Charlene Sands - Special Deliveries - Her Nine-Month Secret

Whether she would ever admit it or not, she had landed on her feet in the money stakes.

He called her just before he was ready to leave the office. It was a little after five, hours before his normal departure time, but he hadn’t been able to focus on anything. She had asked him to mull things over. As far as he was concerned he had devoted the necessary time to the task at hand.

‘We need to meet.’

Holly heard the peremptory command in his voice and shivered. ‘Okay.’

‘Where are you staying?’

She gave him the name and address of the hotel. No one could accuse it of being five-star. It might struggle to make two, in fact.

Just out of the shower, she looked at the shabby wallpaper, the uninspiring prints on the wall and the snap-together furniture.

‘That part of London is a dump. Couldn’t you have found anywhere a little more upmarket?’

‘This wasn’t meant to be a weekend break,’ Holly retorted. ‘I had to come to London, so I chose somewhere affordable.’

‘I will send my driver for you…’

‘If you tell me where you want to meet,’ Holly interjected, just in case he thought that she would be impressed by a driver, ‘I can take public transport.’

Luiz ignored that. ‘He will be with you in half an hour.’

‘Luiz…’

‘Don’t be proud, Holly. I have a driver and it will save you the hassle of taking the tube or a bus. We’ll talk when we meet.’

Autocratic and controlling, Holly thought as she disconnected. And yet, hadn’t he always been? When they had been going out together, he had always known what to do in any crisis. He had always made decisions with an assurance that made you believe that there could not be any other possible outcome than the one he dictated. She had thrilled at his intuitive mastery, which was what she now suddenly decided to label arrogance.

Having put on weight, and having now found out that she was pregnant, Holly had abandoned all attempts to squeeze into her normal jeans and had invested in a couple of loose dresses. The one she now put on was slightly less frumpy than the one in which she had travelled and, despite her blistering scorn for Luiz and the lies he had told her, she still found herself surreptitiously eyeing her reflection in the mirror.

She didn’t think she looked pregnant. Not really. Perhaps a bit in profile; she looked at herself sideways on and placed her hand flat on her stomach. She looked… fat.

The shock of discovering herself to be pregnant had very quickly been replaced with joy, despite the obvious pitfalls ahead. Never had she wanted something as much as she wanted this baby. It might be Luiz’s nightmare, but not for her.

With this in mind, she anxiously climbed into the back seat of the top-of-the-range car which arrived to collect her precisely when Luiz had told her it would. It was only once she was inside the car that she realised she had forgotten to ask him where, exactly, they would be meeting.

Anticipating a restaurant, she was taken aback when the driver pulled away from the main drag to manoeuvre the leafy streets of Chelsea. She was even more taken aback when they finally stopped in front of an impressive four-storeyed red-brick building fronted by elaborately moulded wrought-iron gates. Two art deco stone lions, each slightly under a metre high, sat on either side of the black front door.

She had seen his office. Now she was going to see his house. She felt a nervous flutter and staunchly reminded herself that they were no longer lovers. They were now two people unhappily bound by circumstance.

The driver discreetly melted away the minute Luiz was in the hallway. For a few seconds, Holly could only stare. He was in a pair of faded black jeans that emphasised the length and muscular strength of his legs, and a dark-grey polo shirt. He was barefoot because the warm wooden floors were liberally broken with silk rugs which she imagined were sensuously soft to walk on.

It was an effort to tear her eyes away from him so that she could inspect her surroundings. Having braced herself for whatever further signs of this life he had been living away from her, she was still shocked at the visible extent of his wealth.

Bold paintings adorned the pale walls. Behind him, spanning a floor and a half, light filtered through an awe-inspiring stained-glass window. In various directions she could see further evidence of the wealthy background he had kept such a closely guarded secret from her. More paintings on the walls, a plant the size of a small tree strategically placed in the corner of a room, the merest glimpse of a sunken sitting area in what appeared to be a massive drawing room.

Holly was reluctantly forced to concede, just for a few seconds, that here was a man who might be über-cautious when it came to trust, especially in view of his past experience at the hands of a gold-digger.

‘If you’re going to give me a lecture on what a lowlife I am for hiding all this from you, then let’s get it out of the way so that we can move on to more important issues.’

‘It’s a very impressive house.’

‘Take off the coat.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I want to see evidence of your pregnancy.’

‘You mean you actually don’t believe that I’m telling you the truth?’

‘I do.’ He strolled towards her to ease her out of the coat and then, still standing in front of her, he gently rested his hand on her stomach.

The gesture came from nowhere and was so shocking that Holly gasped and stared up at him with huge, rounded eyes.

‘Well?’ Luiz moved back to thrust his hands into his pockets. Touching her like that, he could feel the firmness of her belly, the swell of it as his flesh and blood grew inside her. It was a sensation like no other. ‘Don’t tell me I don’t have a right to do that.’

‘We no longer have… that sort of relationship, Luiz.’ One feathery touched that had barely lasted two seconds and she could feel her body revving into life, as if it had just been idling for the past few weeks, waiting for a foot to depress the accelerator so that it could get going, charge back to life! She stepped away from him but her heart was beating at a rate and she knew that she was bright red.

Luiz was finding it next to impossible to look at her without imagining her with her clothes off. He had felt her stomach. He would have liked to see it, smooth and full, just as he would have liked to see her breasts, more succulent, the nipples bigger and darker, readying themselves for a suckling baby.

‘You said we… we needed to talk, Luiz, and we do—’

‘I’ll get you something to drink. Have you eaten?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘I’ll order something in.’

‘There’s no need…’

‘If we’re going to have an argument every single time I suggest something, then we won’t get very far,’ Luiz said coolly. ‘I lied to you—put it behind you and move on. Circumstances have now changed. There’s no room for petty resentments.’

Holly bit back the torrent of self-defence that rose quickly to the surface. Arguing would be counter-productive. He was right and she knew that, but she still hated the cool detachment in his voice when he had addressed her. She was humiliatingly aware that he had moved on. For all the stern lectures she had given herself, she hadn’t. It was easy for him to stand there and treat the whole matter like a business problem that required a solution—but then, little had she known it, he was a businessman who presumed that for every problem there was a solution. He was ideally placed to be dispassionate because he had no messy emotional ties to clutter the picture.

‘Fine.’ Holly managed the monosyllable but her voice sounded high and angry. He was heading towards the sitting room she had partially glimpsed through the half-opened door and she followed him, impervious to the grand displays of wealth.