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‘Don’t what?’
Her face was full of unconscious appeal. ‘Mention it. Randy makes such a fuss, and John isn’t working me through my lunch hour. He sends me out because he thinks fresh air is good for me.’
Gilles sighed. ‘I suppose an old bachelor hasn’t a clue how to treat a pregnant woman. I’d say exercise is about the last thing you need right now.’
He was right. She was hot and harassed and her back was sore. She was at that stage of pregnancy where she felt as if she had been pregnant for years. She let him lead her out to the crowded pavement.
‘We never get the chance to talk,’ he remarked when he had finally found a cab. ‘You disappear when I’m around.’
Perhaps her tact had been a bit heavy, she construed. Randy was in love with him. And Gilles? Gilles had an ability to screen his emotions in a way similar to Dane’s.
‘It’s not my business,’ he began, ‘but …’
She took a deep breath. ‘But nothing. I don’t discuss Dane with anyone, Gilles.’
He persisted regardless. ‘You’re not leading a practical life-style.’
‘I’m happy and healthy,’ Claire answered bitingly. ‘And one-parent families are not exactly rare.’
He studied her tightly folded hands. ‘I wish I understood, but however—–’ he produced a careless smile ‘—I’ll say no more for the moment. Instead I’ll tell you why I’m in the mood to celebrate.’
She looked at him enquiringly as they crossed the pavement together. ‘I’ve just bought a ring for Randy,’ he confided spreading open the door of the restaurant.
‘Does she know?’
He shook his head as they were shown to a table.
‘Is a respectable proposal accompanying it?’ Claire dared, awake to the possibility that there mightn’t be.
He laughed. ‘But of course, and it’s probably the only one I’ve ever made,’ he confessed cheerfully.
She smiled and leant forward to grasp his hand. ‘I’m glad,’ she said.
So preoccupied were they that they neither of them noticed the tall redhead rising to her feet at a corner table, an expression of stunned disbelief freezing her features. Claire was just accepting the menu when Zelda stalked over to them.
‘You poisonous little bitch,’ she hissed, with no thought of lowering her voice. ‘With him, of all people!’
Claire flinched in startled collision with Zelda’s angrily accusing eyes. But the older girl awaited no reply. She sped back to the table she had been sharing with another woman. Gilles had already risen again.
Claire shakily drew breath. ‘Do you mind if we go?’ she mumbled, hot with embarrassment.
‘She’ll tell him,’ she sighed in the cab he had procured.
Gilles cursed. ‘It was my fault. I should have known better than to take you out in public. I forgot who I was and who you are by doing so, and I wouldn’t blame Dane for being angry. My apologies, Claire, but I’d prefer to take you back to John’s.’
It was what she preferred, too. Had Zelda noticed that she was pregnant? She could hardly have failed to do so. Hadn’t she been delighted by her disappearance from Dane’s life? Then she would enjoy telling him what a lucky escape he had had.
The afternoon hummed past while she worked. At about four she heard John speaking to another man next door in his library, and when he came into her office she was slightly surprised, for when he had a visitor he generally forgot about work. He smiled. ‘Someone to see you, Claire.’
Dane topped him by half a head, immediately visible to her shocked gaze. After John had gone, he remained poised by the filing cabinet just staring at her where she had frozen upright by her desk. His magnificent blue eyes zeroed in on her pale face only briefly for his attention quickly lodged on the rest of her. He went a whiter shade of pale beneath the dark, burnished gold of his tan.
‘You’re pregnant!’ He practically whispered it, as if it was something decent people didn’t say out loud.
He was riveted to the spot. She wished she could just shut her eyes and disappear, a flaming and anguish-filled embarrassment afflicting her. There was nothing remotely cute or dainty about her now. She had the sex appeal of a blimp in a cotton tent.
He braced a not very steady, long-fingered hand on the cabinet. ‘Very pregnant,’ he added dazedly.
He left Randy behind in degrees of shock. He had entered blazing with ice-cold temper, and right in front of her eyes it had drained out of him, along with his usual hard self-assurance. The strident ring of the phone broke the terrible silence.
