‘I think you’re taking this lady of the manor stuff a bit too seriously.’
Marisa ignored his sneer and shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’
She glanced at his bruised knuckles.
‘You fought with your brother over this?’ She watched him place his uninjured hand over his bruised knuckles and her heart sank. ‘You do know,’ she began, her forehead creased with consternation, ‘that your brother badly wanted to tell you.’
She had never wanted to come between the brothers but she had seen no other way. It wasn’t until much later when Jamie had been given the all-clear that she had thought through the implications of putting Rio in that terrible position of keeping such a huge secret from his twin, but she had thought that so long as Roman never discovered what had happened it would be all right.
‘But he didn’t.’
‘He wanted to tell you!’ Marisa protested again.
Her defence of his twin only fed his anger. ‘A conspiracy takes two at the very least.’
‘It was my decision. We only had a casual relationship, after all, and not even a relationship in the real sense of the word, really—’
‘I proposed to you! I wanted to get married! Admittedly I didn’t know at that point you already had a husband, but proposing to you seems to suggest more than casual on my part, wouldn’t you say?’
It was Marisa’s turn to be angry. ‘Why didn’t I tell you about our baby? Oh, I don’t know, Roman—how about the small print in your proposal?’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
Her fists clenched in reaction to his response, she shot to her feet, her anger energising her. ‘You made it quite clear to me that if I did marry you there would be no children under any circumstances and you were not ever going to change your mind.’
A blank look spread across his face. ‘I might have said something like that—’
‘No, you said exactly that, so what would you have said if I’d come to you and told you I was pregnant, Roman? You’d have said, “Great, let’s be a family,” would you? Do me a favour, of course you wouldn’t. You’d have told me to get rid of it.’
The accusation wiped all the colour from his face but, ignoring all the danger signs, she pushed on, the long-suppressed emotions spilling out of her.
‘Jamie is only here because of me...you never even wanted him to exist.’ Her flashing eyes dared him to contradict her, not that she allowed him the opportunity. There was a breathless passionate sincerity in her concluding words. ‘But from the moment I knew he existed I wanted my baby.’
Her words rang with a truth that for a moment silenced him.
‘We will never know what I’d have said or done, will we? Because you didn’t tell me. You let the world and presumably your poor sucker of a husband believe that the child was his.’
‘Rupert never knew. I didn’t realise that I was pregnant until after he...after he died.’ She had put the tiredness down to the upheaval of Rupert’s death, always expected, but in the end it had all happened very quickly, leaving her feeling dazed and alone. Theirs might not have been a marriage in the conventional sense but while Rupert was alive she had always known there was someone who cared about her. His support had not just been financial, but emotional. For a short time, probably the only time in her life, she’d had a security that she had always lacked, that she had secretly longed for.
Her first suspicion had come when she was sitting in the lawyer’s office feeling nauseous. She had got so tired of sitting there nodding in response to statements couched in dry, technical legal terms and had asked wearily, ‘But what does all that mean?’
‘It means, Mrs Rayner, that you are a very wealthy woman.’
‘But if he had you’d have passed my child off as his, though I suppose that would have involved you sleeping with him first,’ Roman jeered.
She felt her anger flare. ‘You have no right to speak about Rupert like that. We had no secrets from one another, and if things had been different he would have made a fantastic father.’
‘So you told him all about me, then?’
Her eyes slid from his for the first time. ‘It wasn’t the right time.’ When she’d arrived back the evening of Roman’s proposal the butler had greeted her at the door with the news that Rupert had had a very bad turn.
Rushing up the stairs to her husband’s bedroom, she’d taken in at a glance his grey face and had immediately called an ambulance. How could she have offloaded her problems onto Rupert when he was so ill?
‘Where is the child now?’ Something flashed in his eyes. ‘What do you call him? James or Alexander?’
‘Jamie, and he is at home.’ She hadn’t even known the country estate in Sussex had existed until she’d inherited it after Rupert’s death. Then it had seemed like the perfect place to bring up a child.
‘So how often do you leave him?’
Resenting that he made her sound like some sort of absentee mother, she began to retort hotly and then stopped herself, realising she had been on the brink of explaining herself to him. ‘Do you have a problem with working mothers?’
He blinked at finding she had neatly turned the tables on him. ‘Of course I don’t,’ he retorted irritably.
‘Actually, he has a very excellent nanny.’
‘So where is home, exactly?’
‘Sussex.’
‘I want to see him.’
‘Why?’
His brows met in a straight line above his dark eyes and he looked at her as though she had just asked the most ridiculous question on earth. ‘Isn’t it obvious? He is my son!’
‘Biologically, yes, he is your son,’ she agreed. ‘But you’re not his father—it takes more than DNA to be that. What do you want, Roman? To hear him call you Daddy or do you want him
