Page 32 of The Maid's Pregnancy Bombshell

‘Which he’s basicallynot...in the slightest,’ Enzo chipped in, unhelpfully. ‘So, that means that he has to be crazy about you.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Alana contended worriedly.

Her brother-in-law shrugged with elegance, all Italian cool. ‘Well, what would I know?’

Her family had only been making a fleeting visit en route to a flight to Berlin but Alana was relieved to have seen her sister and told her a little more about her mystery marriage. Maybe eventually she would tell Skye everything but just then it had felt like much too soon to reveal the complexities of her relationship with Ares. Ares, the guy who only followed transactional rules in relationships, who hadn’t ever been in love, she assumed. There was no straight path to reach a male of such intricate challenge. He knew she loved him. She thought he believed her, but he wasn’t likely to ever say it back and she wasn’t ever going to say those words again lest it make Ares feel trapped by expectations he could not fulfil. Nothing would chase him from her side faster or kill his desire for her quicker than that kind of unwelcome pressure.

In the short term, Alana preferred to keep her own counsel and concentrate on the positives in her world like Ares and her baby, rather than the disappointments. There was no such thing as perfect, neither in people nor situations, she told herself firmly, refusing to be cast down and constantly fretting about what she couldn’t have.

One little secret, however, she did have the power to control, she reasoned with determination as she searched out Edith to request the key for that locked room. The London house was nowherhome. Hadn’t Ares made that clear every time he got the chance? In fact, Ares was so fond of employing the word ‘our’ when it came to any kind of ownership of his vast pool of possessions that Alana sometimes laughed on that score. He had urged her to use his fabulous cars, throw out furniture she didn’t like or find comfortable, redecorate wherever she liked. So, yes, she definitely had the right to see inside the mysterious locked room!

Once again, she noted the housekeeper’s discomfiture but there was no hesitation about handing over the key. Edith did not, however, offer to accompany her, which once again persuaded Alana that the contents of that room were purely personal to Ares. And she had no plans to go rummaging through any of his private stuff without him, she reflected wryly, because she wasn’t one of those women who refused to respect that a guy could have boundaries too. Whatever she discovered she would decide on her approach afterwards.

The first acknowledgement that struck Alana as she stepped over the threshold of that bedroom was that it was not a mere guest room, it was an overwhelmingly feminine room still littered with a woman’s clutter. That knocked Alana straight off balance. Somehow she had been mentally prepared only to see an unfurnished room full of sealed boxes belonging to Ares. She was not at all prepared for what she actually found.

A woman’s room?

Her disconcerted gaze locked to a large glossy photo of...Marina! And really, after that, there were no doubts to be had whatsoever as to who had once made use of the room. Alana’s stricken gaze shifted to glamorous photo after photo of her husband’s former lover. Marina in evening dress, Marina walking red carpets, Marina performing with her violin on stage. And the woman was gorgeous, there was absolutely no denying that fact. Overall, the room bore a closer resemblance to a shrine than a bedroom, she thought sickly, and she only anxiously tugged open one drawer on sets of daring wispy lingerie before retreating back to the door in shock, wondering what other intimate items might still be packed away and trulynotwanting to know. She yanked the door shut, locked it again and walked away.

Curiosity killed the cat, she repeated inside her head, marvelling that it had not occurred to her sooner that the housekeeper might be embarrassed at her queries because she had assumed that no wife would wish to walk into such a room in her own home. So, why was it still all there in situ? Alana swallowed hard. Was Ares expecting Marina to come back into his life? Was he unable to quite make the break with Marina that he had insisted he had? Was it some sort of sexual obsession? Or was he now realising that he was fonder of the woman than he had ever appreciated?

Unhappily, Alana could fully imagine Ares being that blind to his own emotions and reactions. He lived very much in that world inside his own head, superb at developing technical stuff and solving business problems but barely more sophisticated than a toddler when it came to the more subtle, delicate promptings of his own feelings.

So, she told herself squarely, she was married to a guy who retained a bedroom for another woman. She could handle that. She could deal with that. Of course, she could, she told herself. After all, theirs wasn’t and never had been and never would be anormalmarriage and it was time she stopped pretending otherwise. Getting mushy and sentimental and wittering on about love was unlikely to solve the problem. But whatwould?

