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‘Shall I get it, tell him to come back later?’
‘Like that’s going to work…’ She dragged a hand through her tousled hair and tried to dredge up some calm. ‘No…no, I’ll be fine.’ She took another deep breath, and tightened the sash on her full-length robe as she lifted her chin to a defiant angle.
Maya looked doubtful. ‘If you say so. I’ll be in my bedroom if you need me.’
‘Thanks.’ Beatrice smiled but barely noticed her sister go; her thoughts had already moved on to the person outside the door.
She was vaguely conscious of her sister’s bedroom door clicking closed as she blew out a slow calming breath, which didn’t slow the speed of her pounding heart even a little, and reached for the handle.
Leaving the safety catch in place, she opened it. The action would normally have revealed the communal hallway, with a worn rug that covered the scratched parquet floor, and a noticeboard. But today all she could see through the door was Dante, who effectively blocked everything else from view.
He pushed himself off the wall and far enough away for her to see more of the dark suit he was wearing. Not his normal immaculate self—the fabric was crumpled and his white shirt was open at the neck, revealing a section of warm brown skin—but she barely noticed these details. All she saw, or rather felt, were the powerful, raw emotions that were emanating from him.
‘You moved.’ Dante had been keeping his emotions in check, but the sight of her standing there and he could feel them slipping through his fingers like a wet rope, taking his control with it. ‘No one told me.’
The journey here—he’d been mid-Atlantic when he had received the message, a sentence that was going to literally change his life in ways he was still too shocked to imagine—had already pushed his control to the limits.
The sight of her big blue eyes looking warily at him through the gap, rimmed with red from where she had been crying, didn’t make him any less furious. It just added another layer to the emotions fighting for supremacy in his chest.
‘Last week—it’s bigger.’ Just as she would be soon. An idea that still seemed deeply strange and not quite real.
Dante was very real though, and very angry.
‘The people who live there now seem… I left my security team persuading them I am not dangerous.’ While he had spent several frustrating minutes finding the correct address to give his driver.
‘What are you doing here?’ The accusing words floated through the gap and drew a low feral disbelieving growl from his throat.
‘Are you serious?’
‘It really wasn’t necessary for you to come in person. A simple acknowledgement you’d got the news would have done fine.’
‘Well, I am here.’
‘I’m sure everyone in the building knows that. Come back tomorrow.’
Was he meant to care what people thought?
‘That isn’t going to happen and we both know it. Are you going to let me in or would you like to have this discussion here?’ He bestowed a scathing glance at his surroundings before fixing her with a steely bitter stare. ‘Sorry, I forgot my megaphone, but I have several paparazzi on speed dial…if that is your preference? Sure, let’s share the news! Oh, I forgot, you already have.’ It would be interesting to know just how many people she had told before she had told him…but then he was only the father.
Her lips tightened at the sarcasm. ‘Lower your voice and don’t be so unreasonable.’
‘I suppose I should consider myself lucky you didn’t send the news by text!’
Although on second thoughts, he decided as he experienced a stomach-clenching chilled aftershock of what he had felt as he had listened to his stand-in PA tell him he was going to be a father, a text might have been preferable!
She slipped the safety chain and hastily backed away, standing there, arms folded across her chest, as he entered a hallway that had been described in the rental details as a spacious dining hall.
A slight exaggeration, but it had never felt this claustrophobically cramped before.
‘I tried to contact you.’
‘You didn’t try very hard.’
Her lips compressed. ‘I suppose it depends on your definition of hard. The number I have for you no longer exists. Though why I’m telling you this I don’t know, because I assume that you’re the one who arranged for my calls to be diverted to your robotic PA.’
‘She’s a very good PA.’ And he might have sacked her, he realised, a furrow forming between his dark brows as he replayed the in-flight exchange.
The details of the incident were a little sketchy, but in his shocked state of mind he presumed he must have asked her to repeat what she had just said, because she had repeated, word for word, the message that had left him literally rigid with shock.
