Politely telling the staff that she neither wanted nor needed anything, she paced around one of the vast reception rooms, as she waited for him to come home, feeling at a loss. With a heavy heart she acknowledged that she’d been walking on a tightrope for all these weeks and she knew the time had come to talk to him.
To say what?
She hadn’t decided.
Pace, pace, pace over the polished wooden floors she went, wondering if some sixth sense had warned Vito that she was on the warpath and he’d deliberately chosen to work even later than usual as a result. She knew how much he loathed ‘scenes’ because he had taken great pains to inform her, and up until now she hadn’t felt inclined to complain about a situation she had voluntarily signed up for. But something had happened today in that balloon-filled room. She’d had some kind of epiphany and her restraint had flown out of the window, so that by the time Vito walked into the reception room where she was lying on the sofa staring sightlessly at a magazine, she couldn’t contain her rage.
‘Here you are—at last!’ She threw the magazine down and his eyes narrowed.
A pair of black eyebrows swooped upwards. ‘Is something the matter, Flora?’
His cool, almost indifferent query only added fuel to the fire and Flora sucked in a deep breath, knowing it would serve her purpose better if she stayed calm—but any type of serenity seemed to be beyond her as all her repressed emotions bubbled to the surface. ‘You’re going fishing in October!’ she accused.
Vito almost laughed because she made his pursuit of salmon sound as reprehensible as if he’d acquired another mistress and was keeping two of them concurrently on the go. But he didn’t laugh. He might often have been accused of coldness but he wasn’t stupid and he could see she was angry—angrier than he’d ever imagined she could be.
‘Yes, I am,’ he agreed. ‘Do you have a problem with that?’
‘Do I have a problem with that?’ she echoed. ‘Vito, what are you thinking? You do realise we’ll have a newborn by then?’
A single word leapt from out of her diatribe and hung there in terrible isolation, like the blade of a guillotine, hovering above his head.
We’ll.
How could one small word assume such inappropriate and presumptuous significance?
He raised his eyebrows. ‘And?’
But his determination to remain cool didn’t have the desired effect because she leapt up off the sofa as if it was contaminated.
‘Idon’t have the luxury of going away on some luxury trip!’ she accused him hotly. ‘Because I’ll be looking after a baby.’ She paused and sucked in an angry breath before staring at him very steadily. ‘Your baby.’
In the beat which followed Vito felt a sense of panic rising up inside him and he dealt with it in a way which had always proved fail-safe in the past. ‘You will have childcare help around the clock,’ he assured her. ‘You know that.’
‘Oh, for goodness sake! That’s not what I’m talking about!’ she objected. ‘You’re still in denial, aren’t you? You haven’t actually accepted that this baby is really happening—whether you like it or not!’
He shot the words out like bullets. ‘Things will get back to normal.’
‘But that’s where you’re wrong, Vito. They won’t. Not like you’re used to. Not like before. It’s going to be a completely different kind of normal. I know that from when I had to care for Amy. Nothing will ever be the same.’ She hesitated. ‘And deep down, you probably don’t really want it to.’
Her voice had grown almost gentle and in many ways, Vito found that more difficult to deal with than her anger.
‘What are you talking about?’ he questioned forbiddingly.
‘I think you already love this baby more than you know.’ She took a step towards him and instinctively, he tensed. ‘I saw your face when I was having a scan,’ she informed him softly. ‘I saw how choked up you were.’
Howdareshe try to second-guess him, he thought furiously. To put herself inside his head and tell him what he wasthinking, instead of listening to what he was actually saying to her. Wasn’t this his worst nightmare come true—all the mess and misunderstanding of human emotion, right here—in his home, like a nest of hornets? Didn’t that cancel out the surprising fact that living with her had been more delightful than he’d ever expected?
Becausethiswas the reality of letting a woman into your life.
The breath in his throat was raw and ragged and now he felt the hot burn of guilt. Damn her—why was she making him feel soguilty? ‘I made the fishing arrangements a while back,’ he stated coldly. ‘Before you even came to live here. And even then, I was pretty sure you would have returned to England before the birth.’
‘You’re completely missing the point!’ she howled, lifting her hands in the air in obvious frustration. ‘You can’t just stick us in a box, no matter how much you’d like to. Your baby shouldn’t be something youcompartmentalise!’
Vito felt the quick beat of alarm, knowing he needed to close this down, and quickly. And what better way than with the truth? Even though initially she might find it unpalatable, surely it would be better for her to confront it in the long run.
‘Look, this isn’t going to work, the two of us,’ he said flatly. ‘Not long-term. Your stay here was only ever intended to be temporary and nothing has changed. You are a wonderful woman in so many ways, but I cannot be the man or the father you and the baby need, and deserve.’
‘What are you talking about?’ she whispered.
