The Italian's One-Night Love-Child by Cathy Williams Page B

and off balance. How was it possible for him to do this to her? To shake her to the very core and make her feel giddy when all she wanted to feel was repulsion?
    ‘You don’t look pregnant.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Shouldn’t you be bigger?’
    Bethany was thoroughly disconcerted by this abrupt change of topic. ‘Some people don’t show until quite late on and I’m one of those. Why are you changing the subject?’
    ‘Because you shouldn’t be getting so overwrought in your…condition.’
    ‘How do you expect me to feel when you stand there likea block of ice sneering at me and accusing me of plotting all of this?’ Deep breaths, she thought. Hysteria was no way to deal with the situation. ‘If I had been lunatic enough to get pregnant to trap you, then don’t you think that I might just have contacted you the minute I found out?’
    ‘Why didn’t you?’
    ‘For the same reason that…I took off. I wasn’t the rich, worldly-wise woman you thought I was. I was a nobody, the sort of person you wouldn’t have looked at twice in the normal course of things.’
    ‘Don’t run yourself down,’ Cristiano censured, frowning.
    ‘I’m not running myself down, Cristiano. I’m telling it like it is. You told me yourself that you would never date any woman who didn’t come from a similar background to you because you would never be sure that she wasn’t after you for your money.’
    ‘I never said that!’ The conversation seemed to have run away from him and he couldn’t figure out where or when he had relinquished control.
    ‘Yes, you did!’
    ‘Okay. Maybe I did, although I’m not convinced.’
    ‘So when I discovered that I was pregnant, I knew that I couldn’t contact you. How would you have felt if I’d shown up on your doorstep, one Bethany Macguire, pregnant and average, with nowhere to go and barely a dime to her name? Don’t tell me that you would have fallen over yourself with joy and rapture!’
    ‘That’s hardly the point.’
    ‘Then what is?’
    ‘I deserved to know. When it comes to a child, it’s not about how I would feel or how you would feel, it’s about the child. Had you any intention at all of ever contacting me to tell me that I had fathered a child?’
    Bethany looked away, reddening. Put like that, she sounded like a selfish cow, but at the time the thought of telephoning him, explaining herself, explaining that she was going to have a baby, had left her mind almost as quickly as it had entered it.
    ‘I would have. In due course. Most probably.’
    Cristiano stamped on his immediate response to that. There was little point in pursuing that line of attack, but in his mind he envisaged a scenario in which his child grew up without him around, became the stepson or stepdaughter of some other man who would have entered her life at some point in time. The thought outraged him. Just thinking of her in the arms of someone else outraged him. He put that thought out of his head and resolved to approach the situation from a practical direction.
    He also found himself reluctantly believing her reasons for lying to him in the first place. Which, naturally, didn’t excuse her opportunistic manipulation of the truth, but he would overlook that because there were now far bigger things in the mix and that was a reality he couldn’t afford to forget.
    ‘I’m surprised you didn’t kill me off,’ he mused and Bethany looked up at him, again sidetracked by his change of tone. From icy-cold and enraged, his voice was now low and husky and mildly amused. It made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end and something inside her uncurled, making her feel vulnerable and exposed.
    ‘I’m not that horrible,’ she stuttered breathlessly. ‘Besides, it’s just as well that I didn’t, considering you’ve appeared here. Explaining the sudden appearance of an absent fiancé is enough of a nightmare. Explaining one who had come back to life would have been impossible.’ With some of her anger