Her mouth firmed aggressively.

"I'm not giving her up. She's mine."

There was no reasoning with her. Garth recognised. She was like a tigress protecting her cub and anyone who tried to take the baby away from her would be asking for trouble.

"We can't do this," he protested again, but he could see from her face that Claudia wasn't prepared to listen.

"We can," she insisted.

"I've already told you, Garth, we must..."

At that moment, the baby turned her head and looked at him, her dark green eyes serious and thoughtful as though she knew what he was thinking, as though she was judging him, reminding him that he could be her father; that it was his own flesh and blood he might be rejecting; that, in fact, he owed it to her to go along with Claudia's determination to keep her. -. fo's child . his daughter, flesh of his flesh. But what if she wasn't? What if. Could he take that risk?

Could he live with himself if he turned his back on her? Might he not spend the rest of his life wondering, weighed down by a burden of guilt and regret?

But if they kept her, wasn't she going to be a constant reminder of an incident he would much rather be able to forget, an incident he had already, if he was honest, almost forgotten, telling himself that Katriona had lied to him when she claimed that he had fathered her child?

"We can't do this, Claudia," he repeated, but he already knew that the battle was lost and that, rightly or wrongly, Tara was now theirs.

And what amazed him more than anything else was not Claudia's very evident and very fierce maternal love for the child, but the logic and determination with which she was planning to carry through her deception of being Tara's birth mother. It was as though all the dark despair of the past few months had been wiped away, restoring Claudia to her old self. No, not her old self. The Claudia now confronting him was a mature, powerful Claudia. Watching her was like seeing someone who had stepped out of the shadows and into the brilliance of sunshine.

"Why don't you hold her for a moment?" Claudia suggested softly, as seductive and determined as Eve. The mantle of motherhood, fiercely protective and all-powerful, now sat as easily on her shoulders, had settled as easily around her, as a cloud of lightest thistledown, no weight at all, no burden at all to a woman like Claudia for whom motherhood was the whole reason for her being.

Reluctantly, he took her. She lay in his arms, frighteningly fragile and vulnerable, a scrap of human flesh who surely had nothing to do with him, had no claim upon him, and then she opened her eyes and looked unblinkingly into his, and Garth was lost.

He could actually feel the tug on his heartstrings as though she had physically gripped and yanked them. All his arguments, all his logic, all his objections to what Claudia was suggesting, vanished like mist in the heat of the sun. Whether she was his child or not no longer even mattered. To turn her away, to ignore that look of trust and contentment mingled with confident curiosity in those unbelievably green eyes, was something he simply could not do.

"You see?" he heard Claudia whispering triumphantly at his side as she put out a hand and gently touched the baby's face, watching as she turned her face from him to her and started to smile.

"She wants to be with us. She needs us. You should have seen her when I brought her home, Garth," she burst out passionately.

"She was so thin, so..."

Claudia took a shaky breath. It still filled her eyes with angry tears to think of the way her precious girl had been neglected, her little bottom red and raw with weeping sores from lying too long in urine-soaked rags, her cries for attention sharp and thin with fear and hunger. But all that was past now. She was safe now. Safe, wanted, loved. Oh, so very much loved.

"Give her back to me," she commanded Garth.

Silently, he did so, finding it oddly disconcert and Betraying to have his arms feel so empty without the slight weight of the baby.

"She's ours now," Claudia told him passionately.

"No one will ever know. I've registered her birth and named us as her parents and I've changed doctors. I told the new doctor that she was born while you were stationed abroad. It's a busy surgery. He won't check and soon we'll be moving away anyway because I want Tara to grow up in the country."

There was nothing Garth could do and he knew it. He could only marvel at the speed and tactical expertise with which Claudia had mounted her campaign--and won her victory.

Tara was theirs, but was she his?

l}aising her head from its comfortable position on Ryland's knee, Tara reached for the TV remote control and switched off the set. They had just been watching a hired video to accompany the take-away Chinese meal Ryland had ordered for them while they spent an evening in celebrating the anniversary of their first date.

"Mmm.-just think," Tara commented, stretching luxuriously before resuming her supine position across his body.

"This time next month we'll be in Boston."

"Mmm ... I don't know about that," Ryland teased her, sliding his hand to her hair and letting it slip through his fingers.

He loved her hair, so thick and silky and shiny. It felt so strong and healthy, so full of life, just like Tara herself. That was one of the first things that had attracted him to her, that glowing look of happiness and well-being that practically vibrated from her body. He didn't think he had ever met a happier or better adjusted person than his Tara; the warmth of her personality, her relaxed self-confidence, her air of being totally at ease with herself and with her world had struck him immediately.

"You haven't got your visa yet and I don't know that they'd waive restrictions to let someone like you in he said as she sat up swiftly, the indignant look in her eyes fading as she realised he was deliberately teasing her.

