‘I’m not expecting anything from you,’ Brianna ended. ‘I just thought that you ought to know.’
‘You thought that I ought to know?’ Leo shot her a look of utter incredulity. The impersonal bistro he had chosen now seemed inappropriate. Restless energy was pouring through his body and, as fast as he tried to decipher a pattern to what he was thinking, his thoughts came unstuck, leaving him with just the explosive realisation that in a matter of months he was going to be a father.
‘I realise that you might want to have some input...’
‘You have got to be kidding me, Brianna. You come here, drop this bombshell on me, and the only two things you can find to say are that you felt I ought to know and you realise that I might want some input? We have to get out of here.’
‘And go where?’ she cried.
‘Somewhere a little less full of chattering morons.’
‘I’m not going to your apartment,’ she said, refusing to budge and clutching the sides of her chair as though fearful that at any moment he might just get it into his head to bodily pick her up and haul her over his shoulder to the front door, caveman style.
‘I haven’t said anything to Bridget yet and I’d rather not just at the moment. I...I need time to absorb it all myself so, if you don’t mind, I’d quite like to stay here. Not that there’s much more for me to bring to the table.’
‘And another classic line from you. God, I just don’t believe this.’
Brianna watched as he dropped his head to his hands. ‘I’m so sorry to be the bearer of unexpected tidings. Like I said, though...’
‘Spare me whatever pearls of wisdom are going to emerge from your mouth, Brianna.’ He raised his head to stare at her. ‘It is as it is, and now we’re going to have to decide how we deal with this situation.’ He rubbed his eyes and continued holding her gaze with his.
‘Perhaps you should go away and think about this. It’s a lot to take on board. We could fix a time to meet again.’
‘I don’t think so.’ He straightened and sat back. ‘Waiting for another day isn’t going to alter this problem.’
Brianna stiffened. ‘This isn’t your problem, it’s mine, and I don’t see it as a problem. I’m going to be the one having the baby and I shall be the one looking after it. I recognise that you’ll want to contribute in some way, but let me assure you that I expect nothing from you.’
‘Do you honestly believe that you can dump this on me and I’m going to walk away from it?’
‘I don’t know. A few weeks ago I would have said that the guy at the pub who helped clear snow wouldn’t, but then you weren’t that guy at all, were you? So, honestly? I have no idea.’ She sat on her hands and leaned towards him. ‘If you want to contribute financially, then that would be fine and much appreciated. I don’t expect you to give anything to me, but helping to meet the needs of the baby would be okay. They may be small, but they can be very expensive, and you know all too well what the finances at the pub are like. Especially with all the closures of late.’
‘I know what you think of me, Brianna, but I’m not a man to run away from my responsibilities—and in this instance my responsibilities don’t stop at sending you a monthly cheque to cover baby food.’
‘They don’t?’ Brianna queried uneasily. She wondered what else he had in mind. ‘Naturally you would be free to see your child whenever you wanted, but it might be difficult, considering you live in London...’ She quailed inwardly at the prospect of him turning up at the front door. She wondered whether the onslaught of times remembered, before she had discovered who he really was, would be just too much for her. Not that she would have any choice. It would be his right to visit his child, whether it made her uncomfortable or not.
‘Visiting rights? No, I don’t think so.’
‘I won’t let you take custody of my baby.’
‘Our baby,’ he corrected.
Brianna blanched as her worst imaginings went into free fall. She hadn’t even thought that he might want to take the baby away from her, yet, why hadn’t that occurred to her? He was adopted. He would have very strong feelings about being on hand as a father because his own real father had not been on hand. And, whatever concoctions he had come up with to disguise his true identity, she knew instinctively that he possessed a core of inner integrity.
And those concoctions, she was reluctantly forced to conclude, had not been fabricated for the sheer hell of it. They had been done for a reason and, once he had embarked on that road, it would have been difficult to get off it.