Flora's Defiance (8 page)

It was late afternoon by the time they arrived at Dr Natalie Ellwood’s smart private surgery in an upmarket part of central London. Flora sat edgily in the waiting
room while Angelo continued to do business, just as he had during the journey. If someone had warned her that there was about to be a flood she would have left him to drown with his mobile phone still clutched in his hand. She had met some obsessively hard workers in her time, but Angelo van Zaal was in a class of his own. Mariska’s would-be adoptive father was an unashamed workaholic.

‘Angelo!’ An elegant brunette in a beautifully cut trouser suit emerged wreathed in smiles and swam up to Angelo to kiss him effusively on both cheeks.

‘Flora. This is Dr Ellwood. Natalie, your new patient,’ Angelo drawled smoothly.

‘Have you known Angelo for long? ‘ Natalie asked Flora as she showed her into her surgery.

‘No, not for long. You?’ Flora could not resist asking, although she had noticed that the brunette wore a wedding ring.

‘Oh, for ever. We went to university together. He’s one of my oldest friends,’ Natalie carolled with enthusiasm, her brown eyes resting on Flora with a bright questioning curiosity that she couldn’t hide.

During the period that followed, Flora was examined and subjected to several tests. Natalie and her nurse were very pleasant. Finally, Flora sat down to face the doctor across her desk. ‘Well?’ she pressed nervously.

‘Yes, I can confirm that you are pregnant.’

Flora lost colour. ‘Are you absolutely certain?’

‘Yes, I am. Is this an unintentional conception?’ the brunette doctor asked delicately.

Flora was too much in shock to do anything other than nod like a rather vacant puppet.
Pregnant!
And
by Angelo van Zaal! Dry-mouthed and on wobbly legs, she indicated that she did not wish to discuss the matter further and she returned to the waiting area where Angelo was engaged on yet another phone call, this time in French. Snatches of dialogue about defective materials and an inefficient supplier buzzed in and out of her head while her dazed green gaze sought out his. She encountered brilliant blue eyes of cool enquiry and stared at him with some of the shocked disbelief she was experiencing. She registered the exact moment that he realised what news she had just received because he said something curiously indistinct for a change and, lowering his phone and ending the call, he sprang restively upright.

Every time they met she forgot how tall Angelo was until he stood beside her and she was forced to look up at him, a necessity that rarely came her way, particularly not when she was sporting high heels. For a split second her mind wandered and she recalled how Peter, who had been the same height as her, had hated her to wear heels and stand taller than him.

‘You’re so tall for a woman,’ his mother had once remarked with a raised brow, as if a woman being so tall was somehow in the poorest possible taste.

But then so many men preferred their women to be petite and delicate in stature, Flora reflected helplessly, thinking of how popular her sister, Julie, and her friend, Jemima, had invariably been with men. Being little was generally seen as cute and appealing. Being tall was somehow viewed as being less feminine and desirable.

‘Let’s go,’ Angelo urged, his hand curving to Flora’s
rigid spine. His beautiful sapphire-blue eyes had a stunned quality before he lowered his ridiculously lush black lashes to conceal his expression.

‘So you’re not quite as lucky as you think you are and, apparently, neither of us is infertile,’ Flora remarked drolly on the way out onto the street.

‘We’ll discuss this in private,’ Angelo pronounced crushingly.

‘It’s all right to be shocked,’ Flora told him helplessly. ‘I’m shocked as well.’

But unlike Flora, Angelo wasn’t used to being shocked or put into a situation in which he was not in control of events. Suddenly, he appreciated, his life was yoked to Flora Bennett’s whether he liked it or not. That was, assuming she planned to
have
his child. He swallowed back his questions and chose silence while he marshalled his thoughts.

In a world of her own, Flora sat in the limousine, struggling to adjust to the startling concept that in nine months’ time she would become a mother. Her brain reminded her that there were other options that ranged from adoption to termination. The prospect of having to make either tough choice filled Flora with instinctive recoil. Eighteen months earlier, her sister had refused to consider any option other than giving birth to and keeping her child. But then Julie had been in love with Willem and he had been very much involved in that decision.

