His brain cranked slowly back into gear. He sat down, and hunkered forward, forearms resting lightly on his thighs.
‘You didn’t want me to meet your parents because if I was in the picture it would be hard to eliminate me as the father. Were you planning on telling them that you were pregnant by some guy you’d met by chance?’ His mouth twisted sardonically. ‘Some mustard-wearing creep you met on a misguided online date, maybe?’
‘No! But if you want the truth,’ she told him bluntly, ‘I knew it would complicate things if you were around. It’s going to be horrendous enough getting through this…explaining to everyone that I’m pregnant…’
Except maybe he was right… Maybe they weren’t going to be as disappointed as she had imagined—maybe they would accept it the way they perhaps, possibly, had accepted her—and she hadn’t even seen that because she’d always been so busy comparing herself to Alex and to her high-achieving, brilliant parents…
‘And our unmarried state is going to be hard for them to swallow, given their traditional views on life,’ he said acidly. ‘Erasing me would have made a hell of a lot more sense. You’re right. Maybe you could even have made me out to be some kind of bastard who got you pregnant and did a runner…? The possibilities are endless, aren’t they, when it comes to disposing of an inconvenient lover…?’
‘You’re not being fair…’
‘No?’ he mocked.
‘No. You can hardly blame me for not wanting to shout it from the rooftops. You’ve made it crystal clear to me how you feel about long-term relationships and how you feel about me.’
‘And how do I feel about you?’
‘We have great sex and that’s it. I get it—of course I do. I mean…it works both ways… We’ve…um… Well, I’m not about to start dumping this on you and expecting you to do anything about it.’
Sergio banked down explosive rage.
‘When you say that you don’t expect me to “do anything about it”, what exactly do you mean?’
Her eyes flicked nervously across to him. What was he thinking? What was going through his head? His world had been turned upside down but at least he hadn’t shouted, or accused her of deliberately trying to pin him down. Given his experiences with his father’s second wife, he might have.
‘I mean this isn’t part of your life plan,’ she said. She stared down at her clasped fingers but could still feel his eyes pinned to her. ‘And you don’t have to think that you’re going to be lumbered with…with taking responsibilities you hadn’t banked on. As you may have noticed, my parents are pretty well off… I’ll manage financially…’
‘I’m going to pretend that I didn’t hear what you just said,’ Sergio told her evenly. ‘And I’m going to get this back on track by pointing out a few things. The first is that you don’t know me at all if you think that I am the kind of man who sleeps with a woman and then walks away from a situation like this. The second is that my baby is my responsibility. I have no intention of handing that responsibility to your parents or any other member of your sprawling family, for that matter. Am I making myself clear on this?’
‘That’s fine,’ Susie whispered. ‘If you want to contribute financially, then I won’t say no. I just think it’s important for you to understand that—’
‘You’re not hearing me!’
Susie started, and stared at him nervously. ‘You want to…to help out with money. I understand.’
‘This is not just your deal. Whether I wanted this explosion in my life or not, it’s happened—and I intend to be a fully committed player in the game. I’m not just going to set up a direct debit to your account and visit as and when I can… Oh, no. And if you’re thinking along those lines, then you’ve completely misread the situation, Susie. Start the countdown, my darling. Whether either of us wants it or not, you’re about to become Mrs Burzi…’
SEVERAL WORDS LODGED in Susie’s head with dagger-like precision. Explosion. Player in the game. And finally, Whether either of us wants it or not…Mrs Burzi….
‘We’re both overwrought,’ she managed in a strangled voice. ‘You need a few days to take this in.’
She glanced wildly at the door and wondered whether she could make a sprint for it.
‘You’re not going anywhere, so you can forget eyeing the doorway like it’s the promised land, and I don’t need a few days to think about this. I’ve already thought about it and come up with the only possible solution.’
‘To marry you? That’s the only possible solution?’
‘What else?’
The sexy, teasing man she had fallen in love with had gone. In his place was this cold-eyed stranger, addressing her in a voice that could freeze water.
‘I take full responsibility for the mess we’ve ended up in. It’s the first time I have ever come close to any kind of lapse in taking precautions.’
‘You should hear yourself!’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The mess we’ve ended up in…an explosion in your life…’ Tears stung the back of her eyes. ‘How can you be so…so…callous…?’
‘I’m not being callous.’ Sergio flushed darkly and continued to stare at her.
‘A few hours ago,’ she slammed into him bitterly, ‘you were dragging me in here so that you could make love to me…’
‘You weren’t protesting.’
‘I never said that I was!’ Her eyes flared and she held his stare with mutinous, stubborn persistence.
His change should come as no big surprise. He had never been in it for more than the sex and now his true colours were showing—because whether he magnanimously chose to take responsibility or not the fact was that circumstances had changed horrendously for him.
He wasn’t aiming to be callous. For him it was truly an explosion in his life—and a mess. It just wouldn’t occur to him that those words would be the last ones she might want to hear.
‘I don’t want to get into a huge argument with you,’ Susie told him wearily. ‘But I’m not going to marry you. And quite honestly I have no idea why you would want to marry me. Especially when you had such a dramatic “learning curve”, with your father marrying the wrong woman and then suffering for his mistake. Why would you want to marry the wrong woman?’
‘Circumstances are somewhat different in our case, wouldn’t you say? For a start, you aren’t decades my junior, and you didn’t actively seek me out so that you could extract money from me.’
‘That’s not what you thought when we first met! And you came here because you needed to satisfy yourself that you hadn’t made a mistake. No point taking unnecessary chances.’
‘It’s not going to further this situation if we keep delving into the past. That’s over and done with.’
‘It still doesn’t change the fact that I won’t marry you. We’re not living in the Dark Ages, Sergio. What would be the point of sacrificing our lives just because we happened to make a mistake? People make mistakes all the time, but it doesn’t mean that they condemn themselves to paying for it for the rest of their lives.’
Sergio took every single word that left her mouth