Page 27 of His Secretary's Nine-Month Notice
He stood up and began to prowl the office, his movements jerky. Violet twisted in the chair and followed him. He was raking his fingers through his hair, staring down at the ground, then moving to peer unseeingly through the floor-to-ceiling window that offered such splendid views of the streets of London and all the stick-insect figures scurrying below.
He spun round and his eyes arrowed down to her stomach, which was almost as flat as it always had been.
Violet instinctively and defensively placed her hand on her stomach and cleared her throat.
‘I have stuff to do over here, Matt.’ She gathered her wayward emotions. ‘I just came to break the news, and now it might be a good idea to leave so that you can process the information.’
‘Leave? You want to drop a bombshell and thenleave?’ His voice was incredulous but she held his stare without flinching.
‘I haven’t come here looking for anything,’ she told him, voice glacial, because she was still reeling from the humiliation of knowing just how badly he wanted to escape what was unfolding in front of his horrified eyes. ‘In fact, I debated whether I should come at all. I know this is the last thing you would ask for but, in the end, I felt that it was only right that you should know.’ Her voice tapered off into silence. If he had looked ashen-faced and shocked before, he was now beginning to look thunderously angry.
‘Well, Violet,’ he said in a restrained voice. ‘How very magnanimous of you.’
‘There’s no need for sarcasm.’
‘No? When you sit there telling me that you’re pregnant with my baby and yet you’re only here breaking the news because of a sense of duty, having manfully fought the temptation to just say nothing at all and...what? Bring the baby up on your own on the other side of the world? Spin a few lies when he or she got older and started asking questions? Maybe consign me to a premature grave so that the questions didn’t start getting too uncomfortable? Is that how it would have played out, Violet?’
He was going to be a father.
Not for a second did he not believe her. He was going to be a father. And all of a sudden, the thought of any child of his looking back on his past the way he looked back on his horrified him. Yet she sat there, calmly informing him that she’d actually considered keeping this to herself.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. You didn’t want me here when you thought I might have come to try to seduce you back into bed, so please don’t sit there and start lecturing me about my decision-making process.’ Her voice was strained, close to tears.
‘No, Violet.’ Matt purposefully walked towards her and then leant over her, caging her in, hands on either side of the chair. ‘Ridiculous is the thought that you actually entertained the idea of keeping this from me, and whatever I might have thought when I saw you has nothing to do with anything.’
‘Oh, really?’ She tilted her chin at a defensive angle and stared right back at him. He was so good at making people cower, so good at using the sheer force of his personality and his physicality to intimidate. Didn’t he know that she was clued up on all those tactics and had long since learned how to deal with them? Although, this wasn’t exactly a work-related situation, was it?
‘I’ll stop lecturing,’ he said tersely, ‘when you start explaining how you could have thought that this was something you could keep from me!’
‘You’re towering over me and it’s making me nervous.’
‘God, woman! You could try the patience of a saint!’
‘Which is one thing you’re not,’ Violet returned swiftly.
He made an inarticulate sound under his breath and drew back, then he dragged his chair around his desk and positioned it right next to hers. He was no longer towering over her, but neither was he a safe distance away.
‘Have youeverthought about having a family, Matt?’
He frowned and glowered. ‘What does that have to do with anything?’
‘You asked me how I could have the temerity to even consider, for five seconds,not telling you that I was pregnant. Here’s how. You don’t do commitment. You don’t really do relationships, at least not significant relationships. And you certainly don’t do having kids and playing happy families. What you do are three-month flings that all end in bouquets of flowers from a flower shop in Knightsbridge.’
And,she wanted to tack on,let’s not forget that you are the guy who made it patently clear that there would be no follow-up to our fling because what you were after was a passing liaison. Don’t you go forgetting that!
He flushed darkly and sat back, his long legs sprawled apart. He folded his arms and glared.
Violet summoned all her willpower and returned his glower with cool, calm eyes. The power of his looks was always enough to make her heart skip a beat, and it was no different now, but she had to focus.
She had to erase memories of that blissful bubble they had occupied in Melbourne when they had been lovers, holding hands and doing all the stuff that loved-up couples do. For a while back then, she had managed to forget that they weren’t a normal loved-up couple. For a while, she had managed to forget that Matt Falconer hadn’t been with her because he loved her, but because he had been intrigued at the new and very different side to her he had seen for the first time in his life. He had been with her because of her novelty value and that novelty value had kicked in the minute he had sussed that she was actually a three-dimensional woman and not the cardboard cut-out who had spent two-and-a-half years at his beck and call.
‘Well, this isn’t going to be one of those, is it?’ he muttered darkly.
‘Like I said, I didn’t come here for anything, and I’m not expecting anything. I came because I felt you had to know that you were going to be a father. I’m not about to pressure you into doing anything.’
‘This isn’t the place to discuss the situation. I can’t have this conversation in my office. It’s not a business transaction.’
Violet wanted to tell him that it pretty much was, considering emotions weren’t involved, at least not on his part.
