‘Er, no,’ she muttered with a grimace.
‘Then we can be friends, if nothing else,’ Luca told her with the easy English he had acquired while working in New York for several years, his dark eyes continuing to gleam with warmth and acceptance as he laid his hand down on hers in a soothing gesture.
And a friend worked for Tabby at that moment as nothing else could have done because, as well as Luca being very easy on the eye, Tabby had no friends in whom she had confided her secret. Why? The majority of her uni pals would have suggested a termination for an inconvenient, uncommitted pregnancy and that wasn’t what she wanted, so she would’ve been out of step with them.
Aristide strode into the bakery with his bodyguards in tow like an invading Viking horde and froze in his path when he paused to take in the sight of themotherof his child having her hand fondled by another man, clad in chef whites. For a split second, he hovered in an uncharacteristic act of hesitance.
Tabby saw him straight away. Really, there was no chance ofnotnoticing Aristide, the sheer height of him in a fancy dark suit, his gorgeous dark curly head held high, his keen dark golden eyes scanning the shop while the couple of males accompanying him fell back to the wall to watch him. Whoa, Aristide had a security team, she registered, wondering where they had been the day he visited Traxis.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to Luca as she rose from her seat. ‘I’ll see you later.’
Tabby stalked over to Aristide, attitude in every stressed line of her small, slender frame. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Are you serious?’ Aristide enquired in disbelief at that greeting. ‘We need to talk.’
Tabby thought through several incendiary replies and discarded them because she already knew that Aristide was stubborn, impatient and possibly even a little dramatic. She didn’t need him or any of that in her life but she hadn’t yet contrived to tell him that, so she could accept that, after her announcement that she was expecting his child, a further conversation had to be had. ‘Yes,’ she conceded, feeling generous. ‘But right now, I’m working—’
‘You’re the manager,’ he reminded her and she wondered how he knew that.
‘But this is a very busy shop and if I take time out to talk to you, something may come up,’ she pointed out while thinking, to her annoyance, that he had the most breathtakingly beautiful eyes of anyone she had ever met, liquid gold like a burnished sunset and surprisingly eloquent even when he wasn’t speaking. She sensed his urgency even though he had said nothing to express the feeling and it changed her mind.
Spinning round, she told the bakery’s senior sales assistant that she was in charge until Tabby’s return and, escorting Aristide back out onto the street, she unlocked her new front door again, apologising for the cases in their path.
‘You shouldn’t be lifting anything heavy up a staircase,’ Aristide told her unnecessarily, because she was already painfully aware of all the shoulds and shouldn’ts in her immediate pregnant future.
‘Are you going to take care of my luggage?’ she asked snarkily.
‘No, but my employees will,’ Aristide asserted smoothly.
‘Didn’t think you’d be doing it,’ Tabby commented snidely.
‘I’m not ashamed that I pay others to take care of the necessities of life,’ Aristide countered. ‘My talents lie in other fields.’
‘Not with the right word at the right time, if my experience of you can bear witness,’ Tabby told him tightly.
‘What transpired between us is entirely another story,’ Aristide replied with a hint of defensiveness, sufficient to compress her lips on further provocative remarks. After all, she had nothing to gain from arguing with Aristide, indeed it might even convince him to stay longer and she didn’t want that to happen.
Upstairs, she showed him into the tiny sitting room, smiling with relief when her cases were piled at the door, one after another.
‘Where’s your bedroom?’ Aristide asked suddenly. ‘I’ll move them there.’
‘The room at the end of the corridor,’ she supplied while thinking that she would be occupying her sister’s bedroom, sleeping inherbed withhersheets and that nothing around her actuallybelongedto her. Now that her sister was married, she no longer had much use for the apartment.
For the first time that was a rather deflating acknowledgement of the truth that, in getting pregnant and losing her independence, she had kind of become her twin’s dependant. She reddened, knowing her sister would argue with such a statement but feeling it all the same as she was the elder twin, the one who had been born first, the one who liked to think she was the leading, protective half of the pair. Only not any more…
Tabby was shaken to appreciate, when she emerged from those pointless thoughts, that Aristide had moved her luggage down to the bedroom all byhimself. It struck her that he was on his very best behaviour and that she would be rude if she offered him less. ‘Would you like coffee?’ she asked him as he reappeared, annoyingly looking not the least creased or out of breath from that physical effort.
‘No, thank you,’ he breathed, striding the small distance to the window, turning at the sight of the heavy traffic on the road outside and facing her again, dark eyes narrowed. ‘I need to ask you, but it may not suit you to respond right now. Are you planning to have this child?’
Shame engulfed Tabby in a heated surge and she coloured. It hadn’t occurred to her to think that he might be interested in asking such a very basic question. And yet it was an obvious question in today’s world. Aristide had more layers than she had allowed him to have in her imagination, where she had demonised him. ‘Yes. I will be having the baby,’ she told him rather woodenly because, ironically, it felt like a very personal question from him that she didn’t really want to answer even though common sense was warning her that it would be his baby as well.
Unexpectedly, Aristide appeared to relax at that admission and he smiled, moved to the armchair beside him and folded his big athletic frame down. ‘Then, if it’s not too late to change my mind, I would like coffee—’
Feeling a little dizzy at the surprise of that smile on such a subject, Tabby ducked into the kitchenette and then winced as the cupboard came up empty on the coffee that her twin rarely drank. ‘There’s no coffee…’ she muttered in the doorway.
Aristide shrugged a wide, strong shoulder. ‘I was only trying to be polite—’
‘Is it that much of an effort for you with me?’ she sliced in, unable to still the words on her tongue before she voiced them and then suddenly raising both hands. ‘Forget I said that! Possibly I’m in a hostile mood—’
