The Secret Sinclair (4 page)

‘Did you get involved with some kind of loser?’ he grated. She had been soft and vulnerable and brokenhearted. Had someone come along and taken advantage of her state of mind?

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You must have been distraught to have returned from Africa ahead of schedule. I realise that you probably blame me for that, but if you had stuck it out you would forgotten me within a few weeks.’

‘Is that how it worked for you, Raoul?’

Pinned to the spot by such a direct question, Raoul refused to answer. ‘Did you get strung along by someone who promised you the earth and then did a runner when he got tired of you? Is that what happened? A degree would have been your passport, Sarah. How many times did we have conversations about this? What did he say to you to
convince you that it was a good idea to dump your aspirations?’

He didn’t know whether to stand or to sit. He felt peculiarly uncomfortable in his own skin, and those wide green eyes weren’t helping matters.

‘And why cleaning? Why not an office job somewhere?’

He looked down at his watch and realised that it was nearing midnight, but he was reluctant to end the conversation even though he queried where it was going. She was just another part of his history, a jigsaw puzzle piece that had already been slotted in place, so why prolong the catch-up game? Especially when those huge, veiled, accusing green eyes were reminding him of a past for which he had no use?

If he politely ushered her to the door he was certain that she would leave and not look back. Which was clearly a good thing.

‘You can’t trust people,’ he advised her roughly. ‘Now perhaps you’ll see my point of view when I told you that the only person you can rely on is yourself.’

‘I’ve probably lost my job here,’ Sarah intoned distractedly.

She had seen him look at his watch and she knew what that meant. Her time was coming to an end. He had moved onwards and upwards to that place where time was money. Reminiscing, for Raoul, would have very limited interest value. He was all about the future, not the past. But she had to plough on and get where she needed to get, horrible though the prospect was.

‘I couldn’t countenance you working here anyway,’ Raoul concurred smoothly.

‘What does this place have to do with you?’

‘As of six this evening—everything. I own it.’

Sarah’s mouth dropped open. ‘You own
this
?’

‘All part of my portfolio.’

It seemed to Sarah now that there was no meeting point left between them. He had truly moved into a different stratosphere. He literally owned the company whose floors she had been scrubbing less than two hours ago. In his smart business suit, with the silk tie and the gleaming hand-made shoes, he was the absolute antithesis of her, with her company uniform and her well-worn flats.

Defiantly she pulled off the headscarf—if only to diminish the image of complete servility.

Hair the colour of vanilla, soft and fine and unruly, tumbled out. He had cut his hair. She had grown hers. It tumbled nearly to her waist, and for a few seconds Raoul was dazzled at the sight of it.

She was twisting the unsightly headscarf between her fingers, and that brought him back down to earth. She had been saying something about the job—this glorious cleaning job—which she would have to abandon. Unless, of course, she carried on cleaning way past her finishing time.

He’d opened his mouth to continue their conversation, even though he had been annoyingly thrown off course by that gesture of hers, when she said, in such a low voice that he had to strain forward to hear her, ‘I tried to get in touch, you know …’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Sarah cleared her throat. ‘I tried to get in touch, but I … I couldn’t …’

Raoul stiffened. Having money had been a tremendous learning curve. It had a magnetism all of its own. People he had once known and heartily wished to forget had made contact, having glimpsed some picture of him in the financial pages of a newspaper. It would have been amusing had it not been so pathetic.

He tried to decipher what Sarah was saying now. Had she been one of those people as well? Had she turned to the financial news and spotted him, thought that she might get in touch as she was down on her luck?

‘What do you mean,
you couldn’t
?’ His voice was several shades cooler.

‘I had no idea how to locate you.’ Her heart was beating so hard that she felt positively sick. ‘I mean, you disappeared without a trace. I tried checking with the girl who kept all the registration forms for when we were out there, and she gave me an address, but you’d left …’

‘When did all this frantic checking take place?’

