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He gave an impatient sigh, called to his driver, who was waiting by the open rear door of a black saloon, to start the engine, and then shifted his attention back to her, ‘Tu plaisantes? You’re kidding? Isn’t that an overreaction to my interview? I wouldn’t have been so easy on the minister if I hadn’t been in such a rush for my flight. I know you legal heads are born pedantic worriers but you really need to relax a little.’
‘This has nothing to do with the interview.’
Realisation dimmed his brilliant eyes to suspicious wariness. He walked to the car door and held it open, silently but grudgingly gesturing for her to get in.
His driver pulled out onto Regent Street and headed south to Oxford Circus. The stores on the iconic shopping street were still closed but the pavements were bustling with early morning commuters, coffees in hand, earphone leads dangling, heading to work. There was a buzz in the air; only now in late April were they having the first true warm days of spring.
He twisted to face her, drumming his phone on his knee like an insect at night tap-tap-tapping against a window pane desperate to reach the light inside. ‘I take it that you’re resigning because of our night together.’
She tried to stay impassive. She had been through worse. And survived. But having to share the most wonderful but scary news of her life with a man she barely knew had her rehearsed words stick in her throat and she only managed to eke out a pathetic, ‘Yes.’
‘I thought we had both agreed to put it behind us.’
Oh, God. There was no easy way to say this.
Get it over and done with. Then you can move on with your life.
A fresh bout of nausea joined her pounding heart.
The car was suddenly way too hot.
The panicked, terrified void that had almost consumed her in her doctor’s consulting room reared up again. How would she cope? She couldn’t possibly raise a child on her own. She knew nothing about child-rearing, being a parent.
And what if her depression returned? What would she do then? But it wouldn’t. She was strong now.
And then there were all those selfish thoughts that had eaten her up with guilt: what of her aspirations to become head of Legal, to move into a larger apartment in London, to travel?
She gulped in some air and forced herself to look into those green heartbreaker eyes. ‘I’m pregnant.’
He jerked away.
Behind him, they swept past Trafalgar Square.
Brow furrowed, he stared at her. ‘Because of that night?’
‘Yes! Of course it was that night. I wouldn’t be here telling you if I had any doubt about that. I’m eight weeks pregnant—it has to be you.’
Lucien was once again tapping his phone against his knee, the silver case banging against the charcoal wool of his trousers. She had wrapped her legs around his that night, felt the hard muscle of his thighs. A night of insanity that had knocked her life completely off course.
Lucien shook his head. ‘We used protection.’
She fiddled with the window switch on the door and lowered her window, needing relief from the heat rising in her. Not able to meet his eye, she muttered, ‘Not in the garden...’ She trailed off and looked at him, praying he didn’t need further explanation.
He winced and looked away.
Lucien had held a reception in his Mayfair home for all of his HQ senior management on the night of his first AGM. Lucien’s takeover of Huet had heralded a bonanza for the hairdressers and fashion stores in the vicinity of Huet HQ as the entire female workforce fell for his rugged looks and alpha charisma. But Charlotte knew a player when she saw one. And she refused to join his fan club. Having her heart broken once in a lifetime was once too often for her liking. No man would ever get the opportunity to do so again. In fact she went out of her way to ignore him whenever she saw him at work.
But a week before the party she had to meet with him to discuss issues on a bid contract. And, despite herself, his astute charm and lightning intelligence had threatened to melt her cynicism. At the end of the meeting, dizzy from the effect of being so close to him, she had almost tripped over a low coffee table as she had struggled to leave his office. While he had worn an amused lethal grin.
Brief glances were all they had shared the night of the reception. He had shown no interest in talking to her, and as the party had broken up she had gone out into the garden to find her phone that she’d left there, relieved to get away from her pretence that she was oblivious to him, but also a little miffed that he had spoken to practically everyone else except her. About to go back inside, she had felt her heart somersault when he had walked down the cobbled garden path towards her, his large frame even bigger as his shadow had moved towards her and engulfed her. She had offered a polite thanks and said she should leave with everyone else. But he’d told her that they were alone. Everyone else had already left.
He had smiled down at her. A kind, easy smile. A Well, what will we do now? type of smile. And she had foolishly stepped towards him, all thought and caution abandoned to that wonderful, what seemed sincere, glistening green gaze.
She had reached out her hand towards his open suit jacket with an unbearable urge to touch the dark grey material, to make contact with him.
And he had stepped towards her. Run his fingertips along her cheek.
And the next thing she’d known, his mouth had been on hers, hot, seeking, exploring.
In an instant her body had been aflame. His fingertips, his mouth, his scent, his hard, hard, hard body making her lose every inhibition, every memory, every protective layer she had grown over her heart and soul in the past six years.
