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‘No,’ Holly said quietly. ‘I’m sure there’s a lot of truth behind the rumours. And I haven’t come here because I care. I don’t. The Luiz I cared about and fell in love with disappeared and was replaced by a Luiz I don’t know.’
And yet, even as the words poured out, she was drawn and shaken by the fierce tug of familiarity, of somehow knowing that, underneath the polished surface veneer, there would surely be the person she had grown to know. She shoved aside the wimpish, craven urge to see the three-dimensional man, to marry the two sides of the coin, and instead reminded herself of the undeserved suspicions he had levelled against her. The distrust that had shaken her belief in him, the ease with which he had written her off as a potential opportunist when, after all the time they had spent together, he should have known that he was miles out in his assumptions.
‘Your somebody else,’ she said, drawing in a deep breath.
‘Do you love her?’
‘Come again?’
‘The girl you’re going out with… do you love her?’
‘That question is inappropriate.’ He glanced pointedly at his watch. Every single thing she had said since she had walked into his office had offended him. He was savagely aware that, while her very presence should repel him, he still couldn’t prevent himself from responding to her with a physical reaction that seemed to be utterly out of his control. He was riveted by the incongruity of having her sit in his office which was so distant from her comfort zone.
‘No, it’s not.’
‘She’s suitable.’ Luiz delivered this with scathing honesty. Cecelia was eminently suitable and, the sooner that message was received by whatever rebellious bit of his brain insisted on telling him otherwise, the better.
‘Your family must be very pleased. You told me that your father had been so keen to see you settle down.’
‘Did I? I can’t remember.’ He had told her lots of things. They had talked a lot. She had always enjoyed talking. He once thought that she could coax anyone out of a bad mood with her cheerful chatter. ‘Furthermore, I don’t see where this is going. If you’re not here for a hand out then what are you here for?’
‘What I’m about to say to you might come as a bit of a shock, but I just want you to know that I’m very happy for you; happy that you’ve found someone…’ It physically hurt to say that but say it she did, partly because she knew that she had to be dignified, given the situation, partly because she didn’t want him to feel responsible for her when she told him what she had to.
Luiz stilled. For once he was at a complete loss. Was she ill? Panic flared inside him, obliterating every thought and every feeling.
‘I’m pregnant, Luiz. I wish there was a kinder way of telling you, but I can’t think of any.’
It took a few seconds for his wayward brain to catch up with what she had just said. In fact, even when it did catch up, Luiz didn’t believe that he had heard correctly. His body was tense as he leaned forward, hands flat on the desk, and looked at her with frowning intensity.
‘Sorry. Repeat that. I don’t think I quite caught what you said…’
‘I’m having a baby.’
‘No. No, you’re wrong. You can’t be.’ He was overwhelmed by a sensation of unreality. He wondered if he might be hallucinating.
‘The doctor thinks it might have happened that weekend of the party. I was sick, do you remember? Apparently there’s a chance of the contraceptive failing if you’re sick. I never noticed anything, because as soon as we broke up I came off the pill and I just assumed that I hadn’t had a period because my body was adjusting. Okay, so I was putting on a bit of weight, but I was eating more. I only found out a few days ago when I went to the doctor. The thing is, he did a check and there’s no doubt.’
Her voice was calm and level but she had had a few days to think about it all, to come to terms with her life never being the same again. She had already gone past that state of shock which she could now see Luiz experiencing as his healthy golden colour turned ashen and he stared at her, not really focusing.
‘I don’t believe you.’ But again his eyes were drawn to the fulsome curves which the shapeless sack dress was keen to conceal. She wouldn’t lie. He heavily admitted to himself that she was nothing like Clarissa.
‘Look, I know you’re involved with someone else, and I haven’t come here to try and… and ruin anything for you.’
‘You tell me you’re pregnant and then say that you don’t want to ruin anything for me?’
Holly flushed but maintained eye contact. ‘I didn’t have to come,’ she said quietly. ‘In fact, for a while I was tempted not to, but I thought that you deserved to at least know the truth. I don’t expect you to do anything about it and I don’t want anything from you. I just felt that it was important for you to… to know.’ She stood up and nervously wiped her clammy hands on her dress.
‘Where the hell do you think you’re going? You can’t come in here and drop a bombshell and then leave!’
