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Then she locked the bedroom door, and in the empty quiet of the bedroom contemplated a life without Raoul in it and tried to stop the bottom of her world from dropping out.

CHAPTER ONE

CAUGHT in the middle of crouching on the ground, trying to get rid of a particularly stubborn stain on the immaculate cream carpet that ran the length, breadth and width of the directors’ floor of the very exclusive family bank in which she had now been working for the past three weeks, Sarah froze at the sound of voices emerging from one of the offices. Low, unhurried voices—one belonging to a man, the other to a woman.

It was the first time she had been made aware of any sign of life here. She came at a little after nine at night, did her cleaning and left. She liked it that way. She had no wish to bump into anyone—not that there would have been the slightest possibility of her being addressed. She was a cleaner, and as such was rendered instantly invisible. Even the doorman who had been allowing her entry ever since she had started working at the bank barely glanced up when she appeared in front of him.

She could barely remember a time when she had been able to garner a few admiring glances. The combined weight of responsibility and lack of money had rubbed the youthful glow from her face. Now when she looked in the mirror all she saw was a woman in her mid-twenties with shadows under her eyes and the pinched appearance of someone with too many worries.

Sarah wondered what she should do. Was there some special etiquette involved if a cleaner come into contact with one of the directors of this place? She hunkered down. In her blue checked overalls and with her hair scraped back under a matching scarf, she figured she might easily have passed for a heap of old clothes dumped on the ground, were it not for the elaborate trolley of cleaning materials by her side.

As the hushed voices got closer—just round the corner—Sarah put her all into the wretched stain on the carpet. But with a sinking heart she was aware that the voices had fallen silent, and the footsteps seemed to have stopped just in front of her.

In fact, sliding her eyes across, she could make out some hand-made Italian shoes just below charcoal-grey trousers, sharply creased, a pair of very high cream stilettos, and stockings with a slight sheen, very sheer.

‘I don’t know if you’ve done the conference room as yet, but if you have then you’ve made a very poor job of it. There are ring marks on the table, and two champagne glasses are still there on the bookshelf!’

The woman’s voice was icy cold and imperious. Reluctantly Sarah raised her eyes, travelling the length of a very tall, very thin, very blonde woman in her thirties. From behind her she could hear the man pressing for the lift.

‘I haven’t got to the conference room yet,’ Sarah mumbled. She prayed that the woman wouldn’t see fit to lodge a complaint. She needed this job. The hours suited her, and it was well paid for what it was. Included in the package was the cost of a taxi to and from her house to the bank. How many cleaning jobs would ever have included that?

‘Well, I’m relieved to hear it!’

‘For God’s sake, Louisa, let the woman do her job. It’s nearly ten, and I can do without spending the rest of the evening here!’

Sarah heard that voice—the voice that had haunted her for the past five years—and her mind went a complete blank. Then it was immediately kick-started, papering over the similarities of tone. Because there was no way that Raoul Sinclair could be the man behind her. Raoul Sinclair was just a horrible, youthful mistake that was now in the past.

And yet …

Obeying some kind of primitive instinct to match a face to that remarkable voice, Sarah turned around—and in that instant she was skewered to the spot by the same bitter chocolate eyes that had taken up residence in her head five years ago and stubbornly refused to budge. She half stood, swayed.

The last thing she heard before she fainted was the woman saying, in a shrill, ringing voice, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, that’s the last thing we need!’

She came to slowly. As her eyelids fluttered open she knew, in a fuddled way, that she really didn’t want to wake up. She wanted to stay in her peaceful faint.

She had been carried into an office and was now on a long, low sofa which she recognised as the one in Mr Verrier’s office. She tried to struggle upright and Raoul came into her line of vision, taller than she remembered, but just as breathtakingly beautiful. She had never seen him in anything dressier than a pair of jeans and an old tee shirt, and she was slowly trying to match up the Raoul she had known with this man kneeling over her, who looked every inch the billionaire he had once laughingly informed her he would be.

‘Here—drink this.’

‘I don’t want to drink anything. What are you doing here? Am I seeing things? You can’t be here.’

