Aggie knew, deep down, that if she didn’t love him she would have accepted that marriage proposal. She would not have invested her emotions in a hopeless situation. She would have been able to see their union as an arrangement that made sense and would have been thankful that he was standing by her. Was it any wonder that he was now looking at her as though she had taken leave of her senses?
‘I don’t want us to carry on, waiting until the physical side of things runs out of steam and you start looking somewhere else,’ she told him bluntly. ‘I don’t want to become so disillusioned with you that I resent you being in my life. It wouldn’t be a good background for a child.’
‘Who says the physical side would run out of steam?’
‘It always has for you! Hasn’t it? Unless … I’m different? Unless what you feel for me is … different?’
Suddenly feeling cornered, Luiz fell back on the habits of a lifetime of not yielding to leading questions. ‘You’re having my baby. Of course you’re different.’
‘I’m beginning to feel tired, Luiz.’ Aggie wondered why she continued to hope for words that weren’t going to come. ‘And you’ve had a shock. I think we both need to take a little time out to think about things, and when we next meet we can discuss the practicalities.’
‘The practicalities … ?’ Luiz was finding it hard to get a grip on events.
‘You’ve been nagging me to move out of that house.’ Aggie smiled wryly. ‘I guess that might be something on the list to discuss.’ She stood up to head for her coat and he stilled her with his hand.
‘I don’t want you going back to that place tonight. Or ever. It’s disgusting. You have my baby to consider now.’
‘And that’s the word, Luiz—discuss. Which doesn’t mean you tell me what you want me to do and I obey.’
She began putting on her coat while Luiz watched with the feeling that she was slipping through his fingers.
‘You’re making a mistake,’ he ground out, barring her exit and staring down at her.
‘I think,’ Aggie said sadly, ‘the mistakes have already been made.’
CHAPTER TEN
LUIZ looked at the pile of reports lying on his desk eagerly awaiting his attention and swivelled his chair round to face the expanse of glass that overlooked the busy London streets several stories below.
It was another one of those amazing spring days: blue, cloudless skies, a hint of a breeze. It did nothing to improve his concentration levels. Or his mood, for that matter. Frankly, his mood was in urgent need of improvement ever since Aggie had announced her pregnancy over two months ago.
For the first week, he had remained convinced that she would come to her senses and accept his offer of marriage. He had argued for it from a number of fronts. He had demanded that she give him more good reasons why she couldn’t see it from his point of view. It had been as successful as beating his head against a brick wall. It had seemed to him, in his ever-increasing frustration, that the harder he tried to push the faster she retreated, so he had dropped the subject and they had discussed all those practicalities she had talked about.
At least there she had listened to what he had to say and agreed with pretty much everything. At least her pride wasn’t going to let her get in the way of accepting the massively generous financial help he had insisted on providing, although she had stopped short of letting him buy her the house of her dreams.
‘When I move into my dream house,’ she had told him, her mouth set in a stubborn line, ‘I don’t want to know that it’s been bought for me as part of a package deal because I happen to be pregnant.’
But she had moved out of the hovel two weeks previously, into a small, modern box in a pleasant part of London close to her job. The job which she insisted she would carry on doing until she no longer could, despite his protests that there was no need, that she had to look after herself.
‘I’m more than happy to accept financial help as far as the baby is concerned,’ she had told him firmly. ‘But there’s no need for you to lump me in the same bracket.’
‘You’re the mother of my child. Of course I’m going to make sure that you get all the money you need.’
‘I’m not going to be dependent on you, Luiz. I intend to carry on working until I have the baby and then I shall take it up again as soon as I feel the baby is old enough for a nursery. The hours are good at the school and there are all the holidays. It’s a brilliant job to have if you’ve got a family.’
Luiz loathed the thought of that just as he loathed the fact that she had managed to shut him out of her life. They communicated, and there were no raised voices, but she had withdrawn from him and it grated on him, made him ill-tempered at work, incapable of concentrating.
And now something else had descended to prey on his mind. It was a thought that had formulated a week ago when she had mentioned in passing that she would be going to the spring party which all the teachers had every year.
Somehow, he had contrived to ignore the fact that she had a social life outside him. Reminded of it, he had quizzed her on what her fellow teachers were like, and had discovered that they weren’t all female and they weren’t all middle-aged. They enjoyed an active social life. The teaching community was close-knit, with many teachers from different schools socialising out of work.
‘You’re pregnant,’ he had informed her. ‘Parties are a no-go area.’
‘Don’t worry. I won’t be drinking,’ she had laughed, and right then he had had a worrying thought.
She had turned down his marriage proposal, had put their relationship on a formal basis, and was this because she just wanted to make sure that she wasn’t tied down? Had he been sidelined because at the back of her mind, baby or no baby, she wanted to make sure that she could return to an active social life? One that involved other men, the sort of men she was normally drawn to? He had been an aberration. Was she eager to resume relationships with one of those creative types who weren’t mired in work and driven by ambition?
