Then he turned and walked into the en suite bathroom.
Then silence.
She turned her head aside. Inside her chest her heart started to thud. The drum beats of a funeral.
Slowly, agonisingly, she made herself get out of bed. Made herself find her clothes, struggle into the evening gown that was on the floor, force her feet into her sandals. Made herself walk out of the bedroom, find her handbag, head for the door.
She was about to walk out of another hotel room, another hotel. Another city. But away from the same man. Déjà vu all over again...
Except for one small detail.
As she opened the door a voice behind her sounded. Harsh. Low. And taut as a garotte.
‘I used no protection—I had none with me.’
Ariana turned, horror filling her.
It was the worst two weeks of Ariana’s life.
If she had thought the days following her precipitate flight from New York unbearable, that was nothing, nothing at all, compared to each and every day now, that crawled with agonising slowness towards the due date of her next period. Only then could she be sure that any pregnancy test would be accurate and not a false negative.
Because she could not risk that! Could not risk feeling the desperate relief that the disaster of that hellish night had not resulted in what she feared most. She could not risk thinking she was safe—and then find she was not.
And when her regular-as-clockwork period failed to arrive she knew, with the same horror that had possessed her when Luca had thrown his declaration at her, that all her desperate hope had been in vain. A knowledge confirmed, like a vice crushing all the air out of her lungs, as she stared two days later at the vivid blue line on the pregnancy test stick.
Only one shred of hope was left for her to cling to. The lie she had managed somehow, with a strength she had not known she still possessed, to throw back at Luca before she’d made her escape from him.
‘Don’t worry—I’m protected!’
She had thrown it at him in a defiant snarl and from an impulse that had overridden everything else. Because there was only one thing worse than her being pregnant by Luca—and that was him knowing it.
Cold ran down her spine now as she took in the implications of that blue line. Pregnant. She was pregnant. She had conceived Luca’s baby. She wanted to laugh—a hysterical, demented laugh. Because what other response could she give to such a realisation? Instead, she found her arms going around her midriff, in a protective gesture as old as time.
But there was only one person she must protect her baby from.
Its father.
Luca was working. He was working every hour God sent and then some. He was flying around the world. Working on the plane. Working in the hotels he stayed at. Working when he was back in his apartment in Milan, long into the early hours. Working to forget.
To blank. To block.
To deny.
Deny his own insanity.
Deny what he had done...what he had succumbed to. What he had committed.
How could I have done it? How could I?
He stared darkly and unseeing at his computer screen, the words and the numbers blurring into an incomprehensible mass.
A mess as incomprehensible as the criminal folly of what he had done.
Taken Ariana to his bed again.
The one woman in all the world he did not want to want.
Ariana was planning. Planning with an urgency that was driving her like a demon. First to work to a punishing schedule, finishing off every project, banking all the money she could—her survival fund.