The Paternity Claim

‘Need a towel for your hair?’ he asked, shooting her a quick glance. ‘Or maybe borrow a sweater?’

‘No. Honestly. I’ll be fine.’ But she didn’t feel fine. Her limbs felt stiff and icy as he led her along a wide, deep hallway and into a large, high-ceilinged room, its cool, classic lines made warmly informal by the pulsating colours he had chosen.

Isabella looked around her. It was a very Latino colour scheme.

The walls were painted a rich, burnt orange colour and deepest red and covered with vibrant pictures—there was one she instantly recognised as the work of an up-and-coming Brazilian painter. Two giant sofas were strewn with scatter cushions and a low table contained magazines and papers and a book about football. Dotted around the place were photographs of a young boy in various stages of growing up—Paulo’s son—and a black and white studio portrait of a cool, beautiful blonde, her pale shining hair held close to a little baby. And that, Isabella knew, was Elizabeth—Paulo’s wife.

‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he instructed, ‘while I get dressed and then I’ll make you some coffee—how does that sound?’

‘Coffee would be lovely,’ she replied automatically.

Paulo went back upstairs and into the bathroom to finish shaving and frowned at himself in the mirror. Something was different about her. Something. And not just that she’d put on a little weight. Something had changed. Something indefinable…And it was something more than the dramatic sexual flowering he had noticed a few short months ago. He moved the blade swiftly over the curved line of his jaw.

He had known her for ever. Their fathers had been friends—and the friendship had survived separation when Paulo’s father had eventually settled in England, the home of his new wife. Paulo had been born in Brazil, but had been brought to live in London at the age of six and his father had insisted he make an annual pilgrimage back to his homeland. It was a pilgrimage Paulo had carried on after the deaths of his parents and the birth of his own son.

Every year, just before Carnival erupted in a blaze of colour, he and Eduardo would travel to the Fernandes ranch for a couple of weeks and Paulo had seen Isabella grow up before his eyes.

He had watched with interest as the little girl had blossomed to embrace the whole spectrum of teenage behaviour. She had been stubborn and sassy and sulky, like all teenage girls. By seventeen she had begun to develop a soft, voluptuous beauty all of her own, but at seventeen she had still seemed so young. Certainly to him. Even at eighteen and nineteen she had seemed a different generation to a man who was, after all, a decade older, already widowed and with a young son of his own.

But something had happened to Isabella in her twentieth year. In the blinking of an eye, her sexuality had exploded into vibrant, throbbing life and Paulo had been touched by it; his senses had been scorched by it.

He had lifted her down from her horse and there had been a split-second of suspended movement as he held her in his arms. He had felt the indentation of her waist and the dampness of her shirt as it clung to her sweat-sheened skin. Their laughter had stilled and he had seen the suddening darkening of her pupils as she had looked into his eyes with a hunger which had matched his own.

Desire. Potent as any drug.

And his conscience had made him want no part of it.

He removed the towel from his hips, staring down at himself with flushed disbelief as he observed the first stirring of arousal. He scowled. Because that was the whole damned trouble with sexual attraction—once you’d felt it, you could never go back to how it was before. His easy, innocent relationship with Isabella had been annihilated in that one brief flash of desire. That was what was different.

His mouth twisted as he crumpled up the towel and hurled it with vicious accuracy into the linen basket, then gingerly stepped into a pair of silken boxer shorts.

Isabella wandered distractedly around the sitting room, going over in her head what she was going to say to him, forcing herself to be strong because only her strength would sustain her through this. ‘Paulo, I’m…’

No, she couldn’t come straight out with it. She would have to lead in with a casual yet suitably serious statement. No matter that deep down she felt like howling her heart out with shock and disbelief…because indulging her feelings at the moment would benefit no one. ‘Paulo, I need your help…’

She heard the jangle of cups and looked up, relieved to find that he had covered up with a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. On his chin sat a tiny, glistening bead of scarlet and it drew her attention like a magnet.

He saw the amber brilliance of her eyes as she stared at him and felt the dull pounding of his heart in response. ‘What is it?’ he asked huskily.

‘You’ve cut yourself,’ she whispered, and the bright sight of his blood seemed like a portent of what was to come.

Paulo frowned, lifting a fingertip to his chin. ‘Where?’

‘To the right. Yes. There.’

The finger brushed against the newly shaven surface and drew it away; he looked at it with a frown. Had his hand been shaking? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cut his face. ‘Right,’ he said, absently licking the finger with a gesture which was unintentionally erotic. ‘Coffee.’

