With that parting shot her parents, still chatting and laughing with each other, headed off, leaving a brutal silence behind them.
‘So…’ Cristiano moved so that he was standing in front of her ‘…where to begin…’
‘We can begin with the fact that
I won’t be sharing my bedroom with you
. You can have Shania’s room. Mum and Dad will never know if I get up early enough and smooth down the quilt.’
‘I can think of a better place to start.’ He walked towards the kitchen door and shut it. Then, making sure that she couldn’t bolt, he remained standing in front of the closed door, six foot two of lethal determination. ‘For instance, did you get pregnant on purpose?’
Bethany was horrified at the outrageous insult. She clenched her hands into tight fists and glared at him.
‘That’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard!’
‘Then you’ve led a very sheltered life,’ Cristiano said cuttingly. ‘From where I’m standing, I’m seeing someone who connived her way into my life…’
‘
Connived my way? You
were the one who showed up on my doorstep, don’t you remember?’
‘Hardly
your
doorstep.’
‘Okay, the doorstep!’ She pushed her hair away from her face.
‘…And, having found my bed, decided that I was just too good a catch to let go and what better way to hold a man than to get pregnant by him?’
Bethany laughed incredulously. ‘You think I
planned this
? You really think that I
wanted
to abandon my degree, abandon my independence so that I could have a baby?’ Her eyes filled up, her mouth wobbled; she felt like someone on the edge of a nervous breakdown. She was hardly showing her pregnancy but for the past few months it had been on her mind every waking minute. She had been living on a day to day basis, not daring to think beyond the very near future. The dream of finding her feet away from the little town in which she had grown up was in ruins around her and she couldn’t face the thought of sitting down and really working out what happened next. It was as though Plan A, around which she had based her future, had devolved into some other plan and she no longer had the right tools to grapple with it. Where would she be in six months’ time? A year? Where would she be living? She couldn’t very well remain an indefinite lodger in her parents’ house with a young baby, still sleeping in the bedroom she had slept in as a child herself. But where would she go? And how would she be able to earn a sufficiently good living to support two?
That he could stand there and coolly ask whether she had planned the pregnancy was just too much!
‘Do you really imagine that you’re that much of a dream catch?’ She propelled herself angrily away from the counter against which she had been leaning. ‘You’re
arrogant
, you’re
cruel
and you’re a massive
snob
!’ She poked one shaking finger at him. ‘Do you honestly think that I would throw away my future so that I could hitch my wagon to a guy who hates my guts and thinks I’m a cheap liar?’ She dashed an angry tear away from her face. ‘How sad and…and
desperate
do you think I am?’
‘Calm down. You’re beginning to get hysterical.’
Arrogant? Cruel? A snob?
Shouldn’t
she
be the one on the back foot? To the best of his memory,
he
had been totally upfront with her, so how was it that she was now hurling accusations at
him
?
‘It’s impossible talking to you.’ Bethany was further enraged by the fact that Cristiano was as cool as a cucumber. She felt that if she didn’t leave she would explode and the explosion would wake her parents, if not the entire town.
‘You’re not talking. You’re being hysterical.’
‘You make me
feel
hysterical!’ Her green eyes clashed with his and she felt dizzy and off balance. How was it possible for him to do this to her? To shake her to the very core and make her feel giddy when all she wanted to feel was repulsion?
‘You don’t
look
pregnant.’
‘What?’
‘Shouldn’t you be bigger?’
Bethany was thoroughly disconcerted by this abrupt change of topic. ‘Some people don’t show until quite late on and I’m one of those. Why are you changing the subject?’
‘Because you shouldn’t be getting so overwrought in your…condition.’
‘How do you expect me to feel when you stand there like
a block of ice sneering at me and accusing me of plotting all of this?’ Deep breaths, she thought. Hysteria was no way to deal with the situation. ‘If I had been lunatic enough to get pregnant to trap you, then don’t you think that I might just have contacted you the minute I found out?’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘For the same reason that…I took off. I wasn’t the rich, worldly-wise woman you thought I was. I was a nobody, the sort of person you wouldn’t have looked at twice in the normal course of things.’
‘Don’t run yourself down,’ Cristiano censured, frowning.
