Half an hour later, Zoe was sitting on the edge of the bath at home, staring at the test, and as only one little line showed up and relief flooded through her she thought, Well, thank God for that.
* * *
How he’d ever thought three dates with Zoe would be enough he’d never know, thought Dan, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the soft sounds of her breathing next to him.
He’d enjoyed these past few weeks far more than he’d ever imagined, and to his amazement he was going to miss her while he was away because so far things had been going pretty much perfectly.
Quite apart from their explosive compatibility in bed, he enjoyed her company out of it too. She was intelligent—way more intelligent than he was, he’d discovered when he’d once jokingly asked her what her IQ was—and funny, usually unintentionally.
As they’d talked he’d found her increasingly fascinating. The contrast between her uber-confident professional side and her less confident personal side was intriguing and something he was, oddly enough, enjoying dissecting.
He was beginning to realise that Zoe was different from the women he generally came across. She didn’t cling and she didn’t demand, and refreshingly she seemed perfectly happy with the way things were going.
She might roll her eyes whenever he casually dropped the confidentiality agreement into conversation but she hadn’t once asked him to tear it up, and, even though he’d never implemented it before so he didn’t have anyone to compare her with, he suspected that not everyone would have agreed to sign such a thing without some kind of complaint or a condition perhaps that they revise it at a later date.
So Zoe was pretty much everything he wanted in a woman, and that was undoubtedly why even though he was only going for a week the idea of coming back to her was surprisingly reassuring.
Now that he thought about it, actually, he wouldn’t mind if she were always there when he came back from somewhere. For a while longer, at least.
Contrary to popular belief he’d never had a problem with the concept of commitment. Despite his parents’ disaster of a marriage and nightmare of a divorce he didn’t even have much of a problem with marriage either, at least not in the abstract. It was just that it seemed to him that commitment required trust, and, as his ability to do that had been well and truly shot to pieces by first Natalie, finally Jasmine and quite a few other women in between, it wasn’t an issue that had ever cropped up.
But maybe things were changing. Maybe he was changing, because lately he’d been thinking he wouldn’t really mind if Zoe’s wash bag were to appear in his bathroom. He wouldn’t mind leaving a toothbrush in hers.
Dan rubbed a hand over his face and frowned into the darkness as he wondered what it meant. Was he falling for her? It didn’t seem beyond the realms of possibility, but if he was then what was he going to do about it? Love, if it should ever come to that, hadn’t exactly worked out well for him the last time he’d tried it. In fact it had worked out abysmally. When his relationship with Natalie had imploded he’d gone so completely off the rails that he’d narrowly avoided jail and he wasn’t exactly keen for it to happen again.
As his mouth filled with a sudden bitter taste Dan eased himself off the bed and crept into the en suite bathroom in search of water.
He reached for a glass. He turned on the tap, filled the glass and looked up.
And then he saw it. The pregnancy test box, sitting there on the shelf, and everything around it faded away and all thoughts of how he might or might not feel about Zoe and what he would or wouldn’t do about it shot clean from his head.
With his heart thumping even harder and his fingers trembling even more he put down the glass and picked up the box. Gave it a shake. It was empty. He glanced down at the bin and now a trickle of sweat began to make its way down his spine. He lifted the lid gingerly. Closed his eyes and took a deep breath and then looked. But that was empty too.
And then his head began to pound as questions suddenly started flying around inside. Was she or wasn’t she? Now he thought about it she hadn’t had her period since she’d known him, and that had been, what, five weeks? That didn’t sound good. So if she was, how would he feel about it? If she wasn’t, how would he feel? When had she done the test? When was she planning on telling him? Was she planning on telling him?
Despite the warm cosiness of the bathroom Dan went ice-cold as memories of another time, another woman, another pregnancy slammed into his head. As his knees threatened to give way he planted both hands on the edge of the basin tightly.
On some dim and distant level he knew he wasn’t thinking about this rationally, that things were different this time, that Zoe wasn’t Natalie and he wasn’t twenty-five, but this awareness was slipping further and
further away with every second that the feeling he’d lost his grip on something he’d thought he could control intensified.
His head went fuzzy and his vision blurred and he thought he might be about to pass out.
And that brought him up sharp. Taking a deep shuddery breath, Dan gave himself a shake and pulled himself together. He shook his head and straightened. Shoved his hands through his hair and drank that glass of water and then he felt slightly better.
But the questions and the memories were still ricocheting round his head, making him feel weak. He needed perspective. He needed time and he needed space to work things out and tomorrow wasn’t soon enough. He need it all right now.
Almost stumbling back into the bedroom, Dan picked up his clothes and somehow managed to get them on.
‘What are you doing?’ Zoe murmured sleepily and then stretched, and he gritted his teeth against the sudden fierce temptation to climb back into bed with her and postpone thinking about it all until tomorrow.
‘I have to go,’ he muttered.
She rubbed her eyes and pushed a hand through her hair. ‘Now?’
‘Early flight.’
‘I thought you weren’t leaving until the evening.’