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‘You are. Welcome back, Little Ant.’
A small smile played on her lips, despite herself. He was right, and it felt good to see the re-emergence of her old feisty self.
Every time she was around him, it seemed.
Hastily, she bit her tongue before she could utter that particular nonsense aloud.
‘I’m sorry for judging. For criticising.’
Kaspar’s tone was surprisingly tender. Even...nostalgic? It elicited another smile from her, albeit this time a wry one.
‘You and Robbie may have called me Little Ant, but Dad used to call me his Little Tardigrade.’
The throaty laugh rippled through her, doing things to her it had no business doing. Rushing straight through her body and to her very core, where she was, shamefully, in danger of melting all over again.
‘I think I remember that. You always were little but hardy.’
‘Yet also, sometimes, more fragile than people thought,’ she heard herself replying, too late to clamp down on her words, to swallow them back.
She’d never admitted that to anyone but her father before. Why on earth would she say it now? And to Kaspar, of all people.
‘I never realised.’ His face sharpened. Hard, angular lines that signified his disapproval. ‘I always thought you were such a tough little thing. So strong.’
Archie took in his almost contemptuous expression. It left her feeling as though she’d let him down, let herself down, and she told herself that her heart wasn’t being squeezed, right there, in her splintering chest. She gritted her teeth.
‘Kaspar, I didn’t come here to talk about my ex-husband or my historical mistakes. I just felt I owed it to you to tell you I was expecting a baby, your baby, and I didn’t think it was something that I should do over the telephone.’
‘And then what? You expected me to fall on one knee and propose? To play happy families?’
Actually, she hadn’t thought past this awful meeting. But now he looked so dark, so forbidding, so cold, it was like being plunged into an icy, glacial milk flow. She got the sense that no amount of shivering would ever be able to warm her up while his eyes bored into her like this.
It occurred to her that her best form of defence right now was attack. She folded her arms, tilting her chin up and out as she forced herself to stare him down. Refusing to cower, however he might make her feel.
‘No, Kaspar. I’ve been there, I’ve done that. Marriage isn’t a mistake I intend to make again.’
‘So then what? You thought you’d drop the bombshell and then hop on the next plane back to the UK?’
He was goading her, his scepticism unmistakeable. It was a struggle not to bristle. She had no idea how she forced herself to her feet. Took her first few steps across the room as though she was in complete control of herself.
‘I don’t know what I expected you to do. Any more than, I suspect, you know what to do right now. But I just felt I owed it to you to at least tell you I was pregnant.’ It was a hauteur she hadn’t even known she possessed. ‘Now that I have, I think it’s time for me to leave.’
Kaspar, apparently, wasn’t as impressed as she was.
‘Sit back down, Archie,’ he ground out furiously. ‘You’re mad if you think I’m letting you go anywhere with my baby.’
CHAPTER SIX
WHAT THE HELL was he playing at?
Pacing silently on the other side of the curtain as Catherine conducted a thorough examination of Archie, he struggled to quell the out-of-control fear that was spiralling inside him.
He wasn’t ready to be a father. He’d never thought he ever would be. And that was another of the reasons why he’d always avoided romantic entanglements. He could never, ever risk being the kind of parent his father had been. Worse, being the kind of parent his mother had been. He remembered how it had felt to feel insignificant, unworthy, not...enough. Pain and grief poured through him, like the boilermakers he’d drunk as an unhappy, lost, late-teen; a shot of whisky chased down by a strong beer.
But now his life and Archie’s were bound together. For ever. He’d known that after the first few moments of blind panic had cleared, back in his office. He would never allow a child to grow up the way he had, feeling unwanted or unloved.
He had to be the kind of father to his child that Archie’s father had been to his own kids. The closest thing Kaspar had ever had to a father himself. He owed it to Archie. The woman whose door he suspected he would have been banging down months ago had he not kept the expanse of the Atlantic between them.
Which made no sense. Because that absolutely wasn’t him. He didn’t know what had come over him. The ghosts she had been resurrecting ever since that first night together when he’d realised who she was. When he hadn’t been able to help himself from claiming her anyway.
