I will always treasure the memories I have of our relationship. The world would be a better place if everyone could have a dad like you.
Rest in peace. xxx
Contents
WHEN THE SEVENTH TEST came back positive, Emily knew it was time to face the truth. Face it or spend a fortune on pregnancy tests until there wasn’t a pharmacy she could walk into in the whole of London without blushing with an ‘it’s me again’ grimace. She’d thought buying a jumbo box of tampons was embarrassing, but a basket full of pregnancy tests was way worse. There was no avoiding it. Those little blue lines weren’t lying even if she wished they were.
She. Was. Pregnant.
Not that she didn’t want to have a baby. Some day, with some nice guy who was madly in love with her and had married her at a big, white wedding first.
Her first ever one-night stand and look what had happened. How could she be so fertile? How could condoms be so unreliable? How could she have slept with a man so out of her league? Emily was all for aiming high in life, but a Greek billionaire? And not one of those short, fat, balding middle-aged ones, like those in her local deli, but a six-foot-four heart-stoppingly gorgeous man who had eyes so brown you could lose yourself in them.
Which she had promptly done. Completely and utterly lost herself in a sizzling sexual encounter unlike anything she’d experienced before. Which, truth be told, was not saying much, because her experience could hardly be described as extensive given she’d wasted seven years with her ex-partner Daniel. Seven years. Argh! Why couldn’t the number seven be lucky for her like everyone else? For seven long years she’d waited for a proposal. It had got so bad that every time her ex had bent down on one knee to pick something up off the floor she would get all excited thinking this was it—the moment she’d been waiting for.
It had never happened.
What had happened instead was she’d got cheated on. The ignominy of being betrayed was bad enough, but to be left for a male lover was a whole new level of humiliation. How could she have been the last to know Daniel was gay?
But it wasn’t the betrayal that hurt her the most. It was the loss of being a part of a couple; the shock of being single for the first time in so long she had forgotten how to be single. Going out at night without a partner by her side felt weird, like going out with only one shoe on. Or eating in a restaurant on her own, working her way through a meal, wondering if everyone was speculating if she’d been stood up or something.
She used to love going out to dinner with Daniel, who was a bit of a food and wine connoisseur. They would try different restaurants and cuisines and sit for hours over a meal, discussing the food, the presentation, the wine and even the other diners. She used to love coming home from work knowing she had someone to talk to about her day. Daniel had been her ‘guess what happened to me today’ person, her sounding board, her back-up, her anchor. The person who’d provided the stability she’d craved since she was a child.
She hadn’t had much luck since with dating. Her New Age relationship-therapist mother said it was because she was subconsciously sabotaging her male relationships because of her father issues. Father issues. And whose fault was it she didn’t have a father? Her mother hadn’t managed to get his name and number when she’d had sex with him under a rain-soaked tarpaulin at a music festival.
Emily looked at the pregnancy test again. No. She wasn’t having a nightmare. Well, she was. A living nightmare. A nightmare that involved fronting up to commitment-phobe Loukas Kyprianos and telling him he was going to be a father.
Oh, joy.
Such a task would be a whole lot easier if he had called her in the month since their night of bed-wrecking, pulse-throbbing sex. Or sent a text message. Or an email. A carrier pigeon, even. Given her some tiny thread of hope he might want to see her again.
Although, come to think of it, she hadn’t exactly done herself any favours in that department. She could write a book on how to get a guy to lose interest in one date. When she was nervous she talked too much. Way too much. When she gushed like that, she didn’t just wear her heart on her sleeve but on every visible part of her body. A couple of drinks down and she’d mentioned her dream of marriage, four kids and a dog—an Irish Retriever, no less. To a man who had a reputation as an easy come, easy go playboy.
What was wrong with her?
Emily walked out of the bathroom and picked up her phone. No missed calls. No text messages...apart from four from her mother with links to her prescribed daily meditation and
