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Thrown by the directness of the question, she blinked. ‘It was my decision to go ahead with the pregnancy, my body, my baby,’ she intoned solemnly. ‘What would have been the point telling you? What were you going to do, after, of course, I’d submitted to a lie detector and the prescribed range of DNA tests? Marry me?’
He winced but she didn’t notice.
‘People marry for less,’ he observed carefully.
‘Love, you mean?’
‘You think a transitory chemical attraction is more important than having a child together?’
‘You make love sound like a selfish indulgence,’ she said.
He arched a strongly delineated brow. ‘I wasn’t talking about maternal love.’
‘You asked what I think, well, I think that Ellie and what is best for her are the most important things to me,’ she told him fiercely.
‘Until you meet a man?’ His broad shoulders tensed as a flash freeze image formed in his head of a faceless male in Gwen’s bed and being a father to his child. The constant tug of sexual attraction he was fighting paled beside this raw and primal response to what was only an imaginary scenario.
She released a scornful laugh. ‘Because I feel incomplete without a man in my life? Hardly! I have Ellie, and my work, so I already have everything I need.’
But did she have enough money? he wondered.
‘I suppose that contacting you to keep you in the loop was an option, but not one that filled me with joy and positivity after our affair ended the way it did. And quite honestly I was too busy throwing up for several months to worry about it that much.’
He felt a kick of guilt that was totally irrational because he hadn’t known she’d suffered that badly, but, as they said in every courtroom drama, ignorance was no defence. Something twisted inside him at the thought of her being alone and suffering.
But she wouldn’t have been alone, he realised with a sense of relief. Not all families were as dysfunctional as his.
‘You went home?’ As his glance drifted over her sinuous curves, it was hard for him to imagine her heavily pregnant.
Gwen’s eyes lowered. ‘For a time,’ she said, moistening her lips. ‘I had some savings.’
‘You packed in your job right off? I’m sure they had a very generous healthcare plan.’
‘I was living in America and I was still on a probationary period, so there was no way they were going to give me a permanent contract if I was pregnant.’
He cleared his throat and gave a thoughtful nod. ‘So not good timing, then.’
She gave a sudden laugh. ‘There’s never a good time to have a baby and yet people still do.’
He would have found this conversation more comfortable if he’d been the target of her resentment and anger, but she appeared remarkably calm about having her life thrown upside down. ‘This was hardly a planned pregnancy.’
‘The statistics on that make interesting reading—fewer than you’d think are planned.’
‘At least you had a support network back home.’
Gwen said nothing. The less said about hersupport network,the better. She smoothed back her hair and gave a casual shrug.
‘I have friends and I like to be independent. Also, as luck would have it, I had a small win on a premium bond my late godmother bought me years ago, so money wasn’t a problem.’ It was important to her not to come across as a victim—not of anything. ‘Look, I’m sure you’re not really interested in my finances, so let’s just get to the real reason you’re here.’
Something flickered at the backs of his eyes as he arched a sardonic brow. ‘And that would be?’ he prompted with a display of gentle interest, though there was nothing anyone would describe as gentle in the headlight stare that she found uncomfortably intent.
‘I am not going to make any demands on you. I don’t expect any involvement from you at all.’
A nerve in Rio’s cheek clenched. She said it as though he needed reassurance, while her attitude strongly suggested that the news that she didn’t expect him to be any part of his own child’s life was meant to make himhappy!Dios!He would have been the first to concede that he might have given her reason to think he was not exactly a saint, but did she really think he was such a rat as to walk away from his own child?
‘What sort of demands are we talking?’ He kept his face locked in a mask of polite indifference that became increasingly hard to maintain as an image of her making some very pleasant demands of him floated through his head, her soft, husky laugh, her long, extremely flexible legs, her lips. His gaze sank to her mouth, which he assumed was about to say something far less pleasing than,Again, please, Rio!
His indolent drawl had nothing to do with the flames flickering in his mesmeric eyes, and for a moment Gwen lost her verbal footing as waves of distracting heat thrummed through her body.
