He looked at her as if she were stupid. ‘I’ve done nothing but.’
Cally spent the next few weeks alternately ignoring the situation, and then examining her options in depth. OK, so she was pregnant—frankly that was amazing. The doctor had told her to rest, to try not to worry or stress. She looked around her office. She certainly didn’t need any more stress—her job provided more than enough. She didn’t have the reserves for a sustained battle against Blake.
She had to admit the way he wanted this baby touched her. They wanted the same outcome. They could get through this. A partnership, he’d called it. And maybe that could work. OK, she had to make it work and so she was not going to mess it up with lustful thoughts. For her health, and that of the baby, it was easier to say yes to him. No more arguments. But no more sex either. The situation didn’t need to get any more complicated.
Panic flashed through her. Please, let the baby be OK—it was such a miracle. She was almost afraid to believe it was real. She’d do anything for her baby to be OK.
She blanked out those deeply lodged doubts and refocused on what she should do. Time and time again she faced the fact that she couldn’t deny her baby the opportunity of having two parents who loved it and who would make whatever sacrifices necessary to provide it with security and love. She wanted her baby to have the kind of relationship with its father that she’d had with hers. She wanted the closeness, for it to feel the comfort she had. Her father had loved her, protected her and cared for her—and she had been crushed when he’d died. And then her mother had let her down again and again. Intuitively she knew Blake would never let his child down.
She couldn’t let her child miss out on building a relationship with him. What if something happened to her—what if she died too soon as her father had? If she didn’t give her child the opportunity of knowing and loving its father, she would have failed as its mother—especially when its father wanted to be involved so much. Her baby deserved both of them. She had to try to make it work. And Blake was determined to step up to the plate; there was no denying that. He might not love her, but he would love his child. His child deserved no less, and she couldn’t stand in the way.
Their marriage didn’t have to be the road-crash that her parents’ had been—and if she kept it platonic, then the less risk of ruin there would be. They could live together—a business deal for them that would mean love for their child. Surely she could master the desire she still felt for him—to give all three of them the best chance of living together peacefully. She had to extinguish the fire between them, so that it wouldn’t have the opportunity to burn the whole arrangement down. He’d admitted this wasn’t a love match and she needed to lose any secret dreams of romance and happy ever after.
Besides, right now, for someone who was supposedly her fiancé, he was amazingly invisible. He hadn’t been to see her once since coming to get her papers. Well, she wasn’t going to go out of her way to see him. She was still half hoping he’d forget about the whole mess—wasn’t she?
He didn’t forget. Although he didn’t show up, he rang, without fail, twice a day—eleven a.m.—she figured it was morning–tea time, and then at night at eight. He was so regular she figured he had an alarm set. Hell, he’d probably programmed his mobile to dial her automatically.
After a few weeks she was sick of it—the twice-daily phone calls that lasted less than a few minutes. He was only interested in how she was physically and what she’d eaten. If it weren’t for the baby there would be no contact and even though this was something she already knew, boy, it rankled. She struggled to keep her reactions to him businesslike.
At precisely eight p.m. her phone rang. She answered immediately and before he could even get the ‘hello’ in she spoke in brisk, bored tones.
‘Yes, I had a good day. No, I wasn’t sick. Yes, I had a rest in the afternoon. For dinner I had stir-fried beef with Asian greens and rice, washed down with a glass of orange juice, which will help aid the absorption of iron from the meat and veg. I followed that with some fresh fruit salad with Greek-style yoghurt, therefore covering all major food groups so you can rest assured the baby is getting adequate nutrition. Yes, I’m about to go to bed. I am going to read for a while but I’ll be sure not to stay up too late. I’ll let you know how I slept and what I had for breakfast when you call at the usual time in the morning. Goodnight.’
She didn’t wait for a response, knowing she’d neatly summarised everything he wanted to know. It was all about her health—and the baby’s. She slammed the phone back onto the receiver, totally irritated.
Fortunately, she had all the paperwork ever generated by her company to work through and—largely—keep her mind off a) worrying about her baby and b) worrying about where Blake was—and with whom—and how she could work her way through this impossible situation.
She’d decided to get everything up to date, knowing the end was nigh for her involvement in the company. While it had been small it had been OK, but with success had come expansion and now it was too big for her to manage alone—especially with her child coming. And she wanted to hand it over completely rather than work with someone else as boss. With her time then freed, she’d explore some of her other ideas.
So during the long daylight hours she went through box after box, file after file, and made sure everything was just right. She compiled lists of contacts and wrote up a guide about the daily processes so that someone could walk in, read it and pick up where she’d left off. If she was going to walk away from Cally’s Cuisine, she needed it to be a clean break.
Eleven o’clock the next morning, on the floor in the midst of a pile of papers, she tensed. But her phone sat silent. She wandered over to her desk and stared at it, waiting for it to light up with an incoming call.
Five past eleven—still silent.
Ten past eleven—nada.
Quarter past … twenty past … twenty-five past.
Had she finally got rid of him with her smart-alec spiel last night? For the next two hours she couldn’t focus on her work at all—instead she tried to quell the anxiety that something was wrong. Finally her mobile rang. She glanced at the screen. It was Blake. She expelled the biggest breath, then toughened up. She was busy. She let it ring. Two seconds later it rang again. And then a third time—four, five, six. At that point she switched it to mute and got back to her organising. She only had a couple of last boxes to go through. She climbed up onto her chair, reaching up to the top shelf of her bookcase. She heard the door behind her opening and figured it was Mel. She was utterly unprepared for the loud shout.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
She spun on the chair, overbalanced and fell down onto the floor, only just landing on her feet with a wobble and wild waving of her arms. Then she looked up and in a nanosecond registered the tall, muscled man with the blazing eyes and knew that, so far, she was failing in her attempt to get over the lust.
Irritated, she frowned at his glare and her own fear, heart beating hard against her ribs. ‘Tidying up my paperwork.’
‘You shouldn’t be standing up there, for heaven’s sake. What if you’d landed badly just then?’
‘I only fell because you gave me such a fright barging in here shouting,’ she retorted, a little over-defensive because she knew he was right and she had given herself more than a bit of a fright. She launched straight on the offensive. ‘Are we still getting married in a few days or are you over that moment of madness?’
‘Not madness, Cally—our getting married is a supremely rational decision.’
‘I’m amazed you even recognised me, it’s been that long since you saw me.’
‘Cally …’ he strolled towards her, lips twitching—the first sign of relaxation in his tense stance ‘… have you been missing me?’
‘Certainly