‘Funny, but I was thinking the very same thing.’ Raoul had only now recovered his equilibrium. The second his eyes had locked onto hers he had been plunged into instant flashback, and carrying her into the office had reawakened a tide of feeling which he had assumed to have been completely exorcised. He remembered the smell of her and the feel of her as though it had been yesterday. How was that possible? When so much had happened in the intervening years?

Sarah was fighting to steady herself. She couldn’t believe her eyes. It was just so weird that she had to bite back the desire to burst into hysterical, incredulous laughter.

‘What are you doing here, Sarah? Hell … you’ve changed …’

‘I know.’ She was suddenly conscious of the sight she must make, scrawny and hollow-cheeked and wearing her overalls. ‘I have, haven’t I?’ She nervously fingered the checked overall and knew that she was shaking. ‘Things haven’t worked out … quite as I’d planned.’ She made a feeble attempt to stand up, and collapsed back down onto the sofa.

In truth, Raoul was horrified at what he saw. Where was the bright-eyed, laughing girl he had known?

‘I have to go … I have to finish the cleaning, Raoul. I …’

‘You’re not finishing anything. Not just at the moment. When was the last time you ate anything? You look as though you could be blown away by a gust of wind. And cleaning? Now you’re doing cleaning jobs to earn money?’

He vaulted to his feet and began pacing the floor. He could scarcely credit that she was lying on the sofa in this office. Accustomed to eliminating any unwelcome emotions and reactions as being surplus to his finely tuned and highly controlled way of life, he found that he couldn’t control the bombardment of questions racing through his brain. Nor could he rein in the flood of unwanted memories that continued to besiege him from every angle.

Sarah was possibly the very last woman with whom he had had a perfectly natural relationship. She represented a vision of himself as a free man, with one foot on the ladder but no steps actually yet taken. Was that why the impact of seeing her again now was so powerful?

‘I never meant to end up like this,’ Sarah whispered, as the full impact of their unexpected meeting began to take shape.

‘But you have. How? What happened to you? Did you decide that you preferred cleaning floors to teaching?’

‘Of course I didn’t!’ Sarah burst out sharply. She dragged herself into an upright position on the sofa and was confronted with the unflattering sight of her sturdy work shoes and thick, black woollen tights.

‘Did you ever make it to university?’ Raoul demanded. As she had struggled to sit up his eyes had moved of their own volition to the swing of her breasts under the hideous checked overall.

‘I … I left the compound two weeks after you left.’

Her strained green eyes made her look so young and vulnerable that sudden guilt penetrated the armour of his formidable self control.

In five years Raoul had fulfilled every promise he had made to himself as a boy. Equipped with his impressive qualifications, he had landed his first job on the trading floor at the Stock Exchange, where his genius for making money had very quickly catapulted him upwards. Where colleagues had conferred, he’d operated solely on his own, and in the jungle arena of the money-making markets it hadn’t been long before he’d emerged as having a killer streak that could make grown men quake in their shoes.

Raoul barely noticed. Money, for him, equated with freedom. He would be reliant on no one. Within three years he had accumulated sufficient wealth to begin the process of acquisition, and every acquisition had been bigger and more impressive than the one before. Guilt had played no part in his meteoric upward climb, and he had had no use for it.

Now, however, he felt it sink its teeth in, and he shoved his fingers through his hair.

Sarah followed the gesture which was so typically him. ‘You’ve had your hair cut,’ she said, flushing at the inanity of her observation, and Raoul offered her a crooked half-smile.

‘I discovered that shoulder-length hair didn’t go with the image. Now, of course, I could grow it down to my waist and no one would dare say a word, but my days of long hair are well and truly over.’

Just as she was, she thought. She belonged to those days that were well and truly over—except they weren’t, were they? She knew that there were things that needed to be said, but it was a conversation she’d never expected to have, and now that it was staring her in the face she just wanted to delay its onset for as long as possible.

