Chapter Three #2
Aristide was in shock and grateful not to be in the middle of his working day.
Tabby’s fertility and his own had run a coach and horses through his life plan.
Life had a habit of wrecking such ideas with the unexpected, he reasoned, straightening his spine.
A baby…there was going to be a baby. But the minute he thought that, he realised that he didn’t know even that for a fact.
She might not be planning to go ahead and actually have the baby.
He could not afford to make such an assumption when on that score the future was hers to choose.
Sobered by that reflection, Aristide poured another strong drink and he sat down to consider matters he had once hoped to never have to consider again.
He also reached conclusions that shook him rigid and contributed to another sleepless night.
The next morning, Tabby arrived at the bakery in a rideshare with her cases, reaching them out as fast as she could, toting them one by one across the pavement.
She stowed them inside the street door of Violet’s apartment upstairs and went into the bakery next door to start her working day.
She had taken over the running of the bakery for her sister’s benefit.
She couldn’t do the baking, for which Luca, an Italian pastry chef, had been hired, but she could handle the shop, the staff and the payroll.
In the tiny closet of an office space, Tabby checked the rotas, dealt with a salary query and made notes on the daily special orders for Luca’s benefit.
‘When I have my break at eleven, you’ll join me for coffee,’ Luca declared with warm dark eyes resting on hers.
‘Whatever…’ Tabby was weary of fighting off the Italian’s come-ons, past caring if he forced her to the stage of saying an outright no.
If he took offence, on her head be it even though the bakery couldn’t function without his skills.
Did he truly fancy her or was he merely under the impression that a female manager had to be convinced that he did?
She couldn’t believe his attraction to her was real when she knew that she was looking less than her best with pasty skin and dark circles below her eyes.
And even her hair was going awry while her hormones seemed to be going into overdrive with her pregnancy.
Later, Luca snared her from behind the counter to share morning coffee with him and Tabby was trying to head him off at the pass, as it were, before she decided to simply be honest. ‘Luca, I’ve just discovered that I’m pregnant,’ she admitted awkwardly. ‘So, really this is a case of bad timing—’
‘Is the father with you?’ Luca enquired with startling immediacy.
‘Er, no,’ she muttered with a grimace.
‘Then we can be friends, if nothing else,’ Luca told her with the easy English he had acquired while working in New York for several years, his dark eyes continuing to gleam with warmth and acceptance as he laid his hand down on hers in a soothing gesture.
And a friend worked for Tabby at that moment as nothing else could have done because, as well as Luca being very easy on the eye, Tabby had no friends in whom she had confided her secret.
Why? The majority of her uni pals would have suggested a termination for an inconvenient, uncommitted pregnancy and that wasn’t what she wanted, so she would’ve been out of step with them.
Aristide strode into the bakery with his bodyguards in tow like an invading Viking horde and froze in his path when he paused to take in the sight of the mother of his child having her hand fondled by another man, clad in chef whites.
For a split second, he hovered in an uncharacteristic act of hesitance.
Tabby saw him straight away. Really, there was no chance of not noticing Aristide, the sheer height of him in a fancy dark suit, his gorgeous dark curly head held high, his keen dark golden eyes scanning the shop while the couple of males accompanying him fell back to the wall to watch him.
Whoa, Aristide had a security team, she registered, wondering where they had been the day he visited Traxis.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to Luca as she rose from her seat. ‘I’ll see you later.’
Tabby stalked over to Aristide, attitude in every stressed line of her small, slender frame. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Are you serious?’ Aristide enquired in disbelief at that greeting. ‘We need to talk.’
Tabby thought through several incendiary replies and discarded them because she already knew that Aristide was stubborn, impatient and possibly even a little dramatic.
She didn’t need him or any of that in her life but she hadn’t yet contrived to tell him that, so she could accept that, after her announcement that she was expecting his child, a further conversation had to be had.
‘Yes,’ she conceded, feeling generous. ‘But right now, I’m working—’
‘You’re the manager,’ he reminded her and she wondered how he knew that.
‘But this is a very busy shop and if I take time out to talk to you, something may come up,’ she pointed out while thinking, to her annoyance, that he had the most breathtakingly beautiful eyes of anyone she had ever met, liquid gold like a burnished sunset and surprisingly eloquent even when he wasn’t speaking.
She sensed his urgency even though he had said nothing to express the feeling and it changed her mind.
Spinning round, she told the bakery’s senior sales assistant that she was in charge until Tabby’s return and, escorting Aristide back out onto the street, she unlocked her new front door again, apologising for the cases in their path.
‘You shouldn’t be lifting anything heavy up a staircase,’ Aristide told her unnecessarily, because she was already painfully aware of all the shoulds and shouldn’ts in her immediate pregnant future.
‘Are you going to take care of my luggage?’ she asked snarkily.
‘No, but my employees will,’ Aristide asserted smoothly.
‘Didn’t think you’d be doing it,’ Tabby commented snidely.
‘I’m not ashamed that I pay others to take care of the necessities of life,’ Aristide countered. ‘My talents lie in other fields.’
‘Not with the right word at the right time, if my experience of you can bear witness,’ Tabby told him tightly.
‘What transpired between us is entirely another story,’ Aristide replied with a hint of defensiveness, sufficient to compress her lips on further provocative remarks.
After all, she had nothing to gain from arguing with Aristide, indeed it might even convince him to stay longer and she didn’t want that to happen.
Upstairs, she showed him into the tiny sitting room, smiling with relief when her cases were piled at the door, one after another.
‘Where’s your bedroom?’ Aristide asked suddenly. ‘I’ll move them there.’
