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‘Actually, it’s more like four nights. New York.’
To Megan, four nights sounded like eternity.
‘Lucky you!’ she trilled. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to New York! I don’t suppose there’s much point asking, but try and take some pictures!’
‘You could come with me.’ He had never asked a woman to go on a business trip with him—even a business trip which he had only contrived to lengthen on the spur of the moment.
‘No chance. School.’
Alessandro scowled. ‘A few days away wouldn’t result in a generation of drop-outs.’
‘True. But I can’t.’ There was an edginess to his mood that was transmitting itself to her.
‘Who are you going to go out with?’
‘Oh, just a few friends. Probably a pub.’
That said nothing. Alessandro’s mood deteriorated and later, when they made love, there was an aggression that only stopped a little short of savagery.
He told her that he would call. Every day. Megan told him that there was no need, that she would be fine. She was determined to show him self-reliance.
He left for the airport with the ridiculous notion that he had stupidly dug himself a hole by telling her that he would be away at least two days longer than he needed to be.
It left him a hell of a lot of time to wonder whether she would be going out and chatting with the guy she seemed determined to hang on to even though she must know that it just wasn’t on. At least not in his world.
He couldn’t concentrate. He repeatedly told himself that it had been a stupid idea to try and tease a response out of her by absenting himself from the scene. And she didn’t seem herself when he called her.
Alessandro, who had an office in Manhattan, in one of the seriously tall buildings that dwarfed the street below, swung round in his chair and glared out of the floor-to-ceiling sheet of glass that separated him from a twenty-storey free fall.
He had just got off the phone to her, and although the time difference might have excused her subdued and downright weird response to hearing his voice, he had the sickening feeling that something was wrong.
On the spur of the moment he snatched up the telephone again, drummed his fingers restlessly on the desk as the telephone exchange did its business and connected him through to the landline at the house once again.
It took for ever for her to take the call, making him wonder what he had been interrupting and throwing him into an even darker mood.
‘What’s the matter?’ he delivered tightly, cutting to the chase.
‘Matter?’ Several thousand miles away, Megan swallowed hard as she bought some time. Of course she should have known that Alessandro would have caught her change of mood. Even when he wasn’t looking at her he still seemed capable of reading her like a book.
‘Something’s wrong. What is it?’
‘Nothing. Well…actually, nothing’s wrong, as such, but…but we need to talk…when you get back…’
‘Talk? Talk about what?’ Alessandro had bad experiences with Megan’s need to talk pronouncements, and he was getting a bad feeling now. Suddenly all the meetings he had lined up faded into inconsequence. He would leave New York immediately. He would buy a bloody jet if he had to in order to accomplish that.
‘Don’t worry, Alessandro…it can wait.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
Wait? She just wished it could wait for ever. She held up the little plastic stick with the prominent positive pregnancy line stamped on it like the decisive hand of fate. A bit of sickness, tenderness in her breasts…It hadn’t occurred to her that she might be pregnant until the evening Alessandro had left for New York. She had visited Charlotte for dinner, and after a second dash to the bathroom because she’d felt a little queasy had had the idea planted in her head, when her friend had jokingly asked whether there was ‘a bun in the oven’.
Naturally they had been using contraception. Alessandro had taken care of that. But there had been a couple of times when lust had overridden care. And, thinking back, when had she seen her last period anyway? She had always had irregular periods. That absence, in the great scheme of things, hadn’t been noticed.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ she told Alessandro now. ‘You have fun over there in New York.’
‘Have fun? I’m here on business, Megan. What the hell do you imagine I’m getting up to?’
‘I have no idea,’ Megan said waspishly. ‘It’s your concern!’ Tears were gathering at the back of her throat. ‘Anyway, I’ll see you when you get back, in a couple of days.’ At which point she hung up.