‘You must be pleased.’ Sarah stared down at her feet and sensed him walk towards her until his shadow joined her feet. When he sat down next to her, her whole body stiffened in alarm—because even through the nightmare of her situation, and the pain and misery of how their relationship had ended, her body was still stirring into life and reacting to his proximity. ‘You were always so determined …’ she continued.

‘In this life it’s the only way to go forward. You were telling me what happened to your university career …’

‘Was I?’ She glanced across at him and licked her lips nervously. For two years she had done nothing but think of him. Over time the memories had faded, and she had learnt the knack of pushing them away whenever they threatened to surface, but there had been moments when she had flirted with the notion of meeting him again, had created conversations in her head in which she was strong and confident and in control of the situation. Nothing like this.

‘I … I never made it to university. Like I said, things didn’t quite work out.’

‘Because of me.’ Raoul loathed this drag on his emotions. Nor could he sit so close to her. Frustrated at the way his self-control had slipped out of his grasp, he pulled a chair over and positioned it directly in front of the sofa. ‘You weren’t due to leave that compound for another three months. In fact, I remember you saying that you thought you would stay there for much longer.’

‘Not all of us make plans that end up going our way,’ she told him, with creeping resentment in her voice.

‘And you blame me for the fact that you’ve ended up where you have? I was honest with you. I believe your parting shot was that you were grateful that you would have the opportunity to find Mr Right … If you’re going to try and pin the blame for how your life turned out on me, then it won’t work. We had a clean break, and that’s always the best way. If the Mr Right you found turned out to be the sort of guy who sits around while his woman goes out cleaning to earn money, then that’s a pity—but not my fault.’

‘This is crazy. I … I’m not blaming you for anything. And there’s no Mr Right. Gosh, Raoul … I can’t believe this. It feels like some kind of … of … nightmare … I don’t mean that. I just mean … you’re so different …’

Raoul chose to ignore her choice of words. She was in a state of shock. So was he. ‘Okay, so maybe you didn’t find the man of your dreams … but there must have been someone …’ he mused slowly. ‘Why else would you have abandoned a career you were so passionate about? Hell, you used to say that you were born to teach.’

Sarah raised moss-green eyes to his and he felt himself tense at the raw memory of how she’d used to look up at him, teasing and adoring at the same time. He had revelled in it. Now he doubted that any woman would have the temerity to tease him. Wealth and power had elevated him to a different place—a place where women batted their eyelashes, and flattered … but teased? No. Nor would he welcome it. In five years he had not once felt the slightest temptation to dip his toes into the murky waters of commitment.

‘Did you get involved with some kind of loser?’ he grated. She had been soft and vulnerable and brokenhearted. Had someone come along and taken advantage of her state of mind?

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You must have been distraught to have returned from Africa ahead of schedule. I realise that you probably blame me for that, but if you had stuck it out you would forgotten me within a few weeks.’

‘Is that how it worked for you, Raoul?’

Pinned to the spot by such a direct question, Raoul refused to answer. ‘Did you get strung along by someone who promised you the earth and then did a runner when he got tired of you? Is that what happened? A degree would have been your passport, Sarah. How many times did we have conversations about this? What did he say to you to convince you that it was a good idea to dump your aspirations?’

He didn’t know whether to stand or to sit. He felt peculiarly uncomfortable in his own skin, and those wide green eyes weren’t helping matters.

‘And why cleaning? Why not an office job somewhere?’

He looked down at his watch and realised that it was nearing midnight, but he was reluctant to end the conversation even though he queried where it was going. She was just another part of his history, a jigsaw puzzle piece that had already been slotted in place, so why prolong the catch-up game? Especially when those huge, veiled, accusing green eyes were reminding him of a past for which he had no use?

If he politely ushered her to the door he was certain that she would leave and not look back. Which was clearly a good thing.

‘You can’t trust people,’ he advised her roughly. ‘Now perhaps you’ll see my point of view when I told you that the only person you can rely on is yourself.’

‘I’ve probably lost my job here,’ Sarah intoned distractedly.

She had seen him look at his watch and she knew what that meant. Her time was coming to an end. He had moved onwards and upwards to that place where time was money. Reminiscing, for Raoul, would have very limited interest value. He was all about the future, not the past. But she had to plough on and get where she needed to get, horrible though the prospect was.

