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
