had felt during her depression, had gushed back and threatened to drown her. Lucien had gently drawn away and watched her with a soul-destroying questioning, as though wanting to understand. Only after did it dawn on her that this was a key skill of any Lothario. The pretence to care.
But that night he had brought her to his bedroom and, her body weak with longing though her heart had been afraid, she had willingly gone. And he had made love to her, slowly and tenderly. And after she had cried in his bathroom when she’d realised how empty her life was...and how stupid, stupid, stupid she was to have slept with her womanising boss.
Now, as he faced the consequences of that night, he ran a hand across the deep frown lines of his forehead and muttered, ‘Zut!’
Unexpected sadness pulled hard in her chest. A baby should bring joy, not this shock. What was he even thinking?
Did he hate her for this?
Bitterly regret the fire that had raged between them in the garden and the seconds when they had become one and senselessly forgot all thoughts as to the need to use protection?
Regret the baby growing inside her?
A fierce protectiveness surged through her.
Dismayed at how her hands were trembling, she pulled her notebook from her handbag and opened it to the pages where she had bullet-pointed her action plan. Needing the comfort of seeing in black and white her strategy for coping with this shocking but incredible turn in her life. ‘My doctor confirmed two days ago that I’m almost eight weeks pregnant. My apartment here in London is too small to raise a baby so I’ve decided I’ll move to the countryside, close to where my parents live. I will get work locally.’
He waved off her words with an impatient flick of his hand.
For five, ten, twenty seconds he stared at her intently, his gaze burning a hole in her heart.
He leaned a little closer, his shoulders tense, his eyes scanning her features like an interrogator searching for tell-tale body-language slips in a crime suspect. ‘Are you certain that I’m the father?’
The lawyer in her knew that it was a reasonable question. But the woman in her, the mother-to-be, the idealist who believed in truth, fairness and honour, felt his question like a slap. She felt her throat constrict, a heaviness invade her sinuses, a burning sensation in her eyes. She was not going to cry. She was strong. A fighter. She sucked in some air. He was the serial dater, not her.
‘I haven’t slept with another man in a very long time. What happened between us was not typical for me,’ she said fiercely.
She paused and cringed at having given him too much information and wondered why she felt she had to justify herself to him. Annoyed that she was doing so, she pulled in a steadying breath. ‘I want nothing from you. I don’t need financial support and I know a baby will not fit into your lifestyle. I want to give my child security and stability, a happy childhood. I’ve told you that you will be a father because you have the right to know but I don’t want or need you in our lives.’
‘I DON’T WANT or need you in our lives.’
Charlotte’s words smashed into him.
His car, now opposite the entrance to the darkly historic Tower of London, was snarled up in a herd of London double-decker red buses and he had to rein in the desire to leap from the car and run. To run off the adrenaline twitching in his muscles, drying out his mouth, spinning his heart in crazy arcs.
He was going to be a father.
Something he’d never wanted to be.
Never wanting the responsibility, the fear of failing his child, never wanting to mess up, never wanting to have to face the fact that he was no better than his own father.
And he had always believed that a child deserved to be brought up in a loving environment with committed, responsible parents. Everything he didn’t have.
But a failed, tempestuous, torturous marriage when he was in his late teens had proved to him that he was totally incapable of any such commitment.
And now, before he could even start to process it all, to make sense of this turn in his life, Charlotte was trying to snatch it away.
Those sea-green eyes steadily held his stare when he looked back at her, the only hint of her nervousness in how she fingered the cream lined pages of her notebook.
He leaned a little closer to her. She backed away, her hand rising to touch against the edge of her delicate jawline.
Pain radiated in his own jawline, moving up through his clamped teeth and into his cheekbones. The scar above his ear throbbing, throbbing, throbbing. ‘As you’re pregnant, I’m going to ask you nicely to explain exactly what you mean when you say you don’t want me in your lives.’
She recoiled a little at first but then sat more upright in her seat, both hands running over the material of her black skirt. She settled challenging eyes on him. ‘You don’t want to be a father, not with your lifestyle and commitments... Let’s not get into an argument about this.’
‘Are you saying that I wouldn’t be a good father?’
Her head snapped back at his growl. Crossing one long leg over the other, she held her hands in a tight bunch on her lap. ‘Oh, come on, you’re constantly travelling, your social life keeps at least three celebrity magazines in business. Are you seriously telling me that you have time to fit being a father into that schedule? That you even want to be a father?’
Irritation tightened his chest. She might be right in everything she said, but a sense of being cheated out of something he hadn’t even begun to understand had him ask quietly, ‘And you think you have the right to make that decision for me?’
She grabbed her black leather handbag off the floor of the car and sat it on her lap. She lobbed her notebook into it and hugged the hard lines of the small rectangular bag to her stomach. ‘When it comes to protecting my baby, yes.’
He inhaled a deep breath. ‘Are you seriously saying that you have to protect this child from me?’
‘Well, you’re hardly “father of the year” material, are you? I don’t believe for one minute that you really want the responsibility of a child.’
She had to be kidding.
‘I’m a CEO of a company with a thirty-billion turnover, for crying out loud. Responsible should be my middle name.’
She gave him a satisfied look, the look of a prosecutor knowing they had caught the defendant out. ‘Tell me, just how many companies have you acquired in the past ten years?’
He folded his arms. ‘Sixteen.’
‘And how many countries have you lived in?’
‘What are you getting at, Charlotte?’
‘The way you constantly move around the globe is hardly the sign of a man able to give stability and commitment to a child, is it?’
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