‘Oh, well, when you can fit me into your schedule, I thought we might have a conversation. One like—oh, I don’t know... How about: Ben, it totally slipped my mind, but I had your baby a few years back...?’
She closed her eyes and thought, Oh, hell... Well, maybe now was as good a time as any to get this over with. Sucking in a short, tense breath, every muscle in her body taut, she turned and looked him in the face and nodded.
‘Sorry.’ Then because it crossed her mind he might think she was sorry she’d had Emmy she tacked on hastily, ‘That you found out about it in the way—’ She stopped. She didn’t know how he’d found out, but she supposed the significant bit was it hadn’t been from her. ‘This way.’
He clenched his jaw and ground out grimly, ‘So you’re not even going to deny it?’
A bit late now. ‘I’m not a good liar.’
His lip curled. ‘Oh, I think you’re a very good liar.’
‘I didn’t lie, I just decided not to—’
‘Burden me with the truth?’
She winced at the acid sarcasm and began to resent his occupation of the moral high ground as she jerked her eyes up to meet his intense blue glare.
‘Or were you just not sure who the father was?’
The insult, because there was no doubt he intended it as such, drew a wobbly little laugh from her aching throat. She clamped her teeth over it and lifted her chin. It was an irony she had no intention of sharing with him. She could at least retain that much pride. Having him know she’d thought their one-night stand was the start of something special would have been too cringingly humiliating; she’d prefer he think she was some sort of bed-hopping tart.
‘Oh, there was never any doubt about that,’ she said quietly.
‘Because I’m curious,’ he said, his control straining at the leash. ‘Did you ever intend to tell me?’
‘I thought about it.’ Lily didn’t register the hissing sound her admission wrenched from his clenched teeth. Her eyes glazed as her thoughts drifted backwards. After the initial shock had worn off she had thought about little else. The tipping point had been the article his ex had written. It had seemed like fate that she’d picked it up in the waiting room before her first appointment with the midwife.
It turned out Ben had only been engaged for five minutes before he’d got cold feet and dumped the poor woman. Commitment phobic, the gorgeous ex-model had explained, but the real breaking point, she had confided, had been his refusal to have a family.
You had to admire the woman. She’d have been perfectly justified, in Lily’s opinion, if she’d chosen to stick the knife in. But instead she’d displayed a really healthy attitude focusing on the future, her career change and plugging her new cookery book that was to hit the shelves soon.
That had sealed the deal for Lily. She’d known then that she couldn’t tell him.
‘But I knew how you’d react,’ she continued.
He arched a sardonic brow and ground his teeth in reaction to this claim of psychic abilities. ‘And how is that?’
Lily studied his face, her heart clenched in her chest. Even mad, he was beautiful. She spread her hands in an expressive gesture. ‘Pretty much like this.’
Before she had become pregnant Lily had never asked herself if she wanted to be a mother. Unlike Ben, who it turned out had decided never to be a father. A man who broke off an engagement because having children was a deal breaker was not going to be happy to learn he was about to be a dad by a one-night stand.
‘So how did you find out?’
‘How did I find out?’ He shook his head and looked at her as though she were insane. ‘I saw her, I saw me...’ he ground out, shaking his dark head in an incredulous motion from side to side. ‘Your mother doesn’t know?’
She swallowed, thinking of all the occasions when she had been tempted to confide in someone, wishing she could.
‘Not Mum, not... You can relax, I didn’t tell anyone.’ Not even her twin actually. Especially not her married twin, who was desperate to get pregnant and not having any luck. Having always been able to confide in Lara, Lily found it hard to deal with this new reality. She just hoped that the wall that had built up between them would be removed when Lara finally got pregnant.
‘Relax!’
Lily could feel the anger rolling off him in waves. She struggled to show she was not intimidated by it, but it was not easy when it was buffeting her like a storm-force wind. She bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself physically retreating from his anger, focusing on the metallic taste of blood on her tongue.
‘No one else needs to know, nothing needs to change,’ she assured him earnestly.
Lily could hear his white teeth grind as he closed his eyes and muttered under his breath. He opened them again and she staggered from the contemptuous blast of his deep blue eyes. ‘It already has changed.’
She opened her mouth to contradict him and her glance connected with his relentless stare. Lily was the first to look away.
‘How the hell is it possible for your mother—for everyone—not to see?’
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. On this one point they were on the same page. ‘It’s always seemed obvious to me but no one else seemed to notice. So I thought why—’
‘Bother?’ He cut across her, his voice a furious growl. ‘I am a father!’
‘Biologically.’ She lowered her lashes to hide the hurt and sadness that surfaced when she thought of her little girl, who deserved a father who loved her.
Ben flicked her a look of incredulous scorn and lashed back accusingly, ‘You don’t think a child needs a father?’
Lily almost laughed, but she felt suddenly like crying. ‘It depends on the father.’ Better her baby had no father, than one who didn’t want her.
Lily knew that her own dad had loved her and her twin, but the argument she had overheard the night before he’d died still haunted her. Looking back with adult eyes, she was able to see it for what it had been—a couple with money problems fighting, saying things they didn’t mean. But she still remembered how it had felt when her dad had yelled, Why do you think we’ve got no money? You’re the one who wanted to keep them.
Lily shook herself free from her silent depressing reverie. At her sides her hands clenched. No. She would protect her baby from ever feeling unwanted.
Just the baby?
Hadn’t there been the smallest hint of self-preservation in her decision? Having Ben in her life, a constant reminder of her romantic self-delusion, would not have been easy to deal with.
It would have been agony. Just looking at him, she thought it was! She was no longer naïve enough to call it love, but the primal reaction she had to him was not something she could control, even if it was just sex.
The quiet rebuttal caused Ben to draw a breath. His smouldering gaze dropped, his lashes brushing the slashing angle of his cheek that hid the flicker of uncertainty in his blue eyes. He wondered, wasn’t she right?
His own father had been marginally more involved in his life than his mother, not because of any genuine fatherly feelings but only in the sense that he’d cared more about appearances.
Would he be any better?
Self-doubt was not something that kept Ben awake at night. He’d made his share of bad decisions. The