for their child. Surely she could master the desire she still felt for him—to give all three of them the best chance of living together peacefully. She had to extinguish the fire between them, so that it wouldn’t have the opportunity to burn the whole arrangement down. He’d admitted this wasn’t a love match and she needed to lose any secret dreams of romance and happy ever after.
Besides, right now, for someone who was supposedly her fiancé, he was amazingly invisible. He hadn’t been to see her once since coming to get her papers. Well, she wasn’t going to go out of her way to see him. She was still half hoping he’d forget about the whole mess—wasn’t she?
He didn’t forget. Although he didn’t show up, he rang, without fail, twice a day—eleven a.m.—she figured it was morning–tea time, and then at night at eight. He was so regular she figured he had an alarm set. Hell, he’d probably programmed his mobile to dial her automatically.
After a few weeks she was sick of it—the twice-daily phone calls that lasted less than a few minutes. He was only interested in how she was physically and what she’d eaten. If it weren’t for the baby there would be no contact and even though this was something she already knew, boy, it rankled. She struggled to keep her reactions to him businesslike.
At precisely eight p.m. her phone rang. She answered immediately and before he could even get the ‘hello’ in she spoke in brisk, bored tones.
‘Yes, I had a good day. No, I wasn’t sick. Yes, I had a rest in the afternoon. For dinner I had stir-fried beef with Asian greens and rice, washed down with a glass of orange juice, which will help aid the absorption of iron from the meat and veg. I followed that with some fresh fruit salad with Greek-style yoghurt, therefore covering all major food groups so you can rest assured the baby is getting adequate nutrition. Yes, I’m about to go to bed. I am going to read for a while but I’ll be sure not to stay up too late. I’ll let you know how I slept and what I had for breakfast when you call at the usual time in the morning. Goodnight.’
She didn’t wait for a response, knowing she’d neatly summarised everything he wanted to know. It was all about her health—and the baby’s. She slammed the phone back onto the receiver, totally irritated.
Fortunately, she had all the paperwork ever generated by her company to work through and—largely—keep her mind off a) worrying about her baby and b) worrying about where Blake was—and with whom—and how she could work her way through this impossible situation.
She’d decided to get everything up to date, knowing the end was nigh for her involvement in the company. While it had been small it had been OK, but with success had come expansion and now it was too big for her to manage alone—especially with her child coming. And she wanted to hand it over completely rather than work with someone else as boss. With her time then freed, she’d explore some of her other ideas.
So during the long daylight hours she went through box after box, file after file, and made sure everything was just right. She compiled lists of contacts and wrote up a guide about the daily processes so that someone could walk in, read it and pick up where she’d left off. If she was going to walk away from Cally’s Cuisine, she needed it to be a clean break.
Eleven o’clock the next morning, on the floor in the midst of a pile of papers, she tensed. But her phone sat silent. She wandered over to her desk and stared at it, waiting for it to light up with an incoming call.
Five past eleven—still silent.
Ten past eleven—nada.
Quarter past … twenty past … twenty-five past.
Had she finally got rid of him with her smart-alec spiel last night? For the next two hours she couldn’t focus on her work at all—instead she tried to quell the anxiety that something was wrong. Finally her mobile rang. She glanced at the screen. It was Blake. She expelled the biggest breath, then toughened up. She was busy. She let it ring. Two seconds later it rang again. And then a third time—four, five, six. At that point she switched it to mute and got back to her organising. She only had a couple of last boxes to go through. She climbed up onto her chair, reaching up to the top shelf of her bookcase. She heard the door behind her opening and figured it was Mel. She was utterly unprepared for the loud shout.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
She spun on the chair, overbalanced and fell down onto the floor, only just landing on her feet with a wobble and wild waving of her arms. Then she looked up and in a nanosecond registered the tall, muscled man with the blazing eyes and knew that, so far, she was failing in her attempt to get over the lust.
Irritated, she frowned at his glare and her own fear, heart beating hard against her ribs. ‘Tidying up my paperwork.’
‘You shouldn’t be standing up there, for heaven’s sake. What if you’d landed badly just then?’
‘I only fell because you gave me such a fright barging in here shouting,’ she retorted, a little over-defensive because she knew he was right and she had given herself more than a bit of a fright. She launched straight on the offensive. ‘Are we still getting married in a few days or are you over that moment of madness?’
‘Not madness, Cally—our getting married is a supremely rational decision.’
‘I’m amazed you even recognised me, it’s been that long since you saw me.’
‘Cally …’ he strolled towards her, lips twitching—the first sign of relaxation in his tense stance ‘… have you been missing me?’
‘Certainly not.’ Good thing she wasn’t a little wooden boy with a pointy nose, it’d be six foot long by now.
‘Don’t you want to know why you haven’t seen me? Why I haven’t been round every night taking you to dinner and wooing you with flowers and chocolates and non-alcoholic sparkling grape juice?’
If he could be sarcastic so could she and he would never know that a large part of her wished he’d been doing just that. ‘I was hoping you’d seen the error of your ways and were distancing yourself so you could retract your crazy proposition.’
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