‘I couldn’t countenance you working here anyway,’ Raoul concurred smoothly.

‘What does this place have to do with you?’

‘As of six this evening—everything. I own it.’

Sarah’s mouth dropped open. ‘You own this?’

‘All part of my portfolio.’

It seemed to Sarah now that there was no meeting point left between them. He had truly moved into a different stratosphere. He literally owned the company whose floors she had been scrubbing less than two hours ago. In his smart business suit, with the silk tie and the gleaming hand-made shoes, he was the absolute antithesis of her, with her company uniform and her well-worn flats.

Defiantly she pulled off the headscarf—if only to diminish the image of complete servility.

Hair the colour of vanilla, soft and fine and unruly, tumbled out. He had cut his hair. She had grown hers. It tumbled nearly to her waist, and for a few seconds Raoul was dazzled at the sight of it.

She was twisting the unsightly headscarf between her fingers, and that brought him back down to earth. She had been saying something about the job—this glorious cleaning job—which she would have to abandon. Unless, of course, she carried on cleaning way past her finishing time.

He’d opened his mouth to continue their conversation, even though he had been annoyingly thrown off course by that gesture of hers, when she said, in such a low voice that he had to strain forward to hear her, ‘I tried to get in touch, you know …’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Sarah cleared her throat. ‘I tried to get in touch, but I … I couldn’t …’

Raoul stiffened. Having money had been a tremendous learning curve. It had a magnetism all of its own. People he had once known and heartily wished to forget had made contact, having glimpsed some picture of him in the financial pages of a newspaper. It would have been amusing had it not been so pathetic.

He tried to decipher what Sarah was saying now. Had she been one of those people as well? Had she turned to the financial news and spotted him, thought that she might get in touch as she was down on her luck?

‘What do you mean, you couldn’t?’ His voice was several shades cooler.

‘I had no idea how to locate you.’ Her heart was beating so hard that she felt positively sick. ‘I mean, you disappeared without a trace. I tried checking with the girl who kept all the registration forms for when we were out there, and she gave me an address, but you’d left …’

‘When did all this frantic checking take place?’

‘When I got back to England. I know you dumped me, Raoul, but … but I had to talk to you …’

So despite all her bravado when they had parted company she had still tried to track him down. It was a measure of her lack of sophistication that she had done that, and an even greater measure of it that she would now openly confess to doing so.

‘I came to London and rented a room in a house out east. You would never have found me.’

‘I even went on the internet, but you weren’t to be found. And of course I remembered you saying that you would never join any social networking sites …’

‘Quite a search. What was that in aid of? A general chat?’

‘Not exactly.’

Sarah was thinking now that if she had carried on searching just a little bit longer—another year or so—then she would have found him listed somewhere on the computer, because he would have made his fortune by then. But she had quickly given up. She had never imagined that he would have risen so far, so fast, and yet when she thought about it there had always been that stubborn, closed, ruthless streak to him. And he had been fearless. Fearless when it came to the physical stuff and fearless when it came to plans for his future.

‘I wish I had managed to get through to you. You never kept in touch with your last foster home, did you? I tried to trace you through them, but you had already dropped off their radar.’

Raoul stilled, because he had forgotten just how much she knew about him—including his miserable childhood and adolescence.

‘So you didn’t get in touch,’ he said, with a chill in his voice. ‘We could carry on discussing all the various ways you tried and failed to find me, or we could just move on. Why did you want to get in touch?’

‘You mean that I should have had more pride than to try?’

‘A lot of women would have,’ Raoul commented drily. She turned her head and the overhead light caught her hair, turning it into streaks of gold and pale toffee. ‘But I suppose you were very young. Just nineteen.’

‘And too stupid to do the sensible thing?’

‘Just … very young.’ He dragged his eyes away from the dancing highlights of her hair and frowned, sensing an edginess to her voice although her face was very calm and composed.

‘You can’t blame me if I couldn’t find you …’

Raoul was confused. What was she talking about?

