One Night: Red-Hot Secrets. Penny Jordan
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up to his responsibilities, a man who allowed someone else to make his decisions for him.’ And it had also been the act of a man panicked into fleeing as fast as he could from the surging strength and power of an emotion he hadn’t been able to control. But he couldn’t tell her that. After all it had taken him long enough to admit it to himself—all those nights in his early twenties spent lying awake in bed next to a woman he had just possessed only to find himself filled with distaste for what he had done, conscious of an emptiness within him that had become such a permanent ache it had become ground into him.
From somewhere deep inside her Louise was conscious of her professional voice telling her quietly, It was the act of an orphaned twenty-two-year-old, carrying a heavy weight of huge responsibility and deliberately manipulated by a powerful older man who had his own agenda to protect.
Was she making allowances for him? Wasn’t that what her training had taught her to do? To look behind the façade and dig deep into what lay behind it?
‘I can’t let you deny our son his heritage, Louise. He has a right to grow up knowing what it is—good and bad—just as he has a right to reject it when he has grown up if that is his wish.’
He was sounding so reasonable that it was hard for her to throw emotional arguments at him. They would sound selfish—as though she wasn’t thinking of Oliver, as though she wasn’t listening to him.
‘I know how much I’m asking of you in Oliver’s name, but I also know that you are strong enough to accept the challenges that lie ahead.’
Oh, how underhand—to praise her like that and so undermine her.
‘If I let you walk away would it genuinely be the right thing for Oliver?’ Caesar shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. How is he going to feel about himself and about you, do you think, if you deny him the right to know his real heritage and to know me with it until he is old enough to discover it for himself? Are you really willing to risk inflicting that kind of damage on him just to keep him away from me?’
Of course she wasn’t. How could she? If she was honest with herself, the thought of a loveless, sexless marriage—with anyone other than Caesar—didn’t bother her. After all, she had already decided a long time ago, in the aftermath of the fall-out from Oliver’s conception, that given her apparent drive to pursue men who would only withhold their love from her it was far better for her not to get emotionally involved. After all, what patterns might he learn about man-to-woman relationships if he had to witness his own mother denigrating herself, constantly seeking the love she was being denied?
If she acceded to Caesar’s proposition she would be in a position where she would have some power within their relationship from its start, and be in a position to set boundaries for Oliver’s emotional security in all aspects of his growing up.
And finally she knew that this outcome, a marriage between her and Caesar so that Oliver could grow up with both his parents and legitimacy, would have delighted both her grandparents. They had made so many sacrifices for her—not just in taking her in when she had been so disgraced, but in helping her to learn to be a good mother, in supporting her when she had decided to return to her education, and in giving both her and Oliver the most wonderful and loving home.
She took a deep breath and stood up, walking several yards away from Caesar and into a patch of sunlight in a deliberate move intended to bring him out of the shadows so that she could see his expression when she spoke to him.
‘If I were to agree to your proposition there would be certain terms, certain boundaries with regard to your attitude towards me and how that could impact on Oliver, that I would want guaranteed. However, more important than that, indeed of first importance, is Oliver himself. It is true that he is angry with me because I have refused to discuss the identity of his father with him, and it is true, I agree, that he is missing his great-grandfather’s male influence in his life. As I myself know, however, a bad father can be more damaging than an absent one.
‘You have your own reasons for wanting Ollie, and in spite of what you say you aren’t in a position to claim that you love him as your son. You don’t know him. He doesn’t know you. I am concerned that in the first flush of excitement in discovering that you are his father Ollie might be swept into a son-and-father relationship with you before he really knows you, and that he will have expectations of that relationship that are too idealistic and cannot be met. For that reason I think it is better that Ollie gets to know you better before we tell him about the relationship you share.’
As she had hoped he would, Caesar stepped out of the shadows and came towards her. But any comfort she might have derived from being able to see his expression was more than offset by the rejection of what she had said that she could see so plainly in the hardening of the fiercely strong bone structure of his face. Even his eyes, the same unexpected and steely grey as Oliver’s, were darkening as he looked directly at her before saying arrogantly, ‘I don’t agree. Oliver is obviously an intelligent boy. We look far too alike for him not to put two and two together. Any delay in confirming our relationship could lead to his feeling that I am assessing him, perhaps delaying claiming as my son because I do not entirely want him.’
Thinking of her son’s defensive and prideful nature, Louise gave a reluctant nod.
‘I see your point. But what will we tell him about our past?’
He had an answer for that too—as he seemed to for everything.
‘That you and I parted after a quarrel, during which you told me never to contact you again, before returning to London in the belief that I would not want to know about my child.’
Louise wanted to object to the half-truth, but the practical side of her recognised that for a boy of Ollie’s age such a simple explanation would be far easier for him to deal with and accept than something more emotionally complex.
‘Very well,’ she agreed grudgingly, ‘but before anything is said to Oliver he needs to have the opportunity to get to know you.’
‘I am his father,’ Caesar told her, ‘and because of that he knows me already via his genes and his blood. The sooner he is told the better.’
‘You can’t just expect me to tell Oliver that he is your son and for him to welcome that.’
‘Why not?’ Caesar demanded with a dismissive shrug. ‘If the way Oliver has already responded to me is anything to go by, he wants a father desperately. Can’t you accept that maybe there is something that goes beyond logic, and that he and I instinctively sense we have a blood tie?’
‘You are so arrogant,’ Louise protested. ‘Oliver is nine years old. He doesn’t know you. Yes, he wants a father, but you must be able to see that because of his situation he has created an idealised version of the father he wants.’
‘And whose fault is that? Who refused to allow him to understand and accept the real situation?’
‘What I did, I did for his sake. Children can be just as cruel as adults—even more so. Do you really think I wanted him going through what I had to endure myself, and with much less reason? I was to blame for my own situation. I broke the rules. I shamed my family. All Ollie has done is be born.’
She really loved the boy, Caesar recognised as he heard the protective maternal ferocity in Louise’s voice. With the pride he could hear ringing in her voice it must have been hard for her to bear the condemnation of society for so long. Whilst he had had no payment to make at all. Other than within himself, of course. There he had paid over and over again.
‘We shall be married as quickly as it can be arranged. I have a certain amount of influence that should help to speed up the necessary paperwork. It is my belief that the sooner we are married the more speedily Oliver will be able to settle down in his new life here on the island, with both his parents.’
Louise’s heart jerked as though someone had it on a string. Although Caesar had said they must marry, somehow she’d been so preoccupied with worrying about how Oliver would react to the news that Caesar was his father that she had put the issue