Mistress And Mother

She sugared her coffee and kept on stirring. The prospect of telling Sholto loomed like a hangman’s noose before her. It would be horribly humiliating. Sholto was not easily shocked but this was something else again. He would be shattered and how could she blame him? One time, just one time, and for her the very first time…

‘Are you thinking of emptying the entire sugar bowl into that cup?’ Sholto enquired lazily, almost gently.

Molly dropped the teaspoon with a clatter back on the saucer and lifted her head. ‘I’m pregnant…’ she framed tightly.

Brilliant dark eyes rested on her strained face and unwittingly frightened eyes. It was a slow, steady appraisal. He didn’t blink, nor did his expression alter even by a degree.

Molly breathed shakily, ‘Sholto…did you hear what I said?’

‘I was waiting to see if you were planning to add anything else,’ Sholto confessed, and he started pouring himself a cup of coffee with a hand as steady as a rock. ‘But I should have known better. You had to sit there looking at me as if you expected me to lunge across the table at you and say that if you were pregnant it was nothing to do with me!’

Completely disconcerted by the direction the dialogue was taking, Molly gaped at him in bewilderment.

Sholto coiled back fluidly into his chair, dark, dark eyes semi-screened by his lush lashes. ‘There’s no need for melodrama, Molly. And I can’t fake shock when I already suspected that you might be pregnant.’

Molly frowned. ‘But how could you have suspected? I only started worrying last night.’

‘I took a calculated risk that night at Freddy’s,’ Sholto admitted very quietly, watching her eyes widen in shock. ‘So you didn’t register that fact. I did wonder and I did intend to mention it the next morning, but somehow… that didn’t quite pan out, any more than my call at your office did.’

Colour had surged into Molly’s cheeks again and incredulity fired her gaze as she stared back at him. ‘Are you saying that you didn’t take any precautions?’ she prompted, dry-mouthed with disbelief.

‘You were there, Molly,’ Sholto countered.

‘I wasn’t sure, I just assumed…I just blasted well didn’t notice!’ Molly vented in a sudden shrill burst as she planted her hands on the table-edge and leapt furiously upright. The light-headed sensation which afflicted her only made her angrier. ‘I can’t believe that you could be that irresponsible…that selfish… that inexcusably careless—’

‘Sit down and eat your toast,’ Sholto advised flatly.

She sat down again only because she was dizzy. Every trace of her earlier anxiety and embarrassment had been banished by his confession but she was in the grip of the most devastating sense of shock.

‘Dio…I don’t have one-night stands and I had nothing with me. It was that simple. I took the risk but you took it with me—’

‘You utter toad!’ Molly condemned, infuriated by his attitude. ‘You knew perfectly well that I didn’t know what I was doing!’

‘Santo cielo!’ His lean, strong face revealing his exasperation, Sholto threw his hands in the air in a gesture of stark frustration. ‘What does it matter how it happened? You’re expecting my child now. Let us deal with that. It is a waste of time to wrangle about anything else!’

‘And you kept quiet too…’ Molly thought back to the previous day, his constraint, his assertion that he would not catch that particular bug, and her stomach twisted. She had watched him go pale in his office when she’d felt faint, recognised his grim tension when she was ill. She hadn’t known it but she had been receiving his true reaction then. And it had not been today’s cool, collected calm.

‘I saw no reason to worry you unnecessarily—’

‘Unnecessarily?’ she queried chokily.

‘We were both going to know soon enough. Talking about it wasn’t going to take the possibility away. Apportioning blame is equally pointless. This is a time to be constructive, rather than destructive.’

But Molly was too upset for that. Right from the start Sholto had known that he might make her pregnant. His damnable arrogance! He had computed the risk, taken the chance, had undoubtedly expected his legendary good luck to hold. But it hadn’t. A shock of no mean proportions to a male like Sholto Cristaldi. Recalling his conspicuous lack of nonchalance the day before, Molly could not be fooled by his present calm response.

‘You want me to be constructive?’ Her voice shook at the suggestion.

‘This is a mutual responsibility.’

But it was her body, her life, her future which had been irrevocably changed, not his. That there could actually be a baby growing inside her still felt unreal. In the simmering silence, Sholto rang for Ogden and ordered a fresh pot of coffee.

‘Obviously we have a lot to discuss,’ he drawled with that same maddening cool.

Her hands tightly linked on her lap below the level of the table, Molly looked up, her heart-shaped face tense and drawn. ‘I’m not having a termination. I’m sorry but that isn’t open for discussion.’

His stunning dark eyes narrowed. ‘Did I suggest that it might be?’

‘You couldn’t help but see that as the most convenient solution,’ Molly muttered, running an unsteady hand through her mane of russet hair. ‘After all, this baby wasn’t conceived in a relationship. It’s the accidental consequence of a one-night stand.’