‘I’m not running myself down, Cristiano. I’m telling it like it is. You told me yourself that you would never date any woman who didn’t come from a similar background to you because you would never be sure that she wasn’t after you for your money.’
‘I never said that!’ The conversation seemed to have run away from him and he couldn’t figure out where or when he had relinquished control.
‘Yes, you did!’
‘Okay. Maybe I did, although I’m not convinced.’
‘So when I discovered that I was pregnant, I knew that I couldn’t contact you. How would you have felt if I’d shown up on your doorstep, one Bethany Macguire, pregnant and average, with nowhere to go and barely a dime to her name? Don’t tell me that you would have fallen over yourself with joy and rapture!’
‘That’s hardly the point.’
‘Then what is?’
‘I deserved to know. When it comes to a child, it’s not about how I would feel or how you would feel, it’s about the child. Had you any intention at all of ever contacting me to tell me that I had fathered a child?’
Bethany looked away, reddening. Put like that, she sounded like a selfish cow, but at the time the thought of telephoning him, explaining herself, explaining that she was going to have a baby, had left her mind almost as quickly as it had entered it.
‘I would have. In due course. Most probably.’
Cristiano stamped on his immediate response to that. There was little point in pursuing that line of attack, but in his mind he envisaged a scenario in which his child grew up without him around, became the stepson or stepdaughter of some other man who would have entered her life at some point in time. The thought outraged him. Just thinking of her in the arms of someone else outraged him. He put that thought out of his head and resolved to approach the situation from a practical direction.
He also found himself reluctantly believing her reasons for lying to him in the first place. Which, naturally, didn’t excuse her opportunistic manipulation of the truth, but he would overlook that because there were now far bigger things in the mix and that was a reality he couldn’t afford to forget.
‘I’m surprised you didn’t kill me off,’ he mused and Bethany looked up at him, again sidetracked by his change of tone. From icy-cold and enraged, his voice was now low and husky and mildly amused. It made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end and something inside her uncurled, making her feel vulnerable and exposed.
‘I’m not
that
horrible,’ she stuttered breathlessly. ‘Besides, it’s just as well that I didn’t, considering you’ve appeared here. Explaining the sudden appearance of an absent fiancé is enough of a nightmare. Explaining one who had come back to life would have been impossible.’ With some of her anger defused, she was belatedly aware of just
how close she was to him. Practically touching and it was beginning to get to her. She took a couple of steps back and told him that she was going to bed.
‘Where are your clothes, anyway?’ she asked. Her parents wouldn’t have noticed his lack of a suitcase and she only had now.
‘A certain large hotel a few miles away, as it happens.’
‘Oh, right. The converted manor.’ She would have suggested that he drive right back there but what was the point? Her parents would think it bizarre for the newly reunited couple to spend their first night apart, especially when they had shown such remarkable twenty-first century liberalism in allowing them to share the same bedroom. ‘So you have no clothes with you. Well, what are you going to sleep in, just out of interest.’
‘Tut, tut. Don’t tell me that your memory’s
that
short.’
A stirring, heady drumbeat started deep inside her, bringing hectic colour to her cheeks as she remembered their nights together. No clothes. For her, that had been a novelty. She had
never
slept in the nude before and the first time she had done so she had been incredibly shy because it was almost more intimate than making love. But Cristiano, on the other hand, didn’t even possess a pair of pyjamas.
‘No way. And, furthermore, could you please move. I want to go upstairs now.’
Cristiano didn’t hesitate to step aside. He wasn’t quite sure what the conclusion of their conversation had been. Whether she was Bethany Maguire or Amelia Doni or the Queen of England, she was still as feisty, argumentative and unpredictable as he had remembered and, as usual, he was left feeling as though he had been stuffed in a washing machine and spun at full speed.
Besides, he was interested to see what was going to
happen when they made it to her bedroom. He watched her small, rounded derrière with appreciative eyes as she walked ahead of him. One thing he had not forgotten was her delicacy. She was like spun glass and she moved with the grace of a dancer, even though she most likely had never been to a ballet class in her entire life. It was difficult to judge whether she had any kind of bump at all underneath the baggy jumper, but from behind her shape had certainly stayed the same.
