Page 38 of The Tycoon's Shock Heir

So, until she had made up her mind as to how to approach him, all she’d been able to do was stalk him in the virtual world.

It had become a routine since the day she’d walked out of the hospital. Who was this man who was going to father her child? She had no idea. She barely knew his name.

She had traded in her whole world—her career, her childhood dream about to come true—for one night with him. Just because he’d made her smile and laugh, and kissed her and made her body come alive, made her want to do things she’d never wanted to do before, made her want to lie beside him long after she should have slipped out and away,

She had no doubt that was when it had happened—in the depths of sleep, when they’d found one another in their dreams and the fire had burned and engulfed them.

Making a baby was as easy as that. And two lives were changed for ever.

The horror of it clutched at her heart every time she opened her eyes. In the mornings she’d lie awake in bed, waiting for the hideous nightmare to creep over her again like a dead woman’s shroud. Her career was over. She couldn’t dance for the best part of a year. And, despite all her best efforts, her money was dwindling away.

Memories of the days before her mother had met George would rise like ghouls from the depths of her mind. Wintry mornings in their freezing council flat, painting pictures on the damp windows between the mould-mottled frames, longing for breakfast before school but too afraid to ask her mum in case it made her cry or shout or—worst of all—storm off and leave her.

That fatherless world. The shame of school, where everyone else had pictures to draw and stories to tell of dads who taught them how to swim and ride a bike. Where playground voices had risen in competition: ‘My dad says...’ ‘My dad does...’

She had known nothing about him. He had been just a man who ‘lives far away and can’t come back’. Ignorance had been bliss—until the dreadful night she’d overheard her mother’s slurred voice telling someone how ‘Everything was fine until Ruby came along. If it wasn’t for that kid I’d be in a different world right now.’

She’d stopped asking about her father after that, and tried to bury the sickeningly shameful secret that she’d driven him away. Then she had found dance and her mother had found George and it had been as if she’d lost her mother too.

The only thing she’d had in her world was her body and the music and the steps and the shapes and the struggle to be perfect. If she hadn’t found dance she’d never have made it this far.

Dance had given her confidence. And hope. And finally an understanding that a baby wasn’t responsible for anyone’s actions.

But now she had done this. She had turned off her own life supply and turned on another. This new life.

She would lie in the watery morning light, put her hand on her stomach—still flat and hard with muscle—and wonder what lay beneath. What little life was in there, burrowed away, safe until it was ready to be born? How was she ever going to give it what it needed? What chance did she have of being a proper mother when her own life hadn’t begun until she’d become a boarder at the British Ballet? They were her only family. And now she’d let them down too...

That thought would make her heave herself out of bed before she was sick. She’d clean up, then lie on the cold floor between her tiny bathroom and tiny kitchen and torture herself with fear. What if she was left alone with this? What if Matteo had already met someone else? What if he refused to see her? What if he denied that he’d ever met her?

A phone call to her mother had proved once and for all that being left alone was a very real possibility—because relying on her for help wasn’t an option. Oh, yes, she’d said she’d come to London when the baby was born, but as Ruby had ended the call, and felt the sorrowful finality of her whispered ‘goodbye’, she had known that See you soon was the last thing in the world that would actually happen.

No, there had been no other way. She’d had to try and see Matteo face to face as soon as she could.

So she had followed him on social media and in the press until she knew almost everything about him—including the fabulous annual Cordon D’Or, which ten weeks after she’d left the clinic, was exactly where he was going to be this weekend.

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