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What the hell was wrong? Of course she was worried. So was he, frankly. But he was here with her, driving her to the hospital, fully prepared to be right there by her side, so why the need to launch into an attack?
Frustration tore into him but, like his impatience, he kept it firmly in check.
Suddenly she felt that it was extremely important that she let him know this vital thing. ‘And I just want you to know that, if something does, then your duties to me are finished. You can walk away with a clear conscience, knowing that you didn’t dump me when I was pregnant with your child.’
Alessio sucked in his breath sharply. Ahead, he could see the big, impersonal hospital building. He had wanted her to have private medical care during the pregnancy and for the birth of the baby, but she had flatly refused, and he had reluctantly ceded ground. If, indeed, there was anything at all amiss, that small victory would be obliterated because he would damn well make sure that she got the best medical attention there was available.
‘This is not the time for this sort of conversation.’ He screeched to a halt in front of the Accident and Emergency entrance but, before he killed the engine, he looked at her intently, his eyes boring into her. ‘Just try and relax, my darling. I know you’re probably scared stiff but I’m here for you.’ He brushed her cheek lightly and the tenderness of that touch brought a lump to her throat.
‘You’re here for the baby, not for me,’ Lesley muttered under her breath. But then any further conversation was lost as they were hurried through, suddenly caught up in a very efficient process, channelled to the right place, speeding along the quiet hospital corridors with Lesley in a wheelchair and Alessio keeping pace next to her.
There seemed to be an awful lot of people around and she clasped his hand tightly, hardly even realising that she was doing that.
‘If something happens to the baby...’ he bent to whisper into her ear as they headed towards the ultrasound room ‘...then I’m still here for you.’
* * *
An exhausting hour later, during which Lesley had had no time to think about what those whispered words meant, she finally found herself in a private room decorated with a television on a bracket against the wall and a heavy door leading, she could see, to her own en-suite bathroom.
Part of her wondered whether those whispered words had actually been uttered or had they been a fiction of her fevered imagination?
She covertly watched as he drew the curtains together and then pulled a chair so that he was on eye-level with her as she lay on the bed.
‘Thank you for bringing me here, Alessio,’ she said with a weak smile that ended up in a yawn.
‘You’re tired. But everything’s going to be all right with the baby. Didn’t I say?’
Lesley smiled with her eyes half-closed. The relief was overwhelming. They had pointed out the strongly beating heart on the scan and had reassured her that rest was all that was called for. She had been planning to work from home towards the beginning of the third trimester. That would now have to be brought forward.
‘You said.’
‘And—and I meant what I said when we were rushing you in.’
Lesley’s eyes flew open and she felt as though her heart had skipped a beat. She had not intended to remind him of what he had said, just in case she had misheard, just in case he had said what he somehow thought she wanted to hear in the depths of her anxiety over her scare.
But now his eyes held hers and she just wanted to lose herself in possibilities.
‘What did you say? I can’t quite...um...remember.’ She looked down at her hand which had somehow found its way between his much bigger hands.
‘What I should say is that there was a moment back then when it flashed through my mind—what would I do if anything happened to you? It scared the living daylights out of me.’
‘I know you feel very responsible...with me being pregnant.’ She deliberately tried to kill the shoot of hope rising inside her and tenaciously refusing to go away.
‘I’m not talking about the baby. I’m talking about you.’ He felt as though he was looking over the side of a very sheer cliff, but he wanted to jump; he didn’t care what sort of landing he might be heading for.
So far she hadn’t tried to remind him that he wasn’t her type and that they weren’t suited for one another. That surely had to be a good sign?
‘I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you because you’re the love of my life. No, wait, don’t say a thing. Just listen to what I have to say and then, if you want me to butt out of your life, I’ll do as you say. We can go down the legal route and have the papers drawn up for custody rights, and an allowance to be made for you, and I’ll stop pestering you with my attention.’ He took a deep breath and his eyes shifted to her mouth, then to the unappealing hospital gown which she was still wearing, and then finally they settled on their linked fingers. It seemed safer.
‘I’m listening.’ The love of his life? She just wanted to repeat that phrase over and over in her head because she didn’t think she could possibly get used to hearing it.
‘When you first appeared at my front door, I knew you were different to every single woman I had ever met. I knew you were sharp, feisty, outspoken. I was drawn to you, and I guess the fact that you occupied a special place of intimate knowledge about certain aspects of my private life not usually open to public view fuelled my attraction. It was as though the whole package became irresistible. You were sexy as hell without knowing it. You had brains and you had insight into me.’
Lesley almost burst out laughing at the ‘sexy as hell’ bit but then she remembered the way he had looked at her when they had made love, the things he had said. She might have had insecurities about how she looked, but she didn’t doubt that his attraction had been genuine and spontaneous. Hadn’t he been the one to put those insecurities to bed, after all?
‘It just felt so damned right between us,’ he admitted, stealing a surreptitious look at her face, and encouraged that she didn’t seem to be blocking him out. ‘And the more we got to know one another the better it felt. I thought it was all about the sex, but it was much bigger than that, and I just didn’t see it. Maybe after Bianca I simply assumed that women could only satisfy a certain part of me before they hit my metaphorical glass ceiling and disappeared from my life. I wasn’t looking for any kind of involvement and I certainly didn’t bank on finding any. But involvement found me without my even realising it.’
He laughed under his breath and, when he felt the touch of her hand on his cheek, he held it in place so that he could flip it over and kiss the palm of her hand. He relaxed, but not too much.
‘Thanks to you, my relationship with Rachel is the healthiest it’s ever been. Thanks to you, I’ve discovered that there’s far more to life than trying to be a father to a hostile teenager and burying myself in my work. I never stopped to question how it was that I wasn’t gutted when you told me about the pregnancy. I knew I felt different this time round from when Bianca had presented me with a future of fatherhood. If I had taken the time to analyse things, I might have begun to see what had already happened. I might have seen that I had fallen hopelessly in love with you.’
All his cards were on the table and he felt good. Whatever the outcome. He carried on before she could interrupt with a pity statement about him not really being the one for her.
‘And I may not cry at girlie movies or bake bread but you can take me on. I’m a good bet. I’m here for you; you know that. I’ll always be here for you because I’m nothing without you. If you still don’t want to marry me, or if you want to put me on probation, then I’m willing to go along because I feel I can prove to you that I can be the sort of man you want me to be.’
‘Probation?’ The concept was barely comprehensible.
‘A period of time during which you can try me out for size.’ He had never thought he would ever in a million years utter such words to any woman. But he just had and he didn’t regret any of them.
‘I know what the word means.’ The thoughts were rushing round in her head, a mad jumble that filled every space. She wanted to fling her arms around him, kiss him on the mouth, pull him right into her, jump up and down, shout from the rooftops—all of those things at the same time.
Instead, she said in a barely audible voice, ‘Why didn’t you say sooner? I wish you had. I’ve been so miserable, because I love you so much and I thought that the last thing you needed was to be trapped into marriage to someone you never wanted to see out your days with.’ She lay back and smiled with such pure joy that it took her breath away. Then she looked at him and carried on smiling, and smiling, and smiling. ‘I knew I was falling for you but I knew you weren’t into committed relationships.’
‘I never was.’
‘That should have stopped me but I just didn’t see it coming. You really weren’t the sort of guy I ever thought I could have fallen in love with, but who said love obeys rules? By the time I realised that I loved you, I was in so deep that the only way out for me was to run as fast as I could in the opposite direction. It was the hardest thing I ever did in my entire life but I thought that, if I stayed, my heart would be so broken that I would never recover.’
