Her Pregnancy Surprise. Barbara McMahon

she could hardly breathe.

      ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be putting the pounds on again soon,’ she said, fixing her eyes firmly on her hands clasped neatly in her lap.

      There was a silence, which got longer until, frustrated to the point of screaming, Megan lifted her gaze to his.

      ‘You were supposed to ask why!’

      ‘Why what?’

      ‘Why will I be putting on weight…?’ she prompted.

      A flicker of amusement momentarily lightened the wariness in his eyes. ‘Why will you be putting on weight, Megan?’ he asked obligingly.

      ‘I will be putting on weight because that’s what people do when they’re pregnant, which I am…pregnant, that is.’

      There, it was out! She ought to be feeling a sense of release, but what she was actually feeling was sick…very sick. She pressed a hand to her mouth and waited, her eyes half closed, for the waves of nausea to pass.

      When the imminent danger of throwing up had passed, she swallowed and opened her anxious eyes. Luc hadn’t moved a muscle since she had blurted out her news. She gave a frustrated sigh. Whatever he was feeling, she wasn’t going to see it here—a granite rock face would have been easier to read than those strong symmetrical contours. It was actually his total lack of response, his eerie stillness, that revealed he had even heard what she had said.

      ‘With your baby…obviously.’ She coloured. Maybe it wasn’t obvious at all to him?

      It was possible that he thought she acted with equal wanton abandon with every man that took her fancy…

      On the brink of making a disastrous confession, Megan bit her tongue. Luc didn’t need to hear how special he was, and the fact that she had never felt that way with any other man was something that ought to be kept on a need-to-know basis, and he definitely didn’t need to know!

      ‘Don’t worry, I’m not here to make a scene,’ she told him, gruffly earnest. ‘I just thought that you had the right to know. And,’ she added, ‘it’s not the sort of thing that’s easy to say in a letter. Actually it’s not the sort of thing that’s easy to say full stop,’ she added in a dry undertone. Belatedly she realised this comment might have come over as a little light on empathy. ‘Or hear,’ she tacked on generously.

      Luc’s vibrant complexion had acquired a grey tinge as he lost the last shred of his habitual cool. She’d been prepared for shaken, but Megan got seriously alarmed when he suddenly buried his face in his hands. His classical profile was hidden from her view, but she could hear the laboured sound of his breathing from where she was sitting.

      After a few moments his head lifted and she was relieved to see his colour was improved. ