One-Night Pregnancy (4 page)

‘There’s a lot more to it than that.’ He turned his head as an ambulance drove up and parked beside the helicopter. ‘Your limo has arrived, Mrs Smith.’ He raised her hand and kissed her knuckles again. ‘So it’s time to say goodbye. Take this with you.’

He rummaged in a seat pocket until he came up with a pencil and piece of paper, upon which he wrote a telephone number.

‘If you need me, Bridget—’ his eyes were completely serious now ‘—in case of any unplanned…
consequences
, this number will always get a message to me.’

Bridget took the piece of paper, but she couldn’t see what was written on it. Her eyes were blurred with tears. Then it came to her that there were two ways she could do this. As a tearful wreck, or…

‘And if you need me,’ she said, dashing at her eyes as she raised her hand beneath his to kiss his knuckles, ‘you know where to find me.’

They stared into each other’s eyes until he said, very quietly, ‘Go, Bridget.’ His expression changed to harsh and controlled as a nerve flickered in his jaw, and he added, ‘Before you live to regret it.’

Several hours later Adam Beaumont let himself into a hotel penthouse suite on the Gold Coast, and strode into
the bathroom to divest himself of the orange SES coveralls which had raised a few eyebrows in the hotel.

He took a brisk shower, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and padded through to the lounge.

But with his hand on the telephone he paused and thought about Bridget. Was she still undergoing examination for any unseen injuries? Or was she at home now?

It annoyed him momentarily to realise he couldn’t picture her ‘at home’ because he had no idea where she lived. And it worried him obscurely to think of her at home, wherever that was, and alone. Not only after her amazing and dangerous adventure, but after their spontaneous lovemaking.

What had possessed him? he wondered rather grimly.

She couldn’t have been less like the women he usually dated: soignée, sophisticated girls, well able to take care of themselves even when they discovered that he had no intention of marrying them. Not that he ever tried to hide it.

As to
why
he had no intention of marrying them, was it only a case of once bitten, twice shy? Once betrayed by a woman, in other words? Well, there was also the disillusionment of his parents’ marriage at the back of his mind, but even that, painful as it had been as he grew up, did not equal his disbelief, the raw hurt, the anger and cynicism, the desire for revenge his now sister-in-law’s defection had provoked in him.

Strangely, though, he hadn’t thought about it in recent times—until a copper-headed girl with green eyes had winkled it out of him last night. And, yes, he
thought harshly, it
did
still hurt, so it was better packed away—along with the whole thorny question of whether he would ever trust a woman again.

But to get back to Bridget Smith—why
had
he done it?

To comfort her? Yes. To prove to her that her one previous experience had been no more than a case of the wrong man? Yes.

Because he hadn’t been able to help himself?

Well, yes, he conceded. And that had been due to a combination of those green eyes, that lovely, tender little body, her freshness, and the simplicity and naturalness of her reactions. Yes, all of that. Plus admiration—because she had been brave and humorous, and those little touches of hauteur had secretly amused him. Even her outrageous lies on the subject of the nonexistent Mr Smith had amused him.

It came to him from nowhere. Perhaps, if he was ever to take a—how to put it?—convenient wife, Bridget Smith was the kind of girl he needed?

He stared out at the view from the penthouse as he pictured it. Mrs Bridget Beaumont. Then a frown came to his eyes and reality kicked in. He was better off steering clear of
any
commitment to a woman. Far better off.

He shrugged and lifted the receiver to organise the retrieval of his Land Rover and the possessions in it. He was about to put the phone down when he thought that there was one thing he
could
do for Mrs Smith. He could at least facilitate the retrieval of
her
possessions, if not her car…

Bridget had had to get a locksmith to let her into her flat, although not much later—after she too had showered and changed out of her coveralls—a knock on her door had revealed yet another SES officer, bearing her overnight bag and her purse, both retrieved from her car.

She was immensely grateful, even though the news about her car was not good. It was going to have to be taken out of its final resting place piece by piece.

She closed the door on the officer and bore her purse to the dining room table as if it were precious booty. Once she’d checked everything and found it all there she sat back and looked around, feeling suddenly sandbagged as all the events of the previous twenty-four hours kicked in.

It was small, but comfortable, her flat: two bedrooms, open-plan lounge, dining room, kitchen and a pleasant veranda, on the second floor of a modern two-storeyed building in a quiet suburb not far from the beach.

Although she could have owned it—her father had divided his quite substantial estate between her and her mother—she’d decided to keep her nest egg from her father intact in case she ever really needed it.

She’d put quite some effort into decorating her flat, though. She’d used a cool green for the walls, with a white trim, and cool blues for the furnishings and rugs.

