CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER FIVE

H E TRIED NOT to wonder about that. He definitely didn’t ask. But how could he fail to be curious about why a woman who was so sensual and passionate hadn’t had sex in such a long time?

It was not the most important thing in that moment though, so he pushed it aside.

‘Be that as it may,’ he said with a tone of resignation. ‘Here we are.’

‘Yes, here we are.’ She stared up at him, as if looking for an answer he didn’t know how to give. An assurance. But he was all out of promises. Raul was moving into fresh new territory, and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. ‘Which brings me to my next point,’ she said slowly.

‘There’s more?’

Libby rolled her eyes. ‘We’re talking about a marriage. Don’t you think it’s wise to go through more than a couple of details?’

She had a point, but Raul believed they would make it work however they had to. He knew all he needed on that score: they both cared about this child more than they did their own wishes. It was his only concern.

‘What else?’ he prompted.

‘Where we’ll live, for starters.’

‘My headquarters are in New York.’

Her throat shifted as she swallowed. ‘New York?’ she said softly. ‘For real?’

He scanned her features. ‘You don’t like it?’

‘I’ve never been,’ she replied. ‘I’ve never been anywhere. I can’t just move to New York.’

‘Why not? What’s holding you here?’

She looked around.

‘Do you have family? A support network?’

‘I have friends,’ she said, but weakly.

He expelled a breath. ‘We can move back, if you don’t like New York. For now, though, it’s how it has to be. I cannot uproot my business at the drop of a hat and relocate to Sydney.’

‘You mean you don’t want to,’ she said stubbornly.

‘I am prepared to make all sorts of accommodations for this child; I am asking you to meet me halfway.’

‘New York is the other side of the world, that’s not halfway.’ Her expression was belligerent, but he could see she was waning on this point. ‘I don’t even have a passport.’

Raul’s brows flexed as he processed her statement. It was totally antithetical to him—he who travelled at the drop of a hat, drawn to his business interests all over the world. But he could see the vulnerability in her face at having made the admission and didn’t want to exacerbate it.

‘No problem. My assistant will arrange it.’

Libby’s jaw dropped. ‘Just like that?’

‘You will likely have to fly to Canberra to expedite matters. Justine will arrange it.’

‘Your assistant?’

‘Yes.’ He nodded once. ‘Is there anything else?’

She shook her head, and she looked so lost, as though she was a little girl, stranded in a storm, that he felt the strangest compulsion to reach out and draw her into a hug, to stroke her back and promise her everything would be okay.

But Raul didn’t really believe in those assurances.

He wanted, more than anything, to make their child’s life perfect, but he wasn’t stupid enough to promise any such thing. Life had a way of pulling the rug out from under you. It was better to brace for that, at all times, than live in a fool’s paradise.

So he simply said, ‘I’ll see to the paperwork. You handle the passport. Deal?’

And, just like that, a week later, Libby was sitting onboard Raul’s private jet, staring at a thick wad of papers, highlighter and pen in hand as though they were her sword and shield.

He’d engaged a law firm to advise her, but Libby wasn’t going to leave things to chance. Trust didn’t come easily for her, and she wasn’t going to be stupid about something as important as her child’s future.

So she sat, legs curled up beneath her on the enormous armchair, carefully reading the prenuptial agreement line by line, annotating where necessary, making notes of any queries she had.

The first few pages dealt expressly with the financial arrangements and custodial expectations. The amount Raul had suggested putting in trust for their child made Libby’s eyes water. She felt a rush of compunction to imagine he thought she had any expectation of him setting aside quite so much. She’d simply meant enough. Enough for their child to never have to worry as she’d always worried. Enough to know they were financially secure, come what may.

Raul had made their unborn baby a multimillionaire even before they’d drawn breath.

By page five, they were onto a matter that made Libby blush for a whole other reason.

Extramarital considerations

She read the stipulations with a pulse that was thready and uneven.

It was everything they’d agreed, and then a little extra. In addition to the requirement that any extramarital relationships be kept completely discreet was the requirement that the spouse would be notified, to avoid potential awkwardness.

Libby couldn’t believe she was actually contemplating signing a document like this. It made a mockery of everything she had ever believed about marriage!

‘Good evening, ma’am.’ A steward approached her, male, with blond hair and a broad smile. His accent was American. ‘Would you care for some refreshments?’

Libby quickly shut the contract, mortified to think he might have seen even a hint of what was written on the page.

‘Um...’ she said, aware of not just the steward but also Raul. Though he sat further down the cabin, and she wasn’t even looking at him, she felt his eyes on her. She knew he was watching.

Her pulse ratcheted up.

‘I can bring you a menu,’ he offered.

‘Okay,’ she agreed, fidgeting with her fingers. ‘Thank you,’ she added, forcing herself to smile.

Morning sickness, as pervasive and never-ending as it had been a few weeks ago, seemed to have given her a temporary reprieve and, if anything, Libby was hungry all the time. She found the cravings to be the strangest thing: she’d gone from enjoying reasonably simple foods to wanting to try things she’d never heard of. Inwardly, she couldn’t help smiling as she imagined her baby’s strong will already in evidence.

