‘You did not appear to have forgotten me when I kissed you just now,’ he said sardonically.
She felt heat bloom on her face and silently cursed her fair skin that blushed so easily.
Cortez swung his gaze to the bureau where she kept Harry’s birth certificate. He picked up the two passports that were lying in the drawer and studied them. ‘Were you planning to take Harry abroad as you have a passport for him?’
‘I’ve been invited to my friend’s wedding in Rhodes and I had to apply for a passport for Harry so that I can take him abroad.’ She frowned. ‘When I met you at my birthday party I assumed you were one of Virginia’s friends.’
He slipped both passports into his pocket. ‘We’ll take these to London with us. The DNA clinic might need to see them for identity verification. Do you know your brother’s whereabouts?’
Elin had been about to demand that he give her the passports, but she was distracted by his question.
‘Jarek should have returned to Saunderson’s Bank in Japan,’ Cortez continued. ‘But I have been informed by the bank’s manager that he failed to turn up for work.’
‘I’m sure there’s a good reason,’ she said quickly. ‘Perhaps his flight from England was delayed.’ Elin silently acknowledged a more likely explanation was that Jarek had been on a drinking binge and was holed up in his London apartment in one of his black moods. But she was certainly not going to tell Cortez of her suspicion. However, it was vital that she went to London to try and talk some sense into her brother before he was sacked from his job.
‘I suppose it makes sense to have the DNA test as soon as possible,’ she said. ‘I can be ready to leave in an hour.’
Cortez gave her a speculative look but fortunately he did not ask why she had suddenly changed her mind. ‘Make it half an hour,’ was all he said as he walked over to the door.
Truly he was the most self-centred man she’d ever met. She was tempted to wipe that smug look from his face before she remembered his threat last night when she had been goaded beyond endurance and had tried to slap him. To her eternal shame, an image came into her mind of being held across his knee while he administered a spanking, and the warmth that flared on her face was almost as hot as the molten sensation pooling between her legs.
Elin was shocked by the intensity of her sexual arousal. It had taken her body many weeks to recover from giving birth, and the effort of looking after a baby, the night feeds, lack of sleep and a fog of hormones clouding her brain meant that sex simply had not been on her radar. But one look at Cortez and it was all she could think about. She realised he was giving her an odd look and prayed he could not read her mind.
‘You’ve obviously never had anything to do with babies,’ she muttered. ‘Taking a small child anywhere with all the paraphernalia they need is like a military operation.’
His dark eyes bored into her. ‘I haven’t witnessed you taking care of your son on either of my visits to Cuckmere Hall. Maybe you find motherhood boring compared to your exciting social life. It seems to me that you leave Harry with his nanny most of the time.’
* * *
Forty-five minutes later, Elin was still seething over Cortez’s comments when he drove them to London in his car. During the journey she maintained a frosty silence and he seemed preoccupied with his own thoughts. The nanny, who was sitting in the back of the car next to Harry in his baby seat, made a couple of attempts at conversation but soon gave up.
Elin had asked Barbara to accompany them to London, thinking she might need the nanny to look after Harry while she searched for her brother in the bars near to his home in Notting Hill, where he was a regular customer. She was relieved when she received a text message from Jarek saying he was on a flight to Japan. It was one thing less to worry about. She suggested that Barbara might like to take the afternoon off to visit her daughter who lived in Greenwich. Cortez pulled over outside a Tube station to drop Barbara off, before driving on to the private clinic in central London.
It did not take long for the samples to be collected which would be analysed for the DNA test, and afterwards they drove to the townhouse in Kensington. Cortez had decreed that they would stay in London overnight while they waited for the result of the paternity test.
Walking into the house, Elin was swamped by memories of when she had slept with Cortez on her birthday a year ago. She was agonisingly aware of him as he carried Harry in his baby seat from the car. Her lips felt tender from where he had kissed her earlier, and when she flicked her tongue over them she could still taste him.
She was glad when he opened his laptop and told her that he intended to get on with some work. Her head was pounding, and although Harry was usually a placid baby he was fretful all afternoon and she couldn’t settle him. As she paced up and down the nursery with the inconsolable baby in her arms she decided that she must be a bad mother, as Cortez had implied.
‘Why does he keep crying?’ Cortez asked when he walked into the kitchen and found her struggling to make up a bottle of baby formula with one hand while she jiggled Harry on her hip. ‘Could he be ill?’
‘He’s just a bit colicky. Babies cry because it’s their only way of communicating,’ she said shortly. She felt her tension ratchet up another notch as she tried to feed Harry and he refused to take the teat into his mouth.
‘You don’t feed him from your breast?’ Cortez commented.
‘I wasn’t able to.’ It was another failure that weighed on her conscience but she was in no mood to explain that she had been fighting for her life immediately after Harry’s birth. Although she had tried to breastfeed him when she’d come out of Intensive Care, her body hadn’t produced enough milk.
‘I didn’t realise you were an expert in childcare,’ she said to Cortez sarcastically. ‘It’s a pity you weren’t around when Harry was born and you could have helped to look after him.’
To her relief Harry finally stopped crying and took his feed. When he finished his bottle she carried him up to the nursery and placed him in his cot. Her headache was worse and she had developed a severe pain in her lower back as well as a high temperature. A phone call to her GP in Sussex confirmed her suspicion that she had all the symptoms of another kidney infection, and she was advised to start the course of antibiotics which she’d been prescribed to treat a recurring infection.
Thankfully, she had brought the antibiotics with her. She swallowed one of the pills and a strong painkiller before she called the nanny’s mobile number and explained that she was feeling unwell.
‘Do what the doctor said and start the course of antibiotics immediately,’ Barbara instructed. ‘I’ll leave my daughter’s right away and I should be in Kensington by the time Harry wakes up from his afternoon nap.’
Elin was shivering, but when she glanced in the mirror she saw that her face was flushed and her hair was damp with sweat. Hopefully, the high-strength medication would halt the infection before it got too bad, she thought, as she climbed into bed fully dressed and burrowed beneath the duvet in an attempt to get warm. When she’d suffered previous kidney infections the antibiotics had made her feel as unwell as the illness.
She fell into a fitful, feverish sleep. One minute she was hot and the next freezing cold and, as she tossed and turned, her mind was taken over by terrifying hallucinations. Distantly she was aware of Harry crying, and she knew she
