She glanced wildly at the door and wondered whether she could make a sprint for it.
‘You’re not going anywhere, so you can forget eyeing the doorway like it’s the promised land, and I don’t need a few days to think about this. I’ve already thought about it and come up with the only possible solution.’
‘To marry you? That’s the only possible solution?’
‘What else?’
The sexy, teasing man she had fallen in love with had gone. In his place was this cold-eyed stranger, addressing her in a voice that could freeze water.
‘I take full responsibility for the mess we’ve ended up in. It’s the first time I have ever come close to any kind of lapse in taking precautions.’
‘You should hear yourself!’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The mess we’ve ended up in...an explosion in your life...’ Tears stung the back of her eyes. ‘How can you be so...so...callous...?’
‘I’m not being callous.’ Sergio flushed darkly and continued to stare at her.
‘A few hours ago,’ she slammed into him bitterly, ‘you were dragging me in here so that you could make love to me...’
‘You weren’t protesting.’
‘I never said that I was!’ Her eyes flared and she held his stare with mutinous, stubborn persistence.
His change should come as no big surprise. He had never been in it for more than the sex and now his true colours were showing—because whether he magnanimously chose to take responsibility or not the fact was that circumstances had changed horrendously for him.
He wasn’t aiming to be callous. For him it was truly an explosion in his life—and a mess. It just wouldn’t occur to him that those words would be the last ones she might want to hear.
‘I don’t want to get into a huge argument with you,’ Susie told him wearily. ‘But I’m not going to marry you. And quite honestly I have no idea why you would want to marry me. Especially when you had such a dramatic “learning curve”, with your father marrying the wrong woman and then suffering for his mistake. Why would you want to marry the wrong woman?’
‘Circumstances are somewhat different in our case, wouldn’t you say? For a start, you aren’t decades my junior, and you didn’t actively seek me out so that you could extract money from me.’
‘That’s not what you thought when we first met! And you came here because you needed to satisfy yourself that you hadn’t made a mistake. No point taking unnecessary chances.’
‘It’s not going to further this situation if we keep delving into the past. That’s over and done with.’
‘It still doesn’t change the fact that I won’t marry you. We’re not living in the Dark Ages, Sergio. What would be the point of sacrificing our lives just because we happened to make a mistake? People make mistakes all the time, but it doesn’t mean that they condemn themselves to paying for it for the rest of their lives.’
Sergio took every single word that left her mouth as a personal affront.
Marriage had not crossed his radar in any way, shape or form...ever. Yet he knew that had he offered what he was offering now to any of the women he had dated in the past they would have bitten his arm off in their enthusiasm to accept.
Not only had she turned him down, she had done so without a hint of apology or remorse, and she had told him in no uncertain words that he was not up to scratch, not what she was looking for.
‘So tell me how you see this situation playing out?’ His voice was icy. ‘You remain living where you are? In a flat that is barely big enough for one person, far less two? With temperamental central heating and appliances that don’t work unless they feel like it? Do you envisage romantic times as a pauper, having to swaddle my baby in layers of clothes or risk frostbite? Or will you take up the other option of running back home to Mummy and Daddy and living under their roof for the foreseeable future? Because—and let’s be brutally honest here—your job won’t pay the way.’
‘I haven’t thought that far ahead,’ Susie said faintly. ‘Of course I know that it’s not going to be feasible to stay where I am...’