Intimate Strangers Read Online Free PDF Page A

Am I missing something?” Mac shifted his weight and moved Erik to his other hip.
    “Hmm. I believe I need a moment alone with Chelsea, if you don’t mind.”
    After a moment’s silence, Mac acquiesced. “Call for me if you need anything.”
    “I don’t and won’t,” Tiaan snapped back.
    A short pause, Mac then said, “I meant Chelsea.”
    Once they were alone, his anger exploded. “Why did you not tell me that I had a bloody child?”
    Her expression matched his, viciously irate. “Tell you? Tell you? I didn’t even know your damned name until I got you from the airport today! And don’t you dare chastise me here. I left you my number and you never called!” She backed into the far corner to sit on the bed, bouncing Ruan – his son for Christ’s sakes – in a gentle motion. “I went through all of this by myself; thankfully I had Hannah and Mac to help me though.”
    She left her number? Tiaan thought back to the morning after, when he’d reached for that voluptuous woman he spent the night with, only to find a cold and empty space in the hotel room bed. Seconds later his phone rang and he had to leave on a mission straight away. If she did leave her phone number for him, he mustn’t have seen it in his haste to pack and get on the next flight out.
    Too late to make amends on that note now, he crossed the distance between them and dropped onto her single bed. He could have sworn he’d told her his name, but they hadn’t done much talking that night. Then a thought crossed his mind. If she was so quick to jump into a man’s bed, one whose name she did not even know, this baby could belong to someone else. There was one way to find out.
    “I want a paternity test done.”
    Recoiling as if struck, Chelsea moved to the changing table, making sure to keep an eye on Ruan. Bloody hell, she’d even gone as far as to find an Afrikaans name for the baby. He observed her as she gently removed the soiled nappy – a cloth one, he noted – and cleaned the baby up before putting a fresh one on.
    “I have no need or…I-I don’t want anything from you! I certainly don’t want your money. And no one is sticking a needle in my son. So whatever reason you have for demanding such a ridiculous thing, it’s unjustified and unwanted.” Her voice carried a hard edge to it, as if she had just this minute constructed an impenetrable wall around herself.
    Tiaan opened his mouth to reply, though he didn’t quite know what to say, and was saved by Mac slipping into the room. Thank God for the man. Hopefully he would have a bit of advice on this particularly distressing situation. Just before he met Hannah, Mackenzie found out that he’d had a daughter for years and years. Kayla would be turning sixteen in a few months.
    “Chelsea,” Mac began as he gently pushed her aside to take over dressing little Ruan, “I know this is a delicate situation, and I also should probably mind my own business, but since Hannah came into my life…” He grinned, as if recalling a memory. “Let’s just say I like things sorted, nice and neat, wrapped up with a bow nowadays. It keeps me up at night when there’s unfinished business in my house.”
    Christ, but the baby looked a hell of a lot like the pictures of him at that age. A pang of something indefinable twisted in his chest. He had the urge to hold Ruan, to touch him, like it might make all the difference in the world. The fact that she managed to pull his grandfather’s name out of the thousands of Afrikaans male names out there also astonished him. Chelsea couldn’t have possibly known.
    “What is your blood type, Chelsea?”
    She was at Mac’s side to take Ruan who just started to cry, presumably for her since he ceased as soon as she held him. “O rh negative, why?”
    “Hmm. And Ruan is…?”
    “The same as me.”
    Tiaan gripped his shirt and accidentally pressed too hard on a particularly tender area of his chest. If both mother and child were O type, that meant