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Still disconcerted by the presence of a bunny rabbit whose quivering nose was poking out of the elaborate hutch, Vitale frowned, uneasy with a situation he had never been in before. The sort of lovers he usually had took precautions and accidents didn’t happen, or at least if they did they were kept quiet, he acknowledged cynically. ‘I believe there are tests you can do.’
‘I’ll buy one and let you know the result when I’ve done it,’ she muttered carelessly. ‘But right now I’ve got more important things to worry about—’ Vitale raised a brow. ‘Such as … what exactly?’ ‘Fluffy, my pet rabbit—what am I going to do with her? My neighbour has already lodged a complaint and you heard the landlord! He wouldn’t budge an inch. He’s going to chuck me out of here if I don’t rehome Fluffy!’ she exclaimed.
‘Rules are rules,’ Vitale pronounced, a little out of his depth when it came to keeping pets because he had never had one of any kind. It was a challenge for him to understand the depth of her attachment to the animal, but her distraught expression did get the message across. Growing exasperation gripped him. ‘Perhaps you could give the rabbit away.’
Zara dealt him a furious look of condemnation. ‘I couldn’t give Fluffy away!’ she gasped. ‘She’s been with me since my sixteenth birthday and I love her. Thanks to you I’ve been put through an awful lot of grief over the last couple of weeks but I can cope with it because I’m strong.’
Vitale was still very much focused on what was most important to him and detached from the rabbit scenario. ‘I’ll buy you a pregnancy test and bring it back here—’
‘Don’t put yourself out!’ Zara slung him a seething look of hatred that startled him, for he had not appreciated that those lavender eyes could telegraph that amount of aversion.
Vitale compressed his sensual mouth and heaved a sigh. ‘I must. I’m equally involved in this situation and I can’t relax until we have found out where we stand.’
‘Well, if wondering about where you stand is all you’re worrying about I can help you right now!’ Zara fired back at him. ‘I hate you. If I find out I’m pregnant, I’ll hate you even more. What will I do? I’ll trail you through every court in the land for financial support and I’ll hope it embarrasses the hell out of you!’
Vitale dealt her a seething look of impatience. ‘If you are pregnant you won’t have to trail me through a court for financial support. I would pick up the bills without argument.’
Unimpressed by that declaration and cringing at the unhappy thought of being beholden to him, Zara stood so straight her spine ached and her eyes glowed like embers in a banked down fire. ‘Then I’ll fight not to accept your financial support!’ she slung back.
Vitale was not slow on the uptake and he got the message that whatever it took she was currently out for his blood. As there was nothing that whet his appetite more than a challenge, a sardonic smile slashed his wonderfully well-shaped mouth. She didn’t know who she was dealing with. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ he warned her before he turned on his heel.
‘You’re not the Terminator,’ she told his back acidly before the lift doors closed on him.
Vitale, her sleek sophisticated banker, had gone to buy her a pregnancy test, surely a humble task beneath his high-powered notice? He was not hers, she scolded herself angrily, marvelling that such a designation had even occurred to her. Why was she even speaking to him? Her period was already four days late, a fact she had kept pushed to the back of her mind because she already had more than she could handle on her plate. Usually, however, she was as regular as clockwork in that department, so her disrupted cycle was a source of concern. She stroked Fluffy, inwardly admitting that she really didn’t want to do a test yet because she much preferred to keep her spirits up by concentrating on sunnier prospects. My goodness, she reflected with a creeping feeling of apprehension, becoming a single parent in her current circumstances would be a nightmare.
Within the hour, Vitale returned and handed her a carrier bag. Zara extracted, not one, but four different boxes containin
g pregnancy-testing kits.
‘I had no idea which you would prefer,’ Vitale declared without a shade of discomfiture. Zara dug into the biggest box and extracted the instructions. The print was so tiny she couldn’t read it and the diagram just blurred. Her hand shook, a sense of intense humiliation threatening to eat her alive and turning her skin clammy with perspiration. ‘Go home,’ she told him shakily.
‘Why? I might as well wait.’ Vitale’s impatience to know the result was etched on his face and hummed from his taut restive stance. He lifted one of the other boxes. ‘Use that one. From what I read on the box I understand it can give an immediate result.’
Grateful for that information, Zara took it and unwrapped it, spreading out the instructions on the table with a careful hand, squinting down at it as calmly as she could in an unsuccessful attempt to focus on the minuscule print. All she could see was a blur of mismatched symbols. She thought it was most probably her mood and the awful awareness that she had an audience that was making her dyslexia even worse than it usually was. She needed to stay calm and focused but just at that instant her self-discipline was absent.
‘What’s wrong?’ Vitale queried rather curtly.
Zara breathed in slow and deep. ‘The print is so small I can’t read it,’ she complained.
Assuming that she had imperfect sight but was not prepared to own up to the fact or indeed have anything done about it, Vitale suppressed a groan and lifted the sheet to read the relevant sentences. Zara would have much preferred to have read it herself. Her cheeks flared red and hot but, veiling her gaze, she made no comment. As she locked herself into the tiny shower room with the kit she thought that anything was better than him discovering the truth about her affliction.
Only when Zara reached sixth form had a concerned teacher asked her mother to allow an educational psychologist to test her daughter. Identified as severely dyslexic, Zara had finally been offered the assistance that she needed to catch up with her peers. Unfortunately by that stage her self-esteem had sunk to rock-bottom and she had been unable to believe that reasonable exam grades might be within her reach. Her father, after all, had immediately dismissed her dyslexia as a ‘poor excuse for stupidity’ and had refused to credit the existence of such a condition.
Although a speech-language therapist had been recommended to teach Zara how to handle the problem, her father had refused to consider that option, saying it would be a waste of time and money. Unsurprisingly Zara had never recovered from her father’s shame and disgust at the news that his daughter suffered from something labelled ‘a learning disability’. It was a subject never ever mentioned in her home but she often suspected it was the main reason why her parents continued to look on her as some sort of perpetual child, rather than the adult that she was.
Zara stood in the shower room with her attention on the novelty wall clock left behind by a previous tenant, refusing to allow herself to simply stare at the test to see if it had changed colour. The waiting time up, she straightened her shoulders and finally directed her gaze to the tiny viewing window on the test wand and there was the line of confirmation that she had most feared to see. Her legs almost buckled beneath her and she broke out in a cold sweat of horror.
Wrenching open the door, Zara reeled out. ‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid,’ she proclaimed jaggedly.
‘Let me see.’ Accustomed to trusting in only his own powers of observation, Vitale insisted on checking the test. He might have paled had his attention not been on Zara, who was displaying more than enough shock and consternation for both of them.
‘You can leave now,’ she told him woodenly. But Vitale stayed where he was, his attention involuntarily fixing to her flat stomach. A baby, she was going to have his baby. He was going to have a child with Monty Blake’s daughter. He was utterly appalled at the news. A selfish moment of inattention in the heat of passion was all it had taken to permanently change both their lives. Yet he more than anyone had known the potential cost of such negligence and had the least excuse for the oversight, he conceded with stormy self-loathing.
‘I can’t simply leave you like this,’ Vitale declared with a harsh edge to his deep drawl.
‘Why not?’ Zara gave him a deadened look, still too traumatised to think beyond what she had just learned about her own body. ‘Don’t you think you’ve already done enough?’
In the face of that unnecessary reminder, Vitale stood his ground. It was a bad moment but in almost thirty years he had lived through an awful lot of bad moments and he would not allow himself to flinch from anything unpleasant. But for him the worst aspect was that this was an event outside his control and he liked that reality least of all. ‘I’d like to deal with this before I leave.’
