‘Are you going to finish a sentence today?’ He laughed at the sudden appearance of this bashfulness. ‘Or is there always going to be so much guesswork?’
‘I’m sorry. It seems stupid to be embarrassed talking about any of this when you’re the one, well, we’re the ones... Sorry.’
She laughed, too, and Leo relaxed into his chair as the tension in the air palpably lightened. What was it about her laugh that reached his spine and his heart?
‘I’m doing it again, aren’t I?’ He nodded. ‘They count from the first day of your last period, which means today is week nine of the pregnancy even though it’s not been that long since we...met. Which means they’ll want to schedule the scan for around three weeks’ time.’
‘I’d like to be there.’
‘Me, too.’ They both smiled, and he breathed a sigh of relief, glad that they’d found this common ground at last. Maybe they could do this. Maybe they could find a compromise to make them both happy. And if they did that, what next? What more could there be between them when they weren’t both terrified of what the other craved?
Rachel drew a column on the piece of paper and wrote the heading Appointments at the top; then clicked through the screen of her phone with one hand and wrote the date in the column with the other. She glanced up at him. ‘Do you want to make a note of the date?’
Or maybe they couldn’t. ‘What date? You haven’t got an appointment yet.’
‘No, but I’m sure they’ll make it that week. You could...’
‘Rachel, this is one of those times when you’re going to have to let me make a decision for myself. I’m perfectly capable of keeping in my head the fact that I will have to make some time approximately three weeks from now to attend the scan. It’s not something I’m likely to forget. Just because I’m not doing it your way doesn’t mean I’m doing something wrong.’
She concentrated hard on the page; going over and over one word with her pen until he feared the paper would dissolve. But she didn’t argue with him. The best he could hope for, for now, he supposed.
‘Okay, so that’s the appointments sorted for now. What next?’
‘I want to have the baby in London.’
‘Makes sense, considering you live there.’
‘So you’ll have to make arrangements to be up there, if you want to be around when it happens.’ He nodded, able to see the logic in that. He waited, wondering whether she’d want him to make some more definite plans, but she seemed happy—or at least reluctantly willing—to leave it at that for now. Though he did notice the way her pen ripped through the paper slightly as she wrote the next word.
‘Fine.’
‘Seems to me like we can’t really decide anything to do with dates until you’ve seen a doctor, though,’ Leo said. ‘So how about we leave that for now and move on to another part of the plan? What else is on your list that needs deciding now?’
When she didn’t reply, he looked up from where his eyes had been following her pen scoring into the paper, to find her sitting with her mouth open and a hesitant look on her face. ‘What?’
‘You’re right. We don’t need to decide everything now.’ She started to close the notebook, but Leo reached out and laid a hand across the page, trying not to notice the way that his skin tingled when it accidentally brushed against hers.
‘Something’s worrying you. Why don’t you tell me what it is?’ He tried to catch her eye, but she seemed determined not to meet his gaze. An alarm bell, deep in his belly, started ringing. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘It’s not a problem. It’s just—ʼ she took a deep breath and spat the words out ‘—I had all this worked out with scenarios, and different options and choices, and now that I’m sitting here at your kitchen table it feels weird.’
‘What? Now that I’m a real person and not just an item in your schedule? Now that I get a say?’
She nodded. ‘I am sorry. For turning up with it all finished and ready to present to you. I didn’t mean to cut you out, to tell you this is the way it has to be. I just had to see for myself how I was going to make this work. And the only way to do that was to work it all out and write it down. I can see how it must have looked, as if I was dictating the whole of the rest of your life to you. But I didn’t mean it that way.’
Her honesty eased that little knot of tension from his stomach, and he couldn’t tell her how grateful he was for this acknowledgement that maybe she didn’t have it all worked out after all. Funnily, her apology for creating the schedule in the first place made him want to help her with a replacement more than ever; he wanted to do whatever it took to make this work for them, even if it felt like seeing Exit signs being ripped down in front of him. Because what was an escape to him now? Sure, he could run. He could get far away from Rachel, throw money at the situation to keep the lawyers happy and have nothing to do with this woman and her child ever again. But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t.
And just like that his relaxed feeling was gone. He sat a little straighter in his chair, the tension in his neck and shoulders not allowing him to lounge. There was no escape now. Nothing for it but to plough on, into whatever it was his life held for him. He couldn’t escape the facts: he was going to be a father. This woman, her plans and her notebooks, would be in his life for ever.
But not every part of his life. Rachel’s presence had become an accepted fact between that Italian lunch and her turning up here. But just because he had her in his life, didn’t mean he couldn’t keep parts of it for himself. Keep part of himself safe. So she would be the mother of his child. He couldn’t change that. But that was all she would be. He would stop these daydreams and night-time fantasies about that night. Forget the feel and taste of her lips and skin. He wouldn’t fall into a relationship with her just because she was carrying his child.
‘Let’s just get this over with,’ he said, forcing out the words. ‘We have to talk about it some time, and we’re both here now. What else did you have written down before?’
‘Well...there was one part of the plan I had trouble with,’ she admitted. ‘Without knowing your financial position it was difficult to be accurate, so I came up with a number of different scenarios.’
‘You should know, I’m not as well off as you might think.’ He wasn’t sure why he just threw the words out like that. Best defence perhaps, hoping to scare her off. Instead, he could see from her scowl that he’d offended her. He cursed under his breath. How could they misstep at every turn?
‘And how would you know what I think about your financial position?’
‘Well, we met at a fundraiser where the tickets cost two hundred quid a plate. It would be reasonable on your part to assume that I was loaded. I’m not,’ he added, watching her carefully to see her reaction. She didn’t even look surprised, never mind disappointed.
‘If you remember, I thought you were crashing. So the price of the ticket is neither here nor there.’
She was impossible to second-guess this morning, Leo realised. But nothing he’d seen so far screamed gold-digger. He was cautious of money, and those who wanted it. And he had every reason to be. He’d grown up surrounded by it, rich and miserable. When he’d turned twenty-one, and for the first time could decide for himself how much of the family money he wanted to use, he’d decided the answer was ‘none of it’.
He’d been selling his artwork since school, and when he’d left had set up a website and taken a few commissions, still trying to decide what he wanted to do with his life. When the paperwork had come through authorising his access to his trust fund, he’d decided once and for all that he didn’t want a penny of it for himself. So he’d set up donations to charities, funded a few local projects he was interested in,