horrible though the prospect was.
‘I couldn’t countenance you working here anyway,’ Raoul concurred smoothly.
‘What does this place have to do with you?’
‘As of six this evening—everything. I own it.’
Sarah’s mouth dropped open. ‘You own this?’
‘All part of my portfolio.’
It seemed to Sarah now that there was no meeting point left between them. He had truly moved into a different stratosphere. He literally owned the company whose floors she had been scrubbing less than two hours ago. In his smart business suit, with the silk tie and the gleaming hand-made shoes, he was the absolute antithesis of her, with her company uniform and her well-worn flats.
Defiantly she pulled off the headscarf—if only to diminish the image of complete servility.
Hair the colour of vanilla, soft and fine and unruly, tumbled out. He had cut his hair. She had grown hers. It tumbled nearly to her waist, and for a few seconds Raoul was dazzled at the sight of it.
She was twisting the unsightly headscarf between her fingers, and that brought him back down to earth. She had been saying something about the job—this glorious cleaning job—which she would have to abandon. Unless, of course, she carried on cleaning way past her finishing time.
He’d opened his mouth to continue their conversation, even though he had been annoyingly thrown off course by that gesture of hers, when she said, in such a low voice that he had to strain forward to hear her, ‘I tried to get in touch, you know …’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Sarah cleared her throat. ‘I tried to get in touch, but I … I couldn’t …’
Raoul stiffened. Having money had been a tremendous learning curve. It had a magnetism all of its own. People he had once known and heartily wished to forget had made contact, having glimpsed some picture of him in the financial pages of a newspaper. It would have been amusing had it not been so pathetic.
He tried to decipher what Sarah was saying now. Had she been one of those people as well? Had she turned to the financial news and spotted him, thought that she might get in touch as she was down on her luck?
‘What do you mean, you couldn’t?’ His voice was several shades cooler.
‘I had no idea how to locate you.’ Her heart was beating so hard that she felt positively sick. ‘I mean, you disappeared without a trace. I tried checking with the girl who kept all the registration forms for when we were out there, and she gave me an address, but you’d left …’
‘When did all this frantic checking take place?’
‘When I got back to England. I know you dumped me, Raoul, but … but I had to talk to you …’
So despite all her bravado when they had parted company she had still tried to track him down. It was a measure of her lack of sophistication that she had done that, and an even greater measure of it that she would now openly confess to doing so.
‘I came to London and rented a room in a house out east. You would never have found me.’
‘I even went on the internet, but you weren’t to be found. And of course I remembered you saying that you would never join any social networking sites …’
‘Quite a search. What was that in aid of? A general chat?’
‘Not exactly.’
Sarah was thinking now that if she had carried on searching just a little bit longer—another year or so—then she would have found him listed somewhere on the computer, because he would have made his fortune by then. But she had quickly given up. She had never imagined that he would have risen so far, so fast, and yet when she thought about it there had always been that stubborn, closed, ruthless streak to him. And he had been fearless. Fearless when it came to the physical stuff and fearless when it came to plans for his future.
‘I wish I had managed to get through to you. You never kept in touch with your last foster home, did you? I tried to trace you through them, but you had already dropped off their radar.’
Raoul stilled, because he had forgotten just how much she knew about him—including his miserable childhood and adolescence.
‘So you didn’t get in touch,’ he said, with a chill in his voice. ‘We could carry on discussing all the various ways you tried and failed to find me, or we could just move on. Why did you want to get in touch?’
‘You mean that I should have had more pride than to try?’
‘A lot of women would have,’ Raoul commented drily. She turned her head and the overhead light caught her hair, turning it into streaks of gold and pale toffee. ‘But I suppose you were very young. Just nineteen.’
‘And too stupid to do the sensible thing?’
‘Just … very young.’ He dragged his eyes away from the dancing highlights of her hair and frowned, sensing an edginess to her voice although her face was very calm and composed.
‘You can’t blame me if I couldn’t find you …’
Raoul was confused. What was she talking about?
‘It’s getting late, Sarah. I’ve worked through the night, hammering out this deal with lawyers. I haven’t got the time or the energy to try and decipher what you’re saying. Why would I blame you for not being able to find me?’
‘I’ll get to the point. I didn’t want to get in touch with you, Raoul. What kind of a complete loser do you imagine I am? Do you think that I would have come crawling to you for a second chance?’
‘You might have if you’d been through the mill with some other guy!’
‘There was no other guy! And why on earth would I come running to you when you had already told me that you wanted nothing more to do with me?’
‘Then why did you try and get in touch?’ He felt disproportionately pleased that there had been no other guy, but he immediately put that down to the fact that, whether they had parted on good terms or not, he wouldn’t have wanted her to be used and tossed aside by someone she had met on the rebound.
‘Because I found out that I was pregnant!’
The silence that greeted this pooled around her until Sarah began to feel dizzy.
Raoul was having trouble believing what he had just heard. In fact he was tempted to dismiss it as a trick of the imagination, or else some crazy joke—maybe an attention-seeking device to prolong their conversation.
But one look at her face told him that this was no joke.
‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, and you have to be nuts if you think I’m going to fall for it. When it comes to money, I’ve heard it all.’ Like a caged beast, he shot up and began prowling through the room, hands shoved into his pockets. ‘So we’ve met again by chance. You’re down on your luck, for whatever reason,