She tried for the light touch but it wasn’t easy when all the time she felt the weight of the great burden she carried. ‘I haven’t had a decent cup since I left home.’

‘I can imagine.’ He smiled.

She watched as he slid onto the sofa, moving with the inborn grace of an alley cat. Back home they always called him gato, and it was easy to understand why. The word in Portuguese meant ‘cat’ but it also meant a sexy and beautiful man—and no one in the world could deny that Paulo Dantas was just that.

Tall, dark and statuesque, he was a matchless mix of English mother and Brazilian father. His was a spectacular face, with an arrogant sweep of cheekbones which could have been sculpted from some gold-tinted stone and hooded eyes more black than brown. The luscious mouth hinted at a deeply sensual nature, its starkly defined curves making it look as if it had been created to inflict both pleasure and pain in equal measures.

She took the coffee that he offered her with a hand which was threatening to tremble. ‘Thank you.’

This was crazy, thought Paulo, as he observed her unfamiliar, frozen smile and her self-conscious movements. It was like being in a room with a stranger. What the hell had happened to her? ‘How is your father?’ he enquired politely.

‘He—he’s very well, thank you.’ She tried to lift the coffee cup to her lips but now her fingers were shaking so much that she was obliged to put it down with a clatter. ‘He says to say hello to you.’

‘Say hello back,’ he said evenly, but it was difficult to concentrate when that shaky movement made the lush curves of her body move so uninhibitedly beneath the T-shirt.

Isabella wondered if she was going mad with imagining, or had his gaze just flickered over her breasts? She wondered how much he had seen—and Paulo was an astute man, no one could deny that. Had he begun to guess at her secret already? Unobstrusively she glanced down at herself.

No, she was safe. The hot-pink T-shirt was relatively loose and the matching jeans were far from skin-tight. Nothing clung to the contours of her body. And besides, there was no visible bump yet. Nothing to show that there was a baby on the way, bar the aching new fullness of her breasts and the sudden nausea which could strike her at any time. And frequently did.

She tried a smile, but felt it wobble on her lips. ‘I expect you’re wondering why I’m here.’

At last! ‘Well, the thought had crossed my mind,’ he said, managing to turn curiosity into a teasing little comment. ‘People don’t just turn up from Brazil unannounced—not as a rule. Not without phoning first. And it’s a pretty long way from Vitoria da Conquista.’

Isabella turned her head to glance out of the uncur-tained window into the rain-lashed sky. It certainly was. Back home the temperature would be as warm as kisses, the land caressed by a soft and sultry breeze.

‘And shouldn’t you be at college? It’s still term-time, isn’t it?’

She started to tell the story, though not the whole story. Not yet. ‘Actually, I’ve dropped out of college.’

His body shifted imperceptibly from relaxed to watchful. ‘Why?’ he drawled coldly. ‘Is that what every fashionable student is doing this year?’

She didn’t like the way his mouth had flattened, nor the chilly displeasure in his eyes. ‘No, not exactly.’

‘Then why?’ he demanded. ‘Don’t you know how important qualifications are in an insecure world? What are you planning to do that’s so important that it can’t wait until the end of your course?’

She opened her mouth to tell him about her dreams of travelling, of seeing a world outside the one she had grown up in—and then she remembered, and hastily shut it again. Because that would never happen now. She had forfeited her right to do any of that. ‘I had to…get away.’

Paulo frowned. Her anxiety was almost palpable, and he leaned forward to study her, finding his nostrils suddenly filled with the warm, musky note of her perfume. He moved out of its seductive and dangerous range. ‘What’s the matter with you, Bella?’ he asked softly. ‘What’s happened?’

Now was the time to tell him everything. But one look at the disquiet on his face, and the words stuck in her throat. ‘Nothing has happened,’ she floundered. ‘Other than the fact I’ve left.’

‘So you said.’ He felt another flicker of irritation and made sure that it showed. ‘But you still haven’t come up with a good reason why—’ A pause, while the black eyes bored into her. ‘Mainly, I suspect, because you don’t have one.’ Normally, he wouldn’t have been so rude to her—but then this was not a normal situation. ‘So, Isabella,’ he said silkily. ‘I’m still waiting for some kind of explanation.’

Tell him. But, faced with the iron disapproval in the black eyes, she found that her nerve had crumbled again. ‘I was bored.’

‘You were bored.’ He tapped the arm of his hair with a furious finger.

‘OK, stressed then.’

‘Stressed?’ He looked at her with disbelief. ‘What the hell has a beautiful young woman of twenty got to be stressed about? Is it a man?’