Michelle Douglas – Reunited by a Baby Secret (страница 2)

He lifted his wrist to glance at his watch again. ‘I’m sorry, but—’

‘I’m pregnant!’

The words blurted out of her with no forethought, without any real volition, and with the force of one of Thailand’s summer storms. Her common sense put its head in its hands and wept.

He stilled, every muscle growing hard and rigid, and then his eyes froze to chips of blue ice. ‘I see.’ He opened the door wider, but the expression on his face told her he’d have rather slammed it in her face. ‘You’d better come in.’

She strode into the room with her back ramrod straight. Inside, though, everything trembled. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. She’d meant to broach the subject of her pregnancy gently, not slap him over the head with it.

She stopped in the middle of the enormous living room with its plush sofas and ornate tables and furnishings and pulled in a deep breath. Right. Take two. She touched a hand to her stomach. Mia topolino, I will fix this.

Setting her shoulders, she turned to face him, but her words dried on her lips when she met the closed expression on his face. It became suddenly evident that he wasn’t going to smile and hug her. She did her best not to wobble. Couldn’t he at least take her hand and ask her if she was okay?

Except...why would he smile at her when she stood here glaring at him as if he were the enemy? She closed her eyes and did what she could to collect herself, to find a smile and a quip that would help her unearth the man she’d met two months ago. ‘I know this must come as a shock—’

‘I take it then that you’re claiming the child is mine?’

She took a step back, her poor excuse for a smile dying on her lips, unable to reconcile this cold, hard stranger with the laid-back man she’d met in Thailand. Fear had lived inside her ever since she’d discovered she was pregnant—and she was tired of it. Seizing hold of that fear now, she turned it into anger. ‘Of course it’s yours! Are you attempting to make some slur on my character?’

She didn’t believe in slut-shaming. If that was what he was trying to do she’d tear his eyes out.

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

Oh, so now she was ridiculous, was she? She could feel her eyes narrowing and her fingers curving into claws. ‘I’m just over two months pregnant. Two months ago I was—’

‘On a beach in Thailand!’ He whirled away from her, paced across the room and back again. His pallor made her swallow. He thrust a finger at her, his eyes blazing. ‘Pregnancy wasn’t part of the plan.’

‘There was a plan?’ She lifted her hands towards the ceiling and let loose a disbelieving laugh. ‘Nobody told me about any plan.’

‘Don’t be so obtuse!’

Ridiculous? Obtuse? Her hands balled to fists.

‘We were supposed to...to just have fun! No strings! Enjoy the moment, live in the moment, before sailing off into the sunset.’ He set his legs and stabbed another finger at her. ‘That’s what we agreed.’

‘You think...’ Her breath caught. She choked it back. ‘You think I planned this?’

If anything the chill in his eyes only intensified.

Her brothers might think her an immature, irresponsible piece of fluff, but it knocked the stuffing out of her to find Ryan did too.

Maybe they’re all right.

And maybe they were not! She slammed her hands to her hips. ‘Look, I know this has come as a shock and I know it wasn’t planned, but the salient fact is that I’m pregnant and you’re the biological father of the child I’m carrying.’

Her words seemed to bow him although as far as she could tell not a single one of his muscles moved. She pressed a fist to her mouth before pulling it down and pressing both hands together. She had to think of the baby. What Ryan thought of her didn’t matter. ‘It...it took me a little while to get my head around it too, but now...’

She trailed off. How could she tell him that she now saw the baby as a blessing—that it had become a source of excitement and delight to her—when he stared at her like that? The tentative excitement rose up through her anew. ‘Oh, Ryan!’ She took a step towards him. ‘Is this news really so dreadful to you?’

‘Yes.’

The single word left him without hesitation and she found herself flinching away from him, her hands raised as if to ward him off, grateful her baby was too young to understand its father’s words.

Ryan’s chest rose and fell too hard and too fast. His face had become an immobile mask, but the pounding at the base of his jaw told her he wasn’t as controlled as he might like her to think.

