Her Pregnancy Surprise: His Pregnancy Bargain / The Pregnancy Secret / Their Pregnancy Bombshell

‘No, he hasn’t, but if he had I’d have told him the best way to get you to agree was to let you think it was your brilliant idea to begin with.’

He looked at her, startled for a moment, then the stern lines of his face melted into a grin.

Megan grinned back. ‘I did a psychology module in my first year at uni,’ she explained.

Her laughing eyes meshed with his, the moment of harmony didn’t last long. At almost the exact moment that Megan recognised the atmosphere had changed, that the air between them throbbed with unspoken and dangerous things, Luc stopped laughing. Megan touched her tongue to the perspiration beading her upper lip and the pupils of Luc’s eyes dramatically dilated. She saw him swallow before his dark head angled away from her.

‘Tea or a beer?’ he asked, not looking up.

‘Tea.’ If he could act as though nothing had happened so could she. Maybe she was the one who had started reading sex into everything because she was obsessed—not Luc.

‘Do you mind if I sit down?’ She didn’t wait for his response; if she didn’t sit down soon she would fall. Her knees were shaking. She presumed it was a reaction to the confrontation—she hated confrontations. It couldn’t be good for the baby for her to feel this terrible. In an unconsciously protective gesture her hands went to her still-flat belly.

She sank into the soft chair and tried to think calm thoughts…it was an ambitious plan. Her brain was firing off questions one after the other in rapid succession; there was no let-up from the anxiety-inducing bombardment. How would Luc react? Was he going to be angry? Shocked, obviously—heaven knew she had been! Was he even going to believe her?

When Luc approached, mugs of tea in hand, Megan saw his bare feet. Her stomach muscles fluttered. How could she, how could anybody find bare feet erotic? Now hands, yes. Luc had the most beautiful hands, expressive hands with long, sensitive fingers…This time the tightening of her stomach muscles was vicious.

Catching the direction of her fixed gaze, Luc offered a curt explanation of, ‘Under-floor heating,’ before he nudged an open laptop to one side and set a mug of hot tea on the rustic oak coffee table.

Megan ran her fingers across the oiled surface of the wood. The cottage was filled with natural materials and textures and it was all very tactile and sensual. But nothing she had seen in the cottage made her want to reach out and touch more than the man who took a seat opposite her.

Megan nodded her thanks as her fingers closed around the hot, steaming mug, and pretended she was looking at the flickering images of the screen saver while she was actually greedily observing him fold his long length with fluid grace into a Kelim-covered sofa opposite her. Something in her stomach twisted painfully as she looked at him.

The feeling didn’t go away when she stopped looking.

Luc glanced at his watch.

The pointed gesture brought a resentful sparkle to her eyes. This was about the single most momentous moment in her life and he didn’t even bother disguising he couldn’t wait to see the back of her. Deep down she knew it was irrational to feel angry. Luc didn’t have the faintest idea why she was here—not that anything excused this boorish display of bad manners.

‘I’m so sorry if I’m keeping you from something more important,’ she drawled sarcastically.

‘Only a couple of thousand words.’ Luc, who hadn’t been able to write a word since he’d arrived at the cottage, lied. He leaned forward and rested his chin on the platform of his interlocked fingers.

Megan shivered as his silvered appraisal moved over her.

‘You’ve lost weight,’ he judged with a disapproving frown.

‘A little,’ she admitted.

‘It doesn’t suit you.’

Megan let the brutal observation pass; she recognised a perfect opening when she heard it. Then again, he wasn’t in the best of moods—perhaps she should wait. Wait until when you give birth…? Tell him, Megan, now…now…the voice in her head prompted urgently.

As she opened her mouth her heart was beating so fast she could hardly breathe.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll be putting the pounds on again soon,’ she said, fixing her eyes firmly on her hands clasped neatly in her lap.

There was a silence, which got longer until, frustrated to the point of screaming, Megan lifted her gaze to his.

‘You were supposed to ask why!’

‘Why what?’

‘Why will I be putting on weight…?’ she prompted.

A flicker of amusement momentarily lightened the wariness in his eyes. ‘Why will you be putting on weight, Megan?’ he asked obligingly.

‘I will be putting on weight because that’s what people do when they’re pregnant, which I am…pregnant, that is.’

There, it was out! She ought to be feeling a sense of release, but what she was actually feeling was sick…very sick. She pressed a hand to her mouth and waited, her eyes half closed, for the waves of nausea to pass.

When the imminent danger of throwing up had passed, she swallowed and opened her anxious eyes. Luc hadn’t moved a muscle since she had blurted out her news. She gave a frustrated sigh. Whatever he was feeling, she wasn’t going to see it here—a granite rock face would have been easier to read than those strong symmetrical contours. It was actually his total lack of response, his eerie stillness, that revealed he had even heard what she had said.

‘With your baby…obviously.’ She coloured. Maybe it wasn’t obvious at all to him?

It was possible that he thought she acted with equal wanton abandon with every man that took her fancy…

On the brink of making a disastrous confession, Megan bit her tongue. Luc didn’t need to hear how special he was, and the fact that she had never felt that way with any other man was something that ought to be kept on a need-to-know basis, and he definitely didn’t need to know!

‘Don’t worry, I’m not here to make a scene,’ she told him, gruffly earnest. ‘I just thought that you had the right to know. And,’ she added, ‘it’s not the sort of thing that’s easy to say in a letter. Actually it’s not the sort of thing that’s easy to say full stop,’ she added in a dry undertone. Belatedly she realised this comment might have come over as a little light on empathy. ‘Or hear,’ she tacked on generously.

Luc’s vibrant complexion had acquired a grey tinge as he lost the last shred of his habitual cool. She’d been prepared for shaken, but Megan got seriously alarmed when he suddenly buried his face in his hands. His classical profile was hidden from her view, but she could hear the laboured sound of his breathing from where she was sitting.

After a few moments his head lifted and she was relieved to see his colour was improved. ‘A baby…?’

She nodded, sympathetic to his traumatised condition.

He shook his head from side to side in the hope the action might kick-start his numb brain.

‘So you weren’t taking the pill…?’ He saw the pain flare in her eyes and thought, Good move Luc, let her think you’re blaming her, you insensitive bastard.

‘I’m afraid I didn’t think…I should…’

‘Neither of us thought, Megan.’ His expressionless voice cut into her disjointed stream of self-recriminations.

Megan lapsed into unhappy silence. Through the mesh of her lashes she watched his chest lift as he sucked in a deep breath.

‘I’m sorry, you must be—’

‘I’m not asking for anything from you,’ she interrupted quickly. She saw some emotion, indefinable but strong, flare briefly in his eyes before she ploughed heavily on. ‘I appreciate this is my responsibility. Of course, if you want to have some input, that is fine.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

‘INPUT…’ Luc repeated, looking at Megan as though she had run mad.

She exhaled a small gusty sigh of relief as she managed to wrench her fascinated eyes from the muscle in his lean cheek that was clenching and unclenching. ‘And if you don’t that’s equally fine,’ she told him with an upbeat smile. ‘There’s no pressure.’

‘Are you trying to be funny?’