No way was he going to lose out on seeing if he could connect with some real family, so that meant he had to face marriage and fatherhood first. The trick was to create a situation he could live with. He didn’t want any child of his suffering through divorce, getting screwed up from feeling unwanted. If he had to have a child, he needed to set up a stable environment for it.
His mind kept zapping to one woman.
He’d trust Tess to do right by him—right by their child.
He was almost sure he’d be able to work out an agreement with her—a sensible legal agreement that protected all parties. Tess wasn’t like any of the other women he knew—the women who’d jump at marrying him because of who and what he was. Tess didn’t want anything from him, didn’t want anything from any man.
But she might want a child.
And she knew where Nick was coming from.
Tessa Steele came from the same place.
It didn’t matter that she was Brian Steele’s daughter—real daughter—she had a mind of her own and had made a life of her own, just like Nick.
The big question was…would she be interested in forging a life in partnership with him, given the incentive of having a child together?
CHAPTER TWO
‘THERE’S nothing of you in him, Tessa,’ her father growled, a disgruntled look on his face as he studied her two-month-old son.
Nothing of him, he meant. Tess knew she was her father’s favourite child because he could see his genes in her red hair, fair skin and blue eyes. She’d never been sure if this was a natural hang-up with him—some male primitive need to see the imprint of himself repeated—or a reaction against having another man’s child passed off as his. Nick’s mother had left a lot of emotional havoc in the wake of her marriage to Brian Steele.
Undoubtedly it had been wounded pride that had driven her father to plunge straight into marriage with another spectacular woman—the blonde and beautiful star of stage and screen, Livvy Curtin. This unlikely coupling had only lasted two years, but at least a child of his own had come out of it and after the divorce had been settled, Livvy had been happy for Brian to have the major share of custody, leaving herself less burdened in pursuing her acting career.
Tess had always known she was loved by her father. Even after his third and still current marriage had produced two sons of whom he was extremely proud, he’d kept a very soft spot for his one and only daughter—a softness which was considerably resented by his third wife who’d taken every opportunity to shunt Tess off to her real mother, who much preferred to ignore that reality. Livvy—you are not to call me Mummy—had no interest whatsoever in even acting out a maternal role.
Tess’s own life experience fed her determination to keep a very simple family line for her child. No marriages. No divorces. No messy extended relationships. Above all, her son was going to know he was loved by his mother. And his genetic pattern was irrelevant. She’d given birth to this baby and he was hers. All hers.
‘He does have curly hair,’ she pointed out, though her own curls were inherited from Livvy, not her father.
Brian Steele’s hair was dead straight, like a wire-brush, and the red was all white now. The blue eyes, however, hadn’t faded one whit with age and were as sharp as ever as they swung to his daughter, wanting to pin her down on a few matters which she’d been successfully evading.
They were sitting in the sunny courtyard at the Steele family’s Singleton property, both of them taking time out from their individual business interests. This securely secluded country home provided the privacy Tess had wanted for having her baby, and since this was her father’s first grandchild, he’d readily granted her the occupation of it for a few months while he and his wife were currently winging between the Steele family residences in Sydney and Melbourne, keeping up their social engagements.
‘Are you going to tell me who the father is?’
‘It doesn’t matter who, Dad.’ She smiled her own deep maternal love at the black-haired, green-eyed baby in the rocker at her feet. ‘He’s mine.’
And thank God his olive skin was never going to have a problem with being out in the Australian sun. No rigid restrictions for his childhood. No fear of disfiguring freckles rammed into him. Her own mother’s brainwashing edict—‘You’ll turn out ugly, ugly, ugly, if you don’t cover up and wear a big hat’—would never be a part of his life.
‘Tessa, I understand you didn’t want to marry the guy…’
‘He wouldn’t have wanted to marry me, either,’ tripped off her tongue before she could think better of revealing that piece of information.
‘Why not?’ Her father sounded affronted, as though any man should feel enormously honoured to be her husband. After all, she was a Steele, daughter of a billionaire, heiress to a fair chunk of the family mining fortune, and not without physical attraction when Tess bothered to play up her natural assets.
She shook her head, not wanting to give away any clues to the identity of her son’s other parent. Her father would be even more affronted to know it was Nick Ramirez he could thank for this grandchild.
‘Does he even know about your having his child?’
‘No. I didn’t tell him. Things would only get messy if I did.’
‘Is he already married?’
‘No.’ Her own vivid blue eyes lasered his. ‘It was just a once only thing, Dad. A big mistake in hindsight. Wrong for both of us. Okay?’
Wrong for Nick, anyway. He’d made that perfectly clear to her afterwards, showing how appalled he was at having been caught up in the spontaneous combustion that had ended in wild hot sex with Brian Steele’s daughter.
‘Don’t you think he might guess when he sees you with a baby?’ her father nagged.
‘That’s very unlikely,’ Tess figured that having sex with her was now a sealed compartment in Nick’s memory, never to be reopened. ‘On the whole, we don’t mix socially,’ she explained. ‘And by the time it’s generally known I have a child, the date of birth will be blurred, so there won’t be any ready connection to him.’
‘You don’t want him to know,’ her father shrewdly concluded.
It was all too complicated, Tess thought. Apart from the family entanglements, on a purely personal level she was not the kind of woman Nick normally chased and bedded, and given his own background, he would absolutely hate the fact of having been involved in an accidental pregnancy. Especially with her!