It was all the encouragement she needed. She raced over to him and seized him by the lapels of his expensive suit and shook him. She wanted some reaction that would help her recognise him, some real emotion. ‘We’re going to have a baby, Ryan! It’s not the end of the world. We can work something out.’ He stood there like a stone and panic rose up through her. She couldn’t do this on her own. ‘For heaven’s sake.’ She battled a sob. ‘Say something useful!’

He merely detached her hands and stepped back, releasing her. ‘I don’t know what you expect from me.’

That was when some stupid fantasy she hadn’t even realised she’d harboured came crashing down around her.

You are such an idiot, Marianna.

A breath juddered out of her. ‘You really don’t want this baby, do you?’

‘No.’

‘The bathroom?’ she whispered.

He pointed and she fled, locking the door behind her before throwing up the crackers she’d managed for breakfast. Flushing the toilet, she lowered the lid and sat down, blotting her face with toilet paper until the heat and flush had subsided. When she was certain her legs would support her again, she stood and rinsed her mouth at the sink.

She stared at her reflection in the mirror. Screw-up! The accusation screamed around and around in her mind.

She didn’t know that man out there. A week on a beach hadn’t given her any insight into his character at all. She’d let her hormones and her romantic notions rule her...as she always did. And now she’d humiliated herself by throwing up in the Executive Suite of the Grande Plaza Hotel. It was all she could do not to scream.

With a superhuman effort, she pushed her shoulders back. She might be impulsive and occasionally headstrong, she might be having trouble reining in her emotions at the moment, but the one thing she could do was save face. Her baby deserved far more than that man out there had to give.

She rinsed her mouth one more time, and dried her hands before pinching colour back into her cheeks. With a nod at her reflection, she turned and flung the bathroom door open...and almost careened straight into Ryan standing on the other side, with his hand raised as if to knock.

She might not recognise him, but the familiarity of those lean, strong hands on her shoulders as he steadied her made her ache.

‘Are you okay?’ His words shot out short and clipped.

She gave a curt nod. He let her go then as if she had some infectious disease he might catch. It took a concerted effort not to snap out, Pregnancy isn’t contagious, you know?

He stalked back out into the main room and she followed him. ‘Can I order something for you? Food, tea...iced water?’

‘No, thank you.’ All she wanted to do now was get out of here. The sooner she left, the better. ‘I—’

‘The fact that you’re here tells me you’ve decided to go ahead with the pregnancy.’

‘That’s correct.’

He shoved his hands into his pockets, his lips pursed. ‘Did you consider alternatives like abortion or adoption?’

She had, so it made no sense why anger should rattle through her with so much force she started to shake. ‘That’s the male answer to everything, isn’t it? Get rid of it...make the problem go away.’

He spun to her. ‘We were so careful!’

They had been. They’d not had unprotected sex once. Her pill prescription had run out a month before she was due to return to Italy, though, and she’d decided to wait until she’d got home before renewing it. They’d used condoms, but condoms, obviously, weren’t infallible.

Her heart burned, but she ignored it and straightened. Not that her five feet two inches made any impact when compared to Ryan’s lean, broad six feet. ‘I made a mistake coming here. I thought...’

What had she thought?

Anger suddenly bubbled back up through her. ‘What’s this all about?’ She gestured to his suit and tie, his Italian leather shoes, angry with him for his stupid clothes and herself for her overall general stupidity. ‘I thought you were...’

His lips twisted into the mockery of a smile. ‘You thought me a beach bum.’

She’d thought him a wanderer who went wherever whim and the wind blew him. She’d envied him that. ‘You had many opportunities to correct my assumption.’

He dragged a hand down his face. ‘That week in Thailand...’ He shook his head, pulling his hand away. ‘It was an aberration.’

‘Aberration?’ She started to shake with even more force. ‘As I said, I made a mistake in coming here.’

‘Why didn’t you ring?’

She tossed her head and glared. ‘I did. A couple of days ago. I hung up before I could be put through...to the Executive Suite. It didn’t seem the kind of news one should give over the phone.’ It obviously wasn’t the kind of news she should’ve shared with him at all. This trip had been an entirely wasted effort. I’m sorry, topolino. She lifted her chin. ‘I thought you would like to know that I was pregnant. I thought telling you was the right thing to do. I can see, though, that a child is the last thing you want.’