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‘And you wanted to what? Enjoy watching my misery?’
‘I thought you might need some help.’
She was infuriated by his strained gentleness. ‘You haven’t been much help so far—why start now?’
‘Calm down, Kate, it isn’t good for you to get all wrought up over trifles.
’
Trifles? Kate’s mouth fell open at his sheer gall.
He looked around the room, which was in a defiant mess very different from her normal, fastidious requirements, and frowned.
‘Are you packing?’
She recovered from her momentary speechlessness. ‘You wish! Unlike you I don’t choose to run away from my problems.’ No, she ran to them. That was her problem!
‘Then what’s all this?’ He nudged a foot against a stack of carrier bags by the door.
‘Just some things of mine I’m putting out for the rubbish.’
One of the packages slumped, spilling out books, and he bent to tuck them back in the bag, jerking upright as if he had been burnt when he saw the colourful titles.
‘You’re throwing out your books on child-care?’
She gave a bitter laugh at his fierce frown. ‘Well, I won’t need them now, will I? Do you think I should give them away to charity? Feel free to take as many as you like.’
His body took on a dangerous lean. ‘What do you mean you won’t need them, now?’ he said warily.
He wasn’t usually so obtuse. ‘Well, if I’m not going to be a parent, I don’t need to read books on how to develop good parenting skills,’ she choked.
Did he think she would want to keep the reminders of her foolishness around for next time she thought she was pregnant? She was twenty-seven, and in love with a man who had brutally rejected the very essence of her womanhood—at this rate there would never be a ‘next time’.
His wariness gave way to stark tension. ‘What are you going to do? Give the baby up for adoption?’
Kate gasped, shaking her head helplessly.
His face greyed. ‘God, you haven’t decided to go for a termination after all?’ He heeled his chest with his hand, as if massaging the flood flow through his heart. ‘Kate, you’re not thinking straight. You can’t abort your baby…you’ll never be able to live with yourself. It’s not the right decision for you—’
He didn’t know!
Kate stood frozen, inwardly reeling with shock.
He didn’t know there was no baby! She’d thought he had understood—outside the clinic when she’d told him it was all a false alarm—she had thought he’d realised that she meant the whole pregnancy. But he had obviously thought she meant the threatened miscarriage!
He still thought that she was pregnant.
And he didn’t want her to abort his baby.
No, not his…‘your baby’, he said, not ‘my baby’ or ‘our baby’. He was firmly separating mother and child from any connection with himself.
‘But it is my decision,’ she said cruelly. ‘Unless you want to go to court and fight over the right to the foetus—drag out our past, present and future for the world to gloat over…’
He flinched, but stood his ground, the muscles grinding along his jaw. ‘Kate, don’t make any decisions on the basis of the hurt and anger you’re feeling right now. Believe me, I know how badly that goes—how irrevocable some acts of bitterness can be. Every life is precious, because life is so fleeting we have to treasure it while we can…I came back because you’re important to me, and this baby doesn’t change that.’
Again, it was ‘this baby’ not ‘his’, thought Kate, growing icier with every word.
‘The fact that it was unplanned by either of us doesn’t have to be a disaster.’