"Oh, you," she said, pouting at him, her mouth looking so deliciously full and sexy that Ryland just had to lean over and kiss her.

"Mmm.-you still taste of chow mein." Tara laughed softly as she kissed him back.

"Do you remember the first time I stayed over here with you?" she asked him.

"What do you think? Of course I do."

"You didn't have any condoms and we had to go out and buy some--' " I was expecting you to bring them," Ryland fibbed, straight-faced.

His parents would adore her, he knew that already. His mother would take her to heart like another daughter and his father would be entranced by her. Not once in his life could Ryland ever remember a situation where he had been seriously at odds with his parents nor them with him. They would know just as he had known how right Tara was for him.

Where his aunt was concerned, though, the situation was perhaps slightly more complicated. Ryland didn't need to be told how important it was to her that he married and produced children.

After her husband's death, she had poured into the business all the loving and cherishing, all the hopes for the future, she would more normally have given to Margot and ultimately the grandchildren Margot would give her. Grandchildren who would be her natural successors in the business and the natural inheritors of the huge fortune she herself had inherited from her own extremely wealthy family and brought into the marriage, just as Ryland would be his father's.

But there would be no grandchildren for her. That had been made clear by Margot's defiant and bitter announcement that she would never be able to have children. Having been barred from having Lloyd's by the law of the land, she had now barred herself from having any other man's by the law of life.

"I've had a sterilisation," she had told her mother flatly, adding with the intensity that was so much a part of her personality, "I can't have the child of a man whom I don't love, and the only man I shall ever love is Lloyd."

"How do you think your family, your aunt, will react to me?" Tara tuned into his thoughts.

Ryland forced himself to smile reassuringly at her.

"My aunt will be fine. Everything will be fine," he told her determinedly, reaching for her.

He was keeping something from her, withholding something vital, Tara knew instinctively. She was getting the same feeling she could remember getting as a young girl when she had known something was wrong between her parents. In the beginning, prior to their divorce, they had tried to pretend that everything was all right in order to protect her, but she had known that it wasn't.

Ultimately, of course, they had told her the truth--they simply weren't the kind of parents who would ever deliberately lie to her--but their initial refusal to allow her to know what was happening had left her with a subconscious fear of having anyone close to her not be completely honest with her.

"There's something you're not telling me," she challenged him immediately and quietly.

Ryland just managed to prevent himself from taking a sudden indrawn breath of self-betrayal.

"My family will love you," he insisted, knowing it to be the truth, but even though she could hear the conviction and the veracity in his voice, Tara still felt that there was something he wasn't sharing with her.

What? A boyhood romance with a local girl, a girl whose background, whose familiarity, might make her seem more appropriate marriage material in his family's eyes? She knew him too well to suspect him of having had any serious relationship he had not told her about.

But she wanted to silence that sharp, anxiety- inducing inner voice that was gnawing away destructively at her happiness, but Ryland patently had other ideas.

"Ryland," she protested as he leaned forward and started to nuzzle her throat, slipping his hand inside her blouse as he did so.

Ryland didn't want Tara to probe any further into his family background. He still had to figure out a way to explain to her that instead of becoming the wife of a reasonably well-paid young executive in a family business of which one day he would ultimately take charge, he was, in fact, being groomed for the role of heading a hugely profitable enterprise--one that, backed by astute past investment, meant that his and his aunt's personal fortune consisted of assets worth many millions of dollars.

Add to that the money he would one day--hopefully a long, long way in the future--inherit from his aunt.

His stable, loving family background and his own keen brain might have taught him the danger of allowing people into his life simply because they were impressed by or envious of the wealth that would one day be his, but they had done nothing to prepare him for falling in love with a woman who knew nothing about the strictures that modern society could impose on the wealthy and who, he suspected, would enjoy them even less.

Boston wasn't Hollywood, but it didn't have to be. All over the world, even in Britain, wealthy men were finding that in order to protect their families, they had to provide them with the kind of security that would provoke an outcry from the human rights people.

Being shut away behind high fences and followed by their personal bodyguards certainly didn't make for the kind of life he wanted for his kids, or necessarily the kind of life they would have to have, but he doubted that they would be able to have the same kind of freedom Tara had enjoyed as a child, and instinctively he knew that Tara would want her children's childhoods to follow the same pattern as her own.

"But of course I want my children to have both their parents living with them she had told Ryland seriously when they had been talking on the subject.

When she had just finished telling him about her own childhood forays into the countryside with a gang of other kids to catch tiddlers and pick fruit, how could he tell her that such simple pleasures might never be able to be enjoyed by their own children? As the sons and daughters of a very, very wealthy man, for their own protection they would have to play behind the secure walls of their own home.

