Cara kicked off her shoes as soon as she got through the staff door and picked them up, to race past the wait stations where the other servers were having their trays filled, her exhaustion forgotten in a rush of pure unadulterated panic.
Maxim! Maxim was here and he’d found her.
‘Cara, is everything okay?’ She shook her head at Dora’s shocked question as she rushed past her friend towards the stairwell to the locker room.
Maxim, who had been with another woman.
Kristin Delinski, a world-renowned supermodel who Cara had recognised instantly from the magazines she’d once loved to read. But had avoided in the last five months.
She swiped away the tear that slipped down her cheek as she made it to the stairs.
Good God, why are you crying? Of course he’s with another woman. He’s probably had tons of other women since that night, all of them more beautiful and accomplished than you.
Her line manager, Martha Simpson, was coming up the stairs from the staff locker room as she headed down. ‘Cara, where are you going? There’s two more hours left on your shift!’
‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to go,’ she said, then rushed past, not waiting for the woman’s answer. She wouldn’t be able to come back, not now he knew where she worked.
She made it to the locker room.
He wasn’t following her. Why would he? But, even so, urgency made her hands clumsy as she grabbed her bag, shoved the heels inside, slipped on her flats and untied the apron. She was reaching for her coat when she heard footsteps enter the room, and a deep voice had her fingers jerking on the coat.
‘Cara...why did you run?’
Hearing the roughened R, the husky intimacy of her name said in his gruff French accent—a sound which had woken her from dreams so many nights since she’d left France—had so many conflicting emotions hurtling into her chest. She turned to face him without thinking, the urge to see him again riding roughshod over all her instincts of self-preservation.
She realised her mistake as his gaze tracked down to her stomach, and the baby bump, which was no l
onger hidden by the apron.
His eyes met hers, the golden-brown rich with passion and fury and yet dark with accusation, and something she didn’t understand—because it looked strangely like hurt.
‘The child, is it mine?’
She wanted to say no, to protect herself and her baby from that caustic cynical gaze, and the character of the man she knew lay behind it. Powerful, arrogant, demanding, ruthless. More committed to his revenge against a dead man than he would ever be to someone like her. But something about the flash of pain which had been there and then gone in a heartbeat had the lie catching in her throat.
She turned back to the locker, releasing the coat, and pressed her forehead against the cool metal. The weariness that had haunted her for weeks returned to sap the last of the energy from her limbs, but this time it was accompanied by the bone-sapping guilt she had wrestled with for months. She thought she’d conquered it, thought she’d come to terms with her choice not to contact Maxim. But if she had, why could the truth still punish her?
She placed a hand over her stomach and silently apologised to her child before saying the only words that would come out of her mouth.
‘Yes. Yes, it is.’
CHAPTER NINE
MAXIM WAS IN shock. Or at least he thought he was. Because it was hard to tell, so many emotions were bombarding him at once he could hardly control them, let alone differentiate or identify them.
Cara was carrying his child.
The only emotion he knew he didn’t feel was regret—that he had found her. For a man who had never intended to become a father this didn’t make a lot of sense, but there was no denying the surge of protectiveness that had blindsided him when he’d first identified Cara on the balcony.
‘Why did you not contact me?’ he demanded, allowing his anger to show—to cover the hurt he didn’t want to acknowledge.
She raised her head, the tiredness in her eyes and those dark shadows under them that had disturbed him so much making his fingers clench into fists.
He swallowed hard, forcing himself to resist the urge to pick her up and cradle her against his chest. She looked as if she were about to collapse. How long had she been working like this, late into the night, constantly on her feet?
‘Because I didn’t want you to know,’ she said.
The pain caused by the softly spoken words arrowed into his gut, making him stiffen.