Page 6 of 2 Books in One Bundle

‘Even so,’ she said, slicing open the netted bag and pouring its contents into the colander, ‘you’d think that a text saying,I’M PREGNANT, CALL ME!—in caps—might have generatedsomesort of response. I mean, as messages go, it’s not exactly ambiguous.’

‘Perhaps he really is as heartless as his reputation suggests.’

Physically he wasn’t, of course. Many times that night Mia had felt it thundering beneath her palm as they hurtled again and again into blissful oblivion.

His morning-after etiquette, however, left a lot to be desired, she reflected as she switched on the tap and swirled the colander around beneath it.

Not that she was still smarting over the way he’d disappeared or anything. Well aware of his reputation, she hadn’t expected him to linger over breakfast and then suggest a romantic walk in the park. A ‘thanks for a fun time’ and a goodbye might have been nice, but she’d never had a one-night stand before—it had never struck her as the best way of achieving the commitment she was after—so who knew? Presumably, rendering women boneless with pleasure and then sneakily creeping from their bed while they recovered was his modus operandi.

‘I accept that he may have forgotten me,’ she said, wincing at the unflattering thought, made worse by the fact that, despite her every effort, she had not forgotten him. ‘But even a “who is this?” would be better than complete radio silence.’

‘Could he have blocked you?’

‘How would I know?’

‘Try my phone.’

Mia put down the mussels and switched off the tap, then took the device Hattie was holding out. She entered the number that was now etched into her memory, hit the button to dial it and braced herself for the impact of Zander’s deep, spine-tingling voice pouring into her ear. But, as she’d expected, it rang a couple of times and went to an automated voicemail, and there didn’t seem much point in leaving yet another message.

‘This doesn’t work either,’ she said, handing the phone back with a tut of irritation.

‘So what will you do next?’

It was an excellent question, and right now Mia was all out of answers. She was weak from having thrown up for seven mornings in a row. She was still in shock from discovering two days ago that she was pregnant and not, as she’d initially wondered, suffering from either a bug or food poisoning. Hattie, to whom she’d had to confess almost everything after gagging violently at the sight of some undressed squid, was doing her best to be helpful, but her failure to contact the father of her baby was only adding to her stress, and she was exhausted.

‘Quite honestly, I’d like to go and lie down in a dark room and stay there for a month,’ she said, heaving the colander out of the sink and setting it on the side.

‘You can’t,’ said Hattie, aghast.

‘I know.’

However tempting, running away and hiding wasn’t an option. Not only did she not do that any more, but also Christmas was Halliday Catering’s busiest time of the year. Bookings were pretty much back to back for the next five weeks, and she would not let anyone down.

Nor would she give up on Zander until she’d turned over every stone in her efforts to speak to him. He had the right to know she was pregnant with his child. How involved he wanted to be, if at all, was his choice to make and she would not deprive him of that.

She’d never known her own father. She too was the product of a one-night stand, the irony of which did not escape her. But at least she knew the father ofherbaby’s name. Her mother had not. In fact, her mother had known very little about the stranger she’d met in a nightclub thirty-one years ago, which had made tracking him down to inform him of his impending fatherhood impossible.

Growing up, Mia had felt his absence keenly. No amount of daydreaming about who and where he might be and what he might be doing had filled the yawning gap inside her. Reason and fortitude had been no match for the rejection and the longing she’d experienced.

If her father had been around when her mother had fallen ill with dementia, she might have had an easier time of it. She might have felt less shamefully resentful and angry at the situation that was no one’s fault. As she’d matured, she’d come to terms with living with the empty space that her father should have occupied but she would never willingly or deliberately foist that aching sense of loss and abandonment on any child of hers.

And then there was the paralysing fear that if something happened to her, her child would be left on its own, with no one to care for them and no one to rely on. Tests had shown that she didn’t carry the gene that had caused her mother’s illness, so her risk of young-onset dementia was no greater than anyone else’s, but plenty of other things could befall her. She could be run over by a bus or get sick with some other disease, and in the event of her untimely demise there was no one else. Apart from Zander.

‘So?’

Pulling herself together and returning to the present, Mia snapped on a pair of latex gloves. ‘I’m going to have to carry on looking for him until I find him.’

‘How are you going to do that?’

Wasn’t that the million-dollar question? ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

Alone in the boardroom after a three-hour meeting to which he’d paid unusually scant attention, Zander surged to his feet and snatched his coat off a peg. The glass walls were closing in on him. His chest was tight and his head pounded. He needed to move. He needed some air.

The restlessness that had set in over the last month was getting worse, he thought grimly as he strode to the lift and jabbed at the button. The niggling sense of dissatisfaction and the strange ennui, which he just couldn’t seem to shake, no matter how busy he kept himself both professionally and socially, were becoming increasingly intolerable.

Maybe he was burning out.

Or perhaps turning thirty-five had triggered a mid-life crisis.

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