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Ridiculous.
He was the last person to take anyone’s pain away. It was better to keep his distance.
* * *
She was going to be sick.
Archie let her hand fall from the door for the third time in as many minutes, her legs threatening to collapse beneath her. Around six hours ago she’d still been somewhere across the Atlantic. And twelve hours before that she’d been to have a twenty-week ultrasound to determine that her baby was all right.
Their baby.
Hers and Kasper’s.
She’d had months to get used to this but it had made little difference, it still felt utterly surreal to her. So how was it going to feel for Kaspar?
Perhaps she should have thought this through better. Yesterday she’d only been grateful that her work and her life to date meant she had three years remaining on her visa which allowed her multiple visits to the States, for up to six months.
Foolishly, she’d taken it as some kind of sign.
The push she’d needed to go and find Kaspar. To tell him about their baby.
Now Archie stopped, one hand reaching out to lean on the wall, the other hand running tenderly over the slight swelling in her abdomen. It was incredible. A miracle. At least to her. Nothing would ever make up for losing her first baby, Faith, at eighteen weeks gestation, and no baby could ever replace her, but in some ways this new tiny human growing inside her went some way to healing those still-raw wounds.
She hovered outside the door, the small cabin bag and work laptop at her feet, trying to summon the courage to knock. It had to be the last thing he would want to hear. Might even prefer not to know. The Surgeon Prince of Persia a father? The press would have a field day.
Nevertheless, deep down she knew she owed it to this baby, and to herself, to at least tell him. To let him make that decision for herself. Still, it was turning out to be a lot harder than she’d hoped it would be.
The old Archie would probably have blurted it out, however awkwardly or untimely. The Archie of the last few years might have shamefully buried her head for as long as she could.
But which Archie was she now? She was more confused than ever. Swinging wildly from the daredevil Archie of old, right over to the reticent woman of recent years, and then back again.
The skydive, then that night with Kaspar when she’d stripped—stripped—to seduce him, emboldened in a way she hadn’t been for years. For weeks afterwards she’d strutted around feeling ten feet tall and even her friend, Katie, had been forced to admit Kaspar hadn’t been such a bad influence after all.
When she’d discovered she was pregnant, it had been a moment of sheer joy and disbelief that her body had effortlessly achieved the one thing it had been struggling to do throughout her entire marriage to Joe. And then she’d been catapulted right back into the dark, cold prison of her mind.
The fear of losing this baby the way she’d lost Faith overrode everything else. With it, the uncertainty, the confusion, the regression to the hesitant Archie of the previous five years. And so she’d spent the past few months bouncing between the two polar opposite versions of herself.
It was how she’d had the confidence to fly halfway around the world to confront Kaspar, and yet now she was here she couldn’t bring herself to lift her arm and knock on that door. She could make that final move or she could turn around, head straight back to the airport and be on a plane, with him none the wiser. The most shocking part about it was that Archie had absolutely no idea which way she was going to jump.
Who was she? Really?
And then the decision was taken out of her hands. The door suddenly opened and he was striding out. Stopping dead the instant he saw her.
‘Archie.’
‘Kaspar.’
There was a beat as his eyes seemed to take her in. Scanning her face, then dropping down. Another beat as they hovered around the evident swell of her belly.
Her whole world pinpointed around him, her breath seeming to slow and then stop in her chest. Time had done little to diminish the impact he had on her. Maybe it had even amplified it. She had the oddest sensation of falling. Plummeting.
The question was, How painful was the landing going to be?
‘You’d better come in,’ he managed at last. The unusually hoarse tone to his voice only made her nerves jangle all the more.
Then he picked up her bags and was gone. Walking back into his office with as little surprise, as little emotion as if she’d been his next patient he’d been waiting to see.
Still, it took her several long moments before she was able to follow him.
