Maria threw her hands up in the air and turned her back to him, just to get a moment’s reprieve. He did this to her. Made her so feel so mad, so ungrounded…soexposed.
‘How long have you known?’ he asked from behind her.
And this time it was she who closed her eyes. He would never forgive her for keeping something like this from him. She’d known it from the moment she’d decided she needed to.
‘I needed time, Micha,’ she tried to explain.
‘How long?’
‘One month.’
His shock was a gasped exhale.
‘Were you…?’ He seemed to brace himself against the question on the tip of his tongue. ‘Were you waiting until…because you thought I would…?’
Realisation cut through her like a knife and she spun around to face him. ‘No, Micha. No,’ she rushed to reassure him. Whatever she felt about what had passed between them, whatever she thought about what he had done to her, she’d never have thought that he would try to convince her to terminate the pregnancy. Because while she didn’t know the man he had become, she knew the boy he had been.
He might have spent the last eleven years in Paris doing god knows what, but that didn’t mean she didn’t know him, hadn’t grown up with him, hadn’t seen the way he was with his mother, with the people he considered his, family, friends. The people that Micha considered his were protected in a way that went almost beyond necessary.
But how could she explain that it was that very thing that she’d feared would stifle her? Would do more harm to her than anything else?
He looked deep into her eyes, searching for the truth in her words. His second shuddered exhale she felt down to her bones and that was when she felt truly sorry that she’d kept their pregnancy from him. Before it was so quickly masked, she saw the wound her secret had inflicted upon him. The doubts and insecurities she had forgotten in the years spent apart from him.
And for the first time a dust-covered memory floated free. Micha, aged sixteen, boyish and nervously charming, signs of the man he would become beneath his skin. Hints of the flirtation that would become something more in barely a few months’ time, as they shared whispers of futures that they wanted. She’d told him about wanting to take over Gallo Group one day and he’d insisted she would. And when he’d haltingly confessed that he wanted a family, she’d told him she could see it, secretly hoping that perhaps it was something they could have together.
And here they were, nearly twelve years later and…
It was all so very wrong.
How had everything gone so wrong? Micha wondered, as he glared out the window at the placid lake, feeling anything but.
He was going to be a father.
Madonna mia.
He swept a hand through his hair in a way that he wanted to do with his life. He should have left, instead of coming into the living area and planting his feet. He needed time to marshal his thoughts. He felt it, the heady complex chaos of his thoughts filling his mind and stopping his tongue to a point of near silence.
There’s no problem. It just takes Micha longer than most to connect his words to his thoughts, the doctor had said when Gio had dragged him there, wanting to make sure there was no ‘problem’ with the sixteen-year-old who would become his right-hand man. Most had thought that his monosyllabic tendencies were down to either limited intelligence or stubbornness, but Gio had known from the beginning that there was nothing unintelligent about him. He just needed a little time, and a little encouragement to separate out his thoughts from his feelings.
But he didn’t have time. Not now, he thought, pushing aside the familiar nauseating panic that threatened to clog his throat. He needed to think. And quickly. Because if he didn’t get this right, he knew, heknew, Maria would wriggle out of his clasp and disappear. And he couldn’t let that happen.
He was going to be a father.
He, who had never known anything but violence, fear and abandonment from his own. It was true that once, so long ago now he could almost think it unreal, he’d wanted a family. But that was before. Before he had learned that such things were not meant for a man like him.
Because no matter how far he climbed out of the gutter, it was still there: the dirt on his hands that meant he’d never be good enough. Certainly not for Maria Gallo. Only now, there was no choice in the matter.
She had known for a month and she hadn’t told him? The realisation hit him like a freight train, dredging up the question from the deepest part of his soul. The part that had clung fiercely to a relationship that was long since gone.
‘Would you have told me?’ he demanded.
Maria looked at the floor.
‘Yes. Eventually,’ she said in surrender. ‘I just wanted…time. Everything changed, Micha. Everything I thought I knew, everything I thought would be, it’s all gone and this,’ she said, sweeping a hand over a bump that was barely there, ‘this happened and I just… I wanted time.’
He, of all people, understood and knew that feeling. He could appreciate the quiet desperation in her words. He really could. But they didn’t have the luxury of time. And he didn’t have the luxury of being nice.
‘Well, that time is up,’ he said, pulling out his phone and firing off a message to his assistant cancelling all meetings.