Luiz thought of the reports waiting on his desk and smiled sardonically. If only she knew … No one could accuse him of being mired in work now, or driven by ambition. Having a bomb detonate in his life had certainly compelled him to discover the invaluable art of delegation! If only his mother could see him now, she would be overjoyed that work was no longer the centre of his universe.
A call interrupted the familiar downward trend of his thoughts and he took it on the second ring.
He listened, scribbled something on a piece of paper and stood up.
For the first time in weeks, he felt as though he was finally doing something; finally, for better or for worse, trying to stop a runaway train, which was what his life had become.
Over the weeks, his secretary had grown so accustomed to her boss’s moody unpredictability—a change from the man whose life had previously been so highly organised—that she nodded without question when he told her that he would be going out and wasn’t sure when he would be back. She had stopped pointing out meetings that required his presence. Her brain now moved into another gear, the one which had her immediately working out who would replace him.
Luiz called his driver on his way down. Aggie would be at school. He tried to picture her expression when he showed up. It distracted him from more tumultuous thoughts—thoughts of her having his child and then rediscovering a single life; thoughts of her getting involved with another man; thoughts of that other man bringing up his, Luiz’s, child as his own while Luiz was relegated to playing second fiddle. The occasional father.
Having never suffered the trials and tribulations of a fertile imagination, he found that he had more than made up for the lifelong omission. Now, his imagination seemed to be a monstrous thing released from a holding pen in which it had been imprisoned for its entire life, and now it was making up for lost time.
It was a situation that Luiz could not allow to continue but, as the car wound its way through traffic that was as dense as treacle, he was gripped
by a strange sense of panic. He had spent all of his adult life knowing where he was going, knowing how he was going to get there. Recently, the signposts had been removed and the road was no longer a straight one forward. Instead, it curved in all directions and he had no idea where he would end up. He just knew the person he wanted to find at its destination.
‘Can’t you go a little faster?’ he demanded, and cursed silently when his driver shot him a jaundiced look in the rear-view mirror before pointing out that they hadn’t yet invented a car that could fly—although, when and if they ever did, he was sure that Mr Montes would be the first to own one.
They made it to the school just as the bell sounded for lunch and Aggie was heading to the staff room. She had been blessed with an absence of morning sickness but she felt tired a lot of the time.
And it was such a struggle maintaining a distance from Luiz. Whenever she heard that deep, dark drawl down the end of the telephone, asking her how her day had been, insisting she tell him everything she had done, telling her about what he had done, she wanted nothing more than to take back everything she had said about not wanting him in her life. He phoned a lot. He visited a lot. He treated her like a piece of delicate china, and when she told him not to he shrugged his shoulders ruefully and informed her that he couldn’t help being a dinosaur when it came to stuff like that.
She had thought when she had delivered her speech to him all those weeks ago that he would quickly come to terms with the fact that he would not be shackled to her for the wrong reasons. She had thought that he would soon begin to thank her for letting him off the hook, that he would begin to relish his freedom. An over-developed sense of responsibility was something that wouldn’t last very long. He didn’t love her. It would be easy for him to cut the strings once he had been given permission to do so.
But he wasn’t making it easy for her to get over him. Or to move on.
She had now moved from the dump, as he had continued to call it, and was happy enough in the small, modern house he had provided for her. She was still in her job and had insisted that she would carry on working before and after the baby was born, but there were times when she longed to be away from London with its noise, pollution and traffic.
And, aside from those natural doubts, she was plagued by worries about how things would unravel over time.
She couldn’t envisage ever seeing him without being affected. Having been so convinced that she was doing the right thing in refusing to marry him, having prided herself on her cool ability to look at the bigger picture, she found herself riddled with angst that she might have made the wrong decision.
She stared with desolation at the sandwich she had brought in with her and was about to bite into it when … there he was.
Amid the chaos of children running in the corridors and teachers moving around the school stopping to tell them off, Luiz was suddenly in front of her, lounging against the door to the staff room.
‘I know you don’t like me coming here,’ Luiz greeted her as he strolled towards her desk. He wondered whether she should be eating more than just a sandwich for her lunch but refrained from asking.
‘You always cause such a commotion,’ Aggie said honestly. ‘What do you want, anyway? I have a lot of work to do during my lunch hour. I can’t take time out.’
As always, she had to fight the temptation to touch him. It was as though, whenever she saw him, her brain sent signals to her fingers, making them restive at remembered pleasures. He always looked so good! Too good. His hair had grown and he hadn’t bothered to cut it and the slight extra length suited him, made him even more outrageously sexy. Now he had perched on the side of her table and she had to drag her eyes away from the taut pull of his trousers over his muscular thighs.