Cool was the way to go on the sub-tropical Gold Coast. But there were splashes of yellow and pink. Some fluffy yellow chrysanthemums in a pewter flask vase on her dining table—the vase had been a present from her mother, who lived in Indonesia these days.
And some pink cushions on her settee, a fuchsia lampshade atop a pretty porcelain lamp.

There were also some of her own paintings on the walls. Paintings of flowers that flourished in the tropics—orchids, frangipani and hibiscus. Oddly enough, despite her assertion to Adam that she wasn’t much good, she’d entered some of her paintings in a local art show, and the owner of an interior design firm that specialised in decorating motels, rental apartments and offices had bought all six. He’d also told her that he’d take as many more as she could paint, and no matter if she repeated herself.

So far she hadn’t done any more. She wasn’t quite sure how she felt about her work gracing the walls of impersonal motel bedrooms, rental apartments and offices. Did that make her a real artist, or something much more commercial?

But now, as she looked around, art—commercial or otherwise—couldn’t have been further from her mind. Why wouldn’t it be when she’d just gone through a unique experience and then had it torn away from her?

But as she thought of the man called Adam she had to acknowledge that from the moment he’d so reluctantly revealed his past history she’d known he was bitter about women. He’d told her himself he was a rolling stone, so it shouldn’t have come as such a shock that he would walk away from her like that.

But it had, she conceded, and wiped away a ridiculous tear. Because their intimacy, for her, had been so perfect and such a revelation.

Had she unwittingly translated that into the belief that it must have been the same for him?

She grimaced sadly. That was exactly what she had done. But perhaps the bigger question now was—What was she left with?

A memory, to be pressed between the pages of a book until it dried and lost colour like a forgotten rose? A memory that evoked a bittersweet feeling in her breast that faded with time? Or a raging torrent of disbelief and anger that he could have made love to her so beautifully she suspected she would
never
forget it and then simply walked away?

‘WHO’S
this
?’ Bridget Tully-Smith was holding a newspaper and staring at a picture of a man on the front page. Her expression was completely bemused. ‘I don’t believe it…’

Julia Nixon, her colleague and friend, put her red high heels on the dull commercial-grade carpet of the busy TV newsroom and wheeled herself in her office chair from her cubicle to Bridget’s cubicle, next door. She scanned the picture and caption, scanned Bridget in turn, then said carefully, ‘What part of Adam Beaumont don’t you believe?’

‘But that can’t be Adam
Beaumont
!’

‘Oh, it is,’ Julia murmured. ‘In all his glory.’ She frowned. ‘Why can’t it?’

Bridget put the paper down and turned to her friend. ‘Because I met him.’ She paused, and thought how inadequately that covered her encounter with this man roughly three weeks ago.

‘He was—’ She stopped, then went on. ‘He wasn’t
part of the Beaumont empire! If anything he was very much a rolling-stone-that-gathers-no-moss type.’

‘Well, he may be, but that doesn’t stop him from being gorgeous or the real thing.’ Julia stared at the picture with a pensive look in her grey eyes. ‘Has he taken over from Henry Beaumont, his brother?’

Bridget perused the opening paragraph of the article accompanying the picture. ‘There’s a rumour, but that’s all at this stage. How did you know?’

‘High society is my department these days, darling,’ Julia reminded her. ‘You’d be amazed how many strange rumours I hear about the rich and famous when they party.’ She smoothed her pale gilt hair and studied her long red nails with an expression Bridget couldn’t identify.

Julia was in her thirties, an experienced journalist, with a penchant for red shoes, tailored grey suits and red nails to match her lips. She was extremely attractive, although she often exhibited a world-weary streak. She was unmarried but, talking of rumours, was said to have had—still had, for all Bridget knew—a series of highprofile lovers.

‘For example,’ Julia continued, ‘Adam Beaumont is supposed to be estranged from the fabulous Beaumont mining family. He’s certainly made his own fortune—out of construction rather than minerals.’ Julia gestured. ‘Further rumour has it that there’s a blood feud between Adam and Henry Beaumont. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Adam has finally found the lever to unseat Henry.’

Bridget’s mouth fell open.

Julia raised a thinly arched eyebrow at her.

Bridget closed her mouth hastily. ‘Nothing.’

‘And I also wouldn’t be surprised,’ Julia went on, ‘if he doesn’t do as good if not a better job than his brother. I always had Adam Beaumont taped as a cool, tough customer who would be equally at home in a boardroom as a bedroom—he’s as sexy as hell. Where did you meet him? It has to be him, I would say. You couldn’t confuse that face easily.’

Bridget blinked at the picture in the paper and thought, No, you couldn’t. ‘Beside a swollen creek in a flash flood, trying to rescue a carload of people.’

