loved after a brief, unsuccessful attempt to combine motherhood with a demanding career and moved into the cottage she’d inherited from her grandmother.
Now she was saying she wasn’t Ben’s mother! She wasn’t anyone’s mother!
It was a good ten minutes before Tess was capable of continuing their discussion. Looking at her stubborn, closed-in expression as she sat with primly folded arms in the old rocking-chair, Rafe could see that talking to him was the last thing she wanted to do.
‘Why?’
‘Morgan and Edward were out of the country, some jungle or other,’ Tess recalled dully, speaking of her elder sister and brother-in-law who were both brilliant, but unworldly palaeontologists of international renown. They might be the first people everybody thought of consulting when a prehistoric skull was unearthed, but when it came to a pregnant daughter they wouldn’t have been high on anybody’s list.
‘Besides which they would have been worse than useless even if they had been around.’
Tess chose to ignore this accurate summing-up. ‘Chloe was five months gone before she realised and absolutely distraught when she was told it was too late to…’ Tess paused and looked self-consciously uncomfortable.
‘She wanted to be rid of it.’ Rafe shrugged. ‘That figures. She always was a selfish, spoilt brat.’
Honesty prevented Tess disputing this cruel assessment. Her elder sister and her husband always had either indulged or ignored their only child, and the product of this upbringing had turned into a stunningly beautiful but extremely self-absorbed young woman.
‘A scared spoilt brat back then,’ Tess snapped sharply.
‘She didn’t want anyone to know about it; she made me promise. So I took her away.’
‘Isn’t that a bit…I don’t know, Victorian melodrama…?’
‘You’ve not the faintest idea of how weird she was acting.’ Tess had been genuinely worried that Chloe might have done something drastic. ‘I thought a change of scene, away from people that knew her, might help. I imagined,’ she recalled, ‘that after the birth she’d…’
‘Be overcome by maternal instincts.’ Rafe gave a scornful snort.
‘People are,’ Tess retorted indignantly.
‘A classic case of optimism overcoming what’s right under your nose. Chloe was never going to give up partying to stay at home and baby-sit. I can’t believe you were that stupid.’
‘Why?’ she asked, roused to anger by his superior, condescending attitude. It was easy for him to condemn—he hadn’t been there; he couldn’t possibly understand what it had been like. ‘You don’t usually have any problem believing I’m an idiot!’ She shook her head miserably.
‘I don’t know why I’m even telling you all this. It won’t make any difference. The fact is, Chloe is his mother and if she wants him there’s nothing, short of skipping the country, that I can do about it! I wish now I’d adopted him legally myself when she suggested it,’ she ended on a bleak note of self-condemnation.
‘Don’t worry,’ she added, slanting him a small, bitter smile. ‘I haven’t got the cash to skip the country.’
That was another thing that had been nagging away at him. Tess had lived a starkly simple life since she’d moved here, she owned this place outright, had no debts that he was aware of, and she must have made a tidy pile during her brief but successful career. Yet this place needed a lick of paint. In fact it needed a lot of things—not big things, but…And when had she stopped running a car? He couldn’t remember; it hadn’t seemed important at the time. But covering the primaries in the States had been? In light of Tess’s distress there was a big question mark hanging over his priorities.
‘I could lend it to you.’
Just as well he didn’t know how tempting she found his offer, even though she knew it was meant as a joke. “‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be,”’ she quoted sadly.
‘I can’t believe you’ve fooled everyone all this time.’ Rafe was looking at her as though he were seeing her for the first time. It had taken him long enough to get his head around the idea that she was a mother—now he’d have to unlearn something that had been surprisingly hard for him to accept in the first place.
‘It wasn’t intentional, it just sort of happened,’ she replied, knowing her explanation sounded lame.
‘You didn’t just sort of happen to give up a great job you loved. You didn’t just sort of happen to spend over a year of your life bringing up someone else’s child.’
‘I forgot that sometimes,’ she admitted. ‘That he wasn’t really mine,’ she explained self-consciously. ‘And I know what I did must seem a bit surreal to you now, but it was never meant to be a permanent solution. Chloe didn’t want Ben, she wanted to give him up, have him adopted. It seemed so awfully final. You hear about women who have given up their babies suffering, never coming to terms with the regret.
‘I didn’t want that to be Chloe ten years down the line. I thought it was only a matter of time before she realised, and then I suppose as time went on I lost sight of the fact I was just a stopgap.’ With a choked sound she buried her face in her shaking hands. ‘I was right, wasn’t I? She has realised that she wants him. Only it’s been so long I…’
‘God, Tess!’ Rafe thundered, banging his fist angrily down on a blameless bureau. A dozen images he didn’t even know he’d retained of Tess with the baby drifted through his mind—she loved that kid and he loved her. Mother or no mother, they should be together. ‘She can’t just take him away from you!’
Tess’s lips, almost bloodless in her pale face, quivered. The eyes that met his were tragic. ‘Yes, Rafe, yes, she can.’
‘Don’t give me all that martyr stuff, Tess. You don’t actually believe it’s in Ben’s best interests to live with Chloe, do you?’ he grated incredulously. ‘You know Chloe—the novelty will wear off within a couple of months and where will that leave Ben?’ he intoned heavily as her eyes slid miserably away from his. ‘So stop crying and decide how you’re going to stop her.’
The callous implication that she was behaving like a wimp really stung. ‘What do you think I’ve been doing? Whichever way you look at it, Chloe is his mother!’ she reminded him shrilly. ‘I’m just a distant relation.’
‘You’re the only mother Ben has ever known.’
Tess choked back a sob and turned her ashen face away from him. ‘I’ve been so selfish keeping him. I should have encouraged Chloe to take an active part in…’ The horror in her voice deepened as she wailed. ‘He won’t know what’s happening…God, what have I done…?’
Rafe dropped down on his knees beside her chair and took her chin firmly in his hand. ‘You loved him,’ he rebuked her quietly. ‘There’s one person you haven’t mentioned…’
Tess looked at him blankly.
‘What about the father?’
Tess’s slender back stiffened defensively. ‘What about him?’
‘Doesn’t
