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‘Congratulations. Who is the lucky man?’
Maria frowned, both shocked and confused by his question.
‘What do you mean?’ she said, wondering why she was still holding the glass of water and he his, as if they were having a polite exchange rather than the fact he’d just implied that...that...
‘Well, given that we used protection, every single time—’
‘Wait, what?’
‘You cannot really expect to turn up here a convenient three months after our...encounter, and lay claim to my being the father of this miraculous child?’
She was speechless. She had imagined this conversation so many times, but this? Not what she’d expected. Encounter? He’d called the night they shared an encounter? Now she was angry. Of all the feelings she’d experienced thus far, since discovering the fact she was to have a child, anger had not been one of them. Until now.
‘You bastard.’
‘I think the press prefer to call me a beast, but I suppose that will do just as well.’
‘I shouldn’t have come here,’ she said, more to herself, rather than him. But it didn’t stop him from answering.
‘No, you probably shouldn’t have,’ he said, sighing as if she were an inconvenience rather than the mother of his child. ‘Many others have tried to lay claim to such a thing, and believe me, Maria, they were much more skilled at deception than you. And ultimately, they were proved to be the lying, scheming serpents that they were. I must say, I’m quite disappointed. I had thought you different.’
Maria shook her head. Both at the shocking hostility in his tone and at the awfulness that there had been women who had apparently tried to trick him in the past. In a second, all the things she thought they’d shared, the beauty of that one night she’d clung to as her world had morphed and changed before her eyes, burned to dust. She didn’t know this man. She was nothing to him. And she would never, never, force such a thing upon her child.
‘Not as disappointed as I am. I hope that your conscience is kind to you when you realise just how wrong you are,’ she stated, gathering her wits about her, and the scraps of her feelings from the floor. She placed the untouched glass down on the small coffee table, reaching into her bag to retrieve the black and white sonogram image of their, no her, child—the one thing that she could give him, the only thing, and, placing it beside the glass, she turned her back on him and stepped towards the door.
‘Wait.’
‘What for?’ she asked without turning, her back still to him. ‘For you to hurl even more insults at me? I don’t think so.’
‘Please.’
She turned then, not because his tone was pleading—which it wasn’t—but because she would give him this chance. She needed to. She found him standing by the coffee table, one finger on the corner of the sonogram. He wasn’t looking at her, but at it. The image of their child. She wondered what he saw in the grey shapes, the patches of darkness and the surprisingly detailed white figure of their baby. The head, the umbilical cord, arms and legs, all clearly visible.
Finally he looked up at her.
‘Do not lie to me about this, Maria. Do not test me.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m not. I’m pregnant. The baby is yours.’
‘How?’
Again, shaking away the doubt and confusion she had felt when she’d first seen that thin blue line. ‘Condoms aren’t fail proof, I wasn’t on any other kind of contraception. I...’ She shrugged.
‘You’re pregnant. The baby is mine.’
* * *
Maria nodded and Matthieu’s whole world shifted on its axis. He cast his eye back to the small black and white image on the coffee table. His child?
‘I’m...’ stunned, shocked...what? His mind was completely blank. Though the one thing he could recognise above the white noise roaring in his ears was that Maria deserved an apology.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, the sea of confusion and chaotic thoughts making his tone dark, guttural almost. The instant refusal that had risen to his mind had been both cruel and devastating. He hadn’t missed the way her already pale skin had turned almost bone white beneath his taunt. But it hadn’t been that that had convinced him that she spoke the truth. No. It had been her ready departure. So different from the crocodile tears and insincere desperation he’d experienced in the past. Maria had been willing to walk away not just from him, but from what many others had tried to secure. His money. His ring.
A ring he’d once sworn never to put on a woman’s finger. Never imagining for a second the need to do so. Never being so unfailingly irresponsible to sire a child that would, along with its mother, invade his carefully ordered life.
He gestured for her to sit and only after she had stiffly approached the sofa opposite where he stood, and sat, or rather collapsed slightly into the deeply upholstered leather, did he finally sit down too.
‘What is it you want?’ he asked, holding her gaze with the steel trap of his own, ruthlessly seeking out her intentions, almost willingly seeing hints of her avarice.
