Eminently sensible Tess who wouldn’t give him too much grief once his private purpose had been served.
A fast building wave of fierce resentments swelled through her as she waited for Nick to construct a reply aimed at winning her acquiescence to his plan.
No way, she thought venomously. No way in the world was she going to be his bunny in some agenda that held no real caring for her. She was right on edge, ready to explode with a host of blistering home-truths, her nerves jumping so much her skin felt as though it was crawling as she watched him regather himself. No smile. Deadly serious. Dark green eyes locked onto hers, intensely purposeful.
‘It’s about having a child,’ he said softly. ‘It’s about bringing up our child in a far more stable home than we were ever given. You’d be with me on that, wouldn’t you, Tess? We know what it was like for us so…’ The intensity in his eyes moved up a notch. ‘…we’d make it different. Better.’
Her heart lodged in her burning throat, choking off the tirade she’d been about to hurl at him.
He knew about Zack.
Had to.
And he’d just been cobbling together a marriage proposal because he felt it was the right thing for their child to have both parents living under the same roof, making a home…
‘I think we could make a good go of it together,’ he pressed.
Her mind whirled wildly around this contention. She simply hadn’t expected Nick to embrace fatherhood at all, let alone take the old-fashioned honourable route of actually marrying her for the sake of their child. A horribly cynical voice in the back of her head observed that it was far too late to propose an abortion. Their son was already born. A real flesh-and-blood person. Nick’s flesh and blood as well as hers. Had this fact stirred some proprietorial instinct in him?
‘You don’t have to marry me,’ she blurted out, hating the thought of any intimate link between them based on a sense of entrapment. ‘I won’t mind sharing Zack with you. I’m glad you want to play a part in his life.’
‘Zack?’ Nick frowned heavily at her.
Gearing up to criticise her choice of name, just like her father, Tess thought. ‘I don’t see that you have any rights over our son as yet, Nick,’ she stated somewhat belligerently. ‘You weren’t around when I gave birth to him two months ago, so…’
‘You gave birth…to our son…two months ago?’
His voice climbed from a grated growl to a powerful punch of seething emotions. His eyes blazed with frightening intensity. His whole face tightened as though throwing up a wall of resistance to what she’d just told him. His shoulders squared into fighting rigidity.
The snap of breaking glass drew Tess’s gaze down. The V-shaped goblet that had held Nick’s martini was lying askew on the table, its fine stem still gripped upright in his hand. His hand was cut, oozing drops of blood.
Flesh-and-blood reality, Tess thought, her own heart thumping wildly at having faced Nick with it.
This was different to making a plan.
Different to putting forward a proposal.
Zack…their child…was real.
Right now real.
And Nick had not known about him!
The realisation of what she’d just done hit Tess like a knock-out blow.
She shut her eyes.
She shut her mouth.
Everything had just crashed out of control.
She had comprehensively lost the plot.
CHAPTER FIVE
IT WASN’T a lie.
As much as Nick wanted it to be—needed it to be—logic kept ramming it through the savagely defensive resistance in his mind that what Tess had just revealed could not be a lie. She had unwittingly spilled the truth, thinking he already knew it.
There had been no artfulness in what she’d said, no intent to get anything out of him, no reason at all for her to lie about having had his child. And the appalled look on her face when she’d realised his marriage proposal had not been about the baby she had secretly kept from him…impossible to even think she’d made a mistake and the child had been fathered by someone else.
Yet if he accepted this as truth, other things he didn’t want to accept became truths, as well. The words from Enrique’s letter began burning a hellish path through his brain…
I remember your visit to me when you were eighteen, the scorn in your eyes for the way I’d lived my life, taking my pleasure from beautiful women at no cost to myself. Do you honestly believe you haven’t pursued the very same path since then, tasting as many as you can, just because you can?
You’re following my footsteps…
No, I’m different to you, Nick had thought. I’d never be so irresponsible about sowing wild oats…
But he’d done precisely what his father had done.
And he’d done it to Tess.
Of all people.
Leaving her pregnant with a child he’d known nothing about.
A son…born two months ago.
A bastard son.
‘Miss Steele, your limousine is here.’
The announcement from the bellboy broke through Nick’s fierce and tumultuous introspection. ‘No!’ snapped off his tongue, his free hand lifting and slamming down onto the table to reinforce his command. ‘Send it away. We’re not going to a movie premiere.’
‘Sir!’ Consternation on the guy’s face. ‘There’s been an accident with your glass? Do you need medical attention for that cut?’
Cut? Nick’s gaze jerked down to the table, taking in the spilled drink, the broken glass, the stem of which was sticking out of his grasp and stained with bleeding from the fleshy part of his hand between thumb and index finger.
‘I think if you’d just fetch some tissues to form a compress?’ Tess quietly suggested.
Nick glanced up to see she was staring at the wound, too.
The bellboy hesitated. ‘If Mr Ramirez was served with a flawed glass…’
‘It’s nothing,’ Nick quickly declared, not wanting a fuss. ‘I’ll use my handkerchief.’ He whipped the dressy white triangle out of his breast pocket, set down the bit of glass he’d still been holding and wrapped up the evidence of what had obviously been a moment of madness on his part. ‘Sorry about the mess,’ he muttered.
‘It’s no trouble, sir. I’ll get it cleaned up for you. About the limousine, Miss Steele…’
‘Tess…’ Nick growled warningly, his eyes zapping hers with a bolt of ferocious determination.
She sucked in a quick breath and conceded the change of plan. ‘I won’t be needing it, after all. Please let the chauffeur know I’ve cancelled.’