Page 8 of The Housekeeper's One-Night Baby
Pain speared at his heart. And guilt. That ever-present sense of guilt. And something else, too. Something he didn’t recognise. Something he didn’t want to recognise. ‘You’re pregnant,’ he observed raggedly.
‘Six months,’ she offered.
‘Yet I have only just found out. Why the hell didn’t you contact me?’
‘Are you kidding?’ she questioned. ‘I tried! So many times. Soon after the second pregnancy test came back positive and I knew it was really happening, I set out to get in touch with you, but I encountered a setback every step of the way. I had no alternative other than to try to contact you through your company, which meant I was always onto a loser.’
‘What are you talking about?’ he clipped out.
‘Think about it,’ she accused. ‘You’re a very powerful man, Niccolò, and you have a very protective ring of staff surrounding you. You’re a billionaire and I’m just a humble working girl. Gaining access to you was a bit like someone trying to get their hands on the Crown Jewels. That’s why I ended up writing you that letter and sending it by snail mail.’
‘Which I have only just received!’ he exploded, pulling a crumpled sheet of paper from the pocket of his overcoat and waving it in front of her. ‘And you’re no longer living at the address on the letter, hence the difficulty in finding you.’
‘Maybe you need to speak to your team of assistants about relaxing their draconian methods of protecting you,’ she suggested, before biting her lip. ‘If you recall, we didn’t even exchange phone numbers, which was another complicating factor, otherwise I could have tried you at home or texted you, orsomething.’
‘I thought we’d decided that was for the best.’
‘Well, you decided that,’ she argued.
‘Because what happened that day was a crazy aberration between two people living on opposite sides of the world!’
‘Yes, of course there were practical reasons why we weren’t going to see each other again, but they weren’t the only ones, were they?’ Her gaze sliced through him, as pale as new leaves. ‘Do you remember what you said to me, or shall I remind you?“No strings. No expectations.”Those were your exact words, weren’t they, Niccolò—or has pregnancy scrambled my brain so much that I can no longer rely on my own memory?’
‘I was trying to do you a favour,’ he said harshly. ‘I didn’t want you building up any unrealistic romantic dreams about me.’
‘I was hardly likely to do that. A broom cupboard is hardly the most romantic of settings.’ She gave a short laugh. ‘I mean, we’re not exactly talking Romeo and Juliet here, are we?’
‘You wanted it,’ he said softly.
There was a pause as her cheeks flushed and when she spoke, her voice was so low he could barely hear it. ‘You’re saying you didn’t?’
He shook his head before biting out the words reluctantly. ‘Of course I did.’ He wondered how she would react if he told her that the desire he’d felt for her had been off the scale. That he’d never felt anything like that before in his life. Wild. Hungry. Out of control. Hadn’t that realisation been a bigger incentive to make him resist the temptation to see her again than the perceived incompatibility of their two lifestyles? And that had been when he’d thought she was a rich socialite, not a woman actually working in the house. He gave a heavy sigh. ‘If you’d told me you were a virgin, you wouldn’t have seen me for dust.’
‘I didn’t get the chance, did I? We didn’t exactly do a lot of talking.’
He could hear the tremble of something in her voice. Was it anger or was it hurt? ‘No,’ he said, at last. ‘We didn’t.’
‘Oh, well. At least we know where we stand now. It’s hardly ground-breaking stuff. I’m having a baby. On my own. Don’t worry about it. It’s been happening since the beginning of time and women have dealt with it, just as I am. So...’ She tilted her chin up with a fierce gesture of pride and a bright strand of hair came tumbling down to lie against one freckled cheek. ‘Was there anything else?’
Niccolò shook his head with frustration. Was she playing games? Did she really think that, having tracked her down, he was going to walk out of her life again and act as if nothing had happened? ‘You think I’m just going to renege on my responsibilities?’ he demanded roughly. ‘That I would leave the mother of my child to continue working as a servant?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with being a housekeeper,’ she defended hotly. ‘Certainly nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘No?’ His voice grew silky. ‘So why, I wonder, did you keep that rather significant fact hidden from me?’
Lizzie chewed on her lip as she wondered how to answer him. If their passionate liaison had continued a bit longer—she might have confided that she had enjoyed being someone else for once. A woman able to make a gorgeous man regard her with hunger and passion in his eyes, rather than being treated as invisible, or part of the furniture. A woman who had felt like a gorgeous man’s equal for once. But if she told him thatnow, wouldn’t it indicate that her self-esteem had been at an all-time low? Which wouldn’t do much for her morale. It would make her appear weak and she needed to be strong, for all kinds of reasons—but mostly for the sake of her baby.
‘I didn’t tell you any lies,’ she said.
‘No, you didn’t. But you let me think—’
‘What? That I was posh? That I was rich? Why, are those the only sort of women you have sex with, Niccolò?’
‘I hadn’t had sex for over a year before that afternoon,’ he gritted back.
Lizzie wasn’t sure why this unexpected confidence gave her a huge rush of pleasure, only that it did. It slugged through her veins like honey and made her feel as if she were lying in a warm bath. But that type of reaction was dangerous. It belonged to someone attempting to read too much into a situation which Niccolò Macario clearly regretted.
‘You made an assumption about who I really was, based on my appearance,’ she said coolly. ‘I’d tried on one of Sylvie’s designer dresses because she owed me money and didn’t have it. She told me I could sell some of the pieces online and that’s what I was planning to do. So instead of being in my frumpy old grey dress, I was wearing designer for the first time in my life. You obviously thought I was someone completely different when I opened the door, and I was having far too much fun to correct you.’
