CHAPTER ONE

      IGNORING the anxious green eyes, the tense features in the softly lit mirror, Nadine got up from the dressing-table, feeling the apricot satin nightdress move with disturbing sensuality against her skin.

      Whichever way one looked at it, it was still adultery, she thought with an apprehensive little shiver. What other way was there to describe having sex with a married man?

      Heat washed over her as she gazed out of the diamond-paned window, down on to the pleasingly lit gardens of the small country hotel. How discreet of him to bring her here, away from London, she reflected, with increasing tension licking through her as she heard water running out of the basin in the adjoining room. Surely one of the West End hotels might have proved a more appropriate setting—a more impersonal place for the cold, meaningless act they were about to-’Savouring the view?’

      The deep, impartial voice jerked her head round in a blaze of rich auburn, her body stiffening from the sudden, stark exposure to that speculative masculine gaze. The satin nightie did nothing to conceal the gentle curves of her body, and feeling the heat of that gaze, with a dryness in her throat, she uttered challengingly, ‘Are you?’

      He smiled a tight smile—the type she had seen him use often in open court. Cameron Hunter. Brilliant barrister. Ruthless adversary. And Lisa’s husband. She had to remember that. Keep reminding herself of the reason why she was here.

      ‘It’s commendable,’ he approved with a detached softness as he came towards her, a more relaxed smile easing the austerity of hard, strongly defined features.

      He hadn’t undressed yet, and the pull of something frighteningly basic overrode her relief. Jacketless, he was still wearing the white shirt and dark trousers he had worn at dinner, but his muscular leanness was all too apparent now, and with a tight contraction of her throat she noticed how the black wavy hair curling over his collar was mirrored in the open ‘V’ of the shirt he had casually loosened.

      ‘I’m sorry if I kept you. I thought you’d be in bed.’ Nadine swallowed, unable to look at that enormous feature of the plushly Victorian room with all it implied.

      ‘No. That’s all right. I mean…’ How could he appear so cool? ‘I—I mean…you didn’t.’

      Heaven! She was twenty-four, for goodness’ sake! Why did she have to sound like a stammering schoolgirl in contrast with him? Because she didn’t have a clue how to handle this situation—never dreaming, when she had originally agreed to the surrogacy arrangements, that it would ultimately come to this.

      And he was shrewd enough to realise it, she despaired, seeing the line furrowing the high forehead even before he said, ‘Are you sure you…really want to go through with this?’

      She looked at him quickly. No, she wasn’t. Oh, not that his child wasn’t the one thing in the world that she dearly wanted! But not like this, she thought—not in these circumstances. She wondered, from his query alone, if he had reservations too.

      ‘To have a child for another woman is a tall order,’ he stated phlegmatically. ‘You could be forgiven for backing out.’

      Backing out? Nadine’s body went rigid. Hadn’t she considered the consequences of that ever since she had agreed to Lisa’s crazy suggestion? Lisa, who had everything except the one thing she desperately longed for—Cameron’s child. But she, Nadine, had agreedagreed because the only man she had ever wanted was Cameron Hunter.

      Too shy to let him know of her feelings four years ago, she’d had to stand by and painfully watch while he married her best friend—even though she’d always felt that Lisa wasn’t really right for him. Therefore the thought of bearing his child—the child Lisa had craved and which, after countless tests, she had ruefully admitted to Nadine she was physically unable ever to give him—seemed like compensation, in a way, for her own loss.

      And besides, coming when it had, Lisa’s suggestion had been like