Booty Calls and Lies - Chapter One

Chapter One

“Katie.”

“Don’t call me Katie. I don’t want to hear that name again. It’s not my name.”

She hated the name, it reminded her of the girl that he knew and she was not that girl anymore.

Why was he here?

She could have dropped the platter of salads when she saw him at the dining table. The minute his azure blue eyes clashed with her brandy browns, she hoped fervently that he would not recognise her. Her hair was now chestnut, not blonde, as when he knew her. Her eyes were no longer blue, but when his full sensuous lips curved in a smile and he toasted in her direction, her worst nightmare was confirmed and she almost made a dash for it but he followed her outside.

In the distance, feathered clouds stretched lazy tapered ends over the flat topped mountain to form a white, airy table cloth, oblivious to Anna McCall’s woes.

She had to get rid of him!

Did he know?

“What do you mean that it is not your name?”

“I mean that my name is not Katie. I made it up when I met you.”

“You lied about your name?”

“Of course, I did, Nicholas. You did not think all of that was real, did you?”

Nicholas Edmund’s black hair was shorter than she remembered and his temples sported threads of silver. His eyes were touched with fine creases that ran outwards and despite the fact that she felt like gasping for air, he seemed unmoved by her admission.

“I am not naive, I am sure you do that kind of thing all the time.”

His comment rained on her like cheap fragments of glass piercing soft
exposed skin.

Right now she would say anything to get him off her back.

She did not care what he thought of her, did she?

Anna was beginning to panick!

“Maybe I did, you wouldn’t be the wiser, would you?”

She remembered when he’d left her but what did she expect?

“Look, I have to go, I wish I could say that it was nice to bump into you but it wasn’t.”

Nicholas exhaled an audible breath as he thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his blue jeans, the movement made her swallow hard as she watched the crisp white shirt tighten across his chest.

She had to make him leave.

Now!

“Goodbye.”

“What is your name?”

He was interested in knowing her name?

Now?

How touching, as though he cared about her.

She did not want to tell him her name but what the hell, what would it hurt, if it made him go away.

“Anna McCall.”

“Anna McCall.”

She heard him say her name, slow and quiet as though he was contemplating its meaning. He was turning this in his favour, standing around making friends as though they had just met and his tactic was making her nervous. He could unravel everything that she had worked so hard to keep.

She knew all about him, the secretary at the reception office let her use the computer from time to time and Google had pages of information about him, a self-made billionaire who could take everything away in a tick.

“Why did you not tell me your real name? Did you have to make one up?”

She tapped one foot as she crossed her arms.

“I was acting, Nicholas, and an actor requires a name, so that he can play the part right, you know, get into character.”

She hoped he bought her story and would leave, she did not know how long she could go steadying the shaking within her.

“You were acting? We were in a movie in which you were acting?”

He made it sound as though he was the one that was used, what, did he have feelings?

“I was twenty years old. What did you expect that I was going for a “happy ever after”? Isn’t that just for penguins these days, one mate for life?”

Even as the words left her mouth, Anna knew them to be untrue.

Didn’t every women search for her perfect “penguin” who loved her, and only her, for all her days?

“No, it’s not just for penguins, have a little faith Anna or whatever your name is.”

He was close, so close that she could smell his fresh scent flood her.

She was glad that he was getting mad and the madder he got, the faster he would leave.

“There was nothing intimate between us. It was just sex.”

She fought the unknown feeling that threatened to collapse her hardened sculpture to soft clay.

“Just sex, huh, good ol’ fashion twenty first century, sex on demand. Right, Anna?”

What else was it?

He left!

“Yes. No obligation, no emotion just take what you need when you need it.”

Her voice was gruff from the lump in her throat as she remembered the young girl that was her. A girl, who waited to steal a few fleeting moments of love from a stranger and who for a few days, lived for the sound of her phone.

“You are about as rational as a man, Anna.”

The polite tone in which he spoke irritated her and something that resembled shame pricked at her.

Shame? Why should she feel shame?

She remembered the girl whose example she followed. The girl who always got what she wanted and for once Anna wanted to be that girl, the girl who got what she wanted.

“You aren’t exactly above reproach, Nicholas, How old were you then, thirty? Were you calling me for, love or for sex?”

She sounded cool and she wanted to look it too.

It occurred to her that the bandana, that the kitchen required her to use, must make her look ridiculous to him. She pulled the bandana from her hair letting tendrils of chestnut curls fall around her shoulders as she tugged at the badly cut, pink overall dress which hung on her as though she were angular.

