Happy Mother's Day! - By Sharon Kendrick Page 0,81

retorted.

‘Grow up, Erin!’

The weary recommendation drew a sharp gasp of anger from her throat.

‘And don’t blame me for your self-esteem issues.’

‘Don’t try and make it out to be about my problem.’

But didn’t he have a point? Hadn’t part of the problem been that deep down she had never really been able to believe that a man like Francesco could really want somebody like her? She had turned a deaf ear to her doubts because she had wanted him so much, but had she ever really expected it to last?

Francesco’s dark lashes lifted from his chiselled cheekbones that were lent extra prominence at that moment by the two bands of febrile colour along the sharp angles. His eyes were smouldering with an anger he was barely suppressing. ‘You haven’t the faintest idea what is typical of me, Erin, or you would not treat me this way.’

‘Is that a threat?’

He folded his arms across his chest and gave a slow, dangerous smile that made her heart beat a little faster. ‘It is a simple statement of fact—’

The response dragged a dry laugh that bordered on hysteria from her aching throat … nothing about Francesco was simple. Her life had become impossibly complicated from the moment they had met!

Every time he looked at her the sheer enormity of her betrayal in concealing her pregnancy hit Francesco afresh.

Part of him wanted to demand the truth from her. He might have done just that had the situation not been further complicated by the fact he couldn’t look at her without experiencing an even stronger compulsion to pull her into his arms and fill his nostrils with her warm feminine scent.

His bleak eyes stilled on her angry face. ‘What happened to the woman I married?’

The unexpected question sent a stab of pain through Erin. The expression in his eyes told her that whatever feelings he had had for the woman he spoke of were dead. The realisation hurt a lot more than it ought to have.

‘The woman who was warm and spontaneous …’

Erin tossed her head and shrugged. The weak quiver in her voice spoiled her tough pose as she claimed belligerently, ‘She w-wised up.’

‘Your father cheats therefore all men cheat?’

Erin’s eyes fell from his uncomfortably perceptive gaze. Francesco had touched on a subject that had been in her thoughts frequently during the last few weeks, and common sense told her he had a point.

A person couldn’t watch her mother choose time after time to believe her cheating husband’s lies rather than face the truth and not be affected in some way. Had she been so determined not to allow herself to become a victim whom people pitied that she had made a terrible mistake? For as long as she could remember she’d despised her mother for believing the lies her father told. Am I so damned sure, she asked herself, that I won’t do exactly what Mum did?

She couldn’t let herself find out.

Not that the question was anything but academic now; she had made her decision and there was no going back even if she had wanted to.

‘Sometimes, Erin,’ she heard him say as she passed a not quite steady hand across her eyes, ‘an innocent kiss is just that, innocent. Your reaction was totally irrational; you must realise that.’

Erin shook her head in stubborn rejection. ‘I don’t consider it irrational to expect fidelity.’

‘Fou were the woman I married.’ The woman who is carrying my child. He dragged his eyes upwards from her stillflat stomach where they kept drifting.

His original intention had been to confront Erin immediately. His plan had been simple: reveal the phone, play back the message and watch her face when she realised that he knew her secret.

Now he found himself wondering how long she would be prepared to prolong this lie of omission. How long she would be able to look him in the eye and conceal the truth.

‘You were the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with …’

The throaty catch in his deep voice brought Erin’s downcast eyes sweeping upwards. It wasn’t the molten anger she encountered as their eyes connected that drew the involuntary gasp of shock from her throat, but the unexpected glitter of pain and loss she saw in the smoky, expressive depths of his thickly lashed eyes.

‘That,’ he added, bracing one hand against the back of a leather armchair, ‘should have been enough for you.’

A full thirty seconds’ nerve-shredding silence elapsed before Erin could drag her eyes from his mesmeric dark gaze.