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“Dear God, man—”
“Yes. I know. But she was carrying my child. At least, that’s what I believed.”
Lucas sighed again. “Of course.”
“It was a nightmare,” Damian said, shuddering. “I guess she thought it was safe to drop the last of her act. She treated my staff like slaves, ran up a six figure charge at Tiffany…” His jaw knotted. “I didn’t want anything to do with her.”
“No sex?” Lucas asked bluntly.
“None. I couldn’t imagine why I’d slept with her in the first place. She thought I’d lost interest because she was pregnant.” He grimaced. “She began talking about how different things would be, if she weren’t…” Damian started toward the table that held the coffee service. Half
way there, he muttered something in Greek, veered past it and went instead to a teak cabinet on the wall. “What are you drinking?”
“Whatever you’re pouring.”
The answer brought a semblance of a smile to Damian’s lips. He poured healthy amounts of Courvoisier into a pair of crystal brandy snifters and held one out. The men drank. Then Damian spoke again.
“A couple of weeks later, she told me she’d miscarried. I felt—I don’t know what I felt. Upset, at the loss of the baby. I mean, by then I’d come to think of it as a baby, you know? Not a collection of cells.” He shook his head. “Once I got past that, what I felt, to be honest, was relief. Now we could end the relationship.”
“Except, she didn’t want to end it.”
Damian gave a bitter laugh. “You’re smarter than I was. She became hysterical. She said I’d made promises, begged her to spend her life with me.”
“But you hadn’t.”
“Damned right, I hadn’t. The only thing that had drawn us together was the baby. Right?”
“Right,” Lucas said, although he was starting to realize he didn’t have to say anything. The flood gates had opened.
“She seemed to plummet into depression. Stayed in bed all day. Wouldn’t eat. Went to her obstetrician—at least she said she’d gone to her obstetrician—and told me he’d advised her to get pregnant again.”
“But—”
“Exactly. I didn’t want a child, not with her. I wanted out.” Damian took another swallow of brandy. “She begged me to reconsider. She’d come into my room in the middle of the night—”
“You had separate rooms?”
A cold light flared in Damian’s eyes. “From the start.”
“Sure, sure. Sorry. You were saying—”
“She was good at what she did. I have to give her that. Most nights, I turned her away but once…” A muscle knotted in his jaw. “I’m not proud of it.”
“Man, don’t beat yourself up. If she seduced you—”
“I used a condom. It made her crazy. ‘I want your baby,’ she said. “And then—”
Damian fell silent. Lucas leaned forward. “And then?”
“And then,” Damian said, after a deep breath and a long exhalation, “then she told me she’d conceived. That her doctor had confirmed it.”
“But the condom—”
“It broke, she said, when she—when she took it off me—” He cleared his throat. “Hell, why would I question it? The damned things do break. We all know that.”
“So—so she was pregnant again.”
“No,” Damian said flatly. “She wasn’t pregnant. Oh, she went through all the motions. Morning sickness, ice cream and pickles in the middle of the night. But she wasn’t pregnant.” His voice roughened. “She never had been. Not then, not ever.”