Yet Flora even now felt able to reflect that her own baby was already a part of her and, like little Mariska, would be her only other relative and the promising start
to a new family circle. The very word ‘family’ warmed the chill of shock that still held Flora taut.

All right, admittedly, the baby wasn’t planned, but life was all about rolling with the punches, wasn’t it? And just as she was prepared to reorganise her life to become Mariska’s mother she could hardly consider doing less when it came to her own child’s future. She had money in the bank, a comfortable home and a viable business. Those acknowledgements gradually sent greater calm spilling through Flora, a calm that soothed her ragged nerves and fears while she reasoned that she could have found herself pregnant in a much worse situation.

Essentially it didn’t matter how Angelo felt about her being pregnant with his child, she ruminated, and having recognised that truth it was as though a heavy weight fell from her shoulders. She sat a little straighter in her seat and felt a good deal less awkward. She was convinced that she didn’t need Angelo for support and that belief acted like a shot of reassurance in her veins, for not needing a man for
anything
was a cause that lay very close to Flora’s securely guarded heart.

‘W
HERE
are we?’ Flora asked in dismay, lashes fluttering in bemusement as she appreciated that—unbelievably—she had actually followed Angelo blindly out of his limo into a building and, from there, into a lift.

‘On the way up to my apartment. We have to talk,’ Angelo informed her, his wide sensual mouth set in a deadly serious line.

At that point, Flora discovered that she had a deeply inappropriate desire to giggle. Angelo was poker-faced, the smooth, darkly handsome planes of his lean visage taut with self-discipline. He was determined not to put any real emotion on show, she realised with regret. Yet he was pure volatile male below that cool, calculated front that he showed to the world, she reasoned ruefully. She could not resist recalling the shockingly hot and explosive surge of the passion he had unleashed in Amsterdam. Heat slowly crept up from low in her tummy to the responsive peaks of her breasts, stiffening her nipples into tight dagger points below her clothing.

‘Don’t look at me like that,
enamorada mia,’
Angelo purred, his rich drawl low and rough-edged in pitch
while he surveyed her with his amazing royal-blue eyes, the dark pupils as dilated as no doubt her own were.

Suddenly the atmosphere was thick as wet cement and the breath rattled in her throat. ‘What does
enamor
—whatever—mean?’

‘My lover,’ Angelo supplied huskily.

‘No, I’m not, not really,’ she reasoned jerkily, fighting the compulsive pull of his charismatic masculinity with all her might, for every skin cell and nerve-ending she possessed was urging her to walk right into his arms.

His stunning eyes, accentuated by the ebony luxuriance of his lashes, narrowed to become even more devouring and magnetic. ‘Then, what are you?’

Denying her vulnerability, Flora deliberately dropped her attention to study the floor at their feet. ‘A mistake?’

‘That is not how this feels,’ Angelo growled, reaching out a hand to close long brown fingers round her wrist and tug her closer. But he knew he was lying, because that same word was flashing on and off like a warning neon sign at the back of his brain. Yet, as his attention slid from the pouting cherry-tinted invitation of her luscious mouth to the telling indentation of her prominent nipples below her top he had never been further from intellectual control; he was hard and erect and hungry for the tight sheath of her body and that was all that mattered to him.

As Angelo drew her to him dismay sent Flora’s lashes skyward, green eyes flaring bright as jewels as she looked up at his bronzed sculpted features, scanning the slash of his high cheekbones, the jut of his arrogant masculine nose and his obstinate jaw line. This late in
the day his golden-toned skin was steadily darkening with a shadow of stubble that simply highlighted his beautifully shaped mouth. Colliding with his startlingly blue eyes, she was utterly transfixed: he truly was gorgeous.

‘Mistake,’ she told him again unevenly. ‘We’re a mistake—’

Her voice died beneath the passionate onslaught of his sensual lips plunging down on hers and it was as if cautionary buzzers went off throughout her taut, quivering body. She craved him like a woman starved of oxygen, stretching up to kiss him back with fervour, needing and revelling in that heady taste of him with every fibre of her being.

She heard the whirr as the doors opened and he backed her out of the lift without breaking their connection. She stumbled in her heels until her spine was braced against a solid wall and she felt his hands splay to her hips, tilting her pelvis into provocative collision with the urgent thrust of his erection. A split second later, she was free again and reeling dizzily back against the wall for support with her body still greedily humming while she struggled to rescue her wits.

