She was being so cold, so distant, as if ice were running through her veins instead of blood. And could that be good for the baby?
‘I want you to have everything you need, Eve.’
‘But I do! I have a house and I have a job, a good job.’
He remembered the way she had looked around her, as if worried her words would be overheard. He was pretty certain that her pregnancy was still a secret and his killer instinct moved in; he couldn’t help himself. ‘But for how long?’
She stared at him. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Have you told them you’re pregnant?’
‘That’s none of your business.’
‘I think it is.’ A spark spat in the grate with all the force of a gunshot. ‘You may not be employable as a pregnant woman.’
She gave a little laugh. ‘There are laws governing that kind of discrimination,’ she returned. ‘So please don’t worry on my account.’
This was going neither the way that Luca wanted, nor had expected. He had expected a little…what? Gratitude? That the past few weeks might have given her time to calm down and see sense. Surely she must realise that his money could make all the difference to her life as a mother?
‘I do not want you to struggle for money—not when I have enough, more than enough.’
‘But it isn’t going to be a struggle. I’ll manage—’
‘I don’t want you to manage, I want you to be comfortable!’
‘What you want is not really what counts, Luca! It is what I say that does!’
‘But it is my baby, too,’ he pointed out.
‘Oh?’ She feigned surprise. ‘So you’re no longer disputing paternity? What happened? Did you have someone run a DNA test on me, while I was asleep?’
‘Eve!’ Proud, stubborn woman! ‘Let me help you,’ he said suddenly.
She was still hurting from the things he had said; it was hard to imagine a time when she would not. ‘You think your money can buy you anything, don’t you?’
His black eyes glittered. ‘Would you deny me my child, then, Eve?’ he questioned simply.
And something in the way he said it cut through all her defences.
Up until that very moment she had been able to think of the baby almost as an abstract concept—as if it hadn’t been real and, even if it had been, it was nothing now to do with Luca. But she was fast discovering that she had been very naïve. By telling him she had involved him, and someone like Luca wouldn’t take that involvement lightly.
Oh, why hadn’t she kept it secret? He had never intended theirs to be anything other than a short-term love affair. He wasn’t the kind of man who would ever settle down, he just wasn’t. The affair would have burnt out after a few heady weeks, or months—he would have moved on to the next conquest, the way that men like this always did.
But could she honestly have kept it secret from him? Wasn’t it his right to know that his seed had borne fruit? She bit her lip at the irony of it. Because he had never meant it to.
‘What do you want?’ she asked cautiously.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, and it was the first time in all his charmed and powerful life that he had ever made such an admission. He sat down on the sofa and studied her, the dark eyes narrowed in question. ‘You haven’t even told me how far advanced you are.’
‘Nearly five months.’
Five months! ‘Already?’ he asked, slightly unsteadily.
‘Yes, my bump’s hardly showing yet.’ She met his eyes, and despaired, for their inky allure still touched a part of her she had decided had to be out of bounds. If he had stayed away—even for a bit longer—she might have become immune to him. But she wasn’t—and that didn’t help matters. ‘Time flies when you’re having fun,’ she said sarcastically.
Had it really been that long? She must have got pregnant the very first time—before Rome, before he had gone to the States. He remembered with a sinking heart the way he had been incautious, the way he had wanted to make love to her straight after the first time. And she had stopped him.
He frowned. How had so much time passed, almost unnoticed? He had thrown himself into his work since she had first told him—perhaps, he recognised now, using it as a kind of denial therapy. And all the time he had been waiting for the financial demands he was certain would come his way. He had set her a test, he recognised, just as he had right at the beginning when he had waited for her to contact him. And wasn’t that what he always did, in his professional as well as his personal life—set impossibly high standards and wait for people to fail to meet them?