He didn’t. He let her go. Let her walk out of his office, his space, his life.
Taking their child with her.
And he could not move. Not a muscle.
CHAPTER TEN
FRAN CLIMBED INTO the hotel shuttle bus at San Francisco airport. It had been a long flight, and it had come after a gruelling few days. She had flown out of Rome the very afternoon after confronting Nic, not able to bear to stay longer, then landed at Stanstead, taken the bus to Cambridge.
She had spoken to her professor the next morning, telling him she had to leave as soon as possible for urgent personal reasons. Replied to the email sitting in her inbox, accepting an invitation to an interview for a research position at a university in Southern California that she’d applied for when she’d discovered she was pregnant by a man who did not want her.
Her throat tightened unbearably. Now it was she who did not want him. Not the man he was.
And now, it seemed, with bitter irony, it was he who wanted her—or rather the baby she carried.
He was still determined on them marrying. And to that end there had come a slew of emails from him, and text messages, and voicemails, and calls she had ignored just as she’d ignored all his other attempts to communicate with her.
Because she knew what he was saying. The first message from him had said it all.
You’re emotional—I understand that. But we can’t leave it like this. When you’ve calmed down we can talk. For now, I’ll leave you in peace. Then I’ll come and see you in Cambridge and we can sort things out. We have no choice but to sort things out.
She’d deleted the message. And all the others. Only as she’d sat in Departures at Heathrow had she texted him. One final text before boarding.
She had flown quite deliberately to San Francisco. She had somewhere to go before she headed for LA. Somewhere she had to go.
As she checked in to her hotel, hearing the familiar American accents all around her, hearing herself being called Dr Ristori in the way she was used to here, she felt a sense of familiarity, of ease.
It comforted her.
But it brought memories too. Memories that she could not keep out. Memories that came of their own volition. That brought their own pain with them. It was a pain she would have to bear now. Memories of a tall, powerfully built, sable-haired guy with blue, blue eyes and a smile like a desert wolf.
Who was lost to her for ever.
And there was only one place to bear that. The place where she was going now.
Nic stared at the words on the phone screen as if they made no sense. But then, they didn’t. They didn’t make sense at all.
Nic, I’m not going to marry you. It would be a disaster for both of us. Neither of us is who we once thought we were. You aren’t the man I remember, and I am not the woman you remember. We are better off without each other. Please don’t try and make me change my mind, because I won’t. I can’t. We have well over half a year to sort out things like access rights. I’m sure we can come to a civilised arrangement. For now, I can’t cope with that.
He kept reading the words, re-reading them. But still they made no sense. How could they? The imperative of their marriage was paramount. Except... His eyes rested on the words on the screen. For her, that imperative was absent.
We are better off without each other.
He read the words, read them again. Something was building in him. Something he didn’t know, didn’t recognise. But it was powerful. As if pressure were building up inside a volcano—a volcano that had been consigned to dormancy. Mistakenly.
His eyes moved back to the sentence that came before.
You aren’t the man I remember.
He felt the pressure mount within him. His phone was ringing—his PA—but he lifted it only to slam the receiver down again. His focus was on the words, only on the words. And on the sense of pressure building in him. On the words that came next.
I am not the woman you remember.
And the pressure inside his head burst, flowing through his consciousness like lava racing down a mountainside, consuming everything in its path. He was remembering the woman he had once thought her to be. Remembering in absolute coruscating detail every single moment of their time together.
And with that came a realisation, blasting through everything else.
His phone rang again, and this time he snatched it up. ‘Charter a plane to Cambridge, England—now!’