Chapter Six #2
And then his legs were slowing, and it took a moment for him to work out why, another moment for his brain to catch up with his eyes, and then he felt it: that faint shiver like a breeze but not, a feeling of rain falling on his skin, even though it wasn’t raining.
Willa was sitting on an old tree stump.
She was wearing a simple linen dress, and her hair was tied up in the same low ponytail as before, but there was something about her posture, a kind of tension like a deer in a clearing who had heard the soft, unmistakable tread of a predator.
And he wished then that she hadn’t seen him so that he could simply gaze at her for a moment and absorb her unfiltered beauty.
But her shoulders were already bracing, and she was getting to her feet.
‘You were right,’ she said stiffly. ‘I’m pregnant.’
He had expected it. Known it all along. Except it turned out that he hadn’t, because his brain couldn’t seem to process what she was saying.
She had done the test. Five, in fact. They were all positive. She was holding something out. A plastic wand.
Pregnant. 2–3 weeks.
Two to three weeks. The words repeated on a loop inside his head.
‘The two to three weeks is from conception. But you date pregnancy from your last period so I’m about five weeks pregnant.’
He had a sudden, sharp flashback to school and the diagrams in his biology textbook. They had seemed so one-dimensional and lifeless, but this was the beginning of life itself. A new life.
And he felt so unprepared. How could he be a father?
‘And you want to keep the baby?’ He phrased it as a question, but a knot in his stomach loosened as she nodded her head imperceptibly.
‘So what happens next?’ There was a harshness to his voice: he heard it before he saw it in her eyes. But he was still trying to ground his breathing.
‘I suppose I go to the doctor. And obviously you’ll want a DNA test.’
Her words made his chin jerk up sharply. He could remember the expression on her face when Thea had made that remark about his mother’s pregnancy. There was no doubt there or confusion. If she was pregnant, Willa thought he was the father.
‘I don’t want there to be any assumptions made.’ She paused. ‘And just for the record, I don’t have any expectations about how this should work.’
‘Expectations?’
‘For your involvement. With the baby. I just want you to know that I’m not expecting anything from you.’
It stung more than it should. More so than when he woke up at the Clarendon and found her ring and thought that she was engaged. He’d been wrong about that—the ring part anyway. But not wrong apparently about Willa seeing him as nothing more than a fleeting pulse of pleasure.
That night in her hotel room flickered across his mind. It was a bubble of pure, distilled ecstasy. A fever dream outside of time. But things were different now. That pleasure had blossomed into a timeline which would end with the birth of their child.
‘The last time I checked, it takes two to make a baby, Willa.’
She stared at him steadily, and the forest of thorns was back.
He could feel her withdrawing, but she couldn’t hide everything, he thought, his eyes snagging on the pulse hammering against the delicate skin of her throat.
His body tensed as he imagined pressing his mouth against it.
Would he be able to taste what she was feeling?
He certainly wasn’t going to hear it from her lips. She gave him one of those cool, precise looks of hers that gave off Cleopatra-on-her-throne vibes, and despite his irritation he found himself admiring her poise. He couldn’t imagine Ariana being half as composed in the same situation.
Ariana.
He felt a stab of guilt because, truthfully, he couldn’t remember the last time he had thought about his sister or her prenup.
‘There will be plenty of time for us to discuss how to move forward,’ she said after a hard pause that left his teeth on edge because it was a lawyer’s answer.
But she wasn’t supposed to be acting as his lawyer right now.
As if she had read his mind, Willa cleared her throat and looked pointedly back at the path leading to the villa.
‘And we will discuss it, but I’m here in Kallos as your lawyer, Mr Konstantinou, and I know how important it is for you to get this prenup wrapped up, so we should probably get back to work. ’
Mr Konstantinou? That annoyed him.
Only she was right about needing to get back to work.
That she should be the one to point that out was more annoying still.
He was normally the one who had no trouble compartmentalising his life.
But now Willa was doing it for him. Compartmentalising him, he thought savagely as they walked in silence back to the villa.
They worked in the sitting room, which in principle should have been the perfect venue.
It was light and spacious. Except it didn’t feel spacious, largely because the recent past, their recent past, kept nudging his consciousness as they bent over their respective laptops.
