He watched her walk towards the Mustang, heard the hard slam of the door reverberate across the beach, stood bone still until he saw the tail lights had climbed the hill and disappeared around the curve of the road.
She was gone, and he was left there holding her silvery sandals, Prince Charming without his Cinderella. Except he wasn't the hero. He was the villain, the liar, the man who always lost in the end. He turned away and walked slowly towards the two people he hated most in the world, and the child he’d never laid his eyes on in his life.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Every dread-filled step back along the beach towards Justin and Suzie was a step back into his old shoes. He could feel Dylan Day dissolving into the Ibizan sand beneath his feet, leaving him exposed as Matthew McKenzie, the man who let his brother die.
“Leave us,” he snarled at Justin as he approached them. Justin shrank back into the shadows, presumably not wishing to have his face rearranged for a second time that evening.
Suzie sat on the rocks, disinterestedly feeding the baby in the pushchair in front of her from a plastic bottle.
Dylan sighed heavily and sat down a couple of feet away from her, his head in his hands. The sea washed unnoticed over his shoes.
“What the fuck is going on here, Suzie?” he said eventually.
She looked across at him. She looked worn out, more jaded than the last time he’d seen her.
“This is your kid.”
She set the baby’s almost empty bottle down on the rocks and reached into the pushchair to lean him forward, rubbing his back, his chin resting between her thumb and forefinger as she winded him. Dylan stared at him, his tiny face and startling mop of dark hair. How could that be his son?
“I was pregnant when I left you.” Suzie answered the question he hadn’t yet asked. She continued patting mechanically, not looking at the baby, her attention on Dylan.
“Yeah, and you’d been screwing Donovan for months before then,” Dylan reminded her, certain that he hadn’t fathered the child.
He’d barely had sex with Suzie in the last few months of their doomed-from-the-start marriage. Just once or twice, and unhappily, thanks to too much tequila when he’d been especially maudlin about Billy.
The discovery that Suzie had been screwing around behind his back had come as no great surprise. They’d married in Vegas not long after Billy had died, and neither of them had much recollection of the ceremony or of their reasons behind it. Billy had been their link. His brother, her ex-lover. He’d tried to lie in the bed he’d made for a while, but the truth was that it had been a cold and hard place. Numbed by so much unhappiness, he hadn’t been one bit sorry to see her pack her bags.
Suzie had been a symptom rather than the cause. It hadn’t even hurt that she’d left him to shack up with Donovan, the very guy to whom both of his brothers had gambled their lives away to, the very same guy who had taken everything Dylan owned beside the shirt on his back in recompense for Justin’s unpaid debts. It had been a stark choice. His club, or his brother. The fact that his wife had thrown herself into the equation too barely even registered. He’d made the choice he wished he’d been able to make for Billy. He did it for Billy, and to save his mother from the heartache of burying another son.
“He’s been tested,” Suzie said, nodding down at the baby. “He’s not Donovan’s. He even looks like a fucking McKenzie.”
Dylan digested her words, every one a death knell for him.
“So what… you’ve come here after money?” Dylan guessed. “If he’s my child then you know I’ll pay.”
“I don’t want your money,” she said. “And I don’t want your child, either.”
He jerked his head up, not understanding, and she shrugged.
“Come on, Matthew. Do you really think Donny’s going to raise a McKenzie brat?”
It had been a long night. Given time to absorb the facts and think about it, Dylan wouldn’t have wanted Donovan anywhere near his son either. But as it was, in his state of numb shock, he needed her to spell things out for him.
“Suzie… what are you actually saying?”
She stood up, and thrust the pushchair towards him. “He’s three weeks old. Everything you need for him is in his bag.”
“Suzie, for fuck’s sake!” Panic galvanised Dylan onto his feet, knocking into the pushchair handles. “You’re his mother, he needs you. You can’t just walk away from him.”
She was doing exactly that. She turned her back and set off across the sand.
“Suzie! Jesus, Suzie, stop! I don’t have the first fucking clue what to do with a baby.”
His former wife paused and turned around, her hands flung out to the sides.
“So learn. Or give him up. I don’t really care either way as long as I get on that plane without him.”
“You can’t mean that,” he said, appalled.
Suzie sighed and looked at him flatly. “Donovan loves me, Matthew. He takes care of me. He has money.”
Dylan laughed. “Yeah, my fucking money.”
Suzie shrugged, stony-eyed. “He has money,” she said again. “He doesn’t want your kid.” She glanced back at the baby, just once, but her expression didn’t change. “Feed him every few hours. Change his nappy. It’s not fucking rocket science.”
The baby stirred, opening his eyes and blinking up at Dylan. He had Billy’s eyes.
“What’s his name?”
Suzie paused, almost embarrassed. “He doesn’t have one.”
Dylan sighed heavily at Suzie's retreating back. "He does now."
She walked away without a backward glance, off towards Justin further up the beach, off back home without her ex-husband’s bastard child weighing her down.
Kara drove aimlessly, following the coast road. She couldn’t go back to the villa. It was Sophie and Lucien’s wedding night. If she went back now, they’d rally round her, enveloping her in hugs, wiping her eyes, plying her with brandy as she spilled the whole sorry tale of how she’d been deceived again. Sophie would comfort her, and Lucien would want to kill Dylan, and their wedding day memories would be forever tarnished. Kara had enough experience of that herself to know that she couldn’t and wouldn't inflict it on her best friends.
The traffic around her thickened, and she found herself amongst the brash lights and raucous revellers of San Antonio, otherwise known as party central. She could park up the Mustang and lose herself here amongst these people. Drink until she couldn’t remember who she was. Screw someone without even asking his name, and forget the man who hadn’t loved her enough to bother even telling her the truth about his own.