Her heart skipped a beat and her breath caught. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘What if I said I’d changed my mind too?’
‘I haven’t changed—’ She stopped. Stared at him. ‘What?’
‘You heard.’
‘Have you changed your mind?’
He nodded. ‘I have.’
‘You want this baby?’
‘I do.’
She reeled. ‘But how? Why? You said you weren’t fatherhood material and never would be.’
‘I know I did.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Nothing happened. I just wasn’t being entirely honest when I agreed with you that we should go for option number three.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Guilt, mainly.’
She stared at him. ‘Guilt?’
‘It’s my fault you’re pregnant.’
Her heart stumbled for a second. ‘That’s very noble of you, Marcus,’ she said with small smile, ‘but it does take two to tango. And we were careful. No one’s to blame. It’s just one of those things life likes to throw at you to really screw up your plans.’
‘No, it really is. I opened the condom packet with my teeth. I think I might have ripped it.’
It was a possibility, she supposed, but, ‘You don’t know that you did.’
‘Do you have a better explanation?’
‘It could have been anything.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said resolutely. ‘My condom, my application, my fault.’
For a moment she didn’t know what to say. ‘That’s mad,’ she managed eventually. ‘None of this is anyone’s fault.’
He shrugged. ‘I should have been more careful. It’s no excuse, but I wasn’t thinking all that straight at the time.’
‘No. Well, who was?’ said Celia, going warm at the memory.
‘Anyway, because of the guilt I decided that I’d go along with whatever you decided.’
With some difficulty she dragged herself back from the memory of that afternoon. ‘So you lied?’ she asked, frowning.
‘Not exactly,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I simply didn’t allow myself to think about what I wanted in case you wanted something different.’
Nothing simple about that, she thought, as she waded through it all. ‘So given that,’ she said, only about eighty per cent certain she got what he meant because the realisation that had she not said anything he’d have let her go through with it despite wanting the opposite was too much to handle right now, ‘how do I know that your change of heart now doesn’t simply reflect mine?’
Not much point in denying that she had had a change of heart any more, was there? Not when just the thought of holding her child made her heart practically burst from her chest.