‘It’s getting late, Sarah. I’ve worked through the night, hammering out this deal with lawyers. I haven’t got the time or the energy to try and decipher what you’re saying. Why would I blame you for not being able to find me?’

‘I’ll get to the point. I didn’t want to get in touch with you, Raoul. What kind of a complete loser do you imagine I am? Do you think that I would have come crawling to you for a second chance?’

‘You might have if you’d been through the mill with some other guy!’

‘There was no other guy! And why on earth would I come running to you when you had already told me that you wanted nothing more to do with me?’

‘Then why did you try and get in touch?’ He felt disproportionately pleased that there had been no other guy, but he immediately put that down to the fact that, whether they had parted on good terms or not, he wouldn’t have wanted her to be used and tossed aside by someone she had met on the rebound.

‘Because I found out that I was pregnant!’

The silence that greeted this pooled around her until Sarah began to feel dizzy.

Raoul was having trouble believing what he had just heard. In fact he was tempted to dismiss it as a trick of the imagination, or else some crazy joke—maybe an attention-seeking device to prolong their conversation.

But one look at her face told him that this was no joke.

‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, and you have to be nuts if you think I’m going to fall for it. When it comes to money, I’ve heard it all.’ Like a caged beast, he shot up and began prowling through the room, hands shoved into his pockets. ‘So we’ve met again by chance. You’re down on your luck, for whatever reason, and you see that I’ve made my fortune. Just come right out and ask for a helping hand! Do you think I’d turn you away? If you need cash, I can write a cheque for you right now.’

‘Stop it, Raoul. I’m not a gold-digger! Just listen to me! I tried to get in touch with you because I found out that I was having your baby. I knew you’d be shocked and, believe me, I did think it over for a while, but in the end I thought that it was only fair that you knew. How could you think that I’d make something like that up to try and get money out of you? Have you ever known me to be materialistic? How could you be so insulting?’

‘I couldn’t have got you pregnant. It’s not possible! I was always careful.’

‘Not always,’ Sarah muttered.

‘Okay, so maybe you got yourself pregnant by someone else …’

‘There was no one else! When I left the compound I had no idea that I was pregnant. I left because … because I just couldn’t stay there any longer. I got back to England and I still intended to start university. I wanted to put you behind me. I didn’t find out until I was nearly five months along. My periods were erratic, and then they disappeared, but I was so … I barely noticed …’

She had been so miserable that World War III could have broken out and she probably wouldn’t have noticed the mushroom cloud outside her bedroom window. Memories of him had filled every second of every minute of her every waking hour, until she had prayed for amnesia—anything that would help her forget. Her parents had been worried sick. At any rate, her mother had been the first to suspect something when she’d begun to look a little rounder, despite the fact that her eating habits had taken a nosedive.

‘I’m not hearing this.’

‘You don’t want to hear this! My mum and dad were very supportive. They never once lectured, and they were there for me from the very minute that Oliver was born.’

Somehow the mention of a name made Raoul blanch. It was much harder to dismiss what she had said as the rantings of an ex-lover who wanted money from him and was prepared to try anything to get it. The mention of a name seemed to turn the fiction she was spinning into something approaching reality, and yet still his mind refused to concede that the story being told had anything to do with him.

He’d never been one to shy away from the truth, however brutal, but the nuts and bolts of his sharp brain now seemed to be malfunctioning.

Sarah wished he would say something. Did he really believe that she was making up the whole thing? How suspicious of other people had he become over the years? The young man she had fallen in love with had been fiercely independent—but to this extent? How valuable was his wealth if he now found himself unable to trust anyone around him?

‘I … I lived in Devon with them after Oliver was born,’ she continued into the deafening silence. ‘It wasn’t ideal, but I really needed the support. Then about a year ago I decided to move to London. Oliver was older—nearly at school age. I thought I could put him into a nursery part-time. There were no real jobs to be had in our village in Devon, and I didn’t want to put Mum and Dad in a position of being permanent babysitters. Dad retired a couple of years ago, and they had always planned to travel. I thought that I would be able to get something here—maybe start thinking about getting back into education …’

‘Getting back into education? Of course. It’s never too late.’ He preferred to dwell on this practical aspect to their conversation, but there was a growing dread inside him. There had been more than one occasion when he had not taken precautions. Somehow it had been a different world out there—a world that hadn’t revolved around the usual rules and regulations.