Julia pursed her lips as she summed Bridget up from her short cap of coppery hair, her delicate features and her sparkling green eyes, her slender figure in a whitedotted voile blouse and khaki cargo pants to her amber suede pumps. ‘You may have been lucky if you looked like a drowned rat.’

‘Oh, I did.’ Bridget paused with a grimace that turned to a frown. ‘But—is he really a playboy?’

‘He has escorted some of the loveliest, most exotic women in the land, but not one of them has been able to pin him down. Uh-oh.’

Julia wheeled herself back to her domain to answer her phone. And it occurred to Bridget as Julia did so that there was something in her colleague’s demeanour that was a little puzzling. But she couldn’t put her finger on it, so she turned her attention back to the picture in the paper.

Adam Beaumont was thirty-one, and good-looking. In the picture, he was wearing a suit and a tie, and he’d
been captured on the move, with the front flap of his jacket flying open—not at all how she remembered him.

Despite his being soaked and unshaven that tempestuous night, and in jeans and boots, the two things she would always remember about him remained the same, however. It was the same tall, elegant physique beneath that beautiful suit, and the same haunting eyes—those often brooding or moody, sometimes mercilessly teasing, occasionally genuinely amused blue eyes.

It all came flooding back to her, as it had in the moments before she’d made the exclamation that had grabbed Julia’s attention.

But for the time being she was to be denied the opportunity to think back to that memorable encounter with Adam Beaumont, whom she’d known only as Adam. It was an hour before the six o’clock news. The main bulletin of the day was to go to air, and the usual tension was rising in the newsroom.

She heard her name called from several directions, and she folded the newspaper with a sigh, then took a deep breath, grabbed her clipboard and leapt into the fray.

When she got home, she made herself a cup of tea and studied the newspaper again, at the same time asking herself what she knew about the Beaumonts.

What most people knew, she decided. That they were ultra-wealthy and ultra-exclusive. Adam and Henry’s grandfather had started the dynasty as a mineral prospector, looking for copper but stumbling on nickel, and the rest, as they said, was history.

What she hadn’t known was that the family was plagued by a feud, until Julia had mentioned it. The moment Julia had remarked on the possibility of Adam finding the lever to unseat his brother, Henry, it had taken her right back to the shed, the paraffin lamps and the storm, and that hard, closed expression on Adam’s face. If she’d had any doubts that they were one and the same man, they’d been swept away.

Her next set of thoughts was that Adam Beaumont had probably gone out of his way not to reveal his identity—because, to put it bluntly, he was way out of her league.

Surely that was enough, on top of what he himself had said, to kill any lingering crazy longing stone-dead? she reflected—and wrapped her arms around herself in a protective little gesture.

Three weeks had seen her go through a maelstrom of emotional chaos. Her bruises and scrapes might have healed, but her mental turmoil had been considerable. And, as she’d postulated to herself the day she’d been both rescued and abandoned, she felt torn between a bittersweet
it was never meant to be
sensation and a tart resentment that left her feeling hot and cold. If he’d known he wasn’t for her, why had he done it?

Of course she’d been more than happy to participate, but she hadn’t had a cast-in-concrete conviction that she was a loner, had she? Moreover, shortly before it had happened, she had thought she was going to die. Had that accounted somewhat for her willingness in his arms?

But most of all, in these three weeks, she’d felt lonely
and sad. She couldn’t believe she could miss someone so much when she’d only known him so briefly, but she did.

She sniffed a couple of times, then told herself not to be weak and weepy, and turned her attention to the newspaper again.

She reread the article, but there was not a lot to be gleaned from it. It was simply speculation, really, to the effect that there could be moves afoot on the Beaumont board, plus some of the company’s impressive mining achievements.

It also detailed some of Adam Beaumont’s achievements outside the field of mining, and in their own way they were impressive. He was obviously a billionaire in his own right.

So what was it really about, this article? she wondered. It did detail that Adam was not a major shareholder in Beaumonts, whereas Henry was. And how did that line up with what she knew? The fact that Adam had sworn revenge against his brother and was looking for a lever to unseat him?

She shook her head, a little mystified. She stared at the photo of Adam Beaumont and suffered an intensely physical moment. It was as if she were right back in his arms, with that chiselled mouth resting on hers, his hands on her body thrilling and delighting her.

What a pity there was never any future for us, she thought, and blinked away a solitary tear. It was no good telling herself again not to be weak and weepy, because the fact remained there seemed to have been awoken within her a chilly, lonely little feeling she
couldn’t dispel, and—she stopped and frowned—a strange little echo she couldn’t place.

