Page 20 of His Best Mistake

“As far as I’m aware cold’s never been a threat to pregnancy. Liver and blue cheese maybe, sub-zero temperatures, no.”

“You can’t be too careful.”

“Well, thank you anyway,” she said, pulling the coat a little more tightly around her and telling herself to get a grip because, really, it was only a coat – albeit a lovely soft cashmere one – and she should not be going gooey inside just because he’d given it to her.

He did up the button of his suit jacket and sat down next to her. “I’m the one who should be thanking you for agreeing to wait. I apologise for being so abrupt earlier. You took me by surprise.”

“I know,” she said, softening a fraction despite herself.

“I didn’t handle it well. Although that doesn’t seem to be anything new when it comes to you.”

“I’ve had a few days to process the information and you’ve had, what, half an hour?”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“Y

es.”

“Is everything all right?”

“So far so good.”

He shot her a tight smile. “Well, like I said, thank you for waiting.”

“I’m not working today,” she said, focusing on the tea, the information boards, anything other than him, because if she didn’t she might well find herself helplessly inching towards him like an iron filing in the field of a magnet and she did not want to have to explain that away. “I had the time.”

“Have you been working a lot?”

“Enough to keep me busy.”

“Not getting too tired?”

She was permanently exhausted but she could hardly sit around with her feet up. She was self-employed and had a mortgage to pay. “I can manage.”

“Can you?”

“Of course.” Did he really think she couldn’t? OK, so she knew she looked a wreck and the nausea was inconvenient but she was keeping it together. And if he did think that then what else might he think? Only one way to find out. She took a deep, steadying breath in the hope that her yo-yoing emotions would settle. “So I imagine you want to talk about the pregnancy.”

“I do.”

“I can’t think how it happened,” she said, frowning. “I mean, we were so careful, and condoms are supposed to be pretty infallible.”

“The first one, my one, may have been out of date,” he said, his default scowl back in place.

Stella stared at him. “Really?”

“It’s possible.”

How? She’d have thought looking like he did and just being him he’d have got through them on a pretty regular basis. Even hers, the ones they’d subsequently used, had been relatively new. But she could hardly interrogate him about his sex life, could she? It would be way too personal. “I guess anything’s possible,” she said instead.

“It’s the result we have to deal with.”

She looked at him properly then, his words registering, and her heart beginning to thump, with…what? Relief? Hope? Excitement? No. That was all madness.

“We?” she echoed, determinedly locking down all the surging emotion because how they were going to ‘deal with the result’ was still unclear.

“Yes, we,” he said with a decisive nod. “You said I could be involved as much or as little as I wanted, didn’t you?”

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