An unpinned grenade would have had a similar effect.
Loukas’s face drained of colour as if he were the one with morning sickness. He stood frozen for a moment. Totally statue-like—as if someone had pressed a pause button on him. Then he swallowed.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Each one of them was clearly audible in the pregnant silence—no pun intended. Emily watched as if in slow motion when he bent to pick up not one, but seven test wands. He examined the tell-tale blue lines, the wands clanking against each other like chopsticks.
His eyes finally cut to hers, sharp, flint-hard with query. ‘You’re...pregnant?’
He said the word as though it was the most shocking diagnosis anyone could have. Up until a few hours ago, she had thought so too.
Emily wrung her hands like a distraught heroine from a period drama, wincing when her damaged finger protested. ‘I was trying to tell you but—’
‘Is it mine?’ The question was a verbal slap.
She double blinked. ‘Of course it’s yours. I—’
‘But we used condoms.’ The suspicion in his voice scraped at her already overwrought nerves.
‘I know, but condoms sometimes fail, and this time one must have—’
‘Aren’t you on the pill?’ His brows were so tightly drawn above his eyes it gave him an intimidating air.
‘I—I was taking a break from it.’ Emily could feel tears welling up. The concentrated smell of her spilt perfume was making her feel queasy. Her fingertips were fizzing as if her blood were being filtered through coarse sand. The tingling sensation spread to her arms, travelling all the way up to her neck, making it hard to keep her head steady. The room began to spin, the floor to shift beneath her feet as though she were standing on a pitching boat deck. She reached blindly for the edge of the bathroom counter but it was like a ghost hand reaching through fog. Every one of her limbs folded as if she were a marionette with severed strings. She heard Loukas call out her name through a vacuum and then everything faded to black...
* * *
‘Emily!’ Loukas dropped to his knees in front of her slumped form, his heart banging against his chest wall like a bell struck by a madman. Her face was as white as the basin above her collapsed form, her skin clammy. He brushed the sticky hair back from her forehead, his mind still whirling with the news of her pregnancy.
Pregnant.
The word struck another hammer-like blow to his chest. A baby. His baby. How had it happened? He was always so careful. Paranoid careful. He never had sex without a condom. He never took risks. Never. How could he have got her pregnant? It had been a bit low of him to suggest it wasn’t his, but panic had blunted his sensitivity.
A father?
Him?
Why hadn’t he asked her about contraception? If he’d known she wasn’t on the pill, or using a hormone implant device, he would have taken extra caution. He couldn’t be a father. He didn’t want to be a father. He had never planned to be a father. Panic drummed through him like wildebeests in stampede. He tried to picture himself with a baby and his mind went blank, his chest seizing with dread, vice-like. His intestines knotted as though they were being sectioned by twine.
No. Not him. Not now. Not ever.
He looked at Emily’s slumped form and another dagger of guilt jabbed him. Hard. He had done this, upsetting her to the point of collapse. She had been trying to tell him something but he’d been so intent on squaring up their fling he hadn’t given her a chance. No wonder she had acted so nervous and on edge.
She was pregnant.
With his baby.
What was he going to do? What was the right thing to do? Hands-off provision for his child seemed a little tacky somehow. There was no way he could walk away from this. He would have to be involved with his child as he wished his father had been for him. He would have to be responsible for the child. To provide for and protect it. The thought of protecting a child was enough to make Loukas break out in another prickly sweat.
How could he keep a child safe?
He had got Emily pregnant. Some would call it an accident, a freakish trick of fate, or destiny or whatever, but he blamed himself. He had slipped up. He had done what he had sworn he would never do.
He was to become a father, unless she chose to get rid of it.