Of course there was also the fear that she might have fallen pregnant continually at the back of her mind. A state which came under the heading of
consequences
, no doubt, she thought dryly. Statistically, she had decided—the time of the month, it only happening once—it was unlikely. Although she was realistic enough to know it was a statistic not to be relied upon.

But now there was a new feeling added to all her woes, she realised as she laid her head back and stared unseeingly across the room. And it centred around the fact that he’d allowed her to think he was ordinary when in fact he was a billionaire.

What difference does it make? she wondered.

She sat up suddenly. It makes me feel like a golddigger, or as if that would have been his automatic assumption as soon as I found out! she answered herself.

And that outraged her, she found. Although a little niggling thought came to her—perhaps that was the way a lot of women reacted when they discovered who he was? Perhaps that had added to his cynicism about women?

She heaved a huge sigh and deliberately folded up the paper so his picture was inside, not visible. She forced herself to concentrate on her upcoming weekend. She, several others and a party of disabled children were spending the weekend on a farm. It was going to be arduous, and she would give it her all. She would not allow Adam Beaumont to intrude. And her period would come in the natural course of events when it was due, on Sunday.

But her period didn’t come in the natural course of events, and by the following Sunday it still hadn’t.

It would be fair to say that Bridget had held out until the last moment in her belief that her cycle had gone a bit haywire, but when a home pregnancy test proved positive she had to face the cold, hard truth.

She was pregnant after a one-night stand with a man she barely knew—a man who had told her unequivocally that he wasn’t for her…

It was a shattering thought.

Two days after she had made the discovery there was a crisis in the newsroom.

Megan Winslow, who was doing the news on her own because Peter Haliday, her co-presenter, had the flu, fainted half an hour before air time.

Out of the chaos, Bridget was chosen to replace her. In the normal course of events it would most likely have been Julia chosen to do it, but it was her day off. There were several reasons to choose Bridget. She spoke well, with good modulation—she’d belonged to her university dramatic society—and she was familiar with the autocue as she’d occasionally filled in for the weather presenter.

‘You’ve also proofed a lot of the stuff, so you’re familiar with it. We can find you something more formal to wear,’ Megan’s producer said to her. ‘Make-up!’ he yelled.

It was a miracle Bridget managed to speak at all, considering the emotion-charged atmosphere of the newsroom. Even more than that, her own inner turmoil
was mind-boggling. She hadn’t been able to come to grips in any way with the fact that she was carrying Adam Beaumont’s baby. If anyone should be fainting, she should…

But she actually got through reading the news with only a few stumbles. And she had no idea who would be in the unseen audience for that particular broadcast…

Adam Beaumont unlocked the door to his suite in the luxury Gold Coast hotel and threw the keycard onto the hall table. He walked through to the lounge, shrugging off his jacket and tie, and switched on one table lamp.

The view through the filmy curtains was fabulous. The long finger known as Surfers Paradise stretched before and below him like a fairyland of lights, bordered by a faint line of white breakers on the beach and the midnight-blue of the Pacific Ocean, with a silver moon hanging in the sky.

He didn’t give it more than a cursory glance as he got a beer from the bar and poured it into a frosted glass. He’d been overseas, and he was feeling jet-lagged and annoyed. One of his PAs had met him at the airport and given him a run-down of events that had occurred in his absence. One of them was a newspaper article described by his PA as a ‘fishing expedition’, to do with the board of directors at Beaumonts and a carefully worded suggestion that there was some unrest on the board.

Where the hell had that come from? he’d asked, but had not received a satisfactory answer.

The Beaumont board, he thought, standing in the
middle of the lounge, staring at nothing in particular. Ever since he could remember the family circumstances that had contributed to his distance from the board had galled him almost unbearably. And that had contributed, along with his faithless sister-in-law, to his determination to unseat his brother, Henry. But it so happened
he
hadn’t done anything to create the rumours.

He put his beer on a side-table and looked around for the TV remote before he sank down into an armchair.

He was flicking through the channels when his finger was arrested, and he sat up with an unexpectedly indrawn breath as he stared at Bridget, reading the news.

She was wearing an elegant lime-green linen jacket, and her coppery hair was still short but obviously styled. Her eye make-up emphasised her green eyes, and her lips were painted a lustrous pink.

She looked, in two words, extremely attractive, he thought. But what the hell
was
this?

She paused, then launched into a piece she happened
not
to have proofed. Of all things, she stumbled on the Beaumont name. But she collected herself and went on to detail the fact that the rumours circulating were suggesting Henry Beaumont was about to be ousted from the Beaumont board by his brother, in a bitter power struggle.

It was the last item before a commercial break, and as had been agreed, to save viewers any confusion, Bridget said, ‘I’m Bridget Tully-Smith, filling in for Megan Winslow tonight. Please stay with us for all the latest sporting news.’