‘When I got back to England. I know you dumped me, Raoul, but … but I had to talk to you …’

So despite all her bravado when they had parted company she had still tried to track him down. It was a measure of her lack of sophistication that she had done that, and an even greater measure of it that she would now openly confess to doing so.

‘I came to London and rented a room in a house out east. You would never have found me.’

‘I even went on the internet, but you weren’t to be found. And of course I remembered you saying that you would never join any social networking sites …’

‘Quite a search. What was that in aid of? A general chat?’

‘Not exactly.’

Sarah was thinking now that if she had carried on searching just a little bit longer—another year or so—then she would have found him listed somewhere on the computer, because he would have made his fortune by then. But she had quickly given up. She had never imagined that he would have risen so far, so fast, and yet when she thought about it there had always been that stubborn,
closed, ruthless streak to him. And he had been fearless. Fearless when it came to the physical stuff and fearless when it came to plans for his future.

‘I wish I had managed to get through to you. You never kept in touch with your last foster home, did you? I tried to trace you through them, but you had already dropped off their radar.’

Raoul stilled, because he had forgotten just how much she knew about him—including his miserable childhood and adolescence.

‘So you didn’t get in touch,’ he said, with a chill in his voice. ‘We could carry on discussing all the various ways you tried and failed to find me, or we could just move on.
Why
did you want to get in touch?’

‘You mean that I should have had more pride than to try?’

‘A lot of women would have,’ Raoul commented drily. She turned her head and the overhead light caught her hair, turning it into streaks of gold and pale toffee. ‘But I suppose you were very young. Just nineteen.’

‘And too stupid to do the sensible thing?’

‘Just … very young.’ He dragged his eyes away from the dancing highlights of her hair and frowned, sensing an edginess to her voice although her face was very calm and composed.

‘You can’t blame me if I couldn’t find you …’

Raoul was confused. What was she talking about?

‘It’s getting late, Sarah. I’ve worked through the night, hammering out this deal with lawyers. I haven’t got the time or the energy to try and decipher what you’re saying. Why would I
blame
you for not being able to find me?’

‘I’ll get to the point. I didn’t
want
to get in touch with you, Raoul. What kind of a complete loser do you imagine
I am? Do you think that I would have come crawling to you for a second chance?’

‘You might have if you’d been through the mill with some other guy!’

‘There
was
no other guy! And why on earth would I come running to
you
when you had already told me that you wanted nothing more to do with me?’

‘Then why
did
you try and get in touch?’ He felt disproportionately pleased that there had been no other guy, but he immediately put that down to the fact that, whether they had parted on good terms or not, he wouldn’t have wanted her to be used and tossed aside by someone she had met on the rebound.

‘Because I found out that I was pregnant!’

The silence that greeted this pooled around her until Sarah began to feel dizzy.

Raoul was having trouble believing what he had just heard. In fact he was tempted to dismiss it as a trick of the imagination, or else some crazy joke—maybe an attention-seeking device to prolong their conversation.

But one look at her face told him that this was no joke.

‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, and you have to be nuts if you think I’m going to fall for it. When it comes to money, I’ve heard it all.’ Like a caged beast, he shot up and began prowling through the room, hands shoved into his pockets. ‘So we’ve met again by chance. You’re down on your luck, for whatever reason, and you see that I’ve made my fortune. Just come right out and ask for a helping hand! Do you think I’d turn you away? If you need cash, I can write a cheque for you right now.’

‘Stop it, Raoul. I’m not a gold-digger! Just listen to me! I tried to get in touch with you because I found out that I was having your baby. I knew you’d be shocked and, believe
me, I did think it over for a while, but in the end I thought that it was only fair that you knew. How could you think that I’d make something like that up to try and get money out of you? Have you ever known me to be materialistic? How could you be so insulting?’

‘I couldn’t have got you pregnant. It’s not possible! I was always careful.’

‘Not always,’ Sarah muttered.