‘It’s a bombshell for you, Luiz, but not for me—and, before you even think about asking me to get rid of it, then don’t.’
‘I would never ask you to do such a thing.’
‘And don’t think about lumping me in the same bracket as your ex-girlfriend, either. I really am pregnant. I’ve had a scan. I can show it to you if you like. It dates the pregnancy. It’s confirmed. Plus, like I said, I don’t want anything from you. I don’t want your money and I don’t want you thinking that you have to be responsible for accidentally creating a life when you had no plans to. I’m going to go now and leave you to think this over. You might want to tell your fiancée, spare her the shock of finding out later down the line.’
The word ‘fiancée’ failed to register. Luiz was fired with an overwhelming urge to glue her to the chair and make her keep talking while he harnessed his thoughts and started thinking rationally. No part of his brain was functioning the way it normally did. Hell, he was going to be a father!
His eyes dipped to her stomach, back up to those swollen breasts that should have alerted him to the possibility that this was her news, the reason for her sudden appearance. What on earth had possessed him to think that she would suddenly discover the need to fleece him? She had never given a damn about material things. Was he so cynical that, the second she knew the truth about him, he could see no option other than pigeon-holing her? He might be wrong, of course, but now, with a baby inside her—his baby—he no longer had the luxury of disposing of her to protect himself from any possible threat of opportunism.
But she was already heading out of the door.
‘Just think about what I’ve said, Luiz. I’ll be in London until tomorrow and, if you want to talk some more, then that’s fine. You have my mobile number. Unless, of course, you’ve deleted it…’
He looked like death warmed up. She thought that he must truly feel as though his world had imploded, as though his worst nightmare had come true. ‘Right now, I don’t want you to follow me and I don’t want you to try and make me stay here. I’ve said what I’ve come to say and I’m leaving now.’
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_0c189b3c-5cdd-51cc-986a-61d514e32c0f)
HOW COULD SHE sail into his office, make an announcement that was going to blow his world apart and then sail right out, having forbidden him from following her? Or at the very least from locking her in his office and compelling her to repeat herself until his brain began truly absorbing what she had said.
Even as she disappeared through his office door, Luiz knew that it would be a mistake to try and drag her back. Despite her sunny nature, she could be stubborn, and he recognised that closed expression on her face and the thin, determined line of her mouth. It was the same look she had worn when, months previously, an itinerant worker had come to the sanctuary to reclaim the dog he had been caught beating. She had told him to get lost and he had taken one look at that obstinate face and had done as he had been ordered. Luiz had been impressed. He was rather less impressed now, when the stubborn determination was directed at him.
He was going to be a father. He could pretend that she might be lying, but not even he, sceptic that he was, could kid himself on that score. It was a messy situation, but in the quiet of his office, with all calls on hold and all meetings cancelled—much to his secretary’s surprise—Luiz recognised that it was not a situation that was going to go away despite what Holly had defiantly said. The mere fact that she had sought him out was indication enough that she now acknowledged that he was an indispensable part of her life. Talk about him having choices, about him being able to walk away, was empty talk. She surely must know that that would never be an option.
Whether she would ever admit it or not, she had landed on her feet in the money stakes.
He called her just before he was ready to leave the office. It was a little after five, hours before his normal departure time, but he hadn’t been able to focus on anything. She had asked him to mull things over. As far as he was concerned he had devoted the necessary time to the task at hand.
‘We need to meet.’
Holly heard the peremptory command in his voice and shivered. ‘Okay.’
‘Where are you staying?’
She gave him the name and address of the hotel. No one could accuse it of being five-star. It might struggle to make two, in fact.
Just out of the shower, she looked at the shabby wallpaper, the uninspiring prints on the wall and the snap-together furniture.
‘That part of London is a dump. Couldn’t you have found anywhere a little more upmarket?’
‘This wasn’t meant to be a weekend break,’ Holly retorted. ‘I had to come to London, so I chose somewhere affordable.’
‘I will send my driver for you…’
‘If you tell me where you want to meet,’ Holly interjected, just in case he thought that she would be impressed by a driver, ‘I can take public transport.’
Luiz ignored that. ‘He will be with you in half an hour.’
‘Luiz…’
‘Don’t be proud, Holly. I have a driver and it will save you the hassle of taking the tube or a bus. We’ll talk when we meet.’