Perhaps he should have been more open and honest with her right from the start, Ryland acknowledged now, but in the early days of their relationship, he hadn't told her because, quite simply, he hadn't wanted to risk scaring her off. Some women might run a mile towards a man with money, other women run a mile away, and Tara quite definitely belonged to the latter category.

Well, with any luck, it would be a good ten years or so before his aunt finally retired. She was sixty now, but as she had said on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday the previous year, she certainly had no intention of stepping down from control of the business as yet.

Hopefully, by the time she did, Tara would have had time to accustom herself to the reality of what his family's financial background entailed, Ryland decided, reminding her lovingly, "We were meant to be celebrating our anniversary," before he started to deliberately tease the delicate spot just beneath her ear with his lips.

Impossible to persist with their conversation when such delicious little thrills of pleasure were running so distractingly down her body, and her breast was already swelling appreciatively beneath the determined caress of his fingers.

"Mmm..." Closing her eyes, Tara told him softly.

"Ry, you're so lucky."

"Why, because you love me?" he teased her.

But Tara shook her head and told him seriously, "No, because your parents are still together. I love both Mum and Dad to death, but sometimes..." She paused and shook her head.

"It would be the most wonderful thing in the world for me if they got back together. It would make everything perfect."

"I do understand how you feel," Ryland told her gently, 'but they're two adults, Tara. "

"I hear what you're saying," she said thoughtfully.

"It's just... I did try to get them back together once, but it didn't work."

She had been fourteen at the time, missing having her father at home, and suddenly with her own burgeoning womanhood, very intensely conscious of the attention her mother was attracting from other men, aware of it and jealous of it on her father's behalf.

There had been one man in particular, a client of her mother's, a divorced man in his late thirties. He had persuaded her mother to have dinner with him one night.

"I have to go, darling," Claudia had told Tara apologetically.

"It's... it's business and Ashley is so busy, the only time we can discuss things is in the evening."

"Then why can't you discuss it here in your study?" Tara had demanded sharply.

"Why do you have to go out and have dinner with him? I don't want you to go," she had declared passionately, her eyes filling with quick tears.

"Oh, darling, please don't cry," Claudia had begged her in consternation.

"What's wrong? Has something happened at school, someone upset you?"

"No, it's nothing like that," Tara had told her truthfully before adding sternly, "The other girls at school talk about what happens when when women go out for dinner with men at night and I've seen it on television, as well. He just wants to get you into bed. Does Daddy know what you're planning to do?" Tara had challenged her.

Immediately, Claudia's embarrassment had turned to anger.

"What I do and whom I see has nothing whatsoever to do with your father. We're divorced, Tara, and we both have our own lives now. Your father has no right to comment on what I may or may not choose to do, just as I have no veto over the way he lives his life."

"Daddy still has our photograph in his bedroom," Tara had told her provokingly, 'and he doesn't take other ladies out for dinner. "

Her mother had compressed her lips and looked away from her.

The evening her mother was supposed to be going out for dinner, Tara had developed a sick stomach and her mother's date had to be cancelled.

A couple of weeks later while staying with her father, Tara had told him how afraid she was of her mother becoming involved with anyone else.

T want the three of us to be together again," she told her father passionately.

"I hate things the way they are."

"Darling, you know that that isn't possible," her father had remonstrated gently.

"Your mother has a right to live her own life, to see other people, go out on dates if she wants to. You know," he had added quietly, "I understand how you feel, we both do, but these things happen, and the fact that your mother and I don't live together any more doesn't in any way affect our love for you. We both love you very, very much, Tara, and I can promise you that nothing and no one will ever change that love."

"I don't want Mum to meet someone else and get married to him. I don't want either of you to," Tara had confessed, tears rolling down her face.

"You are my father and mother and we should all be together. I hate things the way they are."

"Oh, Tara..." her father had sighed, taking her in his arms to hold and console her.

"You could speak to Mum, say something to tell her... that... You could come back," she had insisted, but her father had shaken his head.

"No, my darling, I'm afraid that I can't."

Over the following months, Tara had tried relentlessly to get her parents back together again, but all to no avail. Now, as an adult, she could see with hindsight that they must have discussed what she was trying to do because they had remained steadfast, so immovable, so united in their calm determination to ensure that while she knew she was secure in their love, their marriage was irretrievably over.

Now, of course, she fully understood and accepted that they both had a right to live their own lives, but there was still a small idiotically idealistic and childish part of her that passionately longed to have them reunited.

As she had already told Ryland, once they were married, it would be forever. She would never, ever divorce him or allow him to divorce her, not once they had a family.

"I suppose you think I'm hideously old fashioned," she had challenged him on the subject.

"No. I agree with everything you're saying," he had returned quietly.

"Our marriage will last, Tara, and it will be for life. How could it be otherwise when my love for you will last for eternity?"