www.millsandboon.co.uk

      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘WHAT exactly do you mean, it’s too late to claim the child?’

      David Wilder glanced apprehensively at his extremely grim client. He had been warned when he joined the prestigious city law firm of Rainer, McTeart and Holston that some of their clients were very demanding indeed, with exacting standards and sometimes very strong and unfortunately erroneous views about their rights under British law.

      ‘Unfortunately we do number among our clients a few who do not yet seem to be aware that there are some things that money just cannot buy,’ the senior partner had told him.

      The senior partner was also his godfather, which was how he had come to join the practice in the first place; a relationship which he suspected was not going to protect him at all when the full wrath of the man standing opposite him burst upon his head.

      He had acted for the best, he reflected miserably. A minor matter was how the senior partner had described the whole affair: something that need not concern their prestigious client, who was, in any event, out of the country on business at the time. Besides, the woman had already made it clear that she would take charge of the child. How was he supposed to know that Garrick Evans would want the child himself?

      It was not, after all, as though there was anything other than the most tenuous of blood ties between them; the son of his deceased second cousin.

      ‘What do you mean, it’s too late?’ Garrick Evans demanded, repeating his earlier question. The lowered volume of his voice in some odd way added to its menace.

      He was a tall man, a good two inches over six foot, with a frame that reminded David Wilder of his school days and the torments of the rugby field. He himself was of a much slighter built, and he gave an inward shudder at the very hardness of the other man. Garrick Evans was well into his thirties, and yet there was an air of honed fitness about him that suggested that he did not spend all his time poring over balance sheets and negotiating deals. But to read the financial press one would think that he did.

      “One of the most important power brokers of our time,” was how the Financial Times had described him, and in doing so had coined a new phrase. A power broker was exactly what Garrick Evans was: a man whose skills in assessing the weak points of an institution and then turning them to either his own or his clients’ advantage were so notorious that it was said in the city that whole boards quailed at the sound of his name.

      A millionaire before he was thirty, he no longer spent his time buying and selling vast corporations, but instead used his skills on a consultancy basis, normally working for governments or very large corporations. He also gave a great deal of his time to ensuring the profitable running of several large charities—time which he gave free of charge, although very few people knew it.

      Garrick Evans had learned a very long time ago that to show people a weakness was to invite them to take advantage of it.

      David Wilder cleared his throat and looked nervously into the cold grey eyes of his client.

      ‘Well…that is…Well, the fact is that by declaring that you were abdicating from any responsibility toward the child, you have also given up any rights you might have had over him.’

      ‘I?’ Garrick queried drily. ‘Odd…I don’t seem to remember making such a momentous decision.’

      ‘Well, no. You were out of the country at the time, in Venezuela, I believe. You may remember you had given strict instructions that you were only to be contacted in an emergency.’

      ‘I see. And you, of course, didn’t consider that the death of my cousin and his wife was an emergency. Is that it? Never mind the fact that my cousin has named me as co-guardian of his child.’

      ‘He was only your second cousin,’ David muttered helplessly. ‘There had been no contact between you as far as we knew.’

      He didn’t add that the whole office knew of his well-documented loathing of hangerson of any kind, and it was for that reason that David had assumed that he wouldn’t want the child.

      ‘So, there was an error of judgement. Now what we have to do is to correct that error. Have you been in touch with the woman? What’s her name?’

      ‘Kate Oakley,’ David supplied for him, admitting, ‘Well, no, not yet. We weren’t sure what your instructions were going to be.’ He cleared his throat nervously again. ‘You see, it would be very difficult now to reclaim the child. We would have to prove negligence on the part of your co-guardian. And here, the mere fact that she’s a woman, and you’re a man, would immediately balance these scales in her favour…We could try to negotiate, of course.’

      He said it so doubtfully that Garrick frowned.

      ‘How much do you know about her?’ he questioned abruptly.

      Silently, David Wilder handed him a file.

      ‘Let me read this and then I’ll come back to you. In the meantime, don’t do anything. If I think it necessary, I’ll go and see Miss Oakley myself. It may be that I will be able to persuade her to see the advantages of the child’s coming to me,’ he said grimly.

      A few hours later, when David Wilder was relating the story to his wife while she was preparing dinner, she turned her head and said thoughtfully, ‘Buy her off, did he mean?’

      David