Modern Romance Collection: August 2017 Books 5 -8. Jennie Lucas
did not even bother to find out if I had conceived your child?’
‘Bastante! Enough.’ Cortez jumped to his feet and glared at her across the desk. He turned his head and spoke in Spanish to the lawyer, who immediately got up and hurried out of the room.
‘How can you have the audacity to question my suitability to be a father when you are patently unsuitable to be Harry’s mother?’ Disgust was stamped on Cortez’s patrician features. ‘If you refuse my offer, which I believe is a fair one, I will seek to be granted custody of my son through legal channels.’
‘No court would take a three-month-old baby away from his mother,’ Elin said vehemently, but her heart was thumping with fear. Cortez was a rich man and could hire the best lawyers, but she had nothing to her name, apart from a rundown cottage that she could not afford to have repaired.
‘A court would not leave a baby with a known drug-user.’ He took no notice when she gasped. ‘Perhaps you are an addict, or maybe you are in control of your drug habit—for now. But the risk of addiction is high and I do not believe any judge would risk leaving Harry in your care. I certainly will not.’
‘I’m not a drug addict.’ Elin heard the hysteria in her voice and fought to bring herself under control, aware that Cortez was likely to suggest she was emotionally unbalanced. But she was astounded by his accusation. ‘I have never taken any kind of substance, legal or illegal, in my life, apart from the one time that my drink was spiked at my birthday party.’
‘I was led to understand from a reliable source that you are a drug-user,’ he said coldly. ‘Stories of your wild lifestyle have often been reported by the press.’
‘Stories is right. Half the things the tabloids print are made up.’
He gave her a cynical look. ‘Are you saying that photographs of you staggering out of nightclubs on numerous occasions when you were clearly either drunk or high were fake?’
‘No, but...’
‘If the reports of your affairs with football stars and other minor celebrities weren’t true, why did you not demand that the newspapers retracted the stories?’
‘I...’ Elin trailed to a halt and bit her lip. She couldn’t admit that she had deliberately played up for the paparazzi to keep the media’s interest away from her brother. Jarek’s addiction to vodka, gambling and women—so many women—made her supposed wild lifestyle seem tame in comparison. If Cortez learned that Jarek had been going off the rails since Lorna Saunderson’s death, he might sack him from Saunderson’s Bank.
‘Presumably you could not threaten to take legal action against the tabloids because the stories they printed about you were true,’ Cortez said grimly. His eyes were chips of obsidian. ‘I have been advised by a child psychologist that Harry is too young to have formed a meaningful bond with you, and he will not be adversely affected by a clean break from you when he is only a few months old.’
‘Of course he has formed a bond with me,’ she choked. ‘I am his mother. For God’s sake, I carried him inside me for nine months, but where were you, his father, then?’ Elin’s anger turned to despair and she struggled to swallow past the lump that had formed in her throat.
‘I was shocked when I realised that my night of shame had resulted in pregnancy,’ she admitted. ‘And terrified that I had to face my pregnancy alone. All the other women at the childbirth classes had their husbands or partners with them, and I pretended that my baby’s father was working abroad because I was too embarrassed to admit I didn’t even know his identity.
‘I never knew my parents,’ she told Cortez huskily. ‘They died when I was a baby and my brother was six, and we were placed in an orphanage. I was luckier than other children in the orphanage because at least I had my brother, who took care of me as well as he was able to. My earliest memories are of feeling fear and confusion. I am Bosnian by birth, and the orphanage was in Sarajevo. When the city was bombed during the Bosnian war, many of the orphanage staff were killed or ran away and abandoned the children.’
She was breathing hard, as if she had run a marathon. ‘I know what it is like to be abandoned. I will never, ever leave my son. Your vile accusations—especially that I use drugs—are untrue. I love Harry more than life and I would never do anything that might harm him or put him at risk.’
From the pram came a faint cry as Harry stirred. Elin shot across the room. Her heart felt as if it would burst with love as she lifted her baby into her arms and pressed tender kisses to his satin-soft cheek. ‘Hello, my angel,’ she murmured and was rewarded with a sleepy smile from her little son that filled her with the sweetest joy.
She turned to find that Cortez had followed her over to the pram and he was standing next to her with a tense expression on his face, as if he feared she might drop Harry, she thought furiously. His next words shocked her more than anything else he had said.
‘When you discovered you were pregnant, why did you decide to go through with it?’
Elin was counting Harry’s eyelashes and only half paying attention to Cortez. ‘What do you mean?’
His breath hissed between his teeth. ‘Did you consider not having your child?’
She jerked her eyes to his face as his meaning sank into her stunned brain and she felt sick. ‘Oh, my God! You think I could have done that? What have I done to deserve your foul accusations? I thought when you suggested I could give away my baby for financial gain that you could not be any more insulting. But I was wrong.’
Something indecipherable glittered in Cortez’s eyes. ‘It was not an unreasonable question. You said you felt scared when you found out you were pregnant and faced being a single mother.’
Elin shook her head. ‘I loved my baby from the minute I knew that a miracle was happening inside me,’ she told him fiercely. ‘At my ultrasound scan when I was told I was expecting a boy, I felt sad that he wouldn’t have a father because I know from my own childhood that a child needs to have security provided ideally by both its parents. A child needs to feel loved. Nothing else is as important.’
She whirled around and walked over to the door with Harry held tightly in her arms. ‘I know something else,’ she said, turning back to stare at Cortez with disgust in her eyes.
He looked...stunned was the only way she could describe the expression on his face. His skin appeared to be drawn tight over his razor-sharp cheekbones. The first time she had seen him at her party a year ago he had reminded her of a wolf, and she should have followed her instincts and fled from him while she’d had the chance, she thought grimly.
‘I know that your wealth does not mean you will be a good father. You can’t buy your son. What Harry needs is a father who will always be there for him, but you weren’t around when I was in Intensive Care after his birth.’ Her voice shook. ‘Thankfully my brother spent hours in the hospital nursery with my son. And of course Harry was looked after by the nurses, but he did not have either of his parents with him, just like I didn’t have my parents when I lived at the orphanage.’
Cortez frowned ‘Why were you in Intensive Care?’
‘I bled heavily soon after giving birth.’ Elin swallowed hard. It was only three and a half months since Harry had been born and the memories of what had happened in the delivery room—when the euphoria of her son’s birth had rapidly turned into a scene from a horror film—were vivid in her mind.
‘The medical term is a postpartum haemorrhage. I was terrified I would bleed to death,’ she admitted. ‘I was rushed into Theatre and given a general anaesthetic, and I don’t remember anything after that. But I was told afterwards that I had emergency surgery and a blood transfusion. If the crash team had not been able to stop the bleeding they would have had to perform a hysterectomy, which you probably know is an operation to remove the womb. But luckily the doctors were able to save my life without ending my chances of one day having another child.’
She looked down at her infant son and blinked away her tears that always