Chapter Four #2
Had he really had sex with her? Taken her virginity in one smooth and delicious thrust?
Yes, he had. And it had been amazing. No.
That wasn’t quite accurate. It had been nothing short of sensational.
Turned on and beguiled by those long legs and cascading hair and the startlingly dramatic change in her appearance, Maximo had succumbed to a one-night stand in a way he hadn’t done since his teenage years.
Her innocence had come as a shock and he still wasn’t quite sure why he hadn’t extricated himself from the situation as quickly as possible after that first time, doing them both a favour and recognising that someone like him was bad news for a small-town woman like her.
But he hadn’t. He had carried on losing himself inside her sweet, tight body for most of the night, over and over again.
And when they’d eventually run out of condoms—something which had never happened to him before—he had pleasured her in other ways.
He had used his tongue and his fingers and, at one point, an ice cube from the freezer downstairs, he recalled—so that the memory of her shuddered cries of fulfilment had stubbornly lodged themselves in his brain for days afterwards.
He’d had difficulty forgetting the way she’d cried out his name and the way her soft thighs had wrapped themselves around his thrusting back.
He’d had difficulty concentrating on work too, drifting off into sensual daydreams at the slightest provocation, until he had forced himself to stop thinking about her.
But none of those things addressed his immediate concerns and now a feeling of wariness crept over him as he looked into Hollie Walker’s face.
Because, why had she asked to see him? Deliberately pushing away the brief cloud of darkness which hovered on the edge of his mind, he met her gaze with a look of polite enquiry.
‘So. What can I do for you, Hollie? I meant it when I told you I was busy. There are things I need to get finished before Christmas, which is in a few days’ time, as you clearly know.’ He forced himself to give a curt nod of acknowledgement in the direction of the smallest tree he had ever seen.
Her mouth was working and her previously glowing complexion had paled. ‘There’s no easy way to say this. I wish there was.’ She clenched her hands into two fists and squeezed them tight until the knuckles grew white. ‘I’m pregnant, Maximo,’ she husked. ‘I’m going to have your baby.’
The world spun and a dull sound inside his head threatened to deafen him. For a minute Maximo thought he must be dreaming, but her trembling body and white face were real enough and told their own story.
For this was no dream. The nightmare had become real.
‘You can’t be.’ His words were icy but the anger growing inside him felt hot and vital and all-consuming. ‘We took precautions.’
‘Well, obviously those precautions didn’t work,’ she said. ‘Look, I realise this has come as a complete shock to you—’
‘But clearly not to you.’ He frowned as he did some rapid mental calculations. ‘We had sex in—’
‘October,’ she supplied swiftly, her cheeks flaming. ‘Just in case you’re muddling me with someone else.’
‘There hasn’t been anyone else,’ he snapped before wondering why on earth he had told her that .
Because wouldn’t it give her more power than she already had if she realised that every other woman had left him cold since he’d exited her bed, that wet dawn morning?
Would she mistakenly start thinking she was special, or different?
‘Oh. Right,’ she said, looking startled.
His gaze skated over her as it had done with so many women in the past, but for once there was only one place it was focussed on. Not on her hair or lips or the curve of her breasts, but on her abdomen. ‘Pregnant,’ he repeated, as if affirming what his naked eye could not see.
‘Eleven weeks.’
He felt as if he were speaking in a language he didn’t really understand. As if he had entered a world which was now defined by dates. ‘You certainly took your time telling me.’
She nodded. ‘I know. I didn’t realise for a while.
At first I couldn’t believe it, because I thought we were so careful.
I made myself do three tests, until eventually I had to accept the evidence of what I found.
And you weren’t around to tell, Maximo. You were supposed to be coming back to Trescombe.
Everyone thought work was going to start on the castle before Christmas—’
‘What work?’ he demanded.
‘Well, you’re turning it back into a hotel, aren’t you? It’s been the talk of the town for months. But you just...disappeared.’
‘I have a global business,’ he informed her coldly. ‘Which seems to have gone into overdrive lately.’
