Even now, thirty years on, he remembered the feel of those walls pressing in around the dreams he’d dreamed in his small fold-out bed.
Even driving through the suburb made him feel claustrophobic—the very sameness of it all, the dreariness of design, the street after street of untended gardens and poorly maintained paintwork—almost as if whatever dream the occupants had once had, had died a slow and painful death.
He’d done well to escape it.
He’d worked damned hard to escape it.
Which made it all the more ironic that this was the first place his child would live. Thank God that, unlike him, it was never a place his child would experience first-hand.
But it didn’t stop him feeling sick to the stomach at the thought of leaving his child behind now. The birth could not come soon enough.
How many months to go?
How many months when she would be living in a suburb he’d sworn he would never set foot in again? He didn’t even want to think about the danger of everyday life out here. Break-ins, school arson and street violence, the suburb made an art form of urban unrest. What kind of environment was that for his baby to develop in?
No kind at all. And it rankled that he should be given this gift of an unborn child, only to have to worry about whether mother and baby survived long enough for him to take the child.
Incubator and baby, he corrected himself as he turned the key in the ignition, the Mercedes purring into life. He couldn’t actually bear to think of this woman as its mother.
It was wrong.
She might be pregnant with his child, but this woman was simply a caretaker for the next however months. She would never be his child’s mother.
Never in a million years!
CHAPTER FIVE
ANGIE slumped against the closed front door, tension draining from her body as she sighed with relief. After what felt like the longest day of her life, after an impossibly draining few hours with an impossible man, finally she was free. Outside, she heard his car engine purr like a jungle cat into life, then the smooth sound of it accelerating away.
Another sigh of relief. He was gone.
And yet still she was unable to get the picture of man and machine out of her head. She shouldn’t have looked. She’d tried to resist. But the temptation to steal just one more glance had been too much.
So she’d peeked over her shoulder and seen him standing there alongside that car of his, watching her, his arms crossed, his eyes shaded by dark glasses that may have covered his eyes but did nothing to hide the intensity of his expression.
So intense she’d had to catch her breath as sensation had skittered up her spine. The sleek black car looked like sin. Its owner had looked even more dangerous. More potent, reminding her of some of the ads in the motoring magazines Shayne had sometimes pored over, except the car would be positioned strategically at the very edge of a cliff top or on a highway next to a rolling surf beach, places that matched driver and machine for pure unbridled beauty. Not places like Spinifex Avenue, with its drab houses and front yards filled with dead gardens and rusting car bodies.
Whoever Dominic Pirelli was and wherever he came from, he did so not belong here.
With a sigh, she pushed herself away from the door and through the near empty lounge room to the kitchen. She dropped her bag on the table, snapped on the kettle and flicked through the mail while she waited for the water to boil. Great. All window envelopes—electricity, rates and… Her heart tripping faster in her chest as she recognised the name of the legal aid office Shayne was using. What did they want now? She tore open the envelope and pulled out the letter, scanning its contents, her mind refusing to believe what her eyes were telling her.
She collapsed onto one of the two remaining mismatched chairs, gutted that he could do this to her. He’d already taken the car and most of the furniture. He’d told her he’d wanted nothing else but a divorce from her ever again.
She read the letter again, slower this time in spite of a heart beating like thunder that sent panic coursing around her body, but the words remained unchanged, their meaning starkly clear.
Shayne wanted a property settlement agreed as quickly as possible. Only now he was claiming half the house—the house that had been her mother’s pride and joy, the house her mother had left her in her will. Her house.