‘Don’t you call me stupid.’ Tabby’s temper flared. ‘I might not be a real brainbox like you, but there’s nothing wrong with my brain-’

‘Isn’t there?’ Christien incised at the speed of a rapier. ‘You’ve already told me that, until your aunt offered you a bed, you were sleeping on a floor while you were pregnant. Had you contacted me, you would have been living in luxury. So not contacting me was an act of inexcusable stupidity!’

‘Listening to you right now, not contacting you strikes me as having been a very clever decision. Being a filthy rich, smug four-letter-word doesn’t make you any more acceptable!’ Tabby shot back at him.

‘Except in the parent stakes. Strive to focus on the main issue, chérie. Four years ago, it was your responsibility to protect our unborn child by taking no risks with your own health. Since when was sleeping on floors recommended for pregnant women?’

Compressing her lips, Tabby turned her head away.

‘But in the present, our primary concern must simply be Jake…not how I feel about your lies or how you feel about me. This is about Jake and his rights.’ Christien lifted a forceful brown hand to stress his point. ‘And his most basic right was his father’s care, which you chose to deny him.’

Tabby knotted her trembling hands tightly together. Her palms were damp, her eyes felt scratchy and her throat was so tight it was hurting. No matter how hard she attempted to make herself she could not hold Christien’s outraged dark golden gaze. It was as if he had got her by the throat and stolen every excuse she might have employed before she even got the chance to think any up. Jake and his rights. No, she had to admit that her son’s right to know his father had only occurred to her in more recent times when she had had to face the fact that Jake would soon be reaching an age when he would be asking awkward questions.

‘The way you felt about me, I didn’t think you’d want to know about him.’ Tabby knew she sounded accusing, but she could not help it for she did not think it was fair for him to refuse to acknowledge that his treatment of her had naturally influenced her expectations and her opinion of him.

‘That decision was not yours to make-’

‘OK…I went to the accident enquiry determined to tell you that you were the father of my son but you couldn’t even give me five minutes of your time-’

As Tabby made that reminder the angular lines of Christien’s fabulous bone structure hardened into prominence below his olive skin, but he stood his ground. ‘That is not the point-’

‘Excuse me, that is exactly the point!’ Tabby argued fiercely, recalling the terrible feeling of humiliation she had experienced that day and stiffening in sick remembrance. ‘I was ready, willing and eager to tell you about Jake. I think you need to remember what a louse you were to me that day-’

‘I did and I said nothing-’

‘And nothing was precisely what you deserved and got for treating me like the dirt beneath your feet!’ Tabby hurled furiously. ‘I practically begged you to speak to me in private in spite of the fact that your awful snobby relatives and friends were all lined up with you and shooting me looks of loathing as if I, rather than my father, had been the cause of that ghastly accident!’

Christien was rigid and pale with rage. ‘Ciel! That day I was too busy grieving for my father to concern myself with the behaviour of other people-’

‘You didn’t give a damn! I was eighteen and I was alone in a foreign country and I was grieving too.’ Tabby was shaking, raw with pain and the need to justify her own actions and defend herself. ‘But you talk now and you behaved then as if you had cornered the grief market. You lost a father. Well, at least you were able to look back on your memories of him with respect and affection. I was denied even that because my dad got drunk and destroyed a lot of other lives as well as his own!’

Christien spread two lean hands in a movement of angry rebuttal. ‘I did not even notice how others were behaving. If you think that grief was all that lay behind my distance with you that day-’

‘Don’t you shout at me!’ Tabby interrupted wrathfully.

Hauling in a furious breath, Christien then froze in bewilderment at the strange noise he could hear emanating down from the floor above. Tabby was quicker to recognise and react to her son’s frightened howl and she raced for the stairs in automatic maternal pilot. She found Jake sitting bolt upright in bed, tears running down his pale, scared face.

‘The car…the car ran me over!’ her son sobbed, letting her work out for herself what had caused the nightmare that had wakened him from his sleep.

Tabby tugged his small, trembling body into her arms. ‘It was just a dream, Jake…just a dream. The car didn’t run you over. You’re safe. You’re all right. You got a fright but you weren’t hurt,’ she told him with a note of soothing and determined cheer in her quiet intonation.

