glad…we do need to talk,’ Hope conceded quietly, backing towards the stairs. ‘If you wait in the sitting room, I’ll get dressed.’
‘Why bother?’ Andreas was tracking her every tiny move with keen male attention.
‘Because I’m not wearing enough clothes,’ she mumbled uncertainly, finding it incredibly hard to concentrate beneath Andreas’s steady appraisal.
‘You’re not wearing any,’ Andreas contradicted huskily. ‘Do you hear me complaining?’
‘Don’t talk like that,’ she begged, her tension rising because she knew she wanted him to talk like that to her. In fact her protest was a truly appalling lie when she knew that more than anything else in the world at that moment she wanted him to kiss her.
Her retreat from the door had exposed the jacket slung down carelessly across the window seat. Andreas treated the garment to a fulminating scrutiny. His hard jaw line clenched taut. ‘Whose jacket is that? Daddy Bear’s?’
Disconcerted, Hope followed the path of his eyes. Her fine brows pleated when she saw that Ben, who had departed a couple of hours earlier, had forgotten to take his jacket with him.
‘Hope?’ Andreas prompted icily. ‘That’s a man’s jacket.’
Never in her life until then had Hope been so tempted to tell a lie for the sake of peace. While she was wondering whether an elderly gardener with expensive tastes could be the likely owner of a designer leather jacket, time ran out.
‘Is Campbell here?’ Andreas slung at her wrathfully. ‘Upstairs in the bedroom?’
Hope exploded into emotive speech, ‘No, of course not. He’s not here but he would have every right to be if he wanted to be! Vanessa may have given me permission to be here but the cottage belongs to her family and Ben’s.’
Andreas paced forward a step. His lean, strong face was set like stone, his brilliant eyes hard as steel. ‘When was Campbell here?’
‘That’s none of your business,’ Hope dared shakily.
His intent gaze flared to a volatile gold. ‘You made it my business again. Either you’re with him or you’re alone. If you’re still with him, I want to know about it!’
‘I’m not discussing Ben with you. You have no right to ask me these questions—’
‘If you’re still involved with Campbell, why did you approach me?’ Andreas launched at her in raw condemnation.
Hope lifted her head high, turquoise eyes dark with stress. ‘This is your baby. It’s got nothing to do with Ben, so just leave him out of things—’
‘That’s a fantasy…I finished with you months ago. How the hell could it be my baby?’ Andreas thundered at her in fierce frustration.
Hope flinched from the violence flaring like a silent lightning strike in the atmosphere. ‘In another week, I’ll be six months pregnant. Six months ago I hadn’t even met Ben Campbell.’
Andreas had fallen very still. He fixed sceptical eyes on her and stared. ‘You can’t be six months pregnant.’
‘The doctor says that some women…of my build,’ she selected with care, ‘don’t look like they’re expecting until the last couple of months.’
His normal healthy colour noticeably absent below his bronzed skin, Andreas coiled his restive hands into powerful fists and half lifted his arms in emphasis. ‘There’s no way you can be six months pregnant,’ he repeated, less stridently it was true, but the repetition of that assurance broke the thin hold she had on her control.
‘Isn’t there?’ Hope gasped, angry pink blooming in her cheeks. ‘You could not be more wrong. Furthermore, if it’s anyone’s fault I’m going to be a mother, it’s yours!’
‘Mine?’ Andreas echoed. ‘You start telling me this crazy story—’
‘What crazy story would that be? You got me pregnant. Who was it who said that he would take care of the precautions?’ Hope shouted at him in a tempestuous fury of frustration and pain. ‘Who assured me that I could safely leave everything to you? And then who didn’t bother when it didn’t suit him? In the shower, in the middle of the night, on the bathroom floor…that time in the limo…’
A slow, dulled rise of blood below his olive skin demarcated the superb slant of his high cheekbones
‘How is it that you took that kind of risk with me? Over and over again? How is it that you then have the cheek to repeatedly insist that some other man must be the father of my child? You’ve got a very short memory, Andreas—’
‘No…I remember that time in the limo,’ Andreas breathed thickly, fabulous golden eyes not quite focused, a frown line between his ebony brows as though he were literally looking back through time. ‘I had flown in from Oslo…I called you to meet me…that…that was pretty much unforgettable.’
Her small fingers curved like talons into her palms. ‘I’m so glad it was memorable enough for you to recall.’
Andreas studied her stomach as covertly as he could. But he could not look away. His baby. It could be; it might be. He was in shock. ‘Now that you’ve said how far along this pregnancy is, I can see there’s a stronger possibility that the baby is mine.’
‘You’re so generous,’ Hope said in a small, tightly restrained voice.
‘I’ll still want DNA testing after the child’s born,’ Andreas assured her, not wishing to seem a pushover while he skimmed his gaze over Ben Campbell’s jacket. His stubborn jaw line hardened. He still had to deal with Campbell. He wasn’t prepared to accept Campbell’s inclusion in any corner of the picture. A miniature Nicolaidis, a son or daughter, his first child, his baby would soon be born. It was amazing how different a slant that put on things.
Pale and stiff, Hope inwardly cringed at the threat of DNA tests. He would take nothing on trust. All over again, she felt hurt and humiliated. ‘That’s up to you but it won’t be necessary.’
‘What’s the state of play between you and Campbell?’
Hope coloured in embarrassment and compressed her lips. ‘Take a guess.’
The inference that her pregnancy had wrecked her affair with Campbell put Andreas on a high. Satisfaction zinged through him in an adrenalin rush. He had to resist the urge to smile in triumph. ‘I imagine you don’t qualify as ideal playmate material with my baby inside you.’
‘Ben doesn’t see me in that light. He’s a friend—’
‘Whereas I never wanted to be your friend,’ Andreas incised with a look of unashamed challenge in his clear gaze. ‘I wanted you in my arms, by my side and in my bed. I didn’t feed you any rubbish lines about friendship.’
‘Nor did you mention the fact that you thought of me as your mistress.’
‘Labels aren’t important.’ Andreas angled back his arrogant dark head, refusing to award her the point. ‘Many women would be proud to be called my mistress.’
‘But
