older man frowned down at the photograph of Polly Johnson. ‘What age is she?’
Digby’s frown remained. ‘She was the only suitable candidate? ’
Raul tautened.
Digby looked shaken.
‘Everything that the psychologist saw in Polly I wanted in the mother of my child,’ Raul stressed without a shade of regret.
‘Wondering is a pointless exercise now that she is pregnant with my child,’ Raul countered very drily. ‘But I will find her soon. Her background was exhaustively investigated. I now know that, just two months ago, she was at her godmother’s home in Surrey. I don’t yet know where she went from there. But before I do find her I need to know what my rights are in this country.’
Digby was in no hurry to break bad news before he had all the facts. British law frowned on surrogacy. If the mother wanted to keep the baby instead of handing it over, no contract was likely to persuade a British judge that taking that child from its mother was in the child’s best interests.
‘Tell me the rest of the story,’ he advised.
While running through the bare facts for the older man’s benefit, Raul stared unseeingly out of the window, grimly recalling his first sight of Polly Johnson through a two-way mirror in the New York legal office. She had reminded him of a tiny porcelain doll. Fragile, unusual and astonishingly pretty.
She had been brave and honest. And so impressively nice—not something Raul had ever sought in a woman before, but a trait he had found very appealing when he had considered all the positive qualities a mother might hand down to her child. Certainly Polly had been younger and less worldly wise than was desirable, but he had recognised her quiet inner strength as well as her essentially tranquil nature.
And the more Raul had watched Polly, the more he had learnt about Polly, the more he had wanted to meet Polly face to face, in the flesh, so that some day in the future he could comfortably answer his child’s curious questions about her. But his New York lawyer had said absolutely not. Strict anonymity would be his only defence against any form of harassment in later years. But Raul had always been a ruthless rule-breaker, with immense faith in his own natural instincts, nor had he ever hesitated to satisfy his own wishes...
And acting on that essential arrogance, he conceded grudgingly now, was how everything had begun to fall apart. Worst of all, he who prided himself on his intelligence and his shrewd perceptive powers had somehow failed to notice the warning signs of trouble on the horizon.
‘So once you knew that the girl had successfully conceived, you installed her in a house in Vermont with a trusted family servant to look after her,’ Digby recapped, because Raul had fallen silent again. ‘Where was her mother while all this was going on?’
‘As soon as Polly signed the contract her mother went into a convalescent home to build up her strength for surgery. She was very ill. The woman knew nothing about the surrogacy agreement. When Polly was only a couple of weeks pregnant, her mother had the operation. Polly had been warned that her mother’s chances of survival were at best only even. She died two days after surgery,’ Raul revealed heavily.
Raul slung him a fulminating glance of scorn. Unfortunate? Polly had been devastated. And Raul had been uneasily conscious that her sole reason for becoming a surrogate had died that same day. Aware from the frustratingly brief reports made by the maid, Soledad, that Polly was deeply depressed, Raul had reached the point where he could no longer bear to stay at a supposedly sensible distance from the woman carrying his baby.
Understandably he had been concerned that she might miscarry. He had sincerely believed that it was his responsibility to offer her support. Isolated in a country that wasn’t her own, only twenty-one-years old, pregnant with a stranger’s baby and plunged deep into a grieving process that her optimistic outlook had not prepared her to face, the mother of his child had really needed a sympathetic shoulder.
Unseen, Digby winced. Raul should have avoided any form of personal involvement. But then Raul Zaforteza was a disturbingly complex man. He was a merciless business opponent and a very dangerous enemy. More than one woman had come to grief on the rocks of his innate emotional detachment. But Raul was also a renowned philanthropist, the most genuine of friends to a chosen few and a male still capable of powerful emotional responses.
Raul compressed his firm lips.
‘And nothing!’ As he swung round from the window, Raul’s hard, dark eyes were sardonic in their comprehension.
Digby restrained himself from pointing out that since Raul was an only child he could only have the vaguest notion of how one treated a little sister. And Digby had three daughters, every one of whom swooned at the mere mention of Raul’s name. Indeed, the last time he had taken Raul home for dinner it had been a downright embarrassing experience, with all three daughters dressed to kill and competing for Raul’s attention. Even his wife said that Raul Zaforteza might well have been packaged by the devil specifically to tempt the female sex.
He pictured a lonely young woman who might only have faced up to what surrogacy really meant in the aftermath of her mother’s death. When that nice, naive young woman had suddenly found herself entertaining a member of the international jet set as self-assured, sophisticated and charismatic as Raul, what effect had it had on her?
‘When
