Laura Iding - Pregnant with His Baby!

Sue stared at her with eyes like saucers. ‘Baby! But I thought that you couldn’t have a baby. You thought it would be the deal-breaker when you told him,’ she reminded her friend. ‘You were over the moon when he said it was no problem with him.’

Dervla nodded miserably. ‘He said he already had Alberto and he didn’t want any more children. That we had a ready-made family.’

‘But you want your own, and there’s a chance …?’

Dervla nodded. Sue was one of the few people she had ever told about the tragic long-term consequences of complications after a perforated appendix and the subsequent peritonitis that had put her on the critical list in her teens.

‘I might be able to have a baby, but not,’ she added, the tears beginning to overflow in earnest from her tragic emerald eyes, ‘with Gianfranco. I have to choose a baby or him.’

Sue’s arms went around her as she began to weep loudly.

‘WELL, what do you think?’ the man at the head of the table asked, lifting his dark head from the spreadsheet he had been studying.

There was a silence in the room as he allowed his hooded gaze to rest on each face in turn. He could read panic in several faces as the executives frantically tried to decide what he wanted to hear.

Gianfranco felt a flash of irritation—he did not surround himself with yes-men or -women.

‘Does nobody have an opinion?’ Or a backbone?

It seemed that nobody had, or if they did they were unwilling to express it. Gianfranco felt his frustration escalate in the growing silence.

‘Perhaps there is somewhere else you want to be?’ he suggested with silken sarcasm.

The trouble, he mused, with people was they couldn’t separate their personal life from their professional life. It was a fatal mistake and one that he couldn’t understand. He had always compartmentalised his life, it was simply a matter of discipline.

His lashes lowered as his dark glance brushed the metal-banded watch on his wrist. He wondered if his assistant, who seemed less than her usual efficient self today, had remembered to relay the message to everyone concerned that he wanted all personal calls to be immediately diverted in here.

The sound of a phone ringing broke the lengthening silence. Gianfranco began to count, his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists as he resisted the urge to immediately pull it from his jacket pocket.

Nobody else reached to check if the call was for them. Gianfranco Bruni’s dislike of such interruptions was well known and nobody would have dreamt of not switching off their mobiles before going into a meeting chaired by him.

It was Gianfranco himself who, after the second ring, pulled a phone from the breast pocket of his jacket and, after glancing at it, rose abruptly, excusing himself.

‘The wife,’ the only woman present at the high-powered meeting predicted, unwittingly echoing Gianfranco’s first thought when he had heard the ring.

No one disagreed.

Before his marriage the previous year Gianfranco would not have disregarded his own rule concerning interruptions. Since the wedding to which no one, least of all media cameras, had been invited there had been some significant changes. It was rumoured that Gianfranco even took a day off occasionally, but that was only a rumour.

‘Well, I hope she says something to put him in a less vile mood.’

‘Yes, our leader is not his usual sunny self this afternoon, is he?’ someone agreed drily.

There was a generous noise of assent around the table.

‘Have you met her? The wife, that is?’ one of the executives asked curiously.

The gentle chatter around the table stopped and a couple of people nodded to confirm they had.

One said, ‘My mother got me to take her to the opening of the new children’s hospice. It turns out to be his wife’s brainchild.’

‘I suppose even a lady who lunches needs something to put on her CV.’

‘That’s what I thought, but it turns out she’s really hands-on. Literally actually,’ he recalled with a reminiscent smile. ‘She was down on her hands and knees rolling around on the grass barefoot with some of the kids.’

‘She doesn’t sound like a Gianfranco Bruni girlfriend.’

‘She’s not—she’s his wife. Maybe that’s the difference. You’re not wrong, though. She really isn’t his usual type.’

‘Presumably not hard on the eye, though?’

‘She’s pretty,’ the speaker agreed. ‘A redhead, green eyes, freckles.’ He gave a reminiscent smile. ‘Really great, sexy laugh.’

‘Sounds like Ricardo was smitten,’ someone said slyly, and there was laughter as the middle-aged man in question flushed but didn’t deny the charge.

‘I’ve never even seen a photo of her.’

Another result of his sudden marriage had been that Gianfranco, who had once supplied the gossip columns with acres of copy, had pretty much slipped off the photo-opportunity map and retreated behind the sort of security that people who were as rich as he was could.

‘Not exactly a party girl, then, the redhead?’

‘She is English, though?’ The person who asked the question glanced at the closed door before he spoke. Being caught gossiping about the boss would do his promotion prospects no good at all.

‘I’m not sure. Her name doesn’t sound English … Der something …?’

‘Dervla.’ It was the sole female who supplied the bride’s name.

‘Wasn’t she a model?’

‘Doubt it. She’s not tall enough,’ one person who had met her said.

‘Well, from what I’ve heard …’

The men leaned forward to catch the woman’s words as her voice dropped to a confidential hiss. ‘I don’t know how true it is, you understand, but my friend’s cousin—he works at the hospital in London where she was apparently working when they met.’

‘She’s a doctor?’

‘No, a nurse … she looked after his son when they were caught up in that terrorist thing.’

There were murmurs as the people present recalled the horrific incident she spoke of.

‘I think it’s so romantic,’ she added dreamily.

One of the men, the youngest there, who had been struggling to defend a business decision earlier to his critical boss, laughed and said scornfully, ‘Gianfranco Bruni doesn’t have a romantic bone in his body. A couple of years’ time and he’ll probably trade her in for a new model.’

When Gianfranco had reached for his phone and not seen Dervla’s name he had needed to dig deep into his seriously depleted reserves of self-control to maintain a semblance of composure.

At least until he was out of the room.

In the corridor he gritted his teeth and ground one clenched fist into the other. It had been forty-eight hours and not a word—not one word!

For all he knew she could be lying unconscious in a hospital bed. Fighting against the swell of crushing anxiety in his chest, he pushed his fingers deep into the ebony hair that sprang from his temples and inhaled deeply, forcing the air into his lungs before expelling it in a gusty sigh.

Get a grip, man, he counselled himself as he smoothed back the tousled hair from his brow and adjusted his tie.

Damn the woman!

‘Gianfranco!’

Gianfranco turned his head at the sound of the familiar voice and forced his lips into a semblance of a smile. Normally he would have been genuinely pleased to see Angelo Martinos, who had been his closest friend since the days when they both shared the distinction of being the only ‘foreigners’ at the English prep school they had been sent to at the ages of nine and ten respectively.

‘Angelo, what brings you here?’ he asked without enthusiasm.