for a moment before glancing back at her mother.
‘I don’t want anything from you,’ Freya stated angrily. ‘Certainly not money,’ she added, unable to hide the flare of contempt in her eyes. ‘I just want you to accept that I’m telling the truth.’
She stared into his brilliant blue eyes, that were so like Aimee’s, and gave an angry sigh. She had no intention of pursuing him through the courts for a slice of his vast fortune as her grandmother had frequently suggested. He didn’t want her and he didn’t want Aimee, and that was fine, she’d manage without him. She just wanted him to accept that she had never lied to him. ‘Why can’t you be honest with me?’ she pleaded.
Zac glanced down at her and tensed. Her thin hospital nightgown had come unfastened so that he could see the curve of one small, pale breast. To his utter disgust he felt his body’s involuntary reaction—a shaming surge of heat in his loins as desire corkscrewed in his gut.
She’d proved herself to be a faithless whore, damn it, who was still brazenly trying to pass off another man’s child as his. It was humiliating to realise the effect she still had on him. He didn’t want to want her; it dented his pride to know that he was seriously tempted to wind his hand into her hair, angle her head and plunder the softness of her moist pink lips in a kiss that would remind her of the passion they had once shared.
Instead he forced himself to move away from the bed and stared out of the window at the rain lashing against the pane. ‘What would you know of honesty, Freya?’ he demanded coldly, his facial muscles tightening so that his skin was stretched taut over his cheekbones. ‘Did you really think I wouldn’t find out about your secret assignations with that anaemic-looking street artist Simon Brooks?
‘Monaco is a small place and gossip runs rife. I am—’he shrugged his shoulders in a typically Gallic gesture ‘—well known in the principality and the speculation that I was being cuckolded by my mistress soon reached my ears. I might even have found the situation amusing,’ he drawled sardonically. ‘It was certainly a novelty. But your attempts to saddle me with another man’s child were not so funny, chérie.’
‘I swear I never slept with Simon,’ Freya said urgently. ‘The bodyguard you’d assigned to protect me made a mistake that day. But at the time—when you said all those terrible things to me—I couldn’t think straight.’ She had been so devastated by Zac’s refusal to believe that she was carrying his baby and so shocked by his accusation that she had slept with Simon that her mind had gone blank and she had simply walked out of his apartment without even trying to defend herself. ‘I’ve had a long time to think about things since then,’ she added bitterly, ‘and now I believe I know what happened.’ She paused for a moment and stared at Zac, faint hope bubbling in her chest when he remained silent. It was the first time since the fateful night two years ago that they had actually spoken properly. The first time he had listened.
‘It’s true I spent a lot of time with Simon, but he was my friend, nothing more. You were always busy working and I was lonely,’ she admitted quietly, thinking of the young English art student who had befriended her during her stay in Monaco. Simon had been touring the Mediterranean coast, scraping a living selling his paintings. Unlike Zac’s glamorous friends, he’d seemed refreshingly ordinary and down to earth, and she had enjoyed his company. ‘We weren’t lovers—he was just someone from home that I liked to talk to.’
‘And I suppose Michel was lying when he told me he’d seen you and Brooks leave the beach arm in arm to return to his camper van?’ Zac drawled. ‘Sacré bleu! I paid Michel to protect you, but when he saw your distinctive pink jacket hanging on the van door and glimpsed you and your floppy-haired artist rolling around inside, he didn’t know what to do. He certainly didn’t want to be seen as a voyeur,’ he added, his lip curling in distaste. ‘My wealth brings with it a very real threat of kidnap and Michel knew that, as my mistress, you were vulnerable. He didn’t want to leave you without protection, but neither did he want to hang around watching your sexual gymnastics with Brooks. In the end he phoned me to ask my advice—while I was hurrying back from a business trip to take you out to dinner,’ Zac finished grimly.
‘Your announcement as soon as I walked through the door that you were pregnant was ill-timed to say the least, chérie,’ he continued when it was evident that she was beyond words. ‘I’d just learned from a man I trusted implicitly that you and Brooks were lovers, and I was certain that I wasn’t the child’s father. It wasn’t difficult to work out that you were pregnant by your penniless artist and hoping to pass the baby off as mine.’
The cold fury in his eyes caused Freya to shiver but this was possibly the only chance she would ever have to defend herself and make Zac see that he was wrong about her. ‘Michel didn’t see me,’ she insisted desperately. ‘He just thought he did. I’d gone to the beach to meet Simon and a group of his friends, including his girlfriend. Kirsten was feeling cold and I lent her my jacket before I walked into the town. She has blonde hair like mine and Michel must have mistaken her for me…’ She stumbled to a halt, her heart sinking at the mockery in Zac’s eyes. ‘I didn’t go to Simon’s van that day and I was never unfaithful to you, Zac,’ she insisted. ‘You have to believe me.’
He stared at her in silence for a few moments and then laughed unpleasantly. ‘You’ve had two years to think of a story. Is that really the best you can do, chérie?’ He paced the room like a caged tiger, his pent up aggression almost tangible. ‘Non!’ he stated fiercely, slicing his hand through the air to emphasise his anger. ‘I refuse to be manipulated by you. I want a paternity test and once I’ve proved conclusively that you are a liar, I never want to see you or hear from you again. Do you understand?’
‘How can you be so sure that I’m lying?’ Freya whispered numbly. Clearly Zac’s opinion of her couldn’t sink any lower and she was shocked by how much it hurt. The contempt in his tone made her want to shrivel but pride brought her head up. The silence between them vibrated with a tension that shredded her nerves and she visibly flinched when he swung round and stared at her.
His expression filled her with a curious sense of foreboding and she felt her stomach churn. She could not tear her gaze from the sculpted beauty of his face but his eyes were hard and cold and, despite the stifling warmth of the hospital ward, she shivered.
Zac paused and then said unemotionally, ‘Because I had a vasectomy—years before we met. The truth is, chérie, that it’s medically impossible for Aimee to be my daughter.’
ZAC watched the shock and confusion on Freya’s face with clinical detachment before he glanced at Aimee. The little girl stared up at him solemnly, her pretty little face surrounded by her mass of curls and her pink cheeks glowing with health. She was not a Deverell, thank God, he thought with quiet certainty. This child would not suffer the way his twin sisters had suffered—victims of the devastating illness that had taken their lives before they were a year old.
He had been a teenager when his mother had given birth to twins. The babies had appeared normal but within a few months both had died from an incurable genetic disorder and after their deaths doctors had warned his parents there was a fifty-per-cent chance that he had also been affected. He had escaped the illness but there was no test available to show if he carried the gene.
The trauma of watching his sisters die and witnessing his parents’ grief had never faded. As an adult he had made the decision that he could not risk the slightest chance of passing on the gene to his own children and had taken the necessary steps to ensure that he would never be a father. The faint regret he’d felt at the time had soon faded and he had moved on, determined to enjoy his life