Luiz watched as she looked away, eager for him to leave, annoyed that he had shown up at her workplace. Tough. He couldn’t carry on as he had. He was going crazy. There were things he needed to say to her and, the further she floated away from him, the more redundant his words would become.
Teachers were drifting in now, released from their classes by the bell, and Luiz couldn’t stop himself from glancing at them, trying to see whether any of the men might be contenders for Aggie. There were three guys so far, all in their thirties from the looks of it, but surely none of them would appeal to her?
Once, he would have been arrogantly certain of his seductive power over her. Unfortunately, he was a lot less confident on that score, and he scowled at the thought that some skinny guy with ginger hair might become his replacement.
‘You look tired,’ Luiz said abruptly.
‘Have you come here to do a spot check on me? I wish you’d stop clucking over me like a mother hen, Luiz. I told you I can take care of myself and I can.’
‘I haven’t come here to do a spot check on you.’
‘Then why are you here?’ She risked a look at him and was surprised at the hesitation on his face.
‘I want to take you somewhere. I … There are things I need to … talk to you about.’
Instinctively, Aggie knew that whatever he wanted to talk about would not involve finances, the baby or her health—all of which were subjects he covered in great detail in his frequent visits—whilst, without even being aware of it, continuing to charm her with witty anecdotes of what he was up to and the people he met. So what, she wondered nervously, could be important enough for him to interrupt her working day and to put such a hesitant expression on his usually confident face?
All at once her imagination took flight. There was no doubt that he was getting over her. He had completely stopped mentioning marriage. In fact, she hadn’t heard a word on the subject for weeks. He visited a lot and phoned a lot but she knew that that was because of the baby she was carrying. He was an ‘all or nothing’ man. Having never contemplated the thought of fatherhood, he had had it foisted upon him and had reacted by embracing it with an enthusiasm that was so typical of his personality. He did nothing in half-measures.
As the woman who happened to be carrying his child, she was swept up in the tidal wave of his enthusiasm. But already she could see the signs of a man who no longer viewed her with the untrammelled lust he once had. He could see her so often and speak to her so often because she had become a friend. She no longer stirred his passion.
Aggie knew that she should have been happy about this because it was precisely what she had told him, at the beginning, was necessary for their relationship to survive on a long-term basis. Friendship and not lust would be the key to the sort of amicable union they would need to be good parents to their child.
Where he had taken that on board, however, she was still struggling and now she couldn’t think what he might want to talk to her about that had necessitated a random visit to the school.
Could it be that he had found someone else? That would account for the shadow of uncertainty on his face. Luiz was not an uncertain man. Fear gripped her, turning her complexion chalky white. She could think of no other reason for him to be here and to want to have a talk with her. A talk that was so urgent it couldn’t wait. He intended to brace her for the news before she heard about it via the grapevine, for her brother would surely find out and impart the information to her.
‘Is it about … financial stuff?’ she asked, clinging to the hope that he would say yes.
‘It’s nothing to do with money, or with any practicalities, Aggie. My car’s outside.’
Aggie nodded but her body was numb all over as she gathered her things, her bag, her lightweight jacket and followed him to where his car was parked on a single yellow line outside the school.
‘Where are we going? I have to be back at school by one-thirty.’
‘You might have to call and tell them that you’ll be later.’
‘Why? What can you have to say that can’t be said closer to the school? There’s a café just down that street ahead. Let’s go there and get this little talk of yours over and done with.’
‘It’s no
t that easy, I’m afraid.’
She noticed that the hesitation was back and it chilled her once again to the core.
‘I’m stronger than you think,’ she said, bracing herself. ‘I can handle whatever you have to tell me. You don’t need to get me to some fancy restaurant to break the news.’
‘We’re not going to a fancy restaurant. I know you well enough by now not to make the mistake of taking you somewhere fancy unless you have at least an hour to get ready in advance.’
‘It’s not my fault I still get a little nervous at some of those places you’ve taken me to. I don’t feel comfortable being surrounded by celebrities!’
‘And it’s what I like about you,’ Luiz murmured. That, along with all the thousands of other little quirks which should have shown him by now the significance of what he felt for her. He had always counted himself as a pretty shrewd guy and yet, with her, he had been as thick as the village idiot.
‘It is?’ Aggie shamefully grasped that barely audible compliment.
‘I want to show you something.’ The traffic was free-flowing and they were driving quickly out of London now, heading towards the motorway. For a while, Aggie’s mind went into freefall as she recollected the last time she had been in a car heading out of London. His car. Except then, the snow had been falling thick and fast and little had she known that she had been heading towards a life-changing destiny. If, at the time, she had been in possession of a crystal ball, would she have looked into it and backed away from sleeping with him? The answer, of course, was no. For better or for worse she had thought at the time, and she still thought so now, even though the better had lasted for precious little time.
A Tempestuous Temptation Page 16