But the consequence that she had feared from the minute she ran to her son’s bedside was already happening. Although Jake had stopped crying as soon as she’d put her arms round him, he was now struggling for breath and wheezing. Worse, because he was not yet fully awake and still recovering from the effects of his nightmare, he was all the more distressed by his physical difficulties.

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHRISTIEN was paralysed to the spot by shock as he watched Jake fight to get air into his skinny little chest. As Christien had not even a nodding acquaintance with what fear felt like, his fear on his son’s behalf hit him as hard as a bullet from a gun. He watched Tabby grab up what looked like an inhaler and tend to the little boy. His little boy.

‘What’s the matter with him…what can I do?’ Christien demanded, sick to the stomach with the force of his concern.

‘You don’t need to do anything. Jake’s fine.’ Tabby’s squeaky tone was a leaden but obvious attempt to conceal her anxiety sooner than increase the risk of Jake getting more upset. ‘It’s just a little asthma attack and the medication in the bronchodilator will help put it under control.’

Unimpressed and constitutionally incapable of standing around doing nothing and feeling helpless, Christien stepped out onto the landing, dug out his mobile phone and hastily called a doctor.

Even as his son’s breathing difficulties subsided Christien discovered that he could not take his attention from Jake. In appearance the little boy was unmistakably a Laroche. His black curls ran down into a peak at the hairline just as Christien’s did. His eyes were just like his paternal grandmother’s-dark, liquid and very expressive. His olive skin was in direct contrast to Tabby’s fair colouring and the pure lines of his bone structure were already hinting at the strong features that could be seen in the family paintings. However, in apparent defiance of those genes from a tall, well-built family, Jake looked shockingly small and slight to Christien, who had had very little to do with young children. But then illness had probably stunted his son’s growth, Christien reflected sadly.

Tabby’s tension was beginning to drain away when Christien sat down on the other side of Jake’s bed as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Jake stared at the tall, dark male in his city suit with huge surprised eyes.

Tabby was annoyed that Christien was pushing in just when she had got her son calmed down. ‘Jake…this is-’

Christien closed a hand over Jake’s tiny one and breathed shakily, ‘I am your papa…your father, Christien Laroche-’

‘Christien!’ Tabby hissed in a piercing whisper, shaken by the ill-considered immediacy of that startling announcement. ‘If you upset him, it could cause another-’

‘Daddy…?’

Jake was studying Christien with big, wondering eyes.

‘Daddy…Papa. You can call me whatever you like.’ Satisfied to have introduced himself and claimed his rightful place in his son’s life, Christien smoothed a thumb over the little fingers curling within his. He smiled. Jake began to smile too.

‘Do you like football?’ Jake piped up hopefully.

‘Never miss a match,’ Christien lied without hesitation.

Feeling excluded for the first time since her son had been born, Tabby watched in a daze as Jake and Christien proceeded to demonstrate that the gap between three years and twenty-nine years was not so great as any mere female disinterested in sport might have supposed. But then Christien was bright enough and smooth enough to sell sand in a desert. A bell sounded and she jerked in surprise, only then appreciating that the cottage now possessed a doorbell.

‘That will probably be the doctor.’ Christien vaulted upright.

‘You called out a doctor?’ Tabby questioned in some annoyance.

‘Don’t go, Daddy,’ Jake protested worriedly.

Tabby hurried downstairs and opened the door to a suave medic in a suit. Jake clasped in one strong arm, Christien hailed the older man from the top of the stairs, and from that point on, as the French dialogue whizzed back and forth too fast for Tabby to follow and Jake was examined, Christien was in charge. Apart from the occasional question relating to the treatment Jake had received in London for his asthma, Tabby was required to play little part in the discussion that took place.

Finally, having shown the doctor out again, Tabby returned to Jake’s bedroom. Christien held a silencing finger to his lips. Her son had fallen asleep in his father’s arms. That Christien had won Jake’s trust so easily shook Tabby. ‘Let me tuck him in.’

‘I don’t think it would be a good idea to risk waking him up again,’ Christien asserted.