Prognosis Baby Daddy - Amy Andrews Page 0,26

were pregnant?’

‘Da.’ Katya nodded.

Ben could feel his thoughts coming back on line now. Things were starting to make sense. And yet they weren’t. ‘Why? You could have just rung me.’

‘Because I don’t want the baby.’

Ben took a moment to absorb her answer. It seemed they were back to not making any sense. ‘So why didn’t you just have a termination?’

When he thought about it, it was exactly the thing that practical, sensible, no-nonsense Katya would do. Why not, if she didn’t want the baby? Want his baby.

The thought struck the centre of his chest – hard. She didn’t want his baby.

Katya shook her head. ‘Tried. Couldn’t.’

Ben’s brow puckered. He felt like he was running in quicksand and sinking. ‘What do you mean, couldn’t? You couldn’t get in to a clinic?’

‘I mean I made the appointment, I sat in the waiting room, they called my name and I just couldn’t go through with it.’

Katya rubbed her stomach. She remembered the moment — the precise moment. The nurse calling her name again and again and knowing, just knowing that she couldn’t do it. For better or for worse she had given this baby life, and she couldn’t take it away.

Ben heard the huskiness in her voice and noted her hand movements. The quicksand solidified a little. How many pregnant women had he seen repeat the same action? Katya’s stomach was still flat, no baby bump at all, yet she had the action down pat.

She sounded surprised by the turn of events and he could imagine how her inability to see something she’d organised all the way through to the end would have turned her neat, practical world upside down.

But nothing changed the fact that growing inside her was his baby. His flesh and blood. A strange sense of possession gripped his gut and he was profoundly thankful that Katya hadn’t been able to go through with the termination.

‘So where do we go from here?’ he asked.

Katya took a deep breath, forgoing her speech for the

direct route. ‘I want you to raise the baby.’

Curiouser and curiouser.

‘Me?’ he said, trying to wrap his head around everything that had come out of her mouth in the last couple of minutes.

‘Well, you are the father,’ Katya said bluntly.

The father. He was going to be a father. The enormity of that simple statement hit him. How could they have been so careless? He couldn’t be a father. He hadn’t even been a good brother. He’d ignored all Mario’s overtures, closed himself off to a relationship he’d invested in since birth.

He’d closed himself off to any kind of love for so long now. Did he even have the capacity for it anymore?

‘And how do you envision that will work?’ he asked, as his brain madly tried to keep up with the ever-changing plot.

Now, this was a topic Katya could talk on. This was what she’d been planning for over a month. ‘I have a plan.’

She did? ‘OK then.’ He rubbed his hands through his hair. ‘Let’s hear it.’

‘I’ll stay here until the baby is born. After the birth, you can take over the baby’s care.’

Ben watched as her face became animated. She’d obviously put a lot of thought into this. ‘And you?’

Katya shrugged. ‘Back to MedSurg, of course.’

Just like that? She could seriously just walk away from her own child? His reticence he could understand. But, Katya? She was the mother. Wasn’t that...innate? How could she reject their child?

‘Why don’t you want the baby?’

Katya shook her head emphatically ‘Why doesn’t matter.’

Ben had the feeling, watching her caress her stomach, that why mattered very much. ‘It does to me.’

Katya wrestled with how much to tell him. He didn’t need to know all the gory details, just the basics. She sighed. ‘From the age of eight until I left home at twenty, I raised three sisters and a brother. I’m all mothered out.’

Ben absorbed her stunning statement silently. He caught a brief glimpse of the eight-year-old Katya before her shutters came down. ‘Your mother?’ he asked.

‘Left it up to me.’

Katya stared at the floor, not daring to elaborate. How could someone who had grown up with everything — emotionally and financially — ever understand the gritty reality of her childhood?

Those five words spoke volumes to Ben. They were brief and clipped and he noted she couldn’t even meet his gaze. Suddenly the whole Katya persona was making much more sense. Her practicality, her harshness, her bluntness. She would have needed to be all those things to mother four children as