Not, how she would have liked him to see her.

Why did she care what she looked like to him?

She did not want to look desirable to him, did she?

“I called you for.”

She watched as he hesitated, her eyes prickling with the knowledge that victory would be hers.

“I called you for sex. It was what you say it was. No obligation, sex.”

Her eyes burned but she refused to let the watery floodgates open.

“Good, I am glad we understand each other.”

With that she turned and walked back to her cottage, ignoring the flowers around her, a seasonal carpet of fushia pink, white and yellow that winded along the west coast for miles.

Her cottage never seemed further.

Nicholas made little work of heading to the little white cottage with its veggie patch of peas, lettuce and tomatoes. Pumpkin tendrils weaved around little sticks and the sight of the flat, round, yellow vegetable made him gag as they brought back painful memories of syringes and drips.

He found the door slightly ajar and heard a voice protest.

“No! No! No!”

He could not explain what drove him to follow her at a distance but he did. He pushed the door open and it took some time for his eyes to adjust to the dark room.

“Anna?”

She turned around to face him, her amber eyes huge in her face, her plump pillow lips parted.

“I did not come here to find you and when, by chance, I did, I thought that I would see how you were doing.”

She stood up, the front of her pink overall a mess of pureed pumpkin.

“Get out!”

Nicholas remembered the heated hours, they had spent together, hours when she made him forget his pain, forget his mortality. He walked in and closed the door behind him as she backed away against the small wooden table in the middle of the room.

“I heard what you had to say and now it’s my turn. I can see that you want nothing to do with me and I want nothing to do with you but I do have something that I need to say to you.”

She seemed to shrink back from him, the antithesis of her former bravado.

“Fine, I’ll be outside in a minute.”

The high-pitched voice that he heard earlier protested again.

“No! No! No!”

Nicholas looked quizzically at her as he walked further in.

“What is that? Do you have a baby in here?”

He laughed a throaty laugh.

“Your “twenty first century women ideals” did not get you into trouble, did it, Anna?”

“No.”

She spoke in a quiet voice and the fire seemed to have fizzled out of her.

Nicholas smiled a crooked smile, he was not surprised, a woman with loose morals was bound to hit the rocky road of baby trouble.

He walked around her and all at once the red was drained out of his face and replaced with white as his smile vanished.

There was pureed pumpkin everywhere, running down the plump cheeks, entangled in the black fuzzy hair that stood on its end, squishing out the closed fists and even on the long dark lashes that framed blue, blue eyes.

Nicholas looked from mother to child and finally his eyes rested on the woman who scooped the toddler up and held him to her.

Was he his?
I
nstinct told him that he was, for Nicholas, it was as though he had turned the pages of the family album right back to when he was a toddler.

The wheels in his head that found, her dashing earlier, strange, clicked into place.

“Is he mine?”

He had meant to speak in a soft tone but the question was laced with accusation and anger.

She seemed to tighten her grip on the toddler as she bit on her lower lip.

“No. He is mine!”

“Nine, nine” said the little cherub as he wrapped the pumpkined arms around his mother’s neck.

“A woman with your philosophies on life, isn’t smart, so let me spell this out for you, am I the father of the boy or do you even know who his father is.”

He saw her flinch from his words but he wanted the truth, he needed the truth. This boy could be the beginning of the life that he had never even dared to dream of.

“Yes.”

It was a soft, little word.

He walked closer to her his eyes never leaving hers.

“Yes, what?”

He waited, his breath held, his gut pulled in.

“He is your son.”

Nicholas exhaled and felt like all the fighting was worth this moment.

He had a son!

He was somebody’s father.

He was a dad!

“Were you going to keep my son away from me?”

“He is my son, too,” she burst out.

“That does not give you the right to keep him away from the very man whose seed sprouted his life. I don’t know why, I expected more from you nothing about you should shock me.”

She laughed then and it seemed hollow as it echoed in the room.

“Sprouted his life? Do you think that it took you solely to create this child? He is my child, he lived and grew in me for nine months. He fed off me and slept in me and if you think that I am going to allow you to lecture to me, you are wrong.”

Nicholas stared at the woman who bore his son and thought that it was not possible to loathe someone as much as he did her.

He had never dreamed that he would be a father, the doctors had confirmed that much and now here he was faced with a woman who was the last person on earth that he would choose as a mother for his child.

