Maybe she never would. Closing her arms over her head as if that could block out the nightmare, she tensed as the scene played out in her head. She had asked the lady operating the scanner if her baby was dead, as if by some miracle the little light she had cherished for so short a time could still find a way to shine. There was no reason for it, the doctor had told her. Nature could be cruel. And once was enough to get pregnant, he had added disapprovingly when she had least needed to hear that.
Once with Dante.
She’d been too young, too inexperienced to handle something like that on her own, the same medical team had advised. But she’d had to handle it. Her mother was dead. She couldn’t say a word to her brother and risk breaking his heart. It would have destroyed the team, set him against Dante. Worse, it would have destroyed her brother’s trust in her, and how could she do that after everything Luc had done for her when their parents had died? She loved her brother too much to put him through that. He would never know.
Why hadn’t she told Dante?
Lifting her head, she gave a sad smile. Practising the art of making babies was Dante’s specialty. Dealing with the aftermath? Not so much.
But this wasn’t all on Dante. According to what she’d overheard when they’d been younger, he’d had a life as a child that no one could envy. It was no wonder that he’d cast about, trying to find love. She was no better. At age eighteen she was supposed to know it all. She had certainly thought she did, and that was the impression she’d given Dante at the party. And he’d used protection. What more was he supposed to do when she had been an all-too-willing partner?
It had been bravado in front of her friends that night. She had wanted to take the bond, the friendship she’d had with Dante and move it on to the next level—preferably before one of her girlfriends landed him. She’d taken the initiative, and she had led him to her room where hot, hungry nature had taken its course.
She should have told him she was a virgin, but she could hardly do that after putting on such an air of experience. She was lucky he had prepared her so well that all she remembered was pleasure. And it had been more than once. They had made love throughout the night. Well, she had. Dante had had sex with her. Maybe he wasn’t capable of anything more...maybe his ruined childhood had numbed him to feelings.
It certainly hadn’t affected his stamina. That had been inexhaustible. He had been inventive and had known how to use every surface in the room. She had never expected anything like it, and knew for a fact she would never experience anything like it again.
What a klutz. What an eighteen-year-old klutz. She should have known that every action had a consequence. She might have anticipated Dante would throw her out of his bed. What else was he going to do? Marry her? Marry a girl on the threshold of life, who’d been his friend and who had taken that friendship and mangled it?
And now she was going to leave the security of her job in the city, with a brother who cherished and cared for her, for the wilds of the pampas with a man she hardly knew these days.
What were her options? Back down and throw away the chance of a lifetime because she was too scared to face the past? Appoint someone else in her place to handle the job? Dante had ruled that out from the start. And she could never live with herself if she did that. Should she live out her life in the shadows from now on, never admitting what she wanted, which was to be judged on her own merits—merits that felt thin and few right now?
It all came back to Dante. When she had discovered she was pregnant, she’d hung on, trying to find the right time to approach him and tell him, but he’d become elusive, moving in such sophisticated company she’d rarely seen him, except from a distance at a match. When she’d lost the baby, nothing else had mattered, and she’d been too bruised to face the rigmarole of trying to convince Dante that he was the father of her child—the child she’d lost. What was the point when there was no child? And so she’d kept her secret all these years.
And then she’d embarked on her fightback, going to college abroad, where she had got her head down and learned what had been expected of her in the hotel trade, which had been to be impeccably groomed at all times, and to have the type of quiet manners that reassured people.
How would Dante react if she told him all that now?
He’d be furious and rightly so, and she couldn’t risk alienating him so close to the polo cup, though with his suspicions already roused she might be forced to tell him. He could always read her. She couldn’t use the argument that many youthful friendships didn’t survive the changes in people, and that they’d moved away and apart, and there’d never been chance to tell him about the baby—she couldn’t do it, because that tiny light still shone too brightly in her mind, and the bond between her and Dante was still so strong.