My father was a minister—’
‘Was?’
‘He drowned when I was nineteen, saving the life of a young boy who was swept off rocks at a surf beach.’ Her quiet pride in her father’s impulsive act of self-sacrifice was evident in the soft lilt of her voice. ‘He worked amongst the local parishes here. We grew up helping him search out his readings and themes for his sermons.’
Rafe turned. ‘We?’
‘My brother, Ian, and I. He was a year younger than me. He was killed in a car accident seven years ago. That was when my mother damaged her back...’
She looked away from the penetrating green stare, remembering the tragedy of that day and the added anguish six months later when her fiancé, who had been the driver of the car in which they had all been travelling, had been unable to handle his guilt and had broken off their engagement.
Rafe saw the tightening crook of her wide mouth, and the distant, unfocused look in her brown eyes as they suddenly evaded his, and wondered with a renewed burst of savage frustration what else she was holding back. He wanted to stride over and seize her by her soft shoulders and shake her until she rattled, spilling out all her secrets, but he had already decided that guile was more effective than force where she was concerned.
The more he found out about this infuriating woman the less he felt he knew her. His angry preconceptions had begun to crumble from the moment that he had held her, soft, limp and helpless in his arms. Unconscious, she had been totally vulnerable, unable to protect herself or the baby nestling inside her ripening body.
His baby.
Ignorance no longer protected him from the consequences of his impulsive act of reckless defiance. However artificial the method of conception, thanks to his father’s unethical revelation there was no retreating from the knowledge that part of Raphael was now part of Jennifer, and vice versa.
So, who was she?
Was she a cunning, money-grubbing, conscienceless bitch? Or a foolishly misguided innocent? A hardhearted, clear-thinking opportunist? Or an impulsive woman who had confused wealth with security and panicked when her rash decision landed her in over her head? Or perhaps she was a combination of all of those things.
It would have suited him to have her as black as she had been painted by his rampaging ex-stepmothers and their ravening hordes. By the time he had finally tracked Jennifer down he had been in a killing black fury, the blade of his rage honed and sharpened by three months of torrid internecine warfare amongst the various competing Jordan factions trying to overturn Sebastian’s will.
There had been threats of injunctions and court orders, and unseemly scuffles in the lawyers’ offices, until it was made clear that the old man had sewed everything up watertight, even to the point of having an independent psychiatric report done which attested to his mental health at the time he had amended his will. Any legal challenge to his final wishes and most of the estate would go to charity. So the scavengers had finally settled for their assigned portions—which had been fair, even generous, if not as lavish as they would have liked.
As the only blood heir, Rafe was unable to avoid being tainted by the ugliness, and even though he knew that the same scenario would have been played out by his rapacious relatives whatever had been in Sebastian’s will, he had focused his anger on Jennifer. She had become the repository for his deeply conflicted feelings about his father. When he had set out from London he had been headed towards a confrontation with the past, and now that he had run slap-bang into the future he was still groping to reconcile the two.
He watched Jennifer nervously brush at the fringe that feathered her pale forehead as she realised he was still staring at her. She got very uneasy if he looked at her for any sustained length of time. When he had first met her in London he had thought it was shyness, but when he had seen her coolly out-staring some of his obnoxious stepbrothers he had realised that her uneasiness was a much less innocent form of awareness.
He pulled his wandering thoughts back into line, calculating the facts. Her father had died when she was nineteen, and a year later she had lost her only brother...and been left with a disabled mother. That gave him an inkling as to the reason Jennifer had never finished her nursing training. He already knew how protective she was towards her mother.
‘And she’s been in a wheelchair ever since? Is she completely paralysed from the waist down?’
Jennifer looked at him in surprise. ‘Oh, no—Mum can walk...some of the time she doesn’t even have to use her stick. But she still has bad bouts of chronic pain and weakness in her legs, and at those times it’s easier to use the wheelchair. It gives her back a rest and it’s safer than her staggering about, risking a fall. Sometimes it happens when she’s overdone things, or is tired, and at other times for no reason that she can explain.’ A shadow passed over her expression. ‘She’s had several operations over the years, but there was so little improvement after the last two that the doctors say it’s no use trying any more corrective surgery. At least there’s no sign of progressive degeneration of the spine, so it shouldn’t get any worse than it is now. Not that that’s much consolation for Mum...’
‘She seems a very happy, well-adjusted person.’
She thought he was still talking about her mother’s injuries. ‘She is.’
‘So why bother with all the complicated lying?’ he continued in the same even tone. ‘Why not simply tell her that you were marrying Sebastian?’
‘Because she would have known it wasn’t for love!’ Paula would have been deeply shocked by the idea of her daughter marrying Sebastian, and even more appalled if she’d discovered the reasons behind it.
‘Then why mention getting married at all?’
‘I was going to have a baby, that’s why! I couldn’t arrive home pregnant and unmarried after only a couple of months away,’ she said, exasperated by his blank look. Of course, in the trendy circles in which he had moved, unmarried mothers were probably the norm. ‘I couldn’t do that to Mum. This is small-town New Zealand. People gossip and they have long memories. She and Dad always set a very moral tone, and Mum is still very active in the local church...’
‘Well, if you didn’t want her to know it was for the money, you could have told her you were doing it out of compassion for a dying man, that it was going to be a marriage in name only—which I take it was part of the agreement?’
‘And then how would I have explained getting pregnant?’ she argued, her question a tacit affirmative to his question.
‘What was wrong with the truth? That Sebastian so desperately wanted another child that you entered a programme for infertile couples.’
‘Mum doesn’t approve of assisted reproductive technology,’ she admitted starkly, aware that she could be handing him yet another weapon against her. ‘I told you—she has very traditional moral views. She and Sebastian had arguments about it. She thinks it’s going against God’s will to try and manipulate life. She would have been very hurt and disappointed to think that I...I—’
‘That her sweet little girl had decided to go into the lucrative rent-a-womb business?’