He almost smiled. “You won’t allow it? You think you can tell me what you will and won’t allow, when the issue is my son?”

“Yes, of course, he’s yours, isn’t he?” Norah said, a scathing note creeping into her voice. “Your property. I was forgetting. All right, let’s fight this battle your way.” She rose to confront him, and he had an odd sensation that she’d removed the gloves. “There can be more than one claimant to a piece of property.”

“Not this one,” Gavin said firmly.

“I’ve just been talking to Angus Philbeam, our lawyer. I wanted to check a point in Liz’s will. Angus is a very thorough man. When he drew it up, he made Liz consider every possibility-even this one. Liz left the guardianship of Peter to Tony, and after him-me.”

Gavin was silent for a split second before exploding, “You must be out of your mind!”

“You can visit Angus and see the will-”

“To hell with the will! No power on earth could give Liz the right to will my son’s guardianship away from me. He’s mine.”

Norah regarded him bitterly. “I’m beginning to understand why Liz always referred to you as Hunter,” she said. “Not Gavin, but just ‘Hunter.’ She said you were so predatory that the name suited you perfectly.”

“It makes a change from ‘grating Gavin,’” he snapped.

“But she was right. You are predatory. Everything is prey to you-something to be fought for and snatched. And you win because you scare people. But I’m not scared. For one thing, even you wouldn’t be inhuman enough to try to drag that child away today.”

“I never said I was going to-”

“And for another you’ll have to go through the courts to get Peter back, and I think they’ll pay attention to that will. They’ll pay even more attention to the fact that this is Peter’s home, where he’s been happy. He’s just lost two parents-”