The Frenchman's Love-Child

am. I’m in agony!’

‘Just stay downstairs,’ Tabby instructed unsteadily.

She shut her eyes tight, forcing back the tears that would have released her tension. She was convinced that no woman had ever made a bigger mess of a relationship. She loved him. She had never stopped loving him. She loved just about everything about him: his sense of humour, his forceful personality, the passion and energy that he brought into every aspect of his life, even that volatile streak of possessiveness that was so contrary to his cool facade. But he didn’t love her. He lusted after her like mad and that was the height of her power over him.

When he’d arrived, she should have kept him at arm’s length, maintained a formal distance that would have been more conducive to the confession that she had to make. What she had just done, what she had just allowed him to do to her, had been very unwise and wrong. But then in her own defence she still had no very clear idea of how she had ended up on that sofa with Christien. Any more than there was anything new in her shell-shocked reaction to her own behaviour with him. When Christien touched her, everything but him blurred out of focus and importance. However, this one time, Tabby thought painfully, just this one time she should have had enough gumption to stay in control for her son’s sake.

‘What’s worrying you?’ Emanating megawatt self-assurance and calm, Christien passed her a glass of wine when she came out of the bathroom, narrowed dark golden eyes intent on her troubled face.

‘What’s worrying me goes back nearly four years,’ Tabby informed him tightly, tipping the wine to her dry lips but barely able to bring herself to swallow.

‘You’ve just come back into my life. It would seem more sensible to leave the past where it belongs for now,’ Christien drawled.

‘I’m afraid that this is a piece of the past that’s not going to go away and roll back up at a more convenient time,’ Tabby mumbled and, feeling her knees going weak under her, she sank down on a sofa and stared into her wineglass. ‘That summer, do you remember me telling you that I was taking the contraceptive pill?’

Disconcerted by that question, Christien frowned. ‘Oui…’

Tabby was embarrassed and she refused to look at him. ‘It was the doctor’s idea that I start taking it because I was having problems with my skin…acne. Well, I was given a three-month supply but I lost a packet somewhere, which meant that I ran out of them while I was still in France.’

‘Ran out of them…?’ Christien queried in bewilderment.

Tabby cringed, for it was hard to admit just how naive she had been in those days. ‘I didn’t think it mattered too much if I had to miss a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, I had this really stupid idea that the pills had a sort of cumulative effect after they’d been taken for a while.’

‘Are you saying…?’ Christien breathed in a seriously strained undertone. ‘Are you saying that even though you were no longer taking the pills you believed that you would still be protected from pregnancy?’

As Christien’s tone rose in volume, Tabby flinched. ‘Don’t shout at me…I know it was stupid, but back then I didn’t know anything about stuff like that. When I was put on that course of pills, I didn’t need to be interested in the small print because it never occurred to me that I would be relying on them as birth control…I didn’t know you were about to come into my life!’

‘I don’t believe this. Why the hell didn’t you ask me to take precautions?’ Christien raked at her with incredulous bite.

‘Well…’

His stubborn jawline clenched. ‘I thought you’d be challenged to answer that-’

‘No, just embarrassed. You’d told me that you disliked condoms-’

‘Zut alors!’ Christien exclaimed.

‘And I didn’t want to annoy you and I persuaded myself that there was no real risk.’ Tabby loosed a sad, shamefaced sigh. ‘I was seventeen and I couldn’t imagine falling pregnant. I thought it couldn’t happen to me and, of course, it did.’

That simple admission lay there like a stone thrown into a deceptively tranquil pond. A pond that was about to start churning up beneath the surface. Pale below his olive skin, Christien stared at her from the other side of the room, magnificent golden eyes shimmering with the ferocity of his tension.

Tabby fixed her discomfited gaze back on her wineglass and then she set it down in an abrupt movement.

‘I found out that I was going to have a baby soon after I went back to England…I had morning sickness like… morning, afternoon and evening too,’ she recalled in a small, flat voice. ‘To cut the wretched long story short, he-’

‘He?’

‘Our son was born three weeks before the inquest into the car crash was held.’ Tabby pleated her trembling hands together to keep them steady. ‘I intended to tell you then-’

‘Bon Dieu…why that late in the day? Why didn’t I hear that I was to be a father months before that?’ Christien shot at her rawly.

‘You changed your mobile phone number. I tried to call the villa in the Dordogne but, by that stage, you had sold it and I had no other address or means of contacting you-’

‘That’s not much of an excuse. You could have made more effort.’

‘I didn’t have your resources to conduct an all-out search and I had other problems!’ Tabby’s temper was sparking in her own defence. ‘In his will, my father left everything he possessed to my stepmother and when she realised I was pregnant she threw me out of the house in literally what I stood up in. I had just started art college and I had to sleep on a friend’s floor until my mother’s sister, Alison, took me in.’

‘I am certain that she could have advised you on the best way to locate me…such as through the name of my airline.’ Majoring in heavy sarcasm as he pointed that out, Christien was not yielding an inch.

‘I think you’re overlooking the fact that you dumped me like a hot potato after that car accident and never spoke to me again-’

‘The crash had nothing to do with it. I saw you with that idiot on the Harley-’

‘But I didn’t know how it was with you, did I? I wasn’t inside your secretive head with you!’ Tabby scanned him with strained eyes that demanded his understanding. ‘I wasn’t aware that you believed I was seeing someone else. All I knew was that you wanted nothing more to do with me after the death of your father and mine. So you had better believe that I wasn’t in any great hurry just then to track you down with the news that I was pregnant…because, believe it or not, I have my pride too!’

Christien was very pale. He raked a not quite steady hand through his luxuriant black hair, his dark eyes brooding and bitter. ‘Why don’t you just get to the point? So, you gave my son up for adoption!’

Tabby registered that she should have guessed that he would assume that she had put their baby up for adoption. After all, he had seen no sign of a child in her life when he’d visited her in London the previous month or when she’d stayed in the cottage over that first weekend. ‘No, I didn’t do that. I couldn’t give him up. He’s upstairs fast asleep…’

Black brows pleating, Christien gazed back at her, what she had just revealed too shattering for him to accept. ‘Comment?’

‘I called him Jake Christien and your name is on his birth certificate. I planned to tell you about him when I attended the accident enquiry.’ Tabby couldn’t keep the bitter hurt out of her voice. ‘But you wouldn’t have anything to do with me-’

‘What are you trying to say?’ Christien was not focusing on what to him was an irrelevance. ‘You are saying that you have our son…that there is a little boy here in this house? I don’t believe you-’

‘The day you visited me in London, he was at nursery school, and I left him in England with Alison when I made my first trip here.’ Tabby rose to her feet as she appreciated that she might as well have been talking to a brick wall for all the listening that Christien seemed able to do.

‘Right now, he is upstairs?’ Christien questioned fiercely.

Tabby halted at the foot of the staircase and whispered, ‘How…how do you feel about that?’

‘That I can’t believe that this is real because, if I start believing it, I might get so angry I lose my head with you.’ Dark golden eyes glittering, Christien stared at her with deadly seriousness. ‘I can’t believe it’s real because you slept with me last week without saying a word-’

A deep dark blush flamed over her face. ‘I didn’t mean to-’