Modern Romance Collection: June 2018 Books 1 - 4. Miranda Lee
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had come over him at the wedding? He was accustomed to responsibility but not to being responsible for other people, with the exception of employees with whom he had no personal ties. From childhood he had learned to hold people at bay to ensure they couldn’t hurt him. If he didn’t let anyone get close he was safe. But Freddie and the children weren’t going to hurt or betray him. He was more likely to hurt them by failing to live up to their expectations, he reasoned impatiently. What if she fell in love with him? He would have to warn her off on that score. The very last thing he wanted to do was hurt Freddie, he acknowledged without hesitation. Or Eloise, or Jack. He was getting attached to the three of them even if he wasn’t supposed to do so.
Practicality not sentiment, he reminded himself with a groan of frustration. But practicality didn’t take any account of emotions or emotional women. And Freddie was emotional, all wide, accusing, hurt eyes and quivering lips. Eloise looked at him in much the same way when he refused to read the dragon story twice over at the same sitting. Jack? Jack was simple in his demands, content solely with attention.
Freddie’s emotional outlook, however, was infinitely preferable to the kind of brassy, avaricious females who littered his past, Zac conceded wryly. She stood up for herself too. She wasn’t a doormat eager to agree with everything he did and said. Freddie hadn’t wanted the watch, she had wanted words, only what was he to do when the words wouldn’t be the ones she wanted to hear? Honesty at any cost? What woman really wanted that?
* * *
The day went past very slowly for Freddie because Zac was such an unknown quantity. For all she knew he could have flown back to London or Brazil or even gone off with another, less demanding woman. ‘Unpredictable’, Angel Valtinos had labelled his half-brother, and now for the first time she was seeing that in Zac and it unnerved her that a simple request for an explanation could infuriate him to such an extent. She bathed the children and saw them into bed, promising that Zac would be back soon and praying that she was right.
She was shocked when she walked out onto the terrace and saw him simply standing there looking out over the valley.
‘Zac...’ she breathed with irrefutable relief. ‘Where have you been?’
‘I went to Nice, checked out the work being done on Angel’s yacht...he asked me to,’ he told her with a fluid shrug as he slowly turned round to face her. ‘How are you?’
‘I wasn’t sure you’d come back,’ she whispered tightly.
‘I may storm off but I’ll always come back,’ Zac murmured with wry amusement. ‘I don’t like losing my temper with people.’
‘I’m not people, I’m your wife,’ she protested as the sun went down behind him in a crimson and golden blaze of colour, the light picking up the straight angle of his dark brows above his deep-set eyes and the wide sensual line of his mouth and sending a shiver of awareness travelling through her. ‘But I’m not sure you were really ready to take on a wife.’
Zac raked long brown fingers through his black hair and breathed in deep. ‘For a split second when I saw you and the children in the church, I felt trapped. I had no excuse to feel like that because I asked you to marry me. Even so, the sudden awareness that I was going to be a husband and a father to two, possibly three kids, knocked me sideways. Being free—the ability to get up and go where I like when I like and do as I like—has always been very important to me. The idea of being tied down filled me with—’
‘Yes, I get it,’ Freddie broke in tightly, ramming down her pain at that honest admission, ironically not wanting him to expand on it. ‘It’s a massive change for you and maybe you hadn’t quite thought it through when you asked me to marry you. But if you want out now, it’s not too late.’
Zac frowned in bewilderment at that statement. ‘It’s way too late. What about the adoption?’
Freddie’s spine stiffened. ‘I would rather give up the children than force you to go through with a marriage you don’t want,’ she told him starkly, because if they were both unhappy it would only make the children unhappy as well and she owed them a better future than that.
Zac went rigid, every muscle in his lean, powerful body pulling taut. ‘That’s a crazy offer to make, meu pequenino. I wouldn’t do that to you.’
‘Strictly speaking, we’re not fully and legally married yet because we haven’t shared a bed. Right now, we could still get an annulment.’
Without warning, Zac was being plunged into a much bigger crisis than he had expected and he wished he had lied about feeling trapped and had skipped the very self-indulgent drinking episode that had followed. ‘I don’t want an annulment. I don’t want to lose you or the children,’ he admitted in a driven undertone. ‘I behaved badly. You suffered for it. Now I’m thinking more clearly and there is no one else I want to marry, no one else I want to be married to... I can only face sharing those kinds of ties with you,’ he completed doggedly.
Freddie finally managed to breathe again. She had believed she had to make the offer because she didn’t see how she could keep him if he didn’t want to be with them. That would be a recipe for disaster. Now, fear and insecurity still pulling at her, she stared up at him anxiously. ‘I don’t want to make you unhappy.’
‘Freddie...in my whole life, nobody ever cared whether or not I was happy!’ Zac exclaimed in wonderment. ‘Can we go indoors now? Standing right at this spot brings back unfortunate memories of the accident I had here as a child.’
‘You came here as a child? And got hurt?’
‘Antonella bought this place almost thirty years ago. My mother and stepfather liked to entertain friends here in the summer,’ he told her flatly as they traversed the marble foyer. ‘I was three and very adventurous. I clambered down the slope and fell and cut my leg badly. Luckily...or unluckily as it later proved...there was a doctor among the friends staying and he saved my life because I had lost a lot of blood.’
Zac had turned pale, his voice roughening as he walked up the imposing staircase. ‘They rushed me to hospital, where it transpired that I have a very rare blood group. Charles’s blood group. Apparently it had been mentioned at my birth but Afonso didn’t pick up on the significance. Afonso believed I was his son and he couldn’t understand why he or Antonella couldn’t give me blood. His best friend, the doctor, explained that I couldn’t possibly be Afonso’s child and that’s the day my life fell apart as far as family goes.’
Freddie had stopped dead on the stairs to work through what he was telling her. ‘Oh, my goodness...’ she framed sickly.
‘I only remember two things about the whole experience. One was my mother having hysterics for days, the other was Afonso, the man whom I believed to be my father and whom I loved, pushing me away in disgust and calling me a “filthy half-breed”,’ he concluded heavily. ‘Of course, he was upset and furious that he had accepted me as his son.’
Freddie winced and placed a soothing hand on his arm. ‘Still no excuse for saying that to you. It wasn’t your fault.’
‘It wasn’t anyone’s fault. My mother had never admitted to my stepfather that she had had an affair with another man after he broke off their engagement. That was her little secret and she preferred to assume that I was Afonso’s child. She went to pieces when the truth came out.’
Freddie’s heart was breaking for him. She was imagining how lost and hurt he must have been at only Eloise’s age, confronted with such a massive rejection and, indeed, hatred. ‘And then what happened?’
‘My mother took me back to Brazil and put me on the horse-breeding ranch with servants to look after me. It was over a year before I saw her again. I didn’t see Afonso again until last year when he approached me with a business opportunity. I said no.’
‘And their marriage survived all that? They stayed together?’
‘Afonso enjoyed the da Rocha lifestyle but he was enraged that, as his wife’s firstborn,