Holly was reluctantly forced to concede, just for a few seconds, that here was a man who might be über-cautious when it came to trust, especially in view of his past experience at the hands of a gold-digger.
‘If you’re going to give me a lecture on what a lowlife I am for hiding all this from you, then let’s get it out of the way so that we can move on to more important issues.’
‘It’s a very impressive house.’
‘Take off the coat.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I want to see evidence of your pregnancy.’
‘You mean you actually don’t believe that I’m telling you the truth?’
‘I do.’ He strolled towards her to ease her out of the coat and then, still standing in front of her, he gently rested his hand on her stomach.
The gesture came from nowhere and was so shocking that Holly gasped and stared up at him with huge, rounded eyes.
‘Well?’ Luiz moved back to thrust his hands into his pockets. Touching her like that, he could feel the firmness of her belly, the swell of it as his flesh and blood grew inside her. It was a sensation like no other. ‘Don’t tell me I don’t have a right to do that.’
‘We no longer have… that sort of relationship, Luiz.’ One feathery touched that had barely lasted two seconds and she could feel her body revving into life, as if it had just been idling for the past few weeks, waiting for a foot to depress the accelerator so that it could get going, charge back to life! She stepped away from him but her heart was beating at a rate and she knew that she was bright red.
Luiz was finding it next to impossible to look at her without imagining her with her clothes off. He had felt her stomach. He would have liked to see it, smooth and full, just as he would have liked to see her breasts, more succulent, the nipples bigger and darker, readying themselves for a suckling baby.
‘You said we… we needed to talk, Luiz, and we do—’
‘I’ll get you something to drink. Have you eaten?’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘I’ll order something in.’
‘There’s no need…’
‘If we’re going to have an argument every single time I suggest something, then we won’t get very far,’ Luiz said coolly. ‘I lied to you—put it behind you and move on. Circumstances have now changed. There’s no room for petty resentments.’
Holly bit back the torrent of self-defence that rose quickly to the surface. Arguing would be counter-productive. He was right and she knew that, but she still hated the cool detachment in his voice when he had addressed her. She was humiliatingly aware that he had moved on. For all the stern lectures she had given herself, she hadn’t. It was easy for him to stand there and treat the whole matter like a business problem that required a solution—but then, little had she known it, he was a businessman who presumed that for every problem there was a solution. He was ideally placed to be dispassionate because he had no messy emotional ties to clutter the picture.
‘Fine.’ Holly managed the monosyllable but her voice sounded high and angry. He was heading towards the sitting room she had partially glimpsed through the half-opened door and she followed him, impervious to the grand displays of wealth.
The actual sitting area was an oasis of colour, sunken in the middle of an exquisite parquet surround, which was a suitable backdrop for beautifully maintained plants on one side and an imposing Chesterfield sofa on the other. Deep burgundy drapes pooled on the floor by the tall windows and picked up the rich colours of the sofas and the rug in the middle.
Luiz went immediately to one of the sofas and sprawled back. She had interrupted him in the middle of a drink. There was a bottle of red wine on the table in front of him, along with a crystal jug of iced water and a glass, presumably meant for her.
‘Before you tell me that my life is going to remain exactly the same,’ he drawled, his dark eyes fixed like lasers on her face, ‘I should warn you that you’ll be wasting your breath. Nothing in my life is going to be the same.’
‘Nothing in my life is going to be the same, either!’
‘And so we have to find a way of us both dealing with this situation.’ Luiz leant forward to refill his glass. He had spent all afternoon thinking about this and the remorseless conclusion he had reached was that he would have to marry her. What choice did he have? He came from a traditional family. It might be perfectly acceptable for her to think that they could have some sort of informal arrangement whereby he popped in to visit his own child when and if he got the chance, maybe video-called if he couldn’t be physically present. It wasn’t going to work.
‘I know it’s going to be difficult,’ Holly told him, ‘But it’s not that unusual a situation. You can come up whenever you want… have quality time. I won’t interfere and I promise to be very accommodating. If, on the other hand, you’d rather not get involved to that extent, then that’s fine as well. I understand that you’ve embarked on a whole new life with someone else and, although I do think it would be important for you to discuss this situation with your… er… girlfriend, there’s no way I would expect anything from you.’
Luiz tilted his head to one side, for all the world as though he was paying keen attention and actually listening to what she was suggesting.
‘No.’
‘No? No? What do you mean no?’ Holly looked at him in sudden confusion. She had exhausted all the options she could think of, so what exactly was he turning down? All of them? Didn’t he know that there was nothing else on the table?
‘I find that none of those options appeal.’ He sighed, finding it fairly incredulous that she seemed to have bypassed the ‘gold mine’ option staring her in the face.
‘I’m not following you.’
‘Let me put it this way: as far as I am concerned, the only choice I have is to marry you. My child will be born legitimate; there’s no other alternative. Naturally, you will have to agree to a pre-nup, but rest assured that as far as money goes you will be well taken care of. In fact, you could say that you will be rich beyond your wildest dreams.’
Holly was staring at him as though he had just grown wings and was now informing her that he would be flying to the moon. She wasn’t sure that she had quite heard correctly. Marriage? Then, following on from that, a pre-nup?
Bright patches of angry colour stained her cheeks but she was determined to keep it together.
‘That’s impossible, Luiz.’
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘But I do,’ she ventured tightly. ‘I could never forgive you for lying to me, Luiz, for assuming that I was an opportunist. Even when you got to know me, you still didn’t feel that you could tell me the truth—and the fact that you can calmly sit there and talk about a pre-nup! Well, that just says it all, it really does.’
‘Whether you like it or not,’ Luiz’s voice was low and firm, the voice of someone who has no intention of yielding, ‘I am part of this equation, Holly. I didn’t ask for this but I’m prepared to do the responsible thing.’
‘I don’t want you to feel responsible! I could never marry someone because they felt that it was their duty to marry me for the sake of a child!’ Distraught, she jumped to her feet and paced the sitting area, glaring down at the ornate Persian rug, unaware that Luiz was in front of her until she crashed into him and was forced to leap back.
She