Page 39 of Cinderella's One-Night Baby

Eventually, she said, ‘Lucasismine. I’m named as his mother on his birth certificate. He’s been mine since he took his first breath.’

‘Tell me what happened.’

Her voice caught. ‘I can’t.’

‘I can’t help if you don’t tell me.’

‘I don’t need help.’

‘Gabrielle, you only agreed to accompany me as my date that night because it was the perfect storm of timing for you.’ Andrés spoke slowly, his words forming as they formulated in his mind. ‘Lucas was with your mother and you’d been offered an invitation to the party of the century with a man you believed to be happily married, all arranged with his wife’s urging. If you’d had the slightest idea of what would happen between us, you would have refused to be my date and no amount of bribery or coaxing would have caused you to change your mind. Am I wrong?’

Eyes now locked on his, she shook her head.

‘If Lucas is legally yours then how is it that something—or someone—has frightened you into hiding away?’

‘Not hiding,’ she refuted. ‘I have a job. Lucas goes to nursery and will be starting school in a few months. We do all the normal things that normal people do.’

‘You were a twenty-three-year-old virgin,’ he pointed out bluntly. ‘That is not normal, not for a woman as sensual as you. Your life revolves entirely around Lucas. Everything you do is for him.’

‘It’s called being a mother.’

‘It’s called hiding from intimacy.’

Gabrielle looked back out over the calming sea and filled her lungs with the salty air. What was the point in fighting it any more?

Andrés already knew the bare bones of the truth. To entrust the rest of it to him...

She’d entrusted her virginity to him. She’d given the whole of herself to him that night and he’d given the whole of himself to her.

She’d told him about their baby expecting him to denounce her and refuse to accept paternity until he had cast iron proof but he believed her. He’d questionedhowshe could be pregnant but he hadn’t questioned his paternity. He’d accepted her at her word.

He could have taken his suspicions about Lucas straight to the authorities. His power meant they would have taken his suspicions seriously. The truth and his power could easily find Gabrielle in the situation of losing both her children. He could gain sole custody of their child and never have to bother with the thing he wanted the least—being tied to a woman for the rest of his life.

Just as on some basic level he must trust her, so too, she realised, did she trust him because as all the thoughts of what he could do swirled in her mind, a certainty grew in her that he would never do them.

She took possibly the deepest breath of her life and said, ‘Lucas’s father is a nasty, evil, rich bastard, and if his name is ever made public, he will have him taken from me.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

GABRIELLEEXHALED.She’d said it. She’d rubbed the lamp and let the Genie out. And as she made that exhale, she heard Andrés take a sharp intake of breath.

Fixing her gaze on the horizon, she said, ‘You need to understand what Eloise was like to understand it all. You see, she was always different. Her brain never worked the same as other people’s. Monte Cleure has terrible mental health provisions—it was worse when we were ruled by King Dominic and his father before him, but I honestly think all the provisions in the world wouldn’t have helped. Her brain was just wired differently, like there was something missing in it, if that makes sense? She was the sweetest, most loving person you could meet but she just couldn’t process her emotions—the slightest thing would upset her and send her into a spiral of screams and tears and self-harm. When our father died she had to be hospitalised until she wasn’t a danger to herself any more.’ She closed her eyes, remembering how her mother too had fallen apart at the seams at the agony of losing her soul mate.

‘She was so beautiful,’ she continued quietly. ‘Men always looked twice at her but The Bastard was the first mansheever noticed, and she was so excited for her first date. I imagined a sweet teenager but instead this man in his thirties wearing typical rich man yachting clothes turned up. It was obvious to me that he thought he was living dangerously by inviting a girl from Monte Cleure’s poor district on a date. Most people sensed Eloise’s vulnerabilities but I didn’t trust that he’d picked up on them so I made sure he knew she had certain issues and that he needed to treat her kindly. He treated her so kindly that when she fell pregnant, he dumped her on the spot and wanted nothing to do with her or the baby. He told her she was unfit to be a mother and demanded she abort it.’

She felt Andrés stiffen.

‘I had to threaten him with the press to make him take responsibility, but he gave her a wedge of hush money and tricked her into signing a contract forbidding her from ever making contact with him again or naming him as the father with the penalty for breaking it being that he’d take custody of the baby he didn’t even want and force her to repay the money.’

At this, Andrés hissed a particularly crude curse under his breath.

‘Yes, he is,’ Gabrielle agreed. ‘That bastard’s treatment of her and his rejection of their child broke her, and she spiralled. She stopped eating, never left the apartment, her health deteriorated... I deferred university to care for her because we didn’t dare leave her alone, and then on one of her lucid days, she sat down with me and Maman and told us she loved her baby too much to put it at risk of being a mother to it and that she wanted me to have it. She wouldn’t listen to reason or take no for an answer, and worked herself up into such a state...’ She squeezed her eyes shut to drive out the image of her beautiful sister screaming and hitting herself. ‘What else could I do but agree?’

‘Couldn’t your mother have...?’

‘Eloise wanted it to be me. She was adamant. She knew I wouldn’t be allowed to adopt the baby because of my age—you have to be twenty-five to adopt in Monte Cleure, even if it’s a family member and even with the consent of the mother—so it had to be made out that the baby was mine. She was insistent.’

‘But why not your mother?’

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