It cut through Tory like a knife. She hadn’t finished her story but she couldn’t now. It was pointless, unfair even.
‘So we haven’t a problem?’ He raised a hand to cup her cheek.
The tenderness in the gesture almost undid her. But he was right. We didn’t have a problem. She did. Not his fault at all.
‘No,’ she agreed.
‘We can go on as we are,’ he added.
Tory could have nodded. So much easier to lie. But she suddenly felt sick to her stomach.
‘Excuse me.’ She rose to her feet as she realised she was actually going to be sick. ‘I have to…’
She couldn’t think of any invention so she just took to her heels down the corridor to the bathroom of steel and glass. She didn’t bother locking the door. Making it to the bowl in time seemed more important.
When Lucas tracked her down, she was still leaning over the sink, the cold tap running as she washed her mouth out. She sensed him behind her and glanced into the mirror to catch his image.
‘I can’t say I’ve ever had that effect on a woman before.’ Lucas hid his true feelings behind humour.
‘It’s not you.’ She straightened and immediately felt dizzy.
He saw her sway and, catching her arm, led her to a window-seat. ‘Just the prospect of continuing to live with me.’
She shook her head. ‘I do love you,’ she admitted softly. ‘I just…just feel trapped.’
‘You’re lying,’ he accused. ‘Trapped doesn’t come into it, not when you love someone.’
There was a bitter note to his voice that Tory had never heard before. Perhaps she deserved it but she really couldn’t cope with acrimony in her current state.
Tears sprung to her eyes and slowly, soundlessly, slid down her face. She didn’t look at him but she heard his exasperated sigh.
‘For God’s sake, don’t cry on me, Tor… Here.’ He handed her a tissue from a box on the shelf.
She used it to wipe her tears but more just replaced them. It wasn’t the first time in the last week that she’d been a helpless weeping mess—or the first time she’d thrown up.
‘Look, I’m sorry—’ he bent to kneel at her side ‘—but I’ve let down enough women gently to read the signs. I need you to be straight up and honest with me. Just say the words: I don’t love you, Luc. Then one of us will pack a bag—me, for now—and we’ll shake hands and wish each other well.’
He tipped her chin up so he could see her face. She tried really hard to make it easy on them both. Got as far as ‘I don’t lo…’, then couldn’t go on.
He must see the truth in her eyes, anyway. She adored him. Was absolutely, irrevocably, painfully in love with this man.
‘Please don’t…’ She appealed for him to understand.
Lucas didn’t but he still put his arms round her and held her and rocked her until her crying subsided.
Tory clung to him, her resolve weakened by his show of compassion. She couldn’t leave him. Not today. Tomorrow, maybe. Or some time later. When it showed.
For now she wanted to go on loving him, making love to him as, tears dried, she turned her head and sought his mouth with hers.
Lucas let her kiss him. Began to kiss her back. Lifted her up and carried her to their bed. Sought oblivion in her sweet, slender body. Found it too for a few precious moments.
Then he lay there, watching her catch her breath, rediscovering for the hundredth time how beautiful she was to him, and said words he promised himself he wouldn’t.
‘Stay with me, Tor—’ He just stopped short of begging. ‘Give it another chance. I’ll—’
Tory put a hand to his mouth, unable to bear it and finally used the truth as a weapon to stop him.
‘I’m pregnant.’
She didn’t add to it, didn’t need to. It hung between them like an exploded bombshell that left silence in its wake.
This time the emotions crossing his face were all too readable. Shock. Disbelief. Anger.
‘Run that past me again,’ he demanded at length.
She repeated simply, ‘I’m pregnant.’
‘You can’t be.’ Not half an hour earlier she’d told him exactly that. He sat up away from her in the bed. He couldn’t look at her and think straight.
Tory sat up, too, leaning back against the pillows.
‘I know I can’t be, but I am.’ She’d found out this week, although her body had been showing the signs for months. ‘The doctors were wrong all that time ago or maybe it was a chance in a million and I got lucky.’
‘Lucky?’ He glanced round to challenge her choice of word.
‘Yes.’ It was how she felt, even now when his, ‘Who needs kids?’ had told her how he would feel. ‘I’ve spent half my life thinking I’d never have children and now this.’
‘You’re keeping it?’ he added.
‘Yes.’ She’d never considered otherwise. ‘I didn’t plan it but now it’s happened, I’ll live with it. That’s the reason I’m leaving. I can’t and don’t expect anything from you, Luc.’
They had once briefly discussed contraception. He’d offered to be responsible and she’d claimed to have it covered. The mistake had been hers.
He twisted round fully and misread the mute apology on her face. ‘It’s not mine, is it?’
Tory hadn’t anticipated such a question. Wishful thinking? Or did he genuinely believe she’d been unfaithful to him?
She shrugged. ‘If that’s what you’d prefer.’
‘Of course it isn’t!’ His voice rose with his temper.
But Tory felt too emotionally fragile for a slanging match. She shifted to the edge of the bed and, picking up his discarded shirt as a shield, stood up.
