The Heir From Nowhere Read Free Page A

with the shifting crowd milling around the water’s edge, it was impossible to pick out individuals. What if he hadn’t waited? What if he’d given up and left?
    Then, as she drew closer, she saw a couple sitting at a table holding hands, their heads bowed, the mood intense. She hesitated, her heart thudding hard in her chest. Could they be them? Could this be the parents of the child growing inside her?
    Even as she watched, she saw the woman swipe tears from the corners of her eyes. Angie felt those tears like a tug against her womb. Surely it must be them? This was the right place and she was late. Was that why she was crying—because she feared Angie wasn’t going to show?
    Yet still she wavered, unwilling to intrude on this private moment. She looked around, shifting from one foot to the other, searching for any other more likely looking couple. There was a party of Japanese studentslining the edge of the boardwalk, and an Italian family seated at a nearby table enjoying gelati and then there was a man in a white shirt with his jacket slung over his shoulder standing with his back to her.
    Her eyes almost skated over him.
    Almost.
    All too soon they skated back. He stood tall and dark and somehow compelling, even from this angle, and when he turned his head to talk to the slim woman Angie had missed standing beside him, his profile only added to his appeal. A strong nose and jaw, and a dark slash of brows atop eyes that seemed focused on the woman beside him.
    Another couple, she surmised, and way too unlikely. The woman looked cool and collected and nowhere near anxious enough to be meeting the woman inadvertently carrying her child, while surely he was too perfect, too virile-looking. For even while she knew fertility had nothing to do with looks, somehow the prospect that this man needed help seemed too far-fetched. Her eyes slipped away. And then she heard a cry of anguish and turned in time to see the woman on the bench jump up, the man reaching for her hand to stop her.
    Guilt consumed her. She shouldn’t have been so late. She should never have hesitated and added to her distress. She dragged in air, desperate to find a way through the sudden tangle her nerves had become, forcing herself to take the few tentative steps towards the couple.
    ‘Over there. Could that be them?’
    Dominic’s eyes followed in the direction Simone indicated, settling on a couple sitting at a table not far away. He sucked in air. Could this be the woman who’d called? Was the man sitting alongside her husband? They wereclearly not tourists, not the way they were dressed, and the woman’s expression, her tightly drawn features and reddened eyes signalled that something was definitely not right between them.
    Could it be because she was carrying someone else’s child? Carrying his?
    Breath whooshed from his lungs as every organ inside him contracted. Was the child Carla had so desperately and futilely wanted somehow growing inside this woman instead?
    He studied the couple while he willed his breathing back to normal, studying them between the holidaymakers and honeymooners and strollers tied with balloons. The woman was blonde and slim, not unattractive under her sad eyes. The man was older, he noticed, whereas she looked around thirty-five—the age, he guessed, where she might be starting to panic about never having children. Had the child she’d longed for turned out to be someone else’s?
    His eyes flicked over their clothes. Both of them had the kind of grooming that took money. Maybe she’d been honest about not wanting his—it looked as if they had plenty of their own to go around. Of course, he rationalised, at the rates the Carmichael Clinic charged, they would have to have money.
    It all seemed to fit.
    ‘What do you think?’ Simone prompted.
    ‘Must be,’ he mused, his eyes leaving the couple for a moment to scan the crowd. There were families and tourists and a gaunt-looking woman who looked as if she was