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Then common sense kicked in. They were both due at work. Making them both late really wouldn’t be fair on their colleagues or the women waiting for appointments. She dressed swiftly; wearing yesterday’s clothes wasn’t pleasant, but she reminded herself that it was only going to be for one short journey on the tube. She padded down the stairs to the kitchen; Theo looked up as she reached the doorway.
‘Perfect timing.’ He handed her the mug of coffee. ‘Can I make you some toast, or would you prefer fruit and yoghurt?’
‘Do you have any cereal?’ she asked hopefully.
He shook his head. ‘Sorry. The best I can do you is toast. I could scramble you some eggs, if you like.’
‘Thanks, but I’ll pass. I’ll grab something at my place.’
He waited a beat. ‘So where do we go from here?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘The way I see it, we have three choices. One, we can forget last night and go on as we were.’
His expression was unreadable, and a chill ran down her spine. Was that what he wanted? ‘And the other options?’ she asked carefully.
‘Two, we face it that last night happened but we realise we don’t have a future, and make a clean break. From now on, we’d be colleagues only.’
Oh, lord. This was getting worse. ‘And three?’
‘Three…’He dragged in a breath. ‘Three, we see if we can make a go of this.’
Was that a real possibility? She looked straight at him. ‘What do you want?’
‘I’m torn between my heart and my head,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve always said that settling down—the whole marriage and children thing—wasn’t for me. But I broke the rules last night. You’re the first woman I’ve spent the entire night with since I was a student.’
She blinked, trying to take in what he was saying. ‘You were celibate that long?’
He smiled wryly. ‘No, but I only dated women who didn’t want a proper relationship—who wanted fun and no commitment. Which meant never staying the night with them.’ He paused. ‘What do you want, Maddie?’
She owed it to him to be honest. ‘I want someone who’s going to love me for my own sake. Who wants the same things out of life as I do.’
‘So we’re back to kids versus no kids,’ he said quietly.
‘There are alternatives. Adoption. Fostering.’
‘And you’d be prepared to give up having a natural child?’
‘It’s an option,’ she said carefully. ‘Something to think about.’
He nodded. ‘The thing is…if we make a go of this, we’re going to make love. A lot. And no matter how careful we are with contraception, you know as well as I do that the only one hundred per cent guaranteed contraception is abstinence.’
She followed his drift. ‘So even if we didn’t plan children, I could still get pregnant by accident.’ And she knew that would really freak him. Big time.
He sighed. ‘We haven’t really got time to discuss this properly now. But maybe we can grab a sandwich at lunchtime and take it to the park or something, find a quiet corner.’
‘Babies permitting.’
‘Babies permitting,’ he agreed with a smile.
She took a sip of the coffee and realised with relief that he’d made it as promised, so she could drink it straight down. She drained the mug, then rinsed it under the tap. ‘I’d better go, or I’ll be late for clinic.’
He kissed her lightly. ‘See you at work.’
Back at her flat, Madison changed swiftly and grabbed a quick bowl of cereal. All the way to the hospital her head was full of the previous night—and what Theo had said that morning.
He wanted her. She knew that. Maybe even loved her, because he’d told her she was the first one he’d let this close to him in years. But would that be enough to get them through their differences, help them find a way of compromising?
Theo spent the morning in clinic. Reassured every single one of his high-risk mums-to-be, examined bumps and checked foetal heartbeats and double-checked blood pressures and persuaded one that she really needed to spend a day or two on the ward on bed rest, where they could keep an eye on her, and reassured another that it didn’t matter that she had a lowlying placenta because as the baby grew the placenta would move away from the cervix and there was every chance she could have a normal birth.
He was on the way back to the ward, walking past the room where he knew Madison was holding her own clinic, when the door opened. He saw her talking to the pregnant woman in the doorway and noticed that she was using exaggerated lip movements. She didn’t usually use her hands as much as that when talking. And then he caught the other woman’s intonation and realised that she was deaf. Madison was clearly using sign language, something he really hadn’t expected.