‘But it was all harder than I thought it was going to be.’ Sarah miserably babbled on to cover her unease. He thought she had lied to try and get money out of him. There was not even a scrap of affection left for her if he could think that. ‘I found a house to rent. It’s just a block away from a friend I used to go to school with. Emily. She babysits Oliver when I do jobs like these …’

‘You mean you’ve done nothing but mop floors and clean toilets since you moved here?’

‘I’ve earned a living!’ Sarah flared back angrily. ‘Office jobs are in demand, and it’s tough when you haven’t got qualifications or any sort of work experience. I’ve also done some waitressing and bar work, and in a month’s time I’m due to start work as a teaching assistant at the local school. Aren’t you going to ask me any questions about your son? I have a picture … In my bag downstairs …’

Raoul was slowly beginning to think the unimaginable, but he was determined to demonstrate that he was no pushover—even for her. Even for a woman who still had the ability to creep into his head when he was least expecting it.

‘I grant that you may well have had a child,’ he said heavily. ‘It’s been five years. Anything could have happened during that time. But if you insist on sticking to this story, then I have to tell you that I will want definite proof that the child is mine.’

Every time the word child crossed his lips, the fact of it being his seemed to take on a more definite shape. After his uncertain and unhappy past, he had always been grimly assured of one thing: no children. He had seen first-hand the lives that could be wrecked by careless parenting. He had been the victim of a woman who had had a child only to discover that it was a hindrance she could have well done without. Fatherhood was never going to be for him. Now, the possibility of it being dropped on him from a very great height was like being hit by a freight train at full speed.

‘I think you’ll agree that that’s fair enough, given the circumstances,’ he continued as he looked at her closed, shocked face.

‘You just need to take one look at him … I can tell you his birth date … and you can do the maths …’

‘Nothing less than a full DNA test will do.’

Sarah swallowed hard. She tried to see things from his point of view. An accidental meeting with a woman he’d thought left behind for good, and, hey presto, he discovered that he was a father! He would be reeling from shock. Of course he would want to ensure that the child was his before he committed himself to anything! He was now the leading man in his very own worst nightmare scenario. He would want proof!

But the hurt, pain and anger raged through her even as she endeavoured to be reasonable.

He might not want her around. In fact he might, right now, be sincerely hoping that he would wake up and discover that their encounter had been a bad dream. But didn’t he know her at all? Didn’t he know that she was not the type of girl who would ever lie to try and wrangle money out of him?

Unhappily, she was forced to concede that time had changed them both.

Whilst she had been left with her dreams in tatters around her, a single mother scraping to make ends meet and trying to work out how she could progress her career in the years to come, he had forgotten her and moved on. He had realised his burning ambitions and was now in a place from which he could look down at her like a Greek god, contemplating a mere mortal.

She shuddered to think what would have happened had she managed to locate him all those years ago.

‘Of course,’ she agreed, standing up.

She could feel a headache coming on. In the morning, Oliver would be at playgroup. She would try and catch up on some sleep while the house was empty. It hadn’t escaped her notice that Raoul still hadn’t shown any appetite for finding out what his son was like.

‘I should go.’

In the corner of her eye, the cleaning trolley was a forlorn reminder of how her life had abruptly changed in the space of a few hours and suddenly become much more complicated. She doggedly reminded herself that whatever the situation between them it was good that he knew about Oliver. She sneaked a glance at him from under her lashes and found him staring down at her with an unreadable expression.

‘I’m very sorry about this, Raoul.’ She dithered, awkward and self-conscious in her uniform. ‘I know the last thing you probably want is to have bumped into me and been told that you’ve fathered a child. Believe me, I don’t expect you to do anything. You can walk away from the situation. It’s only going to clutter up your life.’