if I had?’ His voice was deadly soft. ‘Would you still have received me like this?’
She saw from the dark stare which lanced through her like a laser that it was not a rhetorical question. ‘No. Probably not,’ she admitted.
Mrs Stafford, who had been gazing up at Paulo like a star-struck schoolgirl, now turned to Isabella with a look of reprimand. ‘Isabella—where are your manners? Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?’ She gave Paulo the benefit of a sickly smile.
Isabella swallowed. ‘Paulo, this is Rosemary Stafford—my boss. Paulo is—’
‘Very welcome,’ purred Mrs Stafford. ‘Very welcome indeed. Perhaps we can offer you a little refreshment after your journey? Isabella, why don’t you go and make Mr Dantas a drink?’
Paulo said, in Portuguese. ‘Get rid of her.’
Isabella felt inexplicably nervous. And certainly not up to defying him. ‘I wonder if you’d mind leaving us, Mrs Stafford? It’s just that I’d like to talk to my…friend—’ she hesitated over a word which did not seem appropriate ‘—in private.’
Rosemary Stafford’s pretty, painted mouth became a petulant-looking pout. ‘Yes, I expect you do. I expect you have many issues to resolve,’ she said, with stiff emphasis, and swept out of the sitting room, past where Charlie and Richie were hovering by the door, trying to listen to the conversation inside.
Paulo walked over to the door and gave the boys a slight, almost apologetic shrug of his shoulders, before quietly closing the door on them. And when he turned to face Isabella—she almost recoiled from the look of fury which burned from his eyes.
As though she were some insect he had just found squashed beneath his heel and he wished she would crawl right back where she had come from. But what right did he have to judge her? She thought of all she’d endured since arriving in England, and suddenly Paulo’s anger seemed little to bear, in comparison. She drew her shoulders back to meet his gaze without flinching.
‘You’d better start explaining,’ he said flatly.
‘I owe you no explanation.’
A pulse began a slow beat in his temple. ‘You don’t think so?’ he said quietly.
‘My pregnancy has nothing whatsoever to do with you, Paulo.’
He gave a hollow, bitter laugh. ‘Maybe in the conventional sense it doesn’t—but you involved me the moment you told your father that you were going to pay me a visit.’
She screwed her eyes up and stared at him in confusion. ‘But that was months ago! Before I left Brazil. And I did visit you. Remember? That day I came to see you in your flat?’
‘Oh, I most certainly do,’ he said, grimly resurrecting the memory he had spent months trying to forget. ‘I wondered then why you seemed so anxious. So jumpy.’ He had been intensely aroused by her that day, and had thought that the feeling was mutual—it had seemed the only rational explanation for the incredible tension between them. But he wasn’t going to tell her that. Not now. ‘I also sensed that you were holding back—something you weren’t telling me. And so you were.’ He shook his head. ‘My God!’ he said slowly.
‘And now you know!’
‘Yes, now I know,’ he agreed acidly. ‘I put your tired-ness down to jet-lag—when all the time…’ He looked down over at her swollen stomach with renewed amazement. ‘All the time you were pregnant. Pregnant! Carrying a baby.’ The word came out on a breath of disbelief. ‘How can this have happened, Bella?’
She met his accusing gaze and then she did flinch. ‘Do you really want me to answer that?’
‘No. You’re right. I don’t!’ He sucked in a hot, angry breath. ‘Don’t you realise that your father is worried sick about you?’
‘How can you know that?’
‘Because he rang me yesterday from Brazil.’
‘W-why should he ring you?’ she stumbled in confusion.
‘Think about it,’ he grated. ‘He asked me to come and see you, to find out what the problem is. Why your letters have been so vague, your phone-calls so infrequent.’ He shook his head and the black eyes lanced through her with withering contempt. ‘I certainly don’t relish telling him the reason why.’
‘So he still doesn’t know?’ she questioned urgently. ‘About the baby?’
‘It would seem not,’ he answered coldly. ‘Unless he’s a very good actor indeed. His main anxiety seemed to stem from the fact that he could not understand why you had chosen to flunk university to become an au pair.’
‘But he knew all that! I wrote to him—and told him that living in England was an education in itself!’ she protested.
She’d kept her father supplied with regular and fairly chatty letters—though carefully omitting to mention her momentous piece of news. As far as he knew, she would probably go back and repeat her final year at college. She hadn’t mentioned when she was going home and he hadn’t asked. And she thought that she’d convinced him that she was sophisticated enough to want to see the world. ‘I’ve been writing to him every single week!’
The chill did not leave his voice. ‘So he said. But unfortunately letters sent from abroad are read and reread and scoured for hidden meanings. Your father suspected that you were not happy, though he couldn’t put his finger on why that was. He asked me to come to see whether all was well.’ Another cold, hollow laugh. ‘And here I am.’
‘You needn’t have bothered!’
‘No, you’re right. I needn’t.’ His mouth curved with disdain as he gazed around the bland room, with its unadorned walls and rows of videos where there should have been books. Littered on the thick, cream carpet were empty chocolate wrappers. ‘My, my, my—this is certainly some classy hide-out you’ve chosen, Isabella!’ he drawled sarcastically.
His criticism was valid, but no less infuriating because of that. She struggled to find something positive to say about it. ‘I like the boys,’ she came up with finally. ‘I’ve grown very fond of them.’
‘You mean the two hooligans who nearly rode their skateboards straight into the path of my car?’
Isabella went white. ‘But they aren’t supposed to play with them in the road!’ How was she supposed to watch them twenty-four hours a day? ‘They know that!’
Paulo narrowed his eyes as he took a look at her pale, thin face, which seemed so at odds with her bloated body and felt adrenaline rush to fire his blood. He’d felt a powerful sense of injustice once before in his life, when his wife had died, but the feeling which enveloped him now came a pretty close second.
And this time he was not powerless to act.
‘Answer me one question,’ he commanded.
Isabella shook her head. This one she’d been anticipating. ‘I’m not telling you the name of the baby’s father, if that’s your question.’
‘It’s