Frenzied, they had unbuttoned and unzipped without thought, driven by a desperate hunger for one another. But when he had claimed her against that cold garden wall, she had stilled and her heart had gone into free fall. All of those memories of her ex’s betrayal, of how lonely and ugly and beaten she had felt during her depression, had gushed back and threatened to drown her. Lucien had gently drawn away and watched her with a soul-destroying questioning, as though wanting to understand. Only after did it dawn on her that this was a key skill of any Lothario. The pretence to care.
But that night he had brought her to his bedroom and, her body weak with longing though her heart had been afraid, she had willingly gone. And he had made love to her, slowly and tenderly. And after she had cried in his bathroom when she’d realised how empty her life was...and how stupid, stupid, stupid she was to have slept with her womanising boss.
Now, as he faced the consequences of that night, he ran a hand across the deep frown lines of his forehead and muttered, ‘Zut!’
Unexpected sadness pulled hard in her chest. A baby should bring joy, not this shock. What was he even thinking?
Did he hate her for this?
Bitterly regret the fire that had raged between them in the garden and the seconds when they had become one and senselessly forgot all thoughts as to the need to use protection?
Regret the baby growing inside her?
A fierce protectiveness surged through her.
Dismayed at how her hands were trembling, she pulled her notebook from her handbag and opened it to the pages where she had bullet-pointed her action plan. Needing the comfort of seeing in black and white her strategy for coping with this shocking but incredible turn in her life. ‘My doctor confirmed two days ago that I’m almost eight weeks pregnant. My apartment here in London is too small to raise a baby so I’ve decided I’ll move to the countryside, close to where my parents live. I will get work locally.’
He waved off her words with an impatient flick of his hand.
For five, ten, twenty seconds he stared at her intently, his gaze burning a hole in her heart.
He leaned a little closer, his shoulders tense, his eyes scanning her features like an interrogator searching for tell-tale body-language slips in a crime suspect. ‘Are you certain that I’m the father?’
The lawyer in her knew that it was a reasonable question. But the woman in her, the mother-to-be, the idealist who believed in truth, fairness and honour, felt his question like a slap. She felt her throat constrict, a heaviness invade her sinuses, a burning sensation in her eyes. She was not going to cry. She was strong. A fighter. She sucked in some air. He was the serial dater, not her.
‘I haven’t slept with another man in a very long time. What happened between us was not typical for me,’ she said fiercely.
She paused and cringed at having given him too much information and wondered why she felt she had to justify herself to him. Annoyed that she was doing so, she pulled in a steadying breath. ‘I want nothing from you. I don’t need financial support and I know a baby will not fit into your lifestyle. I want to give my child security and stability, a happy childhood. I’ve told you that you will be a father because you have the right to know but I don’t want or need you in our lives.’
CHAPTER TWO (#u84aa8ffb-41d6-5985-9a72-1828201ef2b5)
‘I DON’T WANT or need you in our lives.’
Charlotte’s words smashed into him.
His car, now opposite the entrance to the darkly historic Tower of London, was snarled up in a herd of London double-decker red buses and he had to rein in the desire to leap from the car and run. To run off the adrenaline twitching in his muscles, drying out his mouth, spinning his heart in crazy arcs.
He was going to be a father.
Something he’d never wanted to be.
Never wanting the responsibility, the fear of failing his child, never wanting to mess up, never wanting to have to face the fact that he was no better than his own father.
And he had always believed that a child deserved to be brought up in a loving environment with committed, responsible parents. Everything he didn’t have.
But a failed, tempestuous, torturous marriage when he was in his late teens had proved to him that he was totally incapable of any such commitment.
And now, before he could even start to process it all, to make sense of this turn in his life, Charlotte was trying to snatch it away.
Those sea-green eyes steadily held his stare when he looked back at her, the only hint of her nervousness in how she fingered the cream lined pages of her notebook.
He leaned a little closer to her. She backed away, her hand rising to touch against the edge of her delicate jawline.
Pain radiated in his own jawline, moving up through his clamped teeth and into his cheekbones. The scar above his ear throbbing, throbbing, throbbing. ‘As you’re pregnant, I’m going to ask you nicely to explain exactly what you mean when you say you don’t want me in your lives.’
She recoiled a little at first but then sat more upright in her seat, both hands running over the material of her black skirt. She settled challenging eyes on him. ‘You don’t want to be a father, not with your lifestyle and commitments... Let’s not get into an argument about this.’
‘Are you saying that I wouldn’t be a good father?’
Her head snapped back at his growl. Crossing one long leg over the other, she held her hands in a tight bunch on her lap. ‘Oh, come on, you’re constantly travelling, your social life keeps at least three celebrity magazines in business. Are you seriously telling me that you have time to fit being a father into that schedule? That you even want to be a father?’
Irritation tightened his chest. She might be right in everything she said, but a sense of being cheated out of something he hadn’t even begun to understand had him ask quietly, ‘And you think you have the right to make that decision for me?’
She grabbed her black leather handbag off the floor of the car and sat it on her lap. She lobbed her notebook into it and hugged the hard lines of the small rectangular bag to her stomach. ‘When it comes to protecting my baby, yes.’