Autocratic and controlling, Holly thought as she disconnected. And yet, hadn’t he always been? When they had been going out together, he had always known what to do in any crisis. He had always made decisions with an assurance that made you believe that there could not be any other possible outcome than the one he dictated. She had thrilled at his intuitive mastery, which was what she now suddenly decided to label arrogance.
Having put on weight, and having now found out that she was pregnant, Holly had abandoned all attempts to squeeze into her normal jeans and had invested in a couple of loose dresses. The one she now put on was slightly less frumpy than the one in which she had travelled and, despite her blistering scorn for Luiz and the lies he had told her, she still found herself surreptitiously eyeing her reflection in the mirror.
She didn’t think she looked pregnant. Not really. Perhaps a bit in profile; she looked at herself sideways on and placed her hand flat on her stomach. She looked… fat.
The shock of discovering herself to be pregnant had very quickly been replaced with joy, despite the obvious pitfalls ahead. Never had she wanted something as much as she wanted this baby. It might be Luiz’s nightmare, but not for her.
With this in mind, she anxiously climbed into the back seat of the top-of-the-range car which arrived to collect her precisely when Luiz had told her it would. It was only once she was inside the car that she realised she had forgotten to ask him where, exactly, they would be meeting.
Anticipating a restaurant, she was taken aback when the driver pulled away from the main drag to manoeuvre the leafy streets of Chelsea. She was even more taken aback when they finally stopped in front of an impressive four-storeyed red-brick building fronted by elaborately moulded wrought-iron gates. Two art deco stone lions, each slightly under a metre high, sat on either side of the black front door.
She had seen his office. Now she was going to see his house. She felt a nervous flutter and staunchly reminded herself that they were no longer lovers. They were now two people unhappily bound by circumstance.
The driver discreetly melted away the minute Luiz was in the hallway. For a few seconds, Holly could only stare. He was in a pair of faded black jeans that emphasised the length and muscular strength of his legs, and a dark-grey polo shirt. He was barefoot because the warm wooden floors were liberally broken with silk rugs which she imagined were sensuously soft to walk on.
It was an effort to tear her eyes away from him so that she could inspect her surroundings. Having braced herself for whatever further signs of this life he had been living away from her, she was still shocked at the visible extent of his wealth.
Bold paintings adorned the pale walls. Behind him, spanning a floor and a half, light filtered through an awe-inspiring stained-glass window. In various directions she could see further evidence of the wealthy background he had kept such a closely guarded secret from her. More paintings on the walls, a plant the size of a small tree strategically placed in the corner of a room, the merest glimpse of a sunken sitting area in what appeared to be a massive drawing room.
Holly was reluctantly forced to concede, just for a few seconds, that here was a man who might be über-cautious when it came to trust, especially in view of his past experience at the hands of a gold-digger.
‘If you’re going to give me a lecture on what a lowlife I am for hiding all this from you, then let’s get it out of the way so that we can move on to more important issues.’
‘It’s a very impressive house.’
‘Take off the coat.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I want to see evidence of your pregnancy.’
‘You mean you actually don’t believe that I’m telling you the truth?’
‘I do.’ He strolled towards her to ease her out of the coat and then, still standing in front of her, he gently rested his hand on her stomach.
The gesture came from nowhere and was so shocking that Holly gasped and stared up at him with huge, rounded eyes.
‘Well?’ Luiz moved back to thrust his hands into his pockets. Touching her like that, he could feel the firmness of her belly, the swell of it as his flesh and blood grew inside her. It was a sensation like no other. ‘Don’t tell me I don’t have a right to do that.’
‘We no longer have… that sort of relationship, Luiz.’ One feathery touched that had barely lasted two seconds and she could feel her body revving into life, as if it had just been idling for the past few weeks, waiting for a foot to depress the accelerator so that it could get going, charge back to life! She stepped away from him but her heart was beating at a rate and she knew that she was bright red.
Luiz was finding it next to impossible to look at her without imagining her with her clothes off. He had felt her stomach. He would have liked to see it, smooth and full, just as he would have liked to see her breasts, more succulent, the nipples bigger and darker, readying themselves for a suckling baby.
‘You said we… we needed to talk, Luiz, and we do—’
‘I’ll get you something to drink. Have you eaten?’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘I’ll order something in.’
‘There’s no need…’
‘If we’re going to have an argument every single time I suggest something, then we won’t get very far,’ Luiz said coolly. ‘I lied to you—put it behind you and move on. Circumstances have now changed. There’s no room for petty resentments.’
