Implacable golden eyes raked over her with stubborn force. ‘I think that the moment you discovered that you were rather more fertile than you wanted to be, you decided to walk out on me and go for an abortion. Perhaps you came to France first in an effort to ensure that you shook me off.’
Pippa’s back was so rigid her spine was protesting her stance, but her pallor was now illuminated by angry colour. ‘You have no right to talk as if you can get inside my head and somehow know what I was planning to do—’
Andreo sent her a fierce look of derision. ‘I don’t need a fortune-teller, do I? You don’t like children—’
‘That is untrue and what is more I never said any such thing.’
His wide sensual mouth compressed into an even more intransigent line. ‘You don’t want children—’
‘What would you know about what I want?’ Pippa flung at him hotly. ‘Maybe I started to feel differently when I realised I was already carrying a baby.’
Andreo’s keen gaze narrowed and glittered. His strong bone structure bearing a little less resemblance to a stone wall, he took a sudden fluid step closer. ‘Did you?’
‘That’s none of your business! You should have asked how I felt…nicely, not gone straight into attack!’ she snapped back at him.
‘Don’t tell me it’s none of my business when you have my baby inside you!’ Andreo thundered back at her.
‘When you talk like that you sound like a fourteenth-century man,’ she told him with a scornfully curled lip.
His sense of humour nowhere in evidence, Andreo jerked a powerful shoulder in dismissal. ‘It’s my baby too and I made it clear that I would take full responsibility if this happened.’
‘Always supposing I wanted you to take responsibility,’ Pippa slotted in, if anything more angry than ever that he should dare to imply that she needed him to take care of her and the baby she carried.
‘Any decisions you make should be discussed with me,’ Andreo delivered grimly.
‘All right.’ Pippa forced out a facetious laugh. ‘Are you any good at changing nappies?’
Andreo gave her an arrested look.
Pippa released an exaggerated sigh of disappointment. ‘Obviously you’ve no experience whatsoever in that line. What about feeds and crying bouts in the middle of the night?’
His level black brows pleated in a bemused frown. ‘We’d have a nanny.’
‘Oh, would we?’
‘Of course…’ But for once Andreo was out of his depth and it was showing in the intensity with which he was watching her while he tried to guess what the right answers might be on her terms. He had half a dozen nephews and nieces but he had had precious little to do with them as babies.
‘So while you are convinced that you should be involved in any decisions I make, you’re not actually willing to do any hands-on parenting—’
‘What is this conversation? Are you saying that you are prepared to have this baby if I get involved?’ Andreo demanded tautly.
‘If you had ever taken the time to ask me, I would have told you up front that I had already decided that I was going to have this child.’ Pippa was breathing in slowly and carefully because the sheer stress of their confrontation was making her head swim. ‘But I don’t need you or your money to manage and if a nanny is all you have to offer, I think we might just be better off on our own.’
‘That’s not all I’m prepared to offer,’ Andreo breathed with savage clarity, brilliant eyes shimmering over her. ‘I’ll marry you…obviously.’
Pippa almost flinched from the demeaning form that that proposal took and a great hollowness entered her then, for it hurt her a great deal that he could even think that she would consider allowing him to marry her. Marriage was for people who couldn’t bear to live apart and who wanted to m
ake a proper commitment to each other. Occasionally people did enter marriage for more prosaic reasons, but she had too much intelligence and way too much pride to become part of such an unequal union: he didn’t love her and that was that. Therefore there was nothing to discuss. As far as she was concerned, how much she loved him did not enter the equation. Nobody knew better than she how disastrous such a marriage could be.
‘You need me in bed and out of it, cara mia,’ Andreo asserted with ferocious assurance. ‘I want you and I want our child as well.’
Hot tears prickled at the back of Pippa’s eyes but she held them back. She would not look at him because she could not bear to betray the utter turmoil of her emotions. Brushing past him before he could even guess her intention, she headed downstairs and reached for the phone book.
‘I’m going to call a cab. What’s the address here?’ she asked Andreo where he lowered like a dark, threatening storm at the foot of the stone staircase.
‘You can’t leave—’
‘Watch me!’ But her defiant glance in his direction fell short for his image was blurring because she was feeling horribly giddy.