She stroked her stomach absentmindedly, staring out of the window at the jet-black sky as the plane cut its way across the globe.

A moment later, the steward was back, handing Libby a menu that was identical in branding to Raul’s business card. She scanned it quickly, bypassing the savoury selection and landing instead on pancakes with bacon and a cup of tea.

‘Won’t take me long,’ the steward said with another charming grin as he disappeared from the cabin.

Libby was not alone for long. Raul strode towards her, and every single one of Libby’s senses went onto high alert as he took the seat opposite her, his long legs spread wide, his body the last word in relaxed athleticism. So why did his proximity have the opposite impact on her?

Every time they went a stretch without seeing one another, she forgot. She forgot how big and strong and masculine he was. How just being near him called to some ancient part of her, making her want to throw caution to the wind, just as she’d done on the boat. She’d put it down to the heat of the moment, the relief and the drama, but what was her excuse now?

Hormones?

She suppressed a grimace, turning to look out the window once more.

‘How are you finding it?’

‘Mortifying,’ she answered honestly. ‘I cannot believe you had a lawyer draft this.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s so... personal ,’ she spluttered.

‘They act for me in the strictest confidence,’ he assured her. ‘This document is completely private.’

‘It’s not that,’ she said with a shake of her head. ‘Doesn’t it embarrass you that they think this is what our marriage is about?’ She lifted the contract higher.

‘It is what our marriage is about,’ he said without a hint of shame. ‘Besides which, I do not particularly care what my legal team thinks about my private life.’

Libby’s eyes narrowed. ‘I bet you don’t care what anyone thinks,’ she said, wishing on all the stars in the heaven that she knew just a little more about the man she was metaphorically getting into bed with.

‘Not particularly,’ he said with a shrug.

The steward returned with a cup of tea. Libby thanked him but made no effort to lift it off the table.

‘It is my experience that people will generally think what they want whether you like their opinion or not. Worrying about it is therefore somewhat futile.’

Her lips twisted into the ghost of a smile. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said, wondering at his innate confidence, and where it came from. Except it went beyond confidence. There was an air of such self-reliance that now Libby did wonder about his life, his childhood, his experiences. What had happened to shape him into the man he was today?

‘You said you didn’t really know your parents,’ she murmured, placing the contract aside and giving him her full attention—or at least, finally showing that he already had it. ‘Who raised you?’

Was she imagining the slight pause? The shift in his features?

‘I was in foster care,’ he responded crisply. It was an open-ended answer. She had no personal experience with the foster system, but she’d heard and read enough to know that some people didn’t fare too well with it, while others did. She supposed it was down to the luck of the draw.

‘And?’

His expression didn’t change. ‘And at fifteen, I ran away,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘I decided I’d had enough of being parented, and wanted to take my chances on the streets.’

‘You did?’

He nodded once.

‘I can’t even imagine...’ she said softly.

He looked at her long and hard and Libby’s mouth was suddenly as dry as dust.

‘Can’t you?’

Her eyes widened. How could he possibly know about her childhood?

‘Why do I find that hard to believe?’ he pushed.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Perhaps it’s because I see something in you, Libby, something that is broken in all the same ways I was.’ He ran his gaze over her features, slow and deliberate, as if he was tasting her. ‘Am I wrong?’

Her lips parted. He wasn’t wrong, but she’d always thought she hid her pain so well. She tried. Her childhood had been difficult, emotionally draining, hurtful. She carried those wounds to this day, yes, but Libby had sworn she wouldn’t be defined by them. Where she felt pain, she acted with love. She smiled when her heart hurt. She was determined to respond to whatever darkness had been in her life with pure light. To hope for lasting love even when her mother had demonstrated again and again how unlikely that was.

That Raul had seen beyond her fa?ade scared Libby to death.

‘I don’t think we’d be entering into this marriage if we hadn’t both experienced a rough start to life,’ she said uneasily.

‘Which means?’

He was asking for specifics and Libby knew it was only fair that she should give them. After all, he had. At least, a brief enough outline for her to gain more of an understanding of him.

‘My mother was single,’ Libby said, sipping her tea, forcing herself to meet Raul’s eyes. ‘Except when she wasn’t. The only thing is, she never met a man she wanted to be with for more than a few months.’ Libby rushed through the explanation. ‘I had a lot of stepdads,’ she added with a grimace.

Raul was very still across from her, his eyes glittering when they met hers with a hardness that took her breath away. ‘It takes a lot more than biology to be a good parent.’

She nodded her agreement. She’d seen that first-hand.

‘Libby.’ His voice was gruff, deep. ‘What we’re doing here, this is who we are. We will do right by our child, in a way no one ever did for us.’ The determination in his voice, the pride, took her breath away.

Tears sparkled on her lashes as she nodded, not sure she could trust her voice to speak.

‘This is all that matters,’ he said quietly.

Libby knew then that they’d made the right decision. This was all about their baby, and always would be.

He had been careful not to touch her as they entered the lift to his penthouse. He’d been careful not to touch her since collecting her from her place in Sydney, and a strange swelling of something had begun to stretch in his chest.

