Chapter Five
It was the nightmare that had haunted her for the last two months, come to life. Micha stood there, eyes wide, knowing, accusing, confusion, anger, and something she couldn’t quite name, swirling in the rich gaze boring into her.
‘Maria? Are you okay? Maria?’
Ivy’s voice sounded so very distant.
‘I have to go,’ Maria whispered into the phone.
‘If I don’t hear from you in twenty minutes I’m telling Antonio,’ Ivy warned.
Maria ended the call without taking her eyes off Micha.
‘You’re pregnant,’ he said again. ‘You’re… We’re…’
He looked as if he’d been sucker-punched.
‘We used protection. We…’ he trailed off again.
He looked, Maria thought, the way she probably had looked when she’d found out too. Shock, confusion, denial, fear. His eyes dropped again to her stomach and she wanted to put her hands there, to protect their child, not from him, but from what would now happen.
She braced herself for the question. For the hurt that would wash over her. For the accusations and denials. For the shouts and the recriminations. But instead, he turned on his heel and left.
What?
Her outraged gasp echoed in the empty room. He left?!
How dare he leave her again?
Fury had her chasing him back down the corridor.
‘Where are you going?’ she demanded, a blinding anger pouring through her veins at the thought that he would leave her, leave them.
She came into the living area and saw him yanking his tie loose with three firm pulls.
He shucked out of his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves, as if he was just about to get started, rather than depart.
He anchored one hand on his hip, as the other flew to fist his thick, dark hair, apparently utterly ignorant of how the sight of him like that melted both her insides and her brain at the same time.
Maybe it was the pregnancy she thought. Maybe—
‘Have you had the tests and the scans?’ he asked, his question pulling her thoughts back to the room but not in a direction she had expected.
She swallowed before answering. ‘Yes.’
He closed his eyes for a beat. ‘Is everything…?’ She thought she almost heard his breath shudder in his lungs, and she realised that he was worried.
‘Everything is fine,’ she rushed to reassure him.
He nodded, only opening his eyes after. Something in his gaze turned then. She suppressed the urge to shiver. There was a coldness there that she’d never once seen in him all those years ago. Age and experience had put that there, and for just a moment, she regretted it.
‘And you answered all their questions? About the medical history?’ he asked, bringing her back to the present.
On the surface his tone was polite, but there was something cold about the question. She ignored the warning signs, irritated instead by the implication that she would have already messed something up. Just like everyone had always expected of her. Just like she had done with GG.
‘Of course I did,’ she replied.
‘Family history?’
‘Yes, Micha. I gave them my family history too.’
‘And mine?’ he asked. ‘What information did you give them about my family history?’ he demanded, his tone morphing from polite to pointed in the space of a heartbeat. ‘Would you have told them about my mother’s gestational diabetes?’
Her thoughts crashed to a halt.
‘I don’t think that has any—’ Maria hesitated.
‘You don’t think? Well, that’s medically accurate, Maria.’
‘I didn’t know,’ she confessed, shamefaced.
‘You didn’t know because you didn’t ask, because you didn’t tell me!’ he shouted.
‘I didn’t tell you because I thought you would force me to marry you,’ she shouted back.
‘Oh, we will be getting married, Maria,’ Micha declared with such supreme confidence it was maddening.
‘Why do you think it is yours?’ she struck out.
‘Are you going to lie to me and tell me it’s not?’ he retorted.
‘No,’ she admitted reluctantly. She ground her teeth together, hating that he knew her so well. Hating that he knew she wouldn’t resort to lies.
‘Then such dramatics are unnecessary,’ he said with infuriating cold-hearted logic. ‘We will marry.’
‘No, we won’t.’
‘Yes, we will,’ he insisted.
Maria threw her hands up in the air and turned her back to him, just to get a moment’s reprieve. He did this to her. Made her so feel so mad, so ungrounded…so exposed.
‘How long have you known?’ he asked from behind her.
And this time it was she who closed her eyes. He would never forgive her for keeping something like this from him. She’d known it from the moment she’d decided she needed to.
‘I needed time, Micha,’ she tried to explain.
‘How long?’
‘One month.’
His shock was a gasped exhale.
