Page 25 of The Maid's Pregnancy Bombshell

Ares stared transfixed at the screen. It was a tiny blip the size of an olive. That that tiny bunch of cells could grow into an actual human being within a few months struck him as a fact worthy of wonder and fascination, but then he was primarily a scientist and he wasn’t sure that that take would be welcome to the mother of his child.

Alana studied the screen with a trembling lower lip.Her baby!Her poor, poor baby, with a man who would never truly want him or her, who would simply go through the motions of fatherhood in a logical, dutiful way. Unnoticed, she shot him an unhappy glance. Her eyes stung. She blinked rapidly.

The consultant discussed the blood test that could tell them the gender of their baby. Ares was all on board for that and failed to even consult Alana as to her preference. He took charge, the way he did with everything, she reflected resentfully. It was her body, her baby, but the way he was behaving, you wouldn’t have thought so. And there he was suddenly being a positive chatterbox with the consultant about the hormonal effects of pregnancy. Now he would begin treating her like a basket case. How dared he nod knowingly like that when the doctor mentioned the possibility of mood changes?

‘Lunch is waiting for us back at the house,’ Ares announced as she clambered back into the limo.

‘It’s a long drive,’ Alana muttered.

‘I was referring to my house here in London. I can hardly maroon you at Templegreen when you’re pregnant. I hope I am more considerate than that.’

Alana could feel that mindless rage building inside her again and sensibly said nothing.

Ares gave up and switched his phone back on. Did she really resent the idea of having his baby that much? She would be a young mother. A lot of young women would not be pleased to find themselves pregnant at her age. Especially when she had only signed up in the first place for a brief fake marriage that had now become...what? He attempted to quantify what their relationship now was and failed. He was lost without that contract. There were no rules, no guidelines. But the contract had become a bad joke after he had broken it in Abu Dhabi and the baby was a consequence of that irrational act. Yet strangely enough he wasn’t feeling remotely annoyed about that baby. Ashamed that he had lost control...yes. Ashamed that Alana, whom he should have looked after better, was clearly distressed...yes.

It felt like a hundred years to Alana since she had last stepped into Ares’s palatial London house. She had been ill and newly married, she reminded herself. She had also been naïve and foolish and utterly mesmerised by the male by her side. That had been when she fell in love with him, she surmised, when he had demonstrated how amazingly caring he could be. A sniff escaped her and Ares flashed a glance at her from his shockingly beautiful dark eyes, a concerned glance. And it was that last proverbial straw all over again!

Ares saw the storm coming and he guided Alana into the vast drawing room and closed the door in his surprised housekeeper’s face. ‘What can I do?’ he asked quietly. ‘To make you feel better?’

‘Nothing!’ she wailed on the back of a sob.

He helped her out of her coat, urged her down into a comfortable armchair and hovered. ‘There has to be something—’

‘Tell me the truth.’

‘About what?’ Ares frowned.

‘How youreallyfeel about the baby!’ She gasped. ‘Because so far you have faked everything you have said and done and you haven’t given me one honest reaction to this pregnancy of mine. I want the truth. I canstandthe truth. I’m not a kid!’

Ares thought very hard. ‘I don’t really know how I feel yet. It’s all too new and fresh. I never expected to have a child—’

Like a hare scenting a fox, Alana sat forward in her seat. ‘And why’s that?’

‘I planned to never have one,’ he admitted grimly. ‘It was a decision I made many years ago—’

‘But why?’ she persisted.

‘I think it was my idea of revenge...notto carry on the family name of Sarris, to let it die out with me,’ he clarified tautly.

Revenge?Alana was shocked by that explanation. Ares, who on the surface seemed so calm and rational, had harboured so primitive and passionate a desire?

‘And how do you feel now that we’ve managed to conceive a child?’ she almost whispered.

Disconcertingly, Ares laughed with what appeared to be genuine amusement. ‘That the revenge idea was a leftover piece of my adolescence and something I should have left behind me a long time ago. After all, it is a melodramatic concept and I am a logical man. Why would I let my ugly past control my entire future?’

‘Yes,’ she agreed, relieved by that concession, feeling calm again, not even understanding why she had almost lost her temper.

‘I can adapt to new circumstances,’ Ares commented with decided pride.

‘Yes...’ Alana smiled. ‘And outside the boundaries of a legal contract.’

‘We don’t need one now, but without one we have no framework,’ he added wryly.

‘How do you feel about the baby?’ she almost whispered.

‘I’m still considering that. You’re very impatient,’ Ares censured as a knock sounded on the door and he turned his head to issue an invitation. ‘That will be Edith offering us lunch.’

Lunch was an oasis of calm after the emotional storms of the morning. Ares chatted away about the latest app he was developing, not seeming to worry about the fact she only understood a tenth of what he was explaining. And then he surprised her right out of the blue by asking how she felt about her birth father, whom she had never met.

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