Protectiveness.

It was the sight of Libby with her bashed-up old suitcase and a look in her eyes that was pure determination and strength. As if to say, ‘Show me everything you’ve got; I’m ready for it.’

She was a fighter. He recognised that quality; he understood it. He didn’t doubt she could take care of herself, and their child.

But she didn’t have to.

Raul hadn’t wanted this. It was the antithesis of what he wanted, in fact, and yet here he was, ready to protect the mother of his child with his life.

Despite her air of strength, he felt her nervousness, her anxieties about the step she was taking away from the familiar, and he’d wanted to reach across and put a hand on her knee as the car had pulled out from the kerb.

But he hadn’t.

Just as he hadn’t put his hand in the small of her back to guide her up the stairs when they’d reached his plane. Nor had he reached out and placed his hand over hers when they’d spoken on the plane and realised how similar their goal was, to protect their child from the sort of childhood they’d had. But he’d wanted to.

The longer he’d sat opposite Libby, watching as she flicked through the document and then fell asleep, highlighter with the lid off, small body curled up in the too-big armchair—they’d never felt too big for him—his fingers had tingled with a want to simply feel. Just one stroke of her soft cheek, to remind himself...to remember.

The air in the lift hummed with a sultry, seductive pulse, urging him to move closer to her. To brush against her, almost as if by accident. But there was a warning there too, because he suspected whatever incendiary spark had flared between them on the boat was still ignited, and they’d be all kinds of stupid to let it burn out of control.

If there wasn’t a child involved.

If they weren’t getting married.

But this was a serious, lifelong commitment to do right by their infant. He wouldn’t let biological impulses complicate everything, so he stood firm on the other side of the lift, staring straight ahead, barely breathing until the doors opened and he waited for the release of the pent-up tension, the energy.

The relief didn’t come.

Grinding his teeth, he stood at the doors to the lift, holding his hand across them and waiting for Libby to precede him.

Her eyes flashed nervously to his then looked straight ahead.

‘Oh,’ she murmured, lips parting.

The lift opened directly into the foyer of his apartment—a large space that was decorated as it had been when he’d bought the place, all in beige and white, with a big mirror above a hallstand that had a decorative bowl and nothing else.

Raul lived a minimalistic life, despite his wealth. He’d learned as a teenager to need only a few small things, to be ready to leave at any point. He hadn’t consciously kept that habit but, now that he thought about it, he had very little connection to anything in his apartment. There were only a few things in here he’d want to take if he left. Which was why it had been easy to buy the place and keep it basically as it had been.

‘You can change anything you don’t like,’ he said, stepping out into the foyer and placing his keys and wallet in the bowl, then turning back to her. But Libby had already stepped away from him, was moving deeper into the penthouse, one hand lifted to her lips as she stared at the double height room beyond the foyer. He tried to see it through her eyes. Through the eyes of the teenager he’d once been, so poor he hadn’t eaten for days, sleeping in an alleyway that reeked of urine and sweat.

It was magnificent, objectively speaking. The penthouse had been made of two full storeys of apartments, combined by the previous owners. The floor-to-ceiling windows offered panoramic views of Manhattan, and there was a deep balcony with a spa beyond the kitchen.

‘We can’t raise a baby here,’ she said, turning to look at him, and instead of there being admiration in her features, he registered abject horror.

He frowned. ‘You don’t like it?’

She looked around again, as if she might see something else in the apartment she’d missed on first inspection. ‘It’s not that.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s...just...so...’

He waited, curious as to what word she would choose.

‘A baby couldn’t relax here,’ she said then laughed softly, nervously. ‘I couldn’t relax here. My God, Raul, this is—’ She bit down nervously on her lower lip, and that same protective urge fired in his gut. To hell with it.

He closed the distance between them and put his hand on her upper arm. A gesture designed purely to reassure and comfort, nothing more, and yet damn it if his fingertips didn’t spark the second he touched her. She expelled a sharp breath and her eyes lifted to his, so he felt the world tipping sideways in a way he immediately wanted to fight.

‘It’s just a place to live.’

‘But it’s not a home,’ she said urgently, swallowing, and he felt her tremble like a little bird. His gut twisted. What did he know about home? He’d never had one. ‘Not like I’ve always wanted to raise a child in.’

Raul had bought the place because it was a good investment and he could afford it. A divorce had meant it was being sold for under market value; he acted quickly to secure it and he hadn’t regretted the purchase since. But he had no emotional ties to the place.

‘Okay, we’ll find somewhere else.’

Her laugh now was a little manic. ‘Just like that?’

‘Why not?’

Libby shook her head, wrapping her arms around her torso. He didn’t drop his hand. He hoped his touch was reassuring to her in some way, even when it was unsettling to him. ‘It’s fine. I’ll get used to it.’

But Raul didn’t like the tone of her voice—anxious and concerned. His thumb stroked her arm gently. ‘Hey.’ He drew her face to his. She stared up at him, eyes wide, looking for something in the depths of his expression, but he didn’t know what. ‘We will make this work.’

It was a promise he made to the both of them, something they both needed in that moment, to hear, and believe.