into the empty auditorium.
Ben Cooper. It had been a long time since she’d even thought his name. But now she was going to see him—in just three days, in fact, when he came aboard in St. Bart’s.
A shiver of something almost like fear raced up her spine.
I’m not afraid of Ben, she assured herself. He got what was coming to him. So what if he’s still angry with me for what I did to him all those years ago? I’m still angry with him for what he did to me. So we’re even.
Problem was, none if it made a difference to the feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Ben Cooper. She just couldn’t believe it.
BEN STARED DOWN INTO the perfect, cherubic face of the baby in his arms, his lips curving into a spontaneous, utterly involuntary grin as Eva offered him a slobbery smile. She was so beautiful. Something tightened in his chest, and he fussed with her brightly colored playsuit for a few seconds as hot emotion burned at the back of his eyes.
For six months now he’d nursed this little urchin to sleep, fed her, bathed her, changed her nappies. He’d shared all the responsibilities of raising her with Danique, his ex-girlfriend, just as any decent man would when he learned one of his guys had gotten past the keeper, so to speak, and scored a goal.
He’d expected to be a dutiful father, at best. The kind of guy who handed over the right amount of child maintenance without quibbling, cooed at how cute the baby was at the appropriate moments and kept a miniature portrait in his wallet for appearances’ sake.
She’d sneaked up on him, though, this little cutie with her wide-eyed stare and her chubby limbs and her repertoire of gurgles and grunts. Perhaps it was her utter vulnerability, her absolute trust in and reliance on him. Or perhaps it was the young/old wisdom shining from her big brown eyes.
Whatever, he’d fallen hard. He’d become the talk of the small island of Anguilla, with everyone nudging one another with amusement that the last of the Caribbean playboys had fallen, taken out not by a woman but by a baby girl.
It was true. He loved her. Dearly. Fiercely. Irreversibly.
And she wasn’t his.
Danique had told him just last week when she’d come to collect Eva from her weekend visitation. His fling with Danique had been all about fun and no tomorrows, and neither of them had ever pretended it was any different. They’d remained friends, though, when the passion had died out, and it had proved a solid basis for their new partnership. Since Danique had had trouble breast-feeding, Eva had been on a bottle since three months, and they’d shared the load between them as much as possible despite the fact that they lived separately and led very different lives.
Last week, Danique had been unusually quiet as she’d gathered up Eva’s diaper bag and other baby paraphernalia, and she’d waited until she was ready to go to drop her bomb.
“Ben, there’s something you need to know. Before I was seeing you for those few weeks, I had a…thing going with Monty Blackman.” Danique’s eyes had shifted over Ben’s shoulder to focus on the wall behind him.
Ben had frowned; Monty was a well-known local businessman. He was also a very married man with a high-profile, politically astute wife.
“Eva is his,” Danique had blurted as though she couldn’t hang on to the words any longer. Tears had stood out in her pansy-brown eyes. “I’ve tried to tell you so many times, but I was scared of how you would react. You’ve been so great with her, and then there’s the money and everything else….”
Ben had shaken his head. “I’m sorry. I just—I don’t believe you.”
When he held Eva in his arms, his heart ached. How could that be if she wasn’t his?
“I had a test done—you can see the results if you like,” Danique had said. “And about the money—I’ll pay you back, I promise. Every cent.”
Ben had sworn pithily. “I don’t give a damn about the money.” He’d paced agitatedly, then stopped to frown at her. “Why now? What’s changed?” he’d asked. Then his frozen brain had swung back into motion and he’d held up a hand to forestall her answering. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. Monty’s leaving Angela.”
Danique had nodded slowly. “I love him, Ben. I’ve loved him for years and I only broke it off with him because I knew it was hopeless. What you and I had—that was about me trying to feel like a whole person again after waiting all those years for Monty to be honest about us.”
“So I was just an insurance policy?” he’d asked bitterly. “A convenient stopgap until the real guy came good?”
“It wasn’t like that,” Danique had cried.
But it had been, and they both knew it.
Now Ben smoothed a thumb across the silky curve of Eva’s cheek. She smelled of frangipanis and milk, and he didn’t know what he was going to do without her in his life. Danique had promised to let him visit, and he was first on the list of babysitters. But it wasn’t enough. It never would be.
“I think that’s everything,” Danique said as she appeared in the living room doorway, two carry bags in hand. She’d come over to collect the last of Eva’s baby debris from his home.
“Okay,” he said. He had a sudden urge to simply refuse to hand Eva back, but it passed as soon as it registered in his mind. He had no rights in this situation.
“I’ve got two shifts again next week,” Danique said. She was working at the local kindergarten as an assistant. “If you want, I can drop Eva by…”
He shook his head and took one deep lungful of sweet Eva-scented air before he handed her over.
“I’ll be away for the next week or so. Nick Pappas called. Jacques was scheduled to run a lecture series on board his new ship, and they need a replacement.”
Jacques’s restaurant was situated on St. Maarten, a twenty-minute ferry ride away from Anguilla, but despite the distance, the fact that he’d broken his leg trying to climb a coconut tree while blind drunk was common knowledge.
“So you’re filling in?” Danique said. “That’s nice of you.”
Ben shrugged. He wasn’t doing it out of kindness. Even the lesser of his two motivations wasn’t remotely kind—wanting to be as far from Danique and a smugly self-satisfied Monty as possible. In fact, he’d been on the verge of saying no to Nikolas, a good customer and a personal friend, when the captain of Alexandra’s Dream had uttered two words that had made Ben’s baser self prick up its ears.
Victoria Fournier.
Tory Fournier, as he’d known her.
Well, well.
He could just imagine her face when she learned at the last minute that she’d been paired with him for a whole cruise. It was almost delicious, if you were the kind of person who didn’t forgive and forget, even after eight long years.
He guessed he must be that kind of person. To be fair, he argued in his own favor, Tory had humiliated him in a spectacular way. He’d have to be suffering from a severe form of premature
