Princess's Nine-Month Secret

‘It’s what I expected. And wasn’t that what this was all about? You warned me, Rico, about how little I could expect from you. Now it seems I’m getting more than I bargained for.’ And she didn’t sound very happy about it.

Rico stared at her in fury, wondering why he didn’t just let her go. She was acting exactly the way he should want, but something compelled him to keep her here. He wanted answers. He also wanted her.

‘It’s different,’ he ground out. ‘Since you’re a virgin.’

Lina rolled her eyes. ‘That’s my business, not yours.’

‘You should have told me.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I never would have slept with you then!’

‘And that’s exactly why I didn’t tell you.’

She was impossible. Rico rolled up to a sitting position and yanked on his trousers. A sudden thought occurred to him, terrible and profound. ‘You said it was safe.’ From behind him Lina didn’t say a word and slowly Rico turned around. ‘I asked you if you were on birth control...’

Her eyes widened a fraction and she hitched the sheet higher. ‘That wasn’t actually what you asked.’

‘I asked if it was safe!’

‘Which could mean something completely different.’

Cold dread swirled in his stomach, along with an anger fiercer than he’d ever felt before. ‘Most women, when in the intimate situation we were in, would know precisely what that meant.’ He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘Are you saying you’re not on birth control?’ Why would she be, if she was a virgin? Unless she’d taken it with the express purpose of losing her virginity tonight. The thought seemed so bizarre he didn’t know what to do with it. ‘Tell me you’re on birth control.’

Lina shrugged, her ink-dark hair sliding about her shoulders. ‘Fine. I’m on birth control.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘You asked me to tell you—’

Rico swore loudly and viciously. ‘I didn’t mean for you to lie.’ He raked a hand through his hair, his fingers pulling on the short strands, frustration now matching his fury and confusion. ‘Lina, I don’t understand you.’

‘You don’t need to.’

He knew she was right, and that infuriated him all the more. He should just send her away. By this point in an evening, usually he would already be in the shower, expecting his bed partner, whoever she was, to be finding her own way out. What was so different now?

‘If you’re not on birth control, you could be pregnant.’ Lina lifted her chin another notch and said nothing. ‘Damn it, Lina, that’s a rather major issue, don’t you think?’

A muscle flinched in her cheek. ‘It’s not your concern.’

‘It is very much my concern,’ Rico returned in a low, dangerous voice, certainty thrumming inside him. He would never abandon his own child, as he had once been abandoned. He would die first. ‘If you are pregnant with my child, it is my paramount concern.’

Her face paled and she blinked slowly, seeming to absorb that statement. Rico shook his head, impatient as well as furious. ‘Did it not even occur to you that you could become pregnant?’

‘Not exactly.’ She bit her lip. ‘I wasn’t thinking about that just then.’

‘Then why on earth did you say it was safe? Did you lie on purpose?’

‘I... I didn’t understand what you meant.’ Colour crept into her face and she looked away.

Rico stared at her incredulously. ‘What did you think I meant, then?’

‘I don’t know.’ Her voice rose in agitation. ‘I wasn’t thinking at all, to be honest.’

‘Neither was I,’ Rico returned grimly, hating that it was true. What a mess. And he had no one to blame but himself. He should have realised how naive she was. She’d given him plenty of clues.

Sitting in his bed, wrapped in his sheet, her hair everywhere, her eyes wide and her face pale, she looked very young and incredibly vulnerable. How could he have thought for a moment that she was experienced, a woman of the world? She was anything but.