Read Online Legally His Omnibus by Penny Jordan - Free Book Online

colour, and then it
burned with a dark tide that swept slowly over his skin until his cheekbones
glowed with its heat.
    ‘No.’ He denied her words explosively.
    His denial ricocheted around the room, burst apart and then
bounded back off the walls at her like a deadly missile. Kate’s hopes died under
its onslaught.
    ‘No!’ Sean was repeating savagely, shaking his head. ‘No!
You’re lying to me, Kate. I know I hurt you when I ended our marriage, and I can
easily understand why you would have turned to someone else, but no way do I
accept that I am Oliver’s father.’
    Someone else? Kate could taste the acid bitterness of her own
anger as she listened to Sean rejecting his son. Beneath her anger, though, lay
the bleakness of her own pain. What had she been expecting? Or could she answer
her own question more easily if she asked herself what she had been hoping
for?
    She’d wanted Sean to take her in his arms and tell her that he
had made a mistake, that he still loved her. That in fact he loved her all the
more because she had given him a son.
    ‘Yes, you did hurt me then, Sean,’ she agreed evenly. ‘But
believe me that cruelty was nothing compared with what you’ve just done. You can
hurt me as much as you like, but I will never, ever let you hurt Oliver.’
    As she forced herself to look into his eyes, her own emotion,
her own pain was pushed to one side by the strength of her maternal need to
protect her child. For Oliver she would sacrifice anything and everything, and
if necessary even herself. She could not ignore or deny the fact that her love
for Sean had never really died, but for Oliver’s sake she would control and
banish that love. And somehow she would learn to live with the pain of having to
do so.
    Everything about Sean’s reaction to her information that he was
Oliver’s father confirmed the wisdom of her decision not to tell him originally
that she had conceived his child. But at the same time everything about it tore
at her heart until she could scarcely endure the pain.
    But it was her anger and contempt on behalf of her son that was
glittering in her eyes now, motivating the scathing tone of her voice as she
told him, ‘That’s right, Sean. Reject Oliver just like you rejected me. But that
won’t alter the fact that he is your son.’
    It gave her a sense of almost anguished satisfaction, along
with a feeling as if someone was turning a knife over inside her heart, to see
the effect his efforts to rein in his temper were having on him. His face once
more leached of colour, leaving it looking bone-white.
    ‘He can’t be mine,’ he insisted harshly.
    ‘Can’t be? Why not? Because you were sleeping with the woman
you left me for when he was conceived? What happened to her, by the way, Sean?
Did you get bored with her, just like you did with me?’ Too wrought up to wait
for his reply, she threw at him furiously, ‘You can deny it all you like, but it
won’t alter the truth. He is your child.’
    Kate shook her head angrily. ‘Don’t you think I wish that he
wasn’t?’ she demanded passionately when he didn’t respond. ‘Don’t you think I
wish that he had been fathered in love, with love, by a man who loved me? By a
man who loved him? A man who wanted to share our lives and be there for both of
us? You’ll never know how much I wanted those things, Sean—for Oliver and for
myself. But unlike you I’ve faced up to the truth.’
    She was shaking from head to foot, Kate recognised, and she was
humiliatingly close to tears.
    For a minute Sean was too shocked by Kate’s angry and
contemptuous outburst to make any response. And then for a minute more he
discovered that he actually wanted to be able to believe her. She was certainly
doing a good job of believing herself, he recognised cynically. But all the
cynicism in the world could not wipe away the strength of his immediate response
to her emotional outburst. Pain, anger and unbelievably longing tore at him in
equal