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‘You don’t look particularly sorry.’ He raked his fingers through his hair. In the darkness, there was a dangerous glitter in his eyes that would have sent a shiver down her spine if she weren’t feeling so angry. ‘Let’s just cut through the crap, Megan. If you’ve got female problems, then I’m the King of England. You were fine today when we were out, and you were perfectly well up until the second half. What the hell’s going on?’
‘I need to talk to you,’ Megan said stiffly, ‘and the back seat of a taxi isn’t the place.’ Nor was his house, for that matter, but there was no way he was going to drop her home, and anyway she had some of her possessions at his place, which she would have to collect.
Alessandro looked first at the distance she had put between them, at her hands which were balled into fists on her lap, and then at her profile as she stared out of the window.
Need to talk? Female problems?
His justified annoyance at her abrupt end to the evening did a rapid U-turn. She had said that she needed to talk to him—correction, that she needed to talk privately—and she had said it in a voice that had made him vaguely uneasy. Add to that the fact that she was sitting like an iceberg next to him, and he came up with the one explanation which made sense.
He didn’t know how, but it was suddenly clear to him that she had managed to get pregnant. She had disappeared to the restrooms at the theatre, had remained there for an inordinately long time, and then had returned with a personality transplant. Had she taken some kind of testing kit to the loo? Maybe being in the company of Melissa had got her thinking about her menstrual cycle? Made her wonder if it had been as regular as it should have? Who knew? Alessandro wasn’t a doctor, but he was pretty sure that he had hit jackpot.
He lapsed into a reflective silence of his own as he began to consider the possibilities of this unexpected event.
He had not considered his relationship with Megan to be a permanent one. She was an itch that he needed to scratch—a fever that roared through his system and needed curing once and for all. A pregnancy would change all that. He thought about becoming a father. Megan wasn’t like Victoria. She would see parenthood as a full-time occupation. Broken nights, changing nappies, sterilising bottles—all of that would be, for her, a shared venture. His life would be turned on its head.
Alessandro looked at her. For someone who must be churning up inside, she appeared remarkably calm. In fact, for someone who was perfectly happy to be swept along on an emotional tide, she seemed to be handling the situation with a lot of sang froid.
The taxi pulled up outside his house.
‘Okay,’ he said, opening his front door and standing back to let her walk past him. ‘You’ve had time to try and work out whatever speech you’ve got prepared…’ Alessandro slammed the door behind him and stayed where he was, leaning against it and watching her. ‘So what’s this talk about? Anything to do with those female problems you mentioned, by any chance?’
On her way to the sitting room, Megan stopped in her tracks and turned to face him.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean. I wasn’t born yesterday, Megan. You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’
After the ensuing silence, during which Megan tried to gather her scattered wits and not burst into laughter at his wild, inaccurate deduction, Alessandro continued calmly.
‘I don’t know how it’s happened, but it has, and now you’re trying to work out how to break the news.’
‘Oh, right. Is that what I’m doing? And how would you suggest I go about it?’ Megan’s voice was cool and level. He imagined she was pregnant? That, she thought, would have been one complication too far, and she was mightily relieved that she didn’t have to deal with it.
Alessandro was a little unsettled by that response. Not a flicker of emotion had crossed her face. ‘Just come right out and confess,’ he advised. ‘You can’t skirt round a pregnancy.’
‘And how will you react?’ Megan tried to tear herself away from a pointless conversation about a non-existent situation. But it was tempting to buy time, and even more tempting to try and find out what he might have felt had he been confronted with a pregnant lover.
Part of her knew that she was just shoring up that little twig of hope, building herself a little fantasy that maybe, in a situation like that, he might suddenly be overwhelmed by need and love and race to her side in a supportive way. He wouldn’t.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she told him in an icy voice. ‘I’m not pregnant, so you can stop worrying.’
