‘I didn’t do it deliberately,’ she said evenly, surprised her voice came out at all.
His heavy frown took over his entire face. ‘You were on the pill, for Christ’s sake!’
‘I know…’ She bit her lip. ‘I had a stomach bug when you were in New York that time…I didn’t think…I thought it would be all right…’
‘Why didn’t you tell me, for God’s sake?’
She stared at him, a slow-burning anger coming to her defence at long last. ‘How could I possibly tell you? You would have promptly escorted me off to the nearest abortion clinic!’
He opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out.
‘You were always so adamant about no kids, no pets and no permanent ties,’ she went on when he didn’t speak. ‘How was I supposed to deal with something like an unexpected pregnancy? I was just twenty years old, I was living in another country away from the security I’d taken for granted for most of my life, living with a man who had no time for sentimentality or indeed any of the ethics that had been drummed into me from the day I was born. How was I supposed to cope with such a heart-wrenching situation?’She drew in a ragged breath. ‘For all I knew, you would have had me off to the nearest facility to get rid of “my mistake” before I could even think of an alternative. I wanted time to think of an alternative…’
‘What sort of alternative were you thinking of?’ he asked after a stiff pause.
She met his eyes for a brief moment. ‘I couldn’t face… getting rid of it…’ She turned away and examined her hands. ‘I considered adoption, but having seen Ellie go through the heartache of wondering whether to seek out her blood relatives or not, I just couldn’t do it. I knew I would spend the rest of my life wondering what my child was doing. Whether his new parents would love him the way I loved him…whether he was happy…’ She lifted her head and gave him an agonised look and continued. ‘I knew that on his birth date for the rest of my life I would wonder… I would ache…I would want to know how he was…I couldn’t go through with it. I had to have him. I had no other choice.’
She stared back down at the tight knot of her hands. ‘I knew you wouldn’t want to know about his existence, so I decided to go it alone. I knew it wouldn’t be easy but my family have been wonderful. They love Lachlan so much…I can’t imagine life without him now.’
Jake turned away, not sure he could cope with Ashleigh seeing how seriously he was affected.
A son!
His son!
His father’s grandson…
His stomach churned with fear. This is what he had spent his lifetime avoiding and now here it was, inescapable. Ashleigh had given birth to his child without his permission and now he had to somehow deal with it.
‘I want a paternity test,’ he said. ‘I want it done immediately and if you don’t agree I’ll engage legal help to bring it about.’
Ashleigh felt another corner of her heart break.
‘If that’s what you need I won’t stop you.’
‘I want it done,’ he said, hating himself for saying it. ‘I want it done so at least I know where I stand.’
‘I don’t want anything from you,’ she said. ‘I’ve never wanted anything from you. That’s why I didn’t tell you. I couldn’t bear the thought of you thinking of me as some sort of grasping woman who wanted their pound of flesh on top of everything else.’
‘Were you ever going to tell me?’
His words dropped into the silence like a bucket of icecold water on flames.
She seemed to have trouble meeting his eyes. He wasn’t sure what to make of it but he assumed in the end it was guilt. Her shoulders were slumped, her head bowed, her hands twisting in front of her.
‘Answer me, damn you!’ he growled. ‘Were you ever going to tell me?’
She lifted her head, her eyes glazed with moisture.
‘I thought about telling you that first night…at the bar…’ Her teeth caught her bottom lip for a moment before she continued raggedly. ‘But you were so arrogant about insisting on seeing me again, as if I’d had no life of my own since we broke up. It didn’t seem the right atmosphere to inform you of…of Lachlan’s existence.’
Jake turned away from her, his back rigid with tension as he paced the floor a couple of times.
He couldn’t take it in.
He tried to replay their conversation at the hotel bar, to see if there had been any hint of her well-kept secret, but as far as he could recall she had only met him under sufferance and had given every appearance of being immensely relieved to escape as soon as she possibly could.