“Every boy needs his father to teach him to be a man. What sort of man would your lifestyle bring into my sons life?”

He knew what sort of men, men who only wanted one thing from a woman before they moved onto the next thing. With her, his son would learn to be a drifter.

“You are not the sort of father my son needs. He needs a strong man, a man with morals, a man who does not call a young girl in the middle of the night for sex.”

He caught her hint and he knew that what he did was wrong but wasn’t life funny? Now he was going to pay for his mistake for the rest of his life.

Pay to her!

She cut a pathetic figure with the pumpkin all over her overall, as she stared at him.

“You don’t look like a very good mother to me. A woman who lives like the way, I know, you live, could not raise a child.”

“I have done a damn good job of raising him without you for eighteen months.”

He ignored the statement and looked at the room and for the first time realised that it was not a cottage but a room that had one window. It held a single bed on one side and an old white wooden cot in the other. Both were covered with neat hand stitched duvets made from patches of old cloth. A ball of wool lay on the bed, pierced with knitting needles with the makings of the beginning of a garment. The front of the room served as a kitchen and a door in the wall to the left indicated a bathroom.

Nicholas could not believe that his son was living in hell for eighteen months.

“What have you been doing for work?”

He shuddered as he thought of what she might have been doing for money.

“I clean offices, scrub floors, serve meals, whatever I have to do.”

His eyes narrowed.

He trusted that she would do “whatever she had to do” to survive. One did not hold views like hers and live a prissy life. His eyes dropped to her legs and he saw that her knees were dark and the skin seemed thicker and harder.

“What is his name?”

“Robert, Robbie.”

“Obbie,” said the little muchkin.

Nicholas looked at the little round face, he walked to her and took the child from her and as Robbie touched his father’s hair, the whiff of pumpkin took Nicholas back to the time of white walls and the stench of disinfectant.

But all that seemed worth it now as he held the boy that he thought he would never have closer to him and touched his nose to the soft, plump cheek and watched as the little hands worked pumpkin into his white shirt.

He would take care of his son. His son would have everything in the world.

His eyes suddenly flew to hers as he realised that she worked.

Did that mean that Robbie was home by himself?

“Who cares for Robbie when you are at work?”

“He goes to work with me.”

Nicholas frowned at her answer.

“Are you insane? Taking a child to work and putting him in danger?”

“I would never put Robbie in danger.”

“What do you do? Leave him in a corner while you sweep and dust?”

“I tie him to my back and sweep and dust. The rural women in this country do it, so I can do it too. Childcare is expensive, so I take him with me. Besides, I don’t trust anyone else to care for him.”

“Tie him to your back?”

“It may be unusual to you but it works for the woman here and it works for me. Robbie is safe as he is out of harms way and he is with me.”

“Where was he today while you were working?”

“The Convention meant a busy kitchen. So I left him with Katherine, a friend.”

Nicholas did not want to imagine what sort of woman her friend was, he absentmindedly stroked the back of the toddler in his arms and smiled as the little boy lay his head on the broad shoulder.

A feeling that he could not understand swept through him, a feeling that made him want to keep Robbie in his arms and never let anybody, including his mother, touch him.

“Doing odd jobs cannot be the life that you wanted for yourself. A woman like you must want more.”

He watched her, waiting for a sign, a hint of something but he was not sure
what.

“Robbie is all I need and want and I am all that he needs.”

That was not what he was looking for.

“I want to keep Robbie with me.”

She sprang forward cat-like to pull the boy from him but the drooping eyelids stopped her.

“See, he is comfortable with me maybe he senses that he is of my flesh and blood.”

“Maybe and maybe not, he loves when we have people around.”

Nicholas knew what she liked.

“What if I bought you a place at the V&A Waterfront and paid you a handsome sum every month. Think about it, you can bleach your hair blonde, buy those blue contact lenses you like so much and even get yourself a boob job. The place is crawling with rich foreign men. That is your specialty, you can get yourself one and I would keep Robbie.”

“Don’t insult me, Nicholas. Robbie is not a business, you cannot negotiate and wrap up the deal of him. He is my baby.”

“Robbie belongs in England with me. He will go to the best schools and the best universities.”

“What about love and what about time? A busy businessman like you does not have a place in his life for a child.”

She stood with her feet apart and her hands on her hips and Nicholas knew that he would have to fight for his life again and more importantly, fight for the life of his son.