‘Okay, so maybe you got yourself pregnant by someone else …’

‘There
was
no one else! When I left the compound I had no idea that I was pregnant. I left because … because I just couldn’t stay there any longer. I got back to England and I still intended to start university. I
wanted
to put you behind me. I didn’t find out until I was nearly five months along. My periods were erratic, and then they disappeared, but I was so … I barely noticed …’

She had been so miserable that World War III could have broken out and she probably wouldn’t have noticed the mushroom cloud outside her bedroom window. Memories of him had filled every second of every minute of her every waking hour, until she had prayed for amnesia—anything that would help her forget. Her parents had been worried sick. At any rate, her mother had been the first to suspect something when she’d begun to look a little rounder, despite the fact that her eating habits had taken a nosedive.

‘I’m not hearing this.’

‘You don’t
want
to hear this! My mum and dad were very supportive. They never once lectured, and they were there for me from the very minute that Oliver was born.’

Somehow the mention of a name made Raoul blanch. It was much harder to dismiss what she had said as the rantings of an ex-lover who wanted money from him and
was prepared to try anything to get it. The mention of a name seemed to turn the fiction she was spinning into something approaching reality, and yet still his mind refused to concede that the story being told had anything to do with him.

He’d never been one to shy away from the truth, however brutal, but the nuts and bolts of his sharp brain now seemed to be malfunctioning.

Sarah wished he would say something. Did he really believe that she was making up the whole thing? How suspicious of other people had he become over the years? The young man she had fallen in love with had been fiercely independent—but to this extent? How valuable was his wealth if he now found himself unable to trust anyone around him?

‘I … I lived in Devon with them after Oliver was born,’ she continued into the deafening silence. ‘It wasn’t ideal, but I really needed the support. Then about a year ago I decided to move to London. Oliver was older—nearly at school age. I thought I could put him into a nursery part-time. There were no real jobs to be had in our village in Devon, and I didn’t want to put Mum and Dad in a position of being permanent babysitters. Dad retired a couple of years ago, and they had always planned to travel. I thought that I would be able to get something here—maybe start thinking about getting back into education …’

‘Getting back into education? Of course. It’s never too late.’ He preferred to dwell on this practical aspect to their conversation, but there was a growing dread inside him. There had been more than one occasion when he had not taken precautions. Somehow it had been a different world out there—a world that hadn’t revolved around the usual rules and regulations.

‘But it was all harder than I thought it was going to
be.’ Sarah miserably babbled on to cover her unease. He thought she had lied to try and get money out of him. There was not even a scrap of affection left for her if he could think that. ‘I found a house to rent. It’s just a block away from a friend I used to go to school with. Emily. She babysits Oliver when I do jobs like these …’

‘You mean you’ve done nothing but mop floors and clean toilets since you moved here?’

‘I’ve earned a living!’ Sarah flared back angrily. ‘Office jobs are in demand, and it’s tough when you haven’t got qualifications or any sort of work experience. I’ve also done some waitressing and bar work, and in a month’s time I’m due to start work as a teaching assistant at the local school. Aren’t you going to ask me any questions about your son? I have a picture … In my bag downstairs …’

Raoul was slowly beginning to think the unimaginable, but he was determined to demonstrate that he was no pushover—even for her. Even for a woman who still had the ability to creep into his head when he was least expecting it.

‘I grant that you may well have had a child,’ he said heavily. ‘It’s been five years. Anything could have happened during that time. But if you insist on sticking to this story, then I have to tell you that I will want definite proof that the child is mine.’

Every time the word
child
crossed his lips, the fact of it being his seemed to take on a more definite shape. After his uncertain and unhappy past, he had always been grimly assured of one thing: no children. He had seen first-hand the lives that could be wrecked by careless parenting. He had been the victim of a woman who had had a child only to discover that it was a hindrance she could have well done without. Fatherhood was never going to be for him. Now, the possibility of it being dropped on him from a
very great height was like being hit by a freight train at full speed.