Holly bit back the torrent of self-defence that rose quickly to the surface. Arguing would be counter-productive. He was right and she knew that, but she still hated the cool detachment in his voice when he had addressed her. She was humiliatingly aware that he had moved on. For all the stern lectures she had given herself, she hadn’t. It was easy for him to stand there and treat the whole matter like a business problem that required a solution—but then, little had she known it, he was a businessman who presumed that for every problem there was a solution. He was ideally placed to be dispassionate because he had no messy emotional ties to clutter the picture.
‘Fine.’ Holly managed the monosyllable but her voice sounded high and angry. He was heading towards the sitting room she had partially glimpsed through the half-opened door and she followed him, impervious to the grand displays of wealth.
The actual sitting area was an oasis of colour, sunken in the middle of an exquisite parquet surround, which was a suitable backdrop for beautifully maintained plants on one side and an imposing Chesterfield sofa on the other. Deep burgundy drapes pooled on the floor by the tall windows and picked up the rich colours of the sofas and the rug in the middle.
Luiz went immediately to one of the sofas and sprawled back. She had interrupted him in the middle of a drink. There was a bottle of red wine on the table in front of him, along with a crystal jug of iced water and a glass, presumably meant for her.
‘Before you tell me that my life is going to remain exactly the same,’ he drawled, his dark eyes fixed like lasers on her face, ‘I should warn you that you’ll be wasting your breath. Nothing in my life is going to be the same.’
‘Nothing in my life is going to be the same, either!’
‘And so we have to find a way of us both dealing with this situation.’ Luiz leant forward to refill his glass. He had spent all afternoon thinking about this and the remorseless conclusion he had reached was that he would have to marry her. What choice did he have? He came from a traditional family. It might be perfectly acceptable for her to think that they could have some sort of informal arrangement whereby he popped in to visit his own child when and if he got the chance, maybe video-called if he couldn’t be physically present. It wasn’t going to work.
‘I know it’s going to be difficult,’ Holly told him, ‘But it’s not that unusual a situation. You can come up whenever you want… have quality time. I won’t interfere and I promise to be very accommodating. If, on the other hand, you’d rather not get involved to that extent, then that’s fine as well. I understand that you’ve embarked on a whole new life with someone else and, although I do think it would be important for you to discuss this situation with your… er… girlfriend, there’s no way I would expect anything from you.’
Luiz tilted his head to one side, for all the world as though he was paying keen attention and actually listening to what she was suggesting.
‘No.’
‘No? No? What do you mean no?’ Holly looked at him in sudden confusion. She had exhausted all the options she could think of, so what exactly was he turning down? All of them? Didn’t he know that there was nothing else on the table?
‘I find that none of those options appeal.’ He sighed, finding it fairly incredulous that she seemed to have bypassed the ‘gold mine’ option staring her in the face.
‘I’m not following you.’
‘Let me put it this way: as far as I am concerned, the only choice I have is to marry you. My child will be born legitimate; there’s no other alternative. Naturally, you will have to agree to a pre-nup, but rest assured that as far as money goes you will be well taken care of. In fact, you could say that you will be rich beyond your wildest dreams.’
Holly was staring at him as though he had just grown wings and was now informing her that he would be flying to the moon. She wasn’t sure that she had quite heard correctly. Marriage? Then, following on from that, a pre-nup?
Bright patches of angry colour stained her cheeks but she was determined to keep it together.
‘That’s impossible, Luiz.’
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘But I do,’ she ventured tightly. ‘I could never forgive you for lying to me, Luiz, for assuming that I was an opportunist. Even when you got to know me, you still didn’t feel that you could tell me the truth—and the fact that you can calmly sit there and talk about a pre-nup! Well, that just says it all, it really does.’
‘Whether you like it or not,’ Luiz’s voice was low and firm, the voice of someone who has no intention of yielding, ‘I am part of this equation, Holly. I didn’t ask for this but I’m prepared to do the responsible thing.’
‘I don’t want you to feel responsible! I could never marry someone because they felt that it was their duty to marry me for the sake of a child!’ Distraught, she jumped to her feet and paced the sitting area, glaring down at the ornate Persian rug, unaware that Luiz was in front of her until she crashed into him and was forced to leap back.
