Happy Mother's Day!

‘What did you say?’ Her lips moved, but did the words come out? Erin wasn’t sure—the blood was pounding so hard in her ears that it drowned out everything else. She gave her head a tiny shake to clear her confused, chaotic thoughts. How could he know?

‘You heard me, Erin: pregnant. You are with child … my child.’ His voice dropped a note with each addition and every syllable contained the same fury that was etched in the strong bones of his lean, patrician face.

She shook her head in bewilderment. ‘I don’t understand … how?’

‘How?’ Francesco echoed, in a thickly accented voice that was so hard she barely recognised it. ‘This is how.’

Erin stared blankly at the mobile phone he flung onto the chair. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘The hospital left a message concerning your antenatal appointment.’

Still wearing a shell-shocked expression, she picked up the phone. ‘I must have given my old number. You really shouldn’t have been listening to my private messages, Francesco.’ She realised even before Francesco swore forcibly in his own tongue that it had been a stupid thing to say.

‘I do apologise for violating your privacy,’ he drawled, sounding anything but and looking. Her eyes skimmed his face and her heart dropped like a stone—angry didn’t really cover the explosive fury that was oozing from every perfect, rampantly male pore. Francesco was incandescent!

‘However, I think, cara, that my transgression pales into insignificance compared to your own. I did not try and rob you of your child, Erin.’

Horrified by his interpretation, she lifted her face in shaky protest. ‘That wasn’t what I was doing! I was going to tell you. I really was …’

There was no softening in his harsh, condemnatory attitude as she spread her hands towards him in a gesture of appeal. If anything it seemed to Erin that her silent entreaty had fed the flames of his fury.

He angled a dark brow sardonically and wondered with blighting sarcasm, ‘When exactly? Or were you going to send me an e-mail after you gave birth?’

‘Does it matter?’ Erin’s shoulders slumped, because clearly what she said didn’t matter. Nothing she said or did was ever going to excuse her silence in Francesco’s eyes.

‘It matters to me, it matters to me that my wife thought it unnecessary to inform me she is carrying my child. It matters to me that she has deliberately tried to conceal her condition from me, though,’ he added, shaking his dark head slowly from side to side, ‘how you thought that was going to work I can’t even begin to imagine. You seem to have lost your grip on reality. What were you planning to do—change your name and flee the country?’

Face screwed up in anguish, she shook her head violently from side to side. ‘You make it sound as though I was deliberately trying to deceive you!’ she protested.

‘And you weren’t?’

Erin literally wrung her hands as she struggled to convince him of her sincerity. ‘I can see how it might seem that way to you, but, no—no, it wasn’t like that at all.’

Francesco’s hands clenched at his sides as he steeled himself to ignore the anguish in her tear-filled blue eyes. ‘What was it like, Erin? Shall I tell you what it was like for me? What it was like to pick up that phone and hear some anonymous voice talk about antenatal appointments?’

‘I know,’ she sighed, ‘and I wouldn’t have had that happen for the world, but it’s just complicated things … I know that sounds pathetic.’

He didn’t disagree, just carried on looking at her with simmering hostility.

‘I knew I had to tell you at some point, but, well … using a child to paper over cracks in a marriage is never a good idea. And I was afraid that you might have a knee-jerk reaction and.suggest that we had to stay together for the sake of the baby.’ Sweeping a tangled skein of bright glossy hair back from her face, she angled a wary gaze at Francesco. He was listening to her and, much to her relief, seemed more in control of his feelings. But the expression in his hooded eyes was frustratingly hard to read.

‘Which is clearly ridiculous?’ Her voice lifted in query as she tried to gauge his reaction. Maybe her fears were misplaced?

It would be ironic considering how much she’d stressed about the possibility if it didn’t even occur to Francesco to suggest they give their marriage another shot for the sake of the baby. After all, he might be a man with some surprisingly oldfashioned ideas about family, but Francesco was also a realist.

‘Ridiculous to want to salvage our marriage to provide a home and stability for our child?’

Their eyes connected and she realised that she had been right to stress—in fact it seemed likely she had not stressed enough. ‘You mean pretend …’

From the way he was looking at her at that moment Erin imagined that Francesco would struggle to maintain a pretence that the sight of her didn’t make him feel physically ill let alone spend their married life acting as though she were the love of his life!

‘That’s hardly realistic, is it, Francesco?’

‘Not as unrealistic as you imagining I will give you a quickie divorce!’ he retorted bluntly.

‘Well, there is no point in hanging around, really, is there? I know some people stay separated for years before they make it official, but—’

‘There will be no separation.’