Reunited by a Baby Secret. Michelle Douglas
her skirt and straightened her shirt before lifting her hand and finally knocking. A thrill coursed through her. She and Ryan might not have made plans to see each other again, but he’d never been far from her thoughts during the last two months and maybe—
The door opened and Marianna’s breath caught and held, suspended between hard pounds of her heart. The haze in front of her eyes slowly dissolved, and in sluggish bewilderment her brain registered that the stranger standing in front of her dressed in a bespoke suit and a crisp cotton business shirt and tie was—
She blinked and peered up at him. ‘Ryan?’
He leaned towards her and then frowned. ‘Marianna?’
The stranger was Ryan! Her pulse jumped as she took in the dark blond hair, the blue-green eyes, and the sensual curve of his lips. Lips that had started to lift, but were suddenly pressed together into a grim straight line.
She stared at that mouth, at the cool light in his eyes. How different he seemed. Her stomach started to churn with a seriousness that forced her to concentrate on her breathing for a moment.
‘What are you doing here?’
That was uttered in a voice she barely recognised. She dug her fingernails into her palms. Smile. Please. Please just smile.
Her inner pleading did no good. If anything, his frown deepened. She stared at him, unable to push a word out of a throat that had started to cramp. Keep breathing. Do not throw up on his feet!
He glanced away and then back at her, and finally down at his watch. ‘I have a meeting shortly.’
A chill chased itself down her spine as her nausea receded. Why would he not smile?
‘I wish you’d called.’
She reached out to steady herself against the doorjamb. He was giving her the brush-off?
He lifted his wrist to glance at his watch again. ‘I’m sorry, but—’
‘I’m pregnant!’
The words blurted out of her with no forethought, without any real volition, and with the force of one of Thailand’s summer storms. Her common sense put its head in its hands and wept.
He stilled, every muscle growing hard and rigid, and then his eyes froze to chips of blue ice. ‘I see.’ He opened the door wider, but the expression on his face told her he’d have rather slammed it in her face. ‘You’d better come in.’
She strode into the room with her back ramrod straight. Inside, though, everything trembled. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. She’d meant to broach the subject of her pregnancy gently, not slap him over the head with it.
She stopped in the middle of the enormous living room with its plush sofas and ornate tables and furnishings and pulled in a deep breath. Right. Take two. She touched a hand to her stomach. Mia topolino, I will fix this.
Setting her shoulders, she turned to face him, but her words dried on her lips when she met the closed expression on his face. It became suddenly evident that he wasn’t going to smile and hug her. She did her best not to wobble. Couldn’t he at least take her hand and ask her if she was okay?
Except...why would he smile at her when she stood here glaring at him as if he were the enemy? She closed her eyes and did what she could to collect herself, to find a smile and a quip that would help her unearth the man she’d met two months ago. ‘I know this must come as a shock—’
‘I take it then that you’re claiming the child is mine?’
She took a step back, her poor excuse for a smile dying on her lips, unable to reconcile this cold, hard stranger with the laid-back man she’d met in Thailand. Fear had lived inside her ever since she’d discovered she was pregnant—and she was tired of it. Seizing hold of that fear now, she turned it into anger. ‘Of course it’s yours! Are you attempting to make some slur on my character?’
She didn’t believe in slut-shaming. If that was what he was trying to do she’d tear his eyes out.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’
Oh, so now she was ridiculous, was she? She could feel her eyes narrowing and her fingers curving into claws. ‘I’m just over two months pregnant. Two months ago I was—’
‘On a beach in Thailand!’ He whirled away from her, paced across the room and back again. His pallor made her swallow. He thrust a finger at her, his eyes blazing. ‘Pregnancy wasn’t part of the plan.’
‘There was a plan?’ She lifted her hands towards the ceiling and let loose a disbelieving laugh. ‘Nobody told me about any plan.’
‘Don’t be so obtuse!’
Ridiculous? Obtuse? Her hands balled to fists.
‘We were supposed to...to just have fun! No strings! Enjoy the moment, live in the moment, before sailing off into the sunset.’ He set his legs and stabbed another finger at her. ‘That’s what we agreed.’
‘You think...’ Her breath caught. She choked it back. ‘You think I planned this?’
If anything the chill in his eyes only intensified.
Her brothers might think her an immature, irresponsible piece of fluff, but it knocked the stuffing out of her to find Ryan did too.
Maybe they’re all right.
And maybe they were not! She slammed her hands to her hips. ‘Look, I know this has come as a shock and I know it wasn’t planned, but the salient fact is that I’m pregnant and you’re the biological father of the child I’m carrying.’
Her words seemed to bow him although as far as she could tell not a single one of his muscles moved. She pressed a fist to her mouth before pulling it down and pressing both hands together. She had to think of the baby. What Ryan thought of her didn’t matter. ‘It...it took me a little while to get my head around it too, but now...’
She trailed off. How could she tell him that she now saw the baby as a blessing—that it had become a source of excitement and delight to her—when he stared at her like that? The tentative excitement rose up through her anew. ‘Oh, Ryan!’ She took a step towards him. ‘Is this news really so dreadful to you?’
‘Yes.’
The single word left him without hesitation and she found herself flinching away from him, her hands raised as if to ward him off, grateful her baby was too young to understand its father’s words.
Ryan’s chest rose and fell too hard and too fast. His face had become an immobile mask, but the pounding at the base of his jaw told her he wasn’t as controlled as he might like her to think.
It was all the encouragement she needed. She raced over to him and seized him by the lapels of his expensive suit and shook him. She wanted some reaction that would help her recognise him, some real emotion. ‘We’re going to have a baby, Ryan! It’s not the end of the world. We can work something out.’ He stood there like a stone and panic rose up through her. She couldn’t do this on her own. ‘For heaven’s sake.’ She battled a sob. ‘Say something useful!’
He merely detached her hands and stepped back, releasing her. ‘I don’t know what you expect from me.’
That was when some stupid fantasy she hadn’t even realised she’d harboured came crashing down around her.
You are such an idiot, Marianna.
A breath juddered out of her. ‘You really don’t want this baby, do you?’
‘No.’
‘The bathroom?’ she whispered.
He pointed and she fled, locking the door behind her before throwing up the crackers she’d managed for breakfast. Flushing the toilet, she lowered the lid and sat down, blotting her face with toilet paper until