‘The room at the end of the corridor,’ she supplied while thinking that she would be occupying her sister’s bedroom, sleeping in her bed with her sheets and that nothing around her actually belonged to her. Now that her sister was married, she no longer had much use for the apartment.
For the first time that was a rather deflating acknowledgement of the truth that, in getting pregnant and losing her independence, she had kind of become her twin’s dependant.
She reddened, knowing her sister would argue with such a statement but feeling it all the same as she was the elder twin, the one who had been born first, the one who liked to think she was the leading, protective half of the pair. Only not any more…
Tabby was shaken to appreciate, when she emerged from those pointless thoughts, that Aristide had moved her luggage down to the bedroom all by himself.
It struck her that he was on his very best behaviour and that she would be rude if she offered him less.
‘Would you like coffee?’ she asked him as he reappeared, annoyingly looking not the least creased or out of breath from that physical effort.
‘No, thank you,’ he breathed, striding the small distance to the window, turning at the sight of the heavy traffic on the road outside and facing her again, dark eyes narrowed. ‘I need to ask you, but it may not suit you to respond right now. Are you planning to have this child?’
Shame engulfed Tabby in a heated surge and she coloured.
It hadn’t occurred to her to think that he might be interested in asking such a very basic question.
And yet it was an obvious question in today’s world.
Aristide had more layers than she had allowed him to have in her imagination, where she had demonised him.
‘Yes. I will be having the baby,’ she told him rather woodenly because, ironically, it felt like a very personal question from him that she didn’t really want to answer even though common sense was warning her that it would be his baby as well.
Unexpectedly, Aristide appeared to relax at that admission and he smiled, moved to the armchair beside him and folded his big athletic frame down. ‘Then, if it’s not too late to change my mind, I would like coffee—’
Feeling a little dizzy at the surprise of that smile on such a subject, Tabby ducked into the kitchenette and then winced as the cupboard came up empty on the coffee that her twin rarely drank. ‘There’s no coffee…’ she muttered in the doorway.
Aristide shrugged a wide, strong shoulder. ‘I was only trying to be polite—’
‘Is it that much of an effort for you with me?’ she sliced in, unable to still the words on her tongue before she voiced them and then suddenly raising both hands. ‘Forget I said that! Possibly I’m in a hostile mood—’
‘Understandably. I assume this development has changed your life a huge amount because you didn’t marry Tore Renzetti,’ Aristide stated, disconcerting her with the sheer level of his knowledge about her.
‘You’ve had me investigated…or something,’ she muttered without surprise, reckoning that such caution and precision went with his sharp-edged, ruthless personality.
‘Guilty as charged. I had to know what was going on and I’m afraid I still don’t understand that relationship,’ Aristide declared.
‘It was supposed to be a business alliance. I’m not sorry to have missed out on marrying the guy—I mean, I never met him—but I’m very sorry and guilty that my sister had to marry him instead.’
‘None of my business,’ Aristide forced himself to say when really he wanted every tiny detail of that arrangement because he had an overriding need to know everything about her.
However, he had heard enough to know that the heir to Renzetti Pharma would not be hovering on the sidelines of Tabby’s life even though he had married another woman.
Truly, that was the only angle, the sole possibility, that had still concerned him.
If she had never met the man, there was no relationship to be considered.
And if the sister had got him instead, that was even better.
‘I really don’t understand what you’re doing here. I’m newly pregnant,’ she pointed out uncomfortably. ‘Now that you know I’m going to have this baby, you can—’
‘I want to take you to see a good obstetrician and have you fully checked over,’ Aristide announced without hesitation. ‘It will be a private appointment in hospital. You are not obliged to agree to the idea but I would be grateful if you did.’
‘Why do you want to take me to see a doctor?’ Tabby was astonished by the suggestion.
‘According to one of my cousins, pregnant women glow,’ Aristide murmured wryly. ‘You’re still beautiful but you’re not glowing.’
‘I’d forgotten how charming you could be…saying all that instead of just biting the bullet and telling me the truth that I look like hell right now!’
‘It’s not like that—’
‘It’s exactly like that,’ she interrupted impatiently. ‘How soon could you set up the appointment?’
His luxuriant black lashes lifted on surprised dark golden eyes. ‘As soon as you like?’
‘I have to wait more than a week to see my GP, so it would suit me very well to visit a specialist sooner,’ Tabby confided in a rush. ‘I’m suffering from terrible nausea and maybe something could be done to alleviate that.’
‘I gather being pregnant hasn’t been a fun experience so far,’ Aristide remarked, still carefully choosing his every word with a caution that irritated her. It struck her that she preferred Aristide relaxed and outspoken because anything else felt fake.
‘Not so as you’d notice,’ she agreed. ‘So, if you organise this obstetrician, we should exchange phone numbers.’
Getting the message that she wanted to return to the bakery, Aristide vaulted upright again and dug out his phone, reminding himself that he had gained more than he had expected from this first visit.
She hadn’t abused him, assaulted him or refused to speak to him.
She was feisty but she could also be reasonable, logical.
He would count the meeting a win, a crucial first step on the route he had chosen.
As they reached the street where his bodyguards awaited him, Aristide turned back to her. ‘I have one question but it’s controversial—’
But Tabby guessed what that question would be, following on from their clash at his apartment that first night. ‘Was I prepared to marry Tore for money?’ she whispered back to him. ‘Yes, but probably not for the reason you assume.’
Aristide was taken aback by that accurate guess and he still wanted to know more. ‘Maybe you’ll tell me about it some day,’ he teased, amused at the way she was playing him and holding back on giving answers. He could not recall when that had last happened to him with a woman.