He inhaled a deep breath. ‘Are you seriously saying that you have to protect this child from me?’
‘Well, you’re hardly “father of the year” material, are you? I don’t believe for one minute that you really want the responsibility of a child.’
She had to be kidding.
‘I’m a CEO of a company with a thirty-billion turnover, for crying out loud. Responsible should be my middle name.’
She gave him a satisfied look, the look of a prosecutor knowing they had caught the defendant out. ‘Tell me, just how many companies have you acquired in the past ten years?’
He folded his arms. ‘Sixteen.’
‘And how many countries have you lived in?’
‘What are you getting at, Charlotte?’
‘The way you constantly move around the globe is hardly the sign of a man able to give stability and commitment to a child, is it?’
This conversation had gone too far. He leaned closer to her and growled, ‘Let me get this straight. You want me out of your lives but yet are expecting me to blindly trust you in raising my baby?’
The words my baby leapt from his mouth unconsciously.
Charlotte looked at him aghast. ‘I’ll give my baby security, routine. I’ll be the best mother that I can be.’
Beneath her defiant tone, there was a nervousness she didn’t quite manage to disguise. Was she as confident about being a parent as she was trying to portray? ‘Did you want this—to be pregnant? To be a mother?’
She lifted one of the gold chain handles of her bag, the only hint of flamboyance in her entire wardrobe, and twisted it around her index finger, the metal tightening as she twisted once, twice, three times. ‘Not until now.’
‘Why?’
She gave a shrug. ‘I was focused on my career.’
Dieu! This was such a mess. A thought tugged in his heart and leaked out into his chest: this baby deserved better than this. He needed to start focusing on the practicalities, understanding just where they stood. ‘Are you seeing anyone else?’
She eyed him warily. ‘Why are you asking?’
He fisted his hands, a stab of jealousy sideswiping him at the possibility that she was dating someone. ‘I want to understand who will support you.’
She unravelled the chain from her finger, in one fast, furious movement. ‘You’re the father. There’s no one else in my life.’ She paused and vigorously rubbed the red welts the chain had left. ‘I know you might find all of that hard to believe given your social life, but it’s the truth.’
He itched with the desire to reach for her finger and soothe her skin himself. That night she had touched him lightly, tenderly, almost reverentially with those delicate hands. That feather-light touch just one of the many inexcusable reasons why he had broken his own ethical code that he never dated employees, never mind slept with them. Exasperated at his own weakness and lack of honour that night, he said sharply, ‘Don’t believe everything you read in the media.’
She rose a disbelieving eyebrow. ‘I saw a picture of you with Annabelle Foster online over the weekend.’
Yes, Annabelle Foster, a TV news reporter, had accompanied him to a Homelessness charity ball, but they had left early, his driver dropping Annabelle directly home. Alone.
Since his night with Charlotte he had dated a few women, but he had ended each date early, a restlessness making his bones itch as he had tried but failed to focus on his date across the restaurant table from him, images of Charlotte’s vulnerable, tender, passionate gaze when they had made love in his bed leaving him with no appetite. For anything.
‘It’s tiresome to attend functions on my own. I enjoy having company, but that doesn’t mean it’s anything more serious than a night out.’
She considered his answer with a suspicious frown but then, with an it doesn’t matter anyway shrug, swung her bag back to the floor. She gave him the faintest whisper of an understanding sigh. ‘I know this must have come as a shock to you. It did to me. But I want this baby... I want to give him or her the same happy childhood I had, with lots of love, laughter, happiness, certainty.’
All of the things he hadn’t had as a child. Instead he’d had arguments and accusations and animosity.
The worst being the night he’d woken to hear his mother sob downstairs that she hated her life, hated being married to his father, hated being tied down with a child with no way out.
His father had lashed back demanding to know if she seriously thought he wanted any of this, a nightmare marriage, his dreams of university, of a better life, long abandoned as he was now straddled with a wife and child to support.
It was another four years before they divorced, five years until his mother eventually threw Lucien out for punching her new boyfriend. Her boyfriend had caught Lucien stealing his beer and had flung a beer can at him. Lucien, sick of the controlling bully who spent his days belittling his mother, had launched himself at him, long past caring about the consequences of anything he did in life. He had ended up with a permanent scar over his ear and living in a fleapit in Bordeaux at the age of seventeen. But at least there, there wasn’t the constant silent, frightening tension of waiting for another bitter argument to start.
History could not repeat itself. This baby was never to feel unwanted.
That thought hit him hard in his gut, in his heart.
‘So who will support you in raising the baby?’
Her arms folded tightly on her waist. ‘My parents will be nearby. I know they will adore being grandparents.’
Which was something...but a feeling of loss, of not being in control of how his life was changing, of needing to make sure he got this right had him warn, ‘Being a single parent won’t be easy.’
She closed the window beside her and gave a shrug. ‘I’ll manage.’
