His absolute conviction that they’d never had a relationship gave him comfort.

‘Perhaps we should go inside to talk about this,’ she suggested, and he shook his head.

As far as he was concerned, the only place she was going was back where she came from.

‘What is there to talk about?’

She bristled angrily and he saw her dark eyes flash slightly as she clutched the baby more tightly.

He hid his surprise. Maybe she wasn’t quite as placid and gentle as she’d first seemed.

She was glaring at him. ‘That is exactly the type of comment I’d expect from a man like you.’

‘A man like me?’ He lifted an eyebrow. ‘And you are, of course, intimately acquainted with me.’

He knew definitely that she wasn’t and the fact that she blushed deeply merely confirmed it.

She chewed her lip. ‘Well, no, but—’

‘We’re not intimately acquainted?’ Alex’s tone was mocking. ‘And yet you’re claiming that we slept together. Maybe your definition of intimate is different to mine.’

She pushed her dark hair away from her face with a shaking hand. ‘We didn’t sleep together.’ She stumbled over the words as if she was uncomfortable saying them. ‘And for your information, you’re the last man on earth I’d sleep with!’

‘And you’re the last woman I’d sleep with,’ Alex shot back, seething with irritation, ‘which makes your claim that I fathered your child utterly ridiculous and totally without foundation. And having clarified that, I think it’s time you made your way back to wherever you came from.’

‘I n-never said you fathered my child,’ she stammered, and he looked at her in growing exasperation. ‘Daisy is my sister’s child. You slept with my sister, Dr Westerling. Slept with her and then left her to deal with the consequences.’

Her sister?

There was another prolonged silence, broken only by the distant rush of waves hitting the beach and the occasional shriek of a seagull.

His first impulse was to ask whether her sister was blonde but he suppressed it and looked at her, carefully concealing his emotions.

‘And where is your sister now?’

‘She’s dead.’

Alex saw the anguish in her dark eyes before she quickly veiled it. Suddenly the baby started to cry miserably, almost as if it had understood that something dreadful had happened.

Reluctantly accepting that this wasn’t a problem that was going to go away in anything like a hurry, he jerked his head towards the cottage.

‘You’d better come inside.’

Vowing that from now on he was going to lead a life of celibacy, Alex gritted his teeth, opened the front door and walked into his house.

There was a gasp of surprise behind him and the girl stopped dead, still clutching the sobbing child.

Alex flung his jacket onto the nearest sofa and glanced at her impatiently. ‘What?’

‘It’s just—I didn’t…’ She looked around her, unable to disguise her surprise. ‘I thought you lived in a cottage.’

‘It is a cottage. Well, actually it’s four cottages knocked into one.’