For the first time, Cristiano considered the baby she was carrying as opposed to the pregnancy with which he had been presented and decided that it was a great credit to his talent for flexibility and his strength of character that he hadn’t immediately felt bitter or trapped. His mother and his grandfather would be over the moon, of that he was sure. It might not have happened in the perfect way, as they would have ideally liked, but the end result would be welcomed with open arms.
They had reached the top of the stairs and Bethany turned to him and pointed down the corridor.
‘My bedroom’s the last on the right,’ she said in a hushed voice. ‘I’ll be in in a minute and you’d better make sure that you’ve made yourself a bed on the floor. I’ll bring you a spare quilt and you can use one of my pillows.’
Cristiano didn’t say anything. He headed for her bedroom, taking his time to have a look at the other rooms he walked past, which were undoubtedly her sisters’ rooms, and he was even able to tell which room belonged to which sister. The one with the shelves and shelves of books would be Shania’s, and the one with pots of make-up and creams would be Melanie’s. Something else, he half mused, that she had not lied about. Her own room was, at the end of the corridor, the biggest, with sprawling windows on two walls and decorated in neutral shades of creams and oatmeal. The furniture was
old and heavy and not at all to his taste, but it seemed to suit the feel of the room and the bed was big. Four fluffy pillows, none of which would be going anywhere near the floor, if only she knew.
Cristiano kicked off his shoes, got rid of his socks and then settled down on the feather mattress with satisfaction, his hands clasped behind his head, his mind pleasantly involved in imagining her reaction when she returned with her spare quilt to find him lying on her bed.
He didn’t have very long to wait. Literally five minutes later she tiptoed into the room, pausing by the door to get her bearings because he hadn’t bothered to switch on the light. It was something she remedied straight away, banging on the switch and then pulsating as she looked at him sprawled out on her bed. She wanted to slam the door hard but resisted the impulse and closed it with a decisive click.
‘What are you doing?’ She flung the quilt at him and he fielded it expertly onto the floor.
‘I’m enjoying the luxury of this great feather mattress of yours. Much more comfortable than the one at the hotel, which shows that money doesn’t always buy the best.’
‘Well, now that you’ve enjoyed it, you can get up and start doing something about your sleeping arrangements.’ The intimacy of their surroundings was choking her and she had to force her legs into action. ‘And these are some of Dad’s pyjamas. Put them on.’
‘Why? You’ve already seen me naked.’
‘That was then and this is now!’
‘Something about horses and stable doors springs to mind here.’
‘I don’t
care
what springs to mind!’ Bethany almost wept with frustration. ‘Just go and…and get into the pyjamas…’ She breathed deeply. ‘The bathroom’s next door…’
‘Sure.’ Cristiano stood up and stretched. ‘But I’m not sleeping on the floor.’
‘Then
I will
!’
‘Oh, no, you won’t.’ He wasn’t smiling as he walked slowly towards her. ‘You’re going to get into that bed and so am I. I won’t have you sleeping on the floor, pregnant.’
‘Then
you
sleep on the floor.’ Her eyes locked with his and her breathing became shallow and laboured.
‘Neither of us is going to be sleeping on the floor and if I come back in here to find that you’ve done something with that quilt other than stuff it away in the wardrobe then I’m not going to be happy.’
‘Oh, and
your
happiness is paramount, naturally!’
He shot her a lazy smile and wondered if he’d actually forgotten how fetching she looked when her eyes were blazing and her colour was up. ‘So we agree on something. It’s a start.’
Bethany spent three seconds fuming as he unhurriedly left the room, grabbing the towel she had brought in with her and stuck on a chair by the door in passing. Then she moved as though propelled by a rocket. Having already washed her face and brushed her teeth, she flung on her old pyjamas, tartan plaid flannelette that any granny would have been proud of, and got into the bed, making sure to draw the covers up to her chin and position one of the pillows as a barrier between them. She then turned her back to the door and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. Neither protected her from the way her skin tingled as she heard the bedroom door quietly open and shut ten minutes later. He moved so silently that she was only aware of him getting into the bed when it was depressed, almost causing her rigid body to topple over the side.