It was distracting to say the least, and almost as frustrating as Willa’s mission to scrutinise and counter his suggestions as to how the prenup should be amended. By midday, he’d had enough.
‘You do realise you’re working for me and not David Arteta?’ he said, after Willa had challenged him yet again.
‘Yes, of course.’
She didn’t look up from her laptop, and his frustration increased. ‘Your predecessor approved that clause. In fact, she wrote it.’
‘It’s a standard clause. I’ve written it myself in countless prenups.
But if Nancy was here, I’m certain she would be amending it.
As I said before, this version of the document is simply a template.
We use it as a framework, a starting-off point for the process of going through the prenup line by line and making it personal for the client. In this case, your sister, Ariana.’
‘You think there should be little hearts above all the is?’
Now she looked up, her eyes narrowing at his face.
‘I know you see this agreement as a means to deter Mr Arteta from pursuing Ariana, but we have to write the prenup with the reasonable assumption that he and your sister will sign it. So I have one question for you. Do you think Ariana will sign this in its present form? Because I have to say it feels unlikely to me.’
It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her that she didn’t know his sister. Only, she did.
That was the difference between Willa and Nancy Kemp. They were both methodical and thorough. That was to be expected at this level.
But Nancy was more process-driven. For her, Ariana’s personality was the sum of her property portfolio and other assets coupled with the status afforded her by being a Konstantinou.
In contrast, Willa asked questions about Ariana’s life, her degree, her interests, her previous relationships. She wanted to know who his sister was.
Larry was right, he thought. She was good at her job.
Shifting back against the sofa, he shook his head. ‘I doubt it, no.’
She stared back at him, and he had a sharp flashback to that moment on the Clarendon’s roof.
‘Then, I suggest we attach a note to this clause.’ She leaned forward to type into her laptop, highlighting the offending paragraph in their shared document. ‘I can come back to it later when I’ve talked to Ariana.’
He frowned. ‘You want to talk to Ariana.’
‘I would have thought that goes without saying.’ Now she frowned. ‘This is her prenup. I need her input. You need her input.’ Willa cleared her throat. ‘Prenups are not legally binding. But in the vast majority of cases, a judge will uphold them if they meet three criteria.’
She ticked them off on her fingers. ‘Was the agreement freely entered into? Did both parties have a full appreciation of the implications of the agreement? Is it fair to hold the parties to the agreement? In other words, the best prenup is one Ariana feels is a choice she is making, willingly. So yes, I need to talk to her. Is that going to be a problem?’
There was an edge to her voice.
‘No.’ It was. He felt suddenly disorientated.
The idea of Willa meeting Ariana seemed seismic.
Of course, Ariana wouldn’t know that Willa was pregnant with his baby, but still it made him feel vulnerable, and he didn’t do vulnerable.
Hadn’t allowed himself to feel vulnerable since Zoe had betrayed his trust.
The memory of that afternoon, of Zoe’s hands splayed against her lover’s shoulders, made his breath snarl in his throat.
He felt a sudden need to push back, to reassert his authority over this woman and her opaqueness, and leaning forward he flipped his laptop shut.
‘No, that won’t be a problem. I’ll text her now.
Just out of interest,’ he added casually as he typed out a message to his sister, ‘why did you think it wouldn’t happen? ’
It was a non sequitur. It shouldn’t make sense, but he knew from the sudden tension in her spine that she understood. Knew that she had been hoping this whole time that he wouldn’t circle back to what she’d said yesterday.
Her eyes were still and wary and very green. She shrugged. ‘Statistically, it was unlikely.’
As answers went, it was entirely plausible.
He’d done some research last night before he fell asleep, before he knew for sure that Willa was pregnant and the chance of pregnancy from a single act of unprotected intercourse was roughly one in twenty or twenty-five percent, assuming the act occurred during the fertile window. Which presumably it had.
Of course, it had been more than one act, which might skew the probabilities a fraction.
Either way, he knew Willa wasn’t telling him the truth.
‘And that’s what you were thinking about, was it? When we were up on the roof, by the pool. When we were both naked. Statistical probabilities?’