click through all the possible answers to the impossible one.
He watched her posture change from defensive to resolute.
‘She’s your daughter. Our daughter.’
He stared at her in silence, but a cacophony of questions was ricocheting inside his head.
Not the how or the when or the where, but the why. Of course he’d used condoms but that first time he’d been rushing. And he’d known that. So why hadn’t he checked everything was okay? Why had he allowed the heat of their encounter to blot out common sense?
But the answers to those questions would have to wait.
‘Okay…’
Shifting in her seat, she frowned. ‘“Okay”?’ she repeated. ‘Do you understand what I just said?’
‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘You’re saying I got you pregnant.’
‘You don’t seem surprised,’ she said slowly.
He shrugged. ‘These things happen.’
To his siblings and half-siblings, even to his mother. But not to him. Never to him.
Until now.
‘And you believe me?’ She seemed confused, surprised?
Tilting his head, he held her gaze. ‘Honest answer?’
He was going to ask her what she would gain by lying. But before he could open his mouth her lip curled.
‘On past performance I’m not sure I can expect that. I mean, you lied about your name. And the hotel you were staying at. And you lied about wanting to spend the day with me.’
‘I didn’t plan on lying to you,’ he said quietly.
Her mouth thinned. ‘No, I’m sure it comes very naturally to you.’
‘You’re twisting my words.’
She shook her head. ‘You mean like saying Steinn instead of Stone?’
Pressing his spine into the wall behind him, he felt a tick of anger begin to pulse beneath his skin.
‘Okay, I was wrong to lie to you—but if you care about the truth so much then why have you waited so long to tell me that I have a daughter? I mean, she must be what…?’ He did a quick mental calculation. ‘Ten, eleven months?’
‘Eleven months,’ she said stiffly. ‘And I did want to tell you. I tried looking for you when I was pregnant, and then again when she was born. But the only Ragnar Steinns I could track down weren’t you.’ She shifted in her seat again. ‘I probably would never have found you if you hadn’t been on the TV.’
He looked at her again, and despite the rush of righteousness heating his blood he could see that she was nervous, could hear the undertone of strain beneath her bravado.
But then it was a hell of a thing to do. To face a man and tell him he had a child.
His heart began to beat faster.
Years spent navigating through the maelstrom of his family’s dramas had given him a cast-iron control over his feelings, and yet for some reason he couldn’t stop her panic and defiance from getting under his skin.
But letting feelings get in the way of the facts was not going to help the situation. Nor was it going to be much use to his eleventh-month-old daughter.
Right now he needed to focus on the practical.
‘Fortunately you did find me,’ he said calmly.
‘Here.’ She was pushing something across the table towards him, but he carried on talking.
‘So I’m guessing you want to talk money?’
At that moment a group of young men and women came into the café and began noisily choosing what to drink. As the noise swelled around them Lottie thought she might have misheard.
Only she knew that she hadn’t.
Ever since arriving in London that morning she’d been questioning whether she was doing the right thing, and the thought of seeing Ragnar again had made her stomach perform an increasingly complicated gymnastics routine. Her mood had kept alternating between angry and nervous, but when he’d walked out into the street her mood had been forgotten and a spasm of almost unbearable hunger had consumed everything.
If she’d thought seeing him on TV had prepared her for meeting him again then she’d been wrong. Beneath the street lighting his beauty had been as stark and shocking as the volcanic rock of his homeland.
And he was almost unbearably like the daughter they shared. Only now it would appear that, just like her own father, Ragnar seemed to have already decided the terms of his relationship.
‘Money?’ She breathed out unsteadily. The word tasted bitter in her mouth. ‘I didn’t come here to talk to you about money. I came here to talk about our daughter.’
Her heart felt suddenly too big for her chest. Why did this keep happening? Why did men think that they could reduce her life to some random sum of money?
‘Children cost money.’ He held her gaze. ‘Clearly you’ve been supporting her alone up until now and I want to fix that. I’ll need to talk to my lawyers, but I want you to know that you don’t need to worry about that anymore.’
I’m not worrying, she wanted to scream at him. She wasn’t asking to be helped financially, or fixed. In fact she wasn’t asking for anything at all.
‘I’ve not been alone. My mother helps, and my brother Lucas lives with me. He works as a tattooist so he can choose his own hours—’
‘A tattooist?’
Glancing up, she found his clear blue eyes examining her dispassionately, as if she was some flawed algorithm. She felt slightly sick—just as she had in those early months of the pregnancy. Only that had been a welcome sickness. A proof of new life, a sign of a strong pregnancy. Now, though, the sickness was down to the disconnect between the man who had reached for her so frantically in that hotel room and this cool-eyed stranger.
She stared at him in silence.
What made this strange, unnerving distance between them a hundred times harder was that she had let herself be distracted by his resemblance to Sóley. Let herself hope that the connection between Ragnar and his daughter would be more than it had been for her and her own father—not just bones and blood, but a willingness to claim her as his own.
But the cool, dispassionate way he had turned the conversation immediately to money was proof that he’d reached the limit of his parental involvement.
She cleared her throat. ‘I know you’re a rich man, Ragnar, but I didn’t come here to beg.’ She swallowed down her regret and disappointment. ‘This was a mistake. Don’t