‘And was that...?’ Her face was screwed up and she seemed to be forcing herself to ask the question. ‘Was that the only reason?’
Maximo’s mouth hardened. Wasn’t it better she knew?
Better to trample on her foolish dreams rather than to allow them to flourish unchecked?
‘Not the only reason, no. If you must know I thought that creating space between us would ensure you didn’t get the wrong idea about what had happened.
I didn’t want you building castles in the air. ’
‘You’re the one with the interest in castles, Maximo,’ she said coldly. ‘I told you at the time I was okay with it.’
‘Women say all kinds of things they don’t mean, Hollie. They say them to save face, or sometimes to convince themselves that they actually believe them.’
She glared at him. ‘And you were so certain I’d be a thorn in your side with my unwanted devotion that you didn’t want to risk a return visit, is that it? Were you worried I’d believe I was hopelessly in love with you?’
‘That was always a possibility.’
‘Even though you’re proving to be so arrogant and unlikeable?’
He shrugged. ‘You were an innocent. A virgin. Sometimes a woman’s first experience of sex can warp her judgement, particularly if it was as good as yours was. I’d warned you what kind of man I was but I wasn’t sure whether you wanted to believe it. But all that is irrelevant now.’
He realised she was looking at him and the reproach on her flushed face suggested she had been hurt by his condemnatory assessment of their night together.
But he wasn’t going to tell lies in order to spare her feelings.
She needed to know the truth, because surely that would limit the painful repercussions of a situation he had been so determined not to create during his own lifetime.
The legacy of his upbringing was bitter enough to taint him for ever and he didn’t want to feel trapped. Not ever again.
‘I’ve never wanted marriage or children,’ he bit out. ‘And while the first is within my power to control, the second is clearly not.’
‘But I’m not asking you for anything!’ she declared furiously, her fists still clenched and looking as if she would like to use them to punch him. ‘I can manage perfectly well on my own.’
He glanced around the small room. At the hand-knitted blanket on the battered sofa.
At tired-looking walls, which even the rainbow glow from the fairy lights on the Christmas tree couldn’t quite disguise.
He remembered the narrow bed in the cold bedroom upstairs, where he had torn the clothes from his body with the eagerness of a boy who had never had sex before.
And the speed with which he had made his escape the following morning, issuing a terse directive to his chauffeur to get him the hell out of there when the car had arrived.
And all he could think was—what had he done ?
‘What, here?’ he demanded. ‘You think you can bring up this baby here, in a place like this?’
‘Of course I can! It may not be grand and I may not have a lot of spare cash, but I will manage. I don’t know how, but I will.
I’m not deluding myself that it’s going to be easy, but I’m not afraid of hard work.
It won’t hurt me to scrimp and save and go without—but there’s one thing my baby will never go short of, and that’s love! ’
An expression of such fierce protectiveness came over her face, that Maximo found himself unexpectedly humbled by her fervour, until he reminded himself that words were cheap. ‘Very admirable,’ he drawled.
‘I’m not seeking your approval.’ Angrily, she shook her head. ‘In fact, I don’t want anything from you, Maximo Diaz. Because I don’t need you! Do you understand?’
But he shook his head, as if she hadn’t spoken.
‘I am not dishonourable enough to desert you in your time of need, just as long as your expectations don’t exceed what I am prepared to offer you,’ he bit out, withdrawing his wallet from his inside pocket and extracting a business card.
He slapped the card down beside the Christmas tree with more force than he had intended, causing the flimsy baubles to jangle before striding towards the front door, barely able to contain the anger which was simmering up inside him.
He pulled open the door. ‘You can telephone my office and they will give you contact details of my lawyer, who will fine-tune all the necessary arrangements,’ he concluded icily.
‘You will have the necessary funds to employ nannies, chauffeurs, cleaners—whatever it is you think you might need to make your life easier once you have a child. But there is one thing you’re never going to get, Hollie—at least, not from me—and that’s a father for your baby. ’