A mere step away, expelling his breath in an audible roughened hiss, Angelo thrust wide the door of his apartment for her entry. It was an effort for him to be that controlled. In fact it was a wonder that he wasn’t still trying to take Flora out on the landing, he acknowledged with derision, resenting and distrusting her sexual power over him. She roused the hot-headed all-consuming sexuality he had believed he had left behind him. With Flora sex was elemental and as fierce and basic in its energy as a
hurricane. Still hugely aroused, he was fighting a driving instinct to haul her back into his arms and carry her off to his bed. As a cascade of erotic imagery engulfed the imagination he had not known he had he almost groaned out loud in frustration. She was pregnant, she was carrying his child, he reminded himself doggedly. Rampant sex would only cloud that serious issue and add to the complexities of their dealings.

Flora could not look at Angelo as she preceded him into a very large modern reception room with a polished floor, sleek contemporary furniture and a wall of full height windows that offered breathtaking views of the river Thames. A deep inner trembling was still afflicting her and she was uncomfortably aware of the damp ache between her thighs and the stinging tightness of her nipples. When he touched her he turned her inside out and she hated it, for her earlier sense of keeping herself together was now entirely destroyed.

Angelo focused on her slender, graceful figure, noticing how the silky strands of her copper hair shone in the sunshine. Renewed desire pierced his tough hide like the point of a dagger sliding between his ribs. ‘Obviously you’ll come back to Amsterdam with me,’ he heard himself say before he even knew he was going to say it, which was for him a most unnerving experience.

Wide-eyed, Flora spun back to look at his lean strong face, which, at every viewing, wreaked such havoc with her thoughts. ‘Why on earth would I do that?’

‘Primarily because you’ll need my support now that you’re pregnant.’

‘I don’t see why—I’m pregnant and healthy, not
suffering from some dreadful disease,’ Flora pointed out tartly.

Angelo rested piercing blue eyes on her. ‘Are you planning to have this baby? Or is it too soon for me to ask you that question? ‘

Flora had frozen, her facial muscles pulling tight as she wondered if he was harbouring hopes that she might ultimately choose not to go through with the pregnancy. She lifted her chin. ‘I already know what I want to do and I intend to have my baby,’ she told him squarely.

Just as quickly Angelo was marvelling that he had ever cherished the smallest doubt on that score. Having a baby with a rich father was a lucrative passport to a more comfortable lifestyle for a scheming woman. And from the instant he had read Flora’s history in that private detective’s report two years earlier he had known how ambitious and grasping she really was. But he had chosen to take a risk without contraception and he could only blame himself for giving her the opportunity to hold him to ransom with a child for at least the next two decades.

His handsome mouth forming a cynical line, he said flatly, ‘Naturally, I will support you in that decision in every way possible. But it would be easier for me to follow through on that promise if you moved to Amsterdam.’

‘I don’t need your support,’ Flora proclaimed with pride.

‘You’re not thinking of the wider issues at stake here,’ Angelo told her coolly. ‘Mariska is in Amsterdam as well.’

Flora stilled, because in the first fine flush of
discovering that she was pregnant she had indeed overlooked that connection and all its possibilities. ‘You mean … we could share her care between us?’

‘What other course would make sense now that you’re also carrying my baby?’ Angelo murmured drily. ‘We could raise both children together.’

‘Are you suggesting that we live together as well? ‘ Flora pressed uncomfortably, colour flaring over her cheekbones as she had not grasped that more intimate aspect of his suggestion when he first mentioned the idea of her moving to the city where he lived.

‘It would be the easiest solution,’ Angelo pointed out with a profound lack of emotion that struck her as very nearly an insult. ‘And the simplest solution is usually the best.’

In similar circumstances, Willem had once asked Julie to marry him. No, Flora had not expected Angelo to bite down on that sacrificial bullet, but the prospect of living under his roof and being forced to depend on him for all her needs filled her with consternation. In such a set-up she would lose her independence and become horribly reliant on her relationship with him working out. But if, in return, she would gain the much-desired right to be Mariska’s mother … ?