‘Pipe down, Stanley,’ Sergio ordered. ‘How many times...?’
‘There’s some folk who are actually interested in what I have to say...sir!’
Sergio sighed heavily and his eyebrows shot up, but he didn’t prolong the conversation, instead smartly shutting the glass partition so that they were enclosed in a private cocoon in the back of the car.
‘That was very rude.’ Susie sat back and closed her eyes to block him out, but she was keenly aware of him with every pore in her body.
‘Stanley would be shocked if I was ever anything but. As a matter of fact there’s a reason why I showed up here to collect you, Susie.’
She turned to look at him, suddenly nervous. ‘What is it?’
Was he about to tell her that she had been replaced? That he was seeing someone else but not to worry, because he would still make sure she was financially taken care of...still make sure that he kept showing up to offer her support...because she was, after all, carrying his child.
A fact which he seemed to have taken on board with effortless ease. Although for all she knew he might spend every second on his own cursing the day he had invited her to sit at his table so that she could escape the horror of her blind date.
‘I have a surprise for you,’ he drawled, leaning against the car door.
‘I don’t like surprises. In fact I hate them.’
‘You’re going to like this one.’ He held her eyes steadily and smiled. ‘You’re now the proud owner of a house in Richmond—within spitting distance of the park...’
‘What?’
‘It’s time you cleared out of that hovel,’ Sergio told her bluntly, ‘and you’ve spent the past two months getting nowhere very fast.’
‘So you went behind my back and just...picked some random place to speed things up?’
‘I accelerated a process that wasn’t getting anywhere.’
‘And when did this process of acceleration begin, exactly?’
‘I spotted it a while back but it wasn’t yet destined for the market.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means I made the owners an offer they found difficult to refuse, but I didn’t want to say anything because they could have backed out at any given moment.’
‘And now?’
‘And now, like I said, you own a house.’
‘You should have told me. You can’t just make big decisions like that without consulting me! I’ll probably hate it—what then?’ She was being horribly unfair, but he made her feel like a parcel in need of urgent delivery. He was just so...controlled and efficient...
‘If you do,’ Sergio said with infuriating calm, ‘we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. And in the meantime...’
‘In the meantime...what?’
‘Try not seeing all the negatives.’
Left to her own devices, he wouldn’t have put it past her to dig her heels in, deliberately finding nothing so that she could head up to Yorkshire, far away from him and his intervention.
And he wasn’t having that. Oh, no. There was no way he was going to let her run away from him...
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘HOW ARE YOUR PARENTS?’
Sergio had seen them only once since the wedding. They had come down to London before leaving to go to Tuscany for two weeks. He had taken them out to the restaurant he owned—the very same restaurant where he had met their daughter. He had wined and dined them and no mention had been made of where he was going with Susie. With that well-bred reticence so typical of the upper classes they had steered diplomatically clear of any contentious subjects.
‘Fine.’
‘Have you mentioned our financial arrangements to them?’
‘I’ve said that you won’t be doing a runner,’ Susie told him vaguely.
Sergio frowned. ‘That’s not really good enough, is it?’
‘They understand that just because I’m pregnant it doesn’t mean that we’re going to be walking up the aisle.’
‘Even though I expect that is what they would like to see?’
She shrugged and held his stare. ‘I haven’t gone into lots of detail, but I think they understand that in this day and age people don’t get married because of an accidental pregnancy. They know that you’re...you’re...’