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He would probably be furious at that, she thought. He would see it as a gesture of defiance—which it hadn’t been.
His reaction to the phone call, however, was taking second place to the dilemma raging inside her. All the doubts she had shoved away had crept out of their hiding places and were wreaking long-overdue havoc.
The minute Alessandro found out about this pregnancy he would insist she marry him. After all this time Megan knew him well enough to know that he was a man who was not afraid of committing for the right reasons. Or at least the right reasons for him. For reasons that made sense. Hence his engagement to Victoria. She had made sense. Hence his living with her. It made sense to expunge her by having her rather than fight it. A baby would necessitate marriage. That, to him, would make sense, because no child of his would be born out of wedlock.
Megan could envisage the Victorian speech even as she sat with the phone in her hand, staring at it.
Did she want to be married to a man who didn’t love her? She had agreed to move in with him because she hadn’t been able to envisage life without him, because at the back of her mind there had been a thread of hope that she would eventually be able to win him over. But would she be able to face a lifetime knowing that he had married her for the wrong reasons? Connected by a child and in a position where walking away might become an impossibility?
For the first time since she had started her job Megan took the next day off work.
With the silence of an empty house around her, she had time to really sit down and take stock. Alessandro disliked emotional roller-coaster rides. She had been too much for him seven years ago, and she had tried very hard not to make any demands of him since she had moved in with him. She had never questioned his movements and had maintained her independence. Fat lot of good all that had done when he was about to be flung onto the craziest roller-coaster ride of his life. She wondered whether he would resent her for having catapulted him into a situation he would never in a million years have wanted with her. Thinking about that made her feel even sicker than she already felt.
The miserable grey day faded into gathering nightfall, and she drooped around the house, ignoring all phone calls and making sure to switch off her cellphone—because Alessandro would phone again, and she just needed time without hearing his voice.
She hadn’t expected to see him. Not when he should have been thousands of miles away. And she was lying on the sofa in the sitting room, nursing the start of a headache, when she felt rather than heard his sudden presence in the room.
He was standing in the doorway and she wondered how long he had been there, looking at her with the strangest expression on his face. The least he could have done was announce his presence by making some noise!
Megan scrambled into a sitting position, the onset of her headache forgotten as she absorbed the deeply sexy man around whom she now felt she had spent years orbiting, like a lost little planet trying to fight a gravitational pull that was too powerful for her.
‘Wha…what are you doing back here?’
Alessandro looked at her white stricken face and knew that he had been right to have dropped everything and returned.
‘You said that you wanted to talk.’
‘You flew back here because I said that we needed to talk?’
Alessandro was quick to spot the fact that she had replaced wanted with needed.
‘I’m glad,’ he asserted, moving towards her.
Before he had left for New York she had been all over him. Now she was watching him cautiously, and he felt a film of perspiration break out over his body. He didn’t know what had engineered this change but time apart, not to mention long, hellish hours on the Red-Eye, had put everything into perspective.
‘Because I want to talk too.’ He swung his long body onto the sofa with her but maintained a certain distance, because he didn’t want to be distracted by the proximity of her body. She was looking at him, holding her breath, and Alessandro wondered why it had taken him so long to wake up to the obvious. ‘I’ve been a fool,’ he muttered in a low, raw voice, which meant that she had to lean towards him just to catch what he was saying. ‘We should never have been apart.’
‘You had meetings in New York….’
‘That’s not what I’m talking about,’ he said, waving aside her interruption with an impatient gesture that was so eloquently him. ‘I mean…’ There was a confusing jumble of words inside him, and a panicky desperation for her to hear them. ‘Seven years ago…I made a mistake…’
‘You did?’
‘I was a young, ambitious fool.’ He was facing up to a stark truth which he had known from the very first minute she had walked out of his digs at the university, and it felt good to get it off his chest. ‘I thought I knew what I wanted.’
