‘It’s true, marriage has never been on my agenda.’
‘Never?’
He held her gaze a long time. ‘No.’
‘Then why now?’
‘Max is a game-changer.’
Max is a game-changer. How true that was! For her, it had been a complete game-changer in every way. No university. No shiny, bright career. No friends—it had been too hard to keep up with them with a small baby at home.
‘Max is your son,’ she agreed quietly. ‘But that has nothing to do with you and me—we can both be a part of his life without having to be a part of each other’s.’
‘That’s not good enough.’
‘None of this is good enough,’ she agreed with quiet insistence. ‘But it’s the card we’ve been dealt.’
He held her gaze for several beats. ‘I’ve organised a town-hall wedding. It’s better if we marry quietly, then deal with the fall-out and the press later.’
Annie had the strangest sensation that she was speaking a foreign language.
‘The...fall-out? Press? I’m not marrying you.’ She paused after each word in the last sentence for emphasis, and because she couldn’t wrap her tongue around the sounds properly.
‘If you would like to have a bigger wedding, we can arrange that in due course. I’ll leave those arrangements up to you. As for your life in Singapore, are you working at the moment?’
She stared at him, a frown drawing her brows together, forming a crease between them. It was all so absurd that she found herself answering anyway. ‘I—Yes. I have a job.’
‘What do you do?’
Her frown deepened. ‘I load properties on to real-estate websites. I work for several agencies.’ She bit down on her lip. ‘It’s something I can do from home, so when Max was little it made a lot of sense. Now he’s at school, but with the holidays and the short days, and the possibility he might be sick and I need time off, the job still suits me.’
Dimitrios’s expression was inscrutable. ‘What happened to university?’
A wave of nostalgia passed through her. Not sadness, exactly, because she could never be sad about Max’s arrival, even when it had signalled the end of so many of her dreams. No, it was nostalgia for the young woman she’d once been.
‘Max happened,’ she reminded him. ‘I couldn’t exactly have a baby and complete a law degree.’
He leaned forward, interlocking his fingers and placing his hands between them. ‘You were accepted on to a top course, if I remember...’
She wouldn’t allow herself to feel even a hint of warmth at his recollection. Dimitrios was a details man. He’d filed the titbit of biographical information for no reason other than it was what he did.
‘It wasn’t feasible.’
‘Your parents?’
‘They moved to Perth.’
His brow lifted. ‘When?’
‘After Lewis died.’ She swallowed hard, the pain of that still difficult to process. Annie had learned then that nothing was stable, or permanent. She’d lost her brother and to all intents and purposes her parents in the space of a few months. Life was a rollercoaster with zero guarantees. ‘Mum found it too hard to stay here. Everywhere reminded her of him. She needed a fresh start.’
‘You were only eighteen, and you were pregnant. Why didn’t you go with them?’
‘We never had a great relationship.’ She was uncertain why she was confiding in him. ‘They weren’t awful to us or anything when Lewis and I were growing up, but they fought a lot, and it was tense. I think Mum wanted everything to be different for me. Finding out I’d got pregnant and planned to raise a baby on my own, that I’d never go to university and my future was “over”—as she said—made her furious. She wanted me to put Max up for adoption.’
Dimitrios’s face was like a thundercloud. ‘You’re not serious? Rather than offer to help you?’
Annie shrugged. ‘It was a no-brainer. They moved to Perth, I stayed here and had Max. Over time, they’ve mellowed. They love him. I tolerate them for that reason alone.’