To be its mother.
‘Beautiful,’ he said, his rich voice gravelly thick and filled with awe and wonder and she looked at him, his gaze intent on the screen, his dark eyes filled with emotion as he drank in the features of his unborn child, and she knew she was dreaming.
For she was nothing to him but a means to an end.
The baby was the thing he wanted, the thing he craved.
She was disposable.
And she had no right to yearn.
With a sigh she realised it was good she’d left his bed when she had, while she’d still been capable of it. Good she’d pulled back and created some distance between them. Good that she’d let him go before he’d done the same to her.
And he would have let her go, nothing surer. Men like him didn’t fall for women like her. They fell for sleek high-gloss sirens who could further their career, not charity cases from the back blocks. Besides, he’d made no attempt since that night to come to her. Wasn’t that proof he was regretting that night as much as her? No, it was clear she’d done the right thing.
And if she managed to keep her distance, she might even just survive this with her pride, if not her heart, intact.
She was quiet on the way home, barely saying a word in response to his attempts at conversation. He’d expected her to be a little shy given the last time they’d tangled words they’d ended up tangled together in the sheets, something he was having trouble getting out of his head, but it was more than that.
She was cool, distant, and so he hadn’t bothered making too many attempts at conversation. For it had soon become clear she didn’t share his excitement over what they had witnessed on the scan.
He was disappointed. He’d thought she’d at least express some interest in the child she was carrying. He’d thought he’d seen some flicker of maternal instinct in her expression in the way she’d curve her hand under her bump, rubbing it gently, whispering soft words when she thought he wasn’t looking. And what about what she’d done in preparing the nursery! It had been Rosa who had disclosed that Angelina had done it all herself—all of it. How could a woman prepare rooms for an infant like that and not be interested in seeing that infant’s face on a screen?
Was she really so opposed to the idea of having a child?
Perhaps she was.
But perhaps that was what it took to be able to walk away. Right from the start she’d insisted she wanted no part in it, that she would walk away and never have anything to do with the child again. Right from the start she’d told him she wouldn’t change her mind.
It appeared that she wouldn’t.
Which was a shame, really.
He’d been thinking lately about what she’d said about Rosa managing an infant along with the house. Rosa would be happy to do it, he knew, but it was unfair to expect her to. He hadn’t given it enough thought. And down there in the garage last night, sculpting the piece he was working on, thinking about this woman splayed across his big bed, a look of utter abandonment on her face when he’d sent her plunging over the abyss for a second time and how much he burned to send her to oblivion again, the kernel of an idea had come to him. A good idea, he’d thought. A sensible solution.
Though clearly it would never work. Not once she found out what he had managed to secure for her.
Shame.
Dinner would have been completely silent if not for the occasional unintended clatter and scrape of cutlery against crockery, and even that rare occurrence intruded into the otherwise quiet. Rosa gathered the unfinished plates, saying nothing yet saying volumes in her eyes. Across the table Dominic sat like a volcano, brooding and about to erupt.
Angelina didn’t dare look at his eyes. She said no to dessert, despite the fact she’d barely touched her dinner, and when Dominic called her back, halfway to leaving, she expected he was going to admonish her for not eating all her meal.
‘I have something for you,’ he said instead. ‘Meet me in my office in ten minutes.’
She almost breathed a sigh of relief. The old Dominic was back. The old Dominic she could deal with.
Duly she arrived at his office at the appointed time, expecting the worst. He was waiting for her, standing stiff and tall and mountainous behind his desk. ‘What did you want to see me about?’ Try as she might, it was impossible to keep the slight tremor from her voice.