Elizabeth Lane - Rags To Riches - At Home With The Boss - The Secret Sinclair / The Nanny's Secret / A Home for the M.D.

‘Neither of us should have …’

‘Maybe it was inevitable.’

‘What do you mean? What are you talking about?’

‘You know what I’m talking about. This thing between us …’

‘There’s nothing between us!’ Sarah cried, stepping back and hugging herself in an automatic gesture of self-defence.

‘Are you trying to convince me or yourself?’

‘Okay, maybe we just … just gave in to something for the sake of old times .’ She took a deep breath. ‘And now we’ve got that out of the way we can move on and … and …’

‘Pretend it never happened?’

‘Exactly! Pretend it never happened!’ She took a few more steps back, but she thought that even if she took a million steps back and fled the country the after-effects of that devastating kiss would still be with her. ‘This isn’t about us . This is about Oliver and your part in his life, so … so …’

Raoul looked at her with a brooding intensity that made her tremble. She didn’t have a clue what was going on in his head. He had always been very good at shielding his thoughts when it suited him. She worked herself up into a self-righteous anger, remembering how terrific he had been at keeping stuff from her—like their lack of future—until she had fallen for him hook, line and sinker. Never again would she let him have that level of control!

‘So just come here tomorrow. You can meet Oliver, and we can work out some kind of schedule, and … then we can both just get on with our own lives …’

BY THE time the doorbell went the following afternoon Sarah hoped that she had risen above her physical weakness of the day before and reached a more balanced place. In other words sorted her priorities. Priority number one was Oliver, and she bracingly repeated to herself how wonderful it was that his father would now be there for him, willing to take on a parental role, whatever that might be. A full and frank discussion of that was high on her agenda. Priority number two, on a more personal level, was to make sure that she kept a clear head and didn’t get lost in old feelings and memories.

She opened the door to a casually dressed Raoul.

‘Oliver’s in the sitting room, watching cartoons,’ she said, getting down to business straight away.

Raoul looked at her carefully, and noted the way her eyes skittered away from his, the way she kept one hand on the doorknob, as though leaving her options open just in case she decided to shut the door in his face. In fact she had only half opened the door, and he peered behind her pointedly.

‘Are you actually going to let me in, or do you want me to forge a path past you?’

‘I just want to say that we’ll really need to discuss … um … the practicalities of this whole situation …’

‘As opposed to what?’

‘I’ve been thinking, Raoul …’

‘Dangerous,’ Raoul said softly. She was in a pair of jeans and a tight tee shirt that reminded him a little too forcibly of the mysterious physical hold she still seemed to have over him. He had spent the night vainly trying to clear his head of images of her.

‘I’ve been thinking that we should have as little to do with one another as possible. I don’t want anything to happen between us. Been there, done that and have the tee shirt. The important thing is that you get to know Oliver, and that should be the extent of our relationship with one another.’

‘And have you told him who I am?’

Sarah was startled and a little taken aback at the speed with which he had concluded a conversation she had spent hours rehearsing in her head. Had she hoped that he would at least try and knock down some of her defences? Had she erected her Keep Off sign in the expectation that he might just try and steamroller through it? Had she secretly wanted him to steamroller through it?

‘Not yet,’ she said crisply. ‘I thought it best that you two get to know one another first.’

‘Okay. Well, there’s some stuff I’d like to bring in.’

‘Stuff? What kind of stuff?’

He nodded to his car, which was parked a few spaces along. ‘Why don’t you go inside? I’ll be a few minutes.’

‘You haven’t bought him presents, have you?’ she asked suspiciously, but when she tried to step outside to get a closer look, he gently but firmly prevented her.

‘Now, how did I know that you would disapprove?’

‘It’s not appropriate to show up with an armful of gifts the very first time you meet him!’

‘I’m making up for lost time.’

Sarah gave up. You couldn’t buy affection, she conceded, but perhaps a small token might help break the ice. Oliver had had no male input in his short life so far aside from her own father, whom he adored. She had been too busy just trying to make ends meet to dip her toes in the dating pool, and anyway she had not been interested in trying to replace Raoul. To her way of thinking she had developed a very healthy cynicism of the opposite sex. So Oliver’s sole experience of the adult world, to a large extent, had been her .

He was in the process of trying to construct a tower of bricks, with one eye on the manic adventures of his favourite cartoon character, when Raoul appeared in the doorway. In one arm there was a huge box, and in the other an enormous sack.

There was more in the boot of the car, but Raoul just hadn’t had the arms to bring it all in. Now he was glad that he hadn’t. Oliver appeared to be utterly bewildered, and Sarah … Her mouth had fallen open in what could only be described as an expression of horror. Couldn’t she say something?

Feeling like a complete fool for the first time in as long as he could recall, Raoul remained standing in the doorway with what he hoped was a warm smile pasted to his face.

‘Oliver! This is … this is my friend, Raoul! Why don’t you say hi to him?’

Oliver scuttled over to Sarah and clambered onto her lap, leaving Raoul trying to forge a connection by introducing a series of massively expensive presents to his son.

An oversized remote controlled car was removed from the box. The sack was opened to reveal a collection of games, books and stuffed toys which, Raoul assured a progressively more alarmed Sarah, had come highly recommended by the salesperson at the toy shop. He stooped to Oliver’s level and asked him if he would care to try out the car. Oliver, by way of response, shook his head vigorously, to indicate very firmly that the last thing he wanted was to go anywhere near the aggressive silver machine that took up a fair amount of their sitting room space.

The games, books and stuffed toys garnered the same negative response, and silence greeted Raoul’s polite but increasingly frustrated questions about playschool, sport and favourite television programmes.

At the end of an agonising forty-minute question and no answer session, Oliver finally asked Sarah if he could carry on with his blocks. In various piles lay the items that Raoul had bought, untouched.

‘Well, that was a roaring success,’ was the first thing Raoul muttered venomously under his breath, once he and Sarah were in the kitchen, leaving Oliver in the sitting room.

‘It’s going to take time.’

Raoul glared at her. ‘What have you told him about me?’ ‘Nothing. Just that you were an old friend.’ ‘Hence the friendly way with in I was greeted?’ His own son had rejected him. Over the years, in his inexorable upward march, Raoul had trained himself to overcome every single setback, because every setback could be seen as a learning curve. He needed to speak French to close a deal? He learnt it. He needed intimate knowledge of the gaming market to take over a failing computer company? He acquired sufficient knowledge to get him by, and employed two formidable gaming geeks to do the rest. He had built an empire on the firm belief that he was capable of doing anything. There were no obstacles he was incapable of surmounting.