, joy flooded her. She would bear the child of a  man who'd brought her felicity beyond her imagining, and who'd aroused  in her a passion she hadn't known she possessed. Hugging her belly in  instinctive protection, she grinned at the opposite wall, her dark eyes  luminous with happiness.

She was going to be a mother.

Then, with a jolt, the hard voice of reason asserted itself. Lia's smile  vanished. She was seven weeks pregnant by a man she'd vowed never to  see again.

Unable to sit still any longer, Lia walked over to one of the two small  windows in her bachelor flat. This one looked out on the iron balconies  of the neighboring apartment block; the afternoon sun shone hot on the  bricks. She was pregnant with Seth Talbot's child. Seth, who ran a host  of international companies from his headquarters a mere thirty blocks  from here, and who was listed in Fortune magazine as one of the richest  men in America.

Well done, Lia.

In two days she was flying to New Zealand to take part in a festival of  young musicians. In a wave of panic Lia felt the tidy rows of bricks  blur in front of her eyes. How could she fit a baby into her life? She  couldn't. It was impossible. She had concerts booked as far ahead as  three years from now; and her career was taking off in a way that both  exhilarated and challenged her. She couldn't abandon it for motherhood.

Abortion?

Everything in her cried out in repudiation. Seth's child? She'd never be  able to live with herself. Besides, she was responsible for this baby's  existence: Seth hadn't forced himself on her. She'd gone willingly to  his bed and now was paying the consequences.

Seth was also responsible.

So what was she supposed to do? Phone him up at work and say, "Remember  me? The woman you had torrid sex with in Paris? Guess what, I'm  pregnant."

She couldn't imagine doing that. Wouldn't he assume she was trying to  trick him into marriage? He was a very rich man, and it was one of the  oldest gambits in the book.

Oh God, she thought in despair, what was she going to do?

Go to the doctor. Find out for sure she was pregnant. Then she'd have  the long flight to Auckland to sit quietly and consider her options.

She'd been right to worry, when she'd first met Seth, that he could derail her life.

He had. By making her pregnant.





Two weeks later, Lia sealed two identical letters, one addressed to Seth  at his Manhattan headquarters, the other to an address in the Hamptons  that she'd found on the Internet. The Hamptons boasted beachside homes  for the extremely rich; she could only assume it was his retreat from  the city. She was almost sure he must have a Manhattan address; but he  would, of course, guard it from general knowledge. She, of all people,  understood the value of personal privacy.

The decision she'd come to over the last few days was that she owed Seth  the truth about her pregnancy: for pregnant she was, the doctor having  merely confirmed something she'd already known.

Yet she dreaded him getting the letters. She couldn't bear to tarnish  that magical night in Paris with accusations that she'd neglected to  warn him she was unprotected against pregnancy; or, worse, with  suspicions that she'd planned the whole thing to entrap him into  marriage.

Whatever his reaction would be, she was sure of two things: it would be  forceful and it would be disruptive. The owner of a company as  far-reaching as Talbot Holdings hadn't gotten there by being nice. Lia  got up from her desk, carrying the letters, took the stairwell to street  level and pushed open the door. The July heat hit her like a blow, and  for a moment she wavered, attacked by the dizziness that so far was her  only symptom; she had, to her enormous relief, avoided morning sickness.

With a sense of putting herself in the hands of fate, Lia pushed away  from the wall, walked two blocks and thrust the letters through the slot  in the mailbox. There. She'd done it. The rest was up to Seth.





CHAPTER FIVE





LIA lay back on the chaise longue. Over her head, palm trees rattled  their fronds in the warm Caribbean tradewinds, while a torrent of  bougainvillea spangled her with shadows. On the blindingly white beach  only a few feet from her private cottage, waves splashed gently up and  down. Another kind of music, she thought idly. One she didn't have to  work for.

Heaven. Utter heaven. How often did she lie back and do absolutely nothing?

Never was the short answer.

She'd get up soon and shower, put on her jazzy new sun-dress and wander  to the least formal of the three restaurants that the resort boasted.  Tomorrow afternoon, after a morning snorkeling on the reef, she had an  appointment at the spa.                       
       
           



       

So what if the few days she was spending here were straining her budget  to the breaking point? She'd gotten off-season rates, and only once a  year did she treat herself to time spent entirely on her own.

She'd been here just over seven hours, and already she felt like a new  woman. Just wait until tomorrow, she thought. A massage, a pineapple  scrub and a dip in the thalassotherapy pool. Whatever that was.

She was quite willing to find out.

Lazily she got up from her chair and wandered toward her charming,  air-conditioned cottage, which was nestled in a miniature botanical  garden where brightly hued butterflies lit on the blooms, opening and  closing their wings as they feasted on nectar. Lia stood on the stone  walk, watching them for a moment. So careless, so hungry for the world's  sweetness … once she'd been like that. But she'd changed in the last  eight years.

How could she not have?

Ruefully she smiled at the iridescent turquoise patches on the wings of  the nearest butterfly. After that night in Paris, it had been years  before she could bring herself to wear turquoise again. But now she did.  In fact, her new swimsuit was also iridescent turquoise, and fit her  like a glove.