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It was a question he had asked himself repeatedly two years earlier when she had accepted his father’s pay-off to turn her back on their relationship and walk away. How had he missed out on that devious, greedy streak in her make-up? At the time he would have described her as the least mercenary woman he had ever met. Had she cunningly concealed her avaricious side from him in an effort to impress him? When they had been together she had gone to great lengths to prove that his wealth meant little to her. And if he was honest, he had been impressed because by that stage he had become bored with women who valued him for what he was worth rather than for the man he was.
Yet the woman he had valued beyond all others had proved to be the greediest of all. That was a lowering truth he hated to recall for it exposed his poor judgement when he was at the mercy of his libido. A reminder he evidently needed, he conceded darkly, acknowledging without much surprise that one look at Chrissie’s beautiful face and slender but shapely proportions could still arouse him.
Chrissie was finally wondering how on earth she could broach the subject of Jaul being a father and increasingly it was sinking in for her that it would come as an enormous shock to him. Her fingers dug into the clutch bag Lizzie had pressed on her and in a sudden movement she bent her pale head and snapped it open to withdraw the birth certificates. Those documents were self-explanatory and there was really no need at all for her to start stumbling into an awkward announcement.
Chrissie extended the certificates. ‘I’m sure you’re wondering why I came here.’ Not to kiss you and dream about ripping off your clothes again, she completed inwardly while her face burned with mortification. ‘I had to see you because I thought you should see these first...’
Another frown drawing together his fine ebony brows, Jaul grasped the documents with an unhidden air of incomprehension. She hadn’t mentioned the kiss and he was grateful for that, well aware of Chrissie’s ability to throw a three-act drama over what he viewed as trivia. Time had shot them both back briefly into the past and that was all. Nothing more need be said, he was thinking while he grasped the fact that for some peculiar reason his estranged wife had given him a pair of birth certificates.
‘What are these?’ Jaul scanned the name of the mother and went cold. ‘You have children?’
‘And so do you,’ Chrissie advised thinly. ‘You got me pregnant, Jaul.’
Jaul stilled and stopped breathing. Pregnant? The word screamed at him. It was not possible in his mind to credit it at that first moment, but now his quick and clever brain was checking dates, making calculations, recognising that whether he liked it or not it was a possibility. A possibility he didn’t want to think about though. He had children, a boy and a girl. The concept was so shattering that he literally could not think for several tense seconds. The woman he was planning to divorce was the mother of his children. Inwardly he reeled from that revelation, instantly grasping how that devastating truth would change everything. Everything!
But why was he only learning about something as incredibly important as the news that he was a father over a year after the event of their birth? Jaul was not accustomed to receiving the kind of shock that rocked his world on its axis. Momentarily he closed his eyes before opening them to stare at Chrissie...beautiful, deceptive Chrissie, who had hit him with an own goal of mammoth proportions.
‘If this is true...and I assume that it is,’ Jaul framed with the greatest difficulty he had ever had in controlling both his temper and his tone, ‘why am I only being told about the existence of my son and daughter now?’
Of all the reactions he might have had and she had envisaged while the taxi ferried her across London, that particular one had not featured. It was a Eureka moment for Chrissie and she didn’t need to leap out of a bath to be galvanised into instantaneous rage and jump to her feet. ‘Is that all you’ve got to say to me?’ she shouted at him full force.
Innumerable generations of royal ice stiffened Jaul’s spine, for no male had been more minutely trained from childhood than he had been to deal with a sudden crisis without any show of unseemly emotion or ill-judged vocal exclamations. ‘What were you expecting me to say?’ he enquired.