An hour later, Alana climbed into a limousine to go shopping. She had looked online but some stuff needed to be personally selected to fit and, what was more, she had been keen to seek out the most exclusive outlet possible. Heaven forbid that she wore anything on her body that might remind Ares of any other woman, never mind one particular glam, glossy giraffe-legged possibility. She had even gone back into that wretched room to check labels and she was ashamed of herself. How could she be so weak, so vulnerable that she changed herself to meet a man’s apparent needs? She had never believed that she could ever be that sort of a woman and now she very much feared that she actuallywas!

In reality, aside from a couple of special occasions, like her wedding day, Alana was a white cotton granny-pants sort of girl under her clothing. She liked flexible and comfy and had not the smallest desire to climb into lacy bits of suggestive nothing or erotic corsets and suspenders.

But now it seemed obvious to her that that was the kind of stuff that Ares enjoyed and it would surely only be a very confident wife in a secure marriage who chose to ignore that truth. Alana was neither confident nor in a secure relationship. She did, however, have a black credit card and she wielded it like a secret weapon at her destination. She would get over her discomfort at the prospect of packaging herself for a man, even for a husband’s benefit, she assured herself righteously, emerging from the bathroom, barely recognisable to her own gaze when she caught a glimpse in a cheval mirror and swiftly looked away again.

Ares was due home and he was a guy with a routine. He strode through the front door, went straight upstairs for a shower and there he would find her waiting. Simples, she told herself, no big deal, just another step in the right direction for the sake of their baby and the marriage she wanted to last. Did she also need long black hair and perfect features and legs as long as a rail track? Maybe she was overreacting to that room. Was that possible? But she was always reading that men were kind of basic when you got down to the bones of them and there was certainly nothing more basic than what she was doing, was there? Steeling herself, Alana arranged herself like a sex bomb—she hoped—on the bed.

Ares came through the door wondering where Alana was and found out. It was the nastiest surprise his bride had ever given him. He took one stunned look at the outfit and hurriedly looked away again. It had never once occurred to him that she would get done up like that and think he would like it because she wasn’t that sort of woman. And he liked that she wasn’t that sort of woman, and catching a glimpse of her done up as though she were being filmed for some porn site shook him rigid. He lost colour, hovered and looked everywhere but at her.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked, striving to understand what on earth could have prompted her into that sleazy seductress mode that ran so much against her character as he knew her.

Equally taken aback by the brooding silence, the tautness of his lean, darkly handsome features, Alana sat up in consternation. She hadn’t been expecting him to start stripping where he stood because Ares was never that predictable, but she certainly hadn’t expected him to treat her to one stricken appraisal and look away as if there was something rather indecent about her attire, because he was not prudish in bed.

‘Nothing’s happened,’ she said defensively. ‘I just thought that maybe you would...er...like—’

‘No,’ Ares sliced in. ‘Idon’tlike,moraki mou. I became far too used to seeing scantily clad women when I was a child. That sort of thing takes me back to times I would sooner forget.’

And that was the moment that Alana registered how crass she had been, to not even think of that possibility, that she was married to a male who had spent his early years in a highly sexualised environment and that such an outfit could be a kind of trigger for him. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she whispered shakily. ‘But I wish you’d told me—’

‘It never crossed my mind thatyou—’

‘But it was all right whenshedid it, was it?’ Alana gasped on the back of a choked sob of humiliation, because she was discovering that going out on a limb to try and make someone love and want her more could be a deeply wounding exercise and a mistake.

Disconcerted by that comeback, Ares quirked an uncomprehending brow at the identity of ‘she’ voiced with such venom. Alana kicked off the ridiculously high heels, snatched up a robe and, hugging it to her, vanished into the bathroom. The door slammed. The lock turned.

Ares breathed in slow and deep. Perhaps he should have mentioned that aversion sooner. Perhaps he should have kept quiet and faked pleasure even. He hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings. She was sensitive, very sensitive, and she had clearly made a singularly weird but commendable attempt to be sexy for him. It was not her fault that he hadn’t found it sexy. It was not her fault that he had frozen like a statue in the middle of their bedroom and found it too much of a challenge to even look at her. It was entirelyhisfault, because anormalguy would have been thrilled, turned on, delighted to discover a wife who made that much effort, particularly when she was pregnant and coping with all sorts of horrible side effects.

He knocked on the bathroom door. ‘Alana!’

‘Go away!’ she wailed. ‘I’m not speaking to you.’

‘I’m sorry—’

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