He followed, making no attempt to hide his nakedness. In fact, he took the shirt from her nerveless fingers and threw it on the bed. Then he stared at her, down at the slight curve of her belly.
Tory trembled at his intensity then actually flinched when he put the palm of his hand above the place where their baby was growing.
‘It’s mine now.’ He stroked her flesh.
The most intimate of acts without being remotely sexual. ‘I—I don’t understand.’
‘You’re mine,’ he told her, ‘so it’s mine. Simple. Just like I’m yours. What happened before we were together has no significance.’
Tory finally caught up. He thought she’d come to him already pregnant. And now, here he was, lying through his teeth—she knew fine he hated the idea of her with another man—so he could keep her.
‘I do so love you, Lucas Ryecart.’ She wanted him to know that. ‘But it’s not going to work. “Who needs kids?” Remember? That’s what you said less than half an hour ago.’
His brow creased, as if he couldn’t recall ever thinking such a thing, far less saying it, even as he admitted, ‘Okay, I said it. But what do you expect? The girl I’m planning to marry has just told me she can’t have children. So I tell her I want four? I don’t think so.’
‘Marry?’ Tory repeated in a slight daze.
‘The sooner, the better, don’t you think?’ he countered.
Tory still looked at him in disbelief. ‘Isn’t that rather conventional?’
He grimaced. ‘These days conventional is: the man runs out on the women, leaving her holding the baby. I’m assuming that’s what he’s done.’
‘Who?’
‘Whoever.’
Tory could have been really mad with him but for the facts a) he was willing to look after her and the child, regardless, and b) she loved him, also regardless.
‘My last lover was a sports commentator who worked for ITV,’ she began to recount.
‘I don’t think I want to hear this.’
‘Well, tough! Just listen. We had a brief, rather tepid affair that ended amicably when he went off for a month to cover the World Cup.’
‘But that was a couple of years ago?’
‘Quite, and I’m three months pregnant.’
He looked conf
used but Tory decided to wait until the penny dropped by itself and, feeling a bit absurd arguing naked, went to pick up her clothes from the floor.
Lucas watched her dressing, then dressed too, but on automatic pilot as the true situation dawned on him.
‘It’s my baby.’ It was a statement this time.
Tory turned and awarded him a somewhat cheeky grin. ‘’Fraid so, but there’s always plastic surgery.’
‘It’s not funny.’ For once Lucas wanted a serious conversation.
But Tory felt skittish. He’d asked her to marry him! He’d asked her to marry him while thinking she was having someone else’s baby! What other love token did a girl need?
‘So why did you let me believe otherwise?’ he demanded, trying to remain angry with her.
‘Not guilty, your honour,’ she threw back. ‘I said, “I’m pregnant.” You said, “It’s not mine, is it?” I rest my case…I’m starving. Fancy some supper?’
He looked ready to explode at the change of subject but Tory was too happy to care as she walked back through the living area to the kitchen beyond. All week she’d fretted over his reaction. She still wasn’t sure precisely what it was but telling her he loved her was certainly an improvement on what she’d visualised.
He trailed her through, still arguing the toss. ‘But why else keep it a secret? Why not tell me earlier? You knew days ago, didn’t you?’
‘I thought…’ she paused to sort it out in her own head ‘…you’d imagine it was deliberate. That I’d got pregnant to trap you. I felt bad, too. You’d made it plain you weren’t planning on children and I said I had it covered. I really did think it was impossible, you know?’
He nodded, accepting her word, and realised how each had misread the other. ‘In point of fact, kids were part of my five-year plan.’
‘Five-year plan?’
‘First year you live with me. Second year, I convince you to marry me. Third and fourth we consolidate. Fifth, we reproduce.’
He ticked each off with a finger and Tory was left wondering if he really could have thought that far ahead.
‘I’ve wrecked that, then.’ She grimaced in apology.
‘So, things will happen a little quicker.’ He shrugged and, coming round the side of the breakfast bar, put his arms round her waist from behind. ‘And money isn’t a problem so you can choose whether to take a career break or hire a good old British nanny or work part-time if the boss is amenable,’ he ended on a wry note.
‘And is he?’
‘Very.’
It was banter but Tory added more seriously, ‘Is he really? To fatherhood, I mean.’
‘Hell, yes.’ He grinned back. ‘If I wait much longer, I’d be too old to swing a baseball bat.’
‘Cricket bat, you mean,’ she couldn’t resist correcting. ‘Anyway, it could be a girl.’
‘Either one will suit,’ he replied and Tory didn’t have to see his face to know he was smiling.
She turned in his arms all the same and reached up to kiss him on the cheek and say, ‘Thank you.’
He slanted her a quizzical look. ‘What was that for?’
‘Making it all right.’ Tory still couldn’t believe her luck.
‘All right?’ he echoed and laughed aloud. ‘It’s goddamn wonderful!’
And Tory finally trusted it was real, the life of happiness stretching before her, coloured vivid by the man at her side.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-7286-0
THE BOSS’S SECRET MISTRESS
First North American Publication 2004.
Copyright © 2001 by Alison Fraser.
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