‘Were you…?’ He seemed to brace himself against the question on the tip of his tongue. ‘Were you waiting until…because you thought I would…?’
Realisation cut through her like a knife and she spun around to face him.
‘No, Micha. No,’ she rushed to reassure him.
Whatever she felt about what had passed between them, whatever she thought about what he had done to her, she’d never have thought that he would try to convince her to terminate the pregnancy.
Because while she didn’t know the man he had become, she knew the boy he had been.
He might have spent the last eleven years in Paris doing god knows what, but that didn’t mean she didn’t know him, hadn’t grown up with him, hadn’t seen the way he was with his mother, with the people he considered his, family, friends.
The people that Micha considered his were protected in a way that went almost beyond necessary.
But how could she explain that it was that very thing that she’d feared would stifle her? Would do more harm to her than anything else?
He looked deep into her eyes, searching for the truth in her words.
His second shuddered exhale she felt down to her bones and that was when she felt truly sorry that she’d kept their pregnancy from him.
Before it was so quickly masked, she saw the wound her secret had inflicted upon him.
The doubts and insecurities she had forgotten in the years spent apart from him.
And for the first time a dust-covered memory floated free.
Micha, aged sixteen, boyish and nervously charming, signs of the man he would become beneath his skin.
Hints of the flirtation that would become something more in barely a few months’ time, as they shared whispers of futures that they wanted.
She’d told him about wanting to take over Gallo Group one day and he’d insisted she would.
And when he’d haltingly confessed that he wanted a family, she’d told him she could see it, secretly hoping that perhaps it was something they could have together.
And here they were, nearly twelve years later and…
It was all so very wrong.
How had everything gone so wrong? Micha wondered, as he glared out the window at the placid lake, feeling anything but.
He was going to be a father.
Madonna mia.
He swept a hand through his hair in a way that he wanted to do with his life.
He should have left, instead of coming into the living area and planting his feet.
He needed time to marshal his thoughts. He felt it, the heady complex chaos of his thoughts filling his mind and stopping his tongue to a point of near silence.
There’s no problem. It just takes Micha longer than most to connect his words to his thoughts, the doctor had said when Gio had dragged him there, wanting to make sure there was no ‘problem’ with the sixteen-year-old who would become his right-hand man.
Most had thought that his monosyllabic tendencies were down to either limited intelligence or stubbornness, but Gio had known from the beginning that there was nothing unintelligent about him.
He just needed a little time, and a little encouragement to separate out his thoughts from his feelings.
But he didn’t have time. Not now, he thought, pushing aside the familiar nauseating panic that threatened to clog his throat. He needed to think. And quickly. Because if he didn’t get this right, he knew, he knew, Maria would wriggle out of his clasp and disappear. And he couldn’t let that happen.
He was going to be a father.
He, who had never known anything but violence, fear and abandonment from his own. It was true that once, so long ago now he could almost think it unreal, he’d wanted a family. But that was before. Before he had learned that such things were not meant for a man like him.
Because no matter how far he climbed out of the gutter, it was still there: the dirt on his hands that meant he’d never be good enough. Certainly not for Maria Gallo. Only now, there was no choice in the matter.
She had known for a month and she hadn’t told him? The realisation hit him like a freight train, dredging up the question from the deepest part of his soul. The part that had clung fiercely to a relationship that was long since gone.
‘Would you have told me?’ he demanded.
Maria looked at the floor.
‘Yes. Eventually,’ she said in surrender. ‘I just wanted…time. Everything changed, Micha. Everything I thought I knew, everything I thought would be, it’s all gone and this,’ she said, sweeping a hand over a bump that was barely there, ‘this happened and I just… I wanted time.’
He, of all people, understood and knew that feeling. He could appreciate the quiet desperation in her words. He really could. But they didn’t have the luxury of time. And he didn’t have the luxury of being nice.
‘Well, that time is up,’ he said, pulling out his phone and firing off a message to his assistant cancelling all meetings.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, hooking her foot behind the ankle of her standing leg. She’d used to do that when she was younger, he remembered. When she was nervous. He dismissed the sight of it and went back to his emails.
‘I’m cancelling all my meetings.’
‘What about Peterson?’ she asked, causing his head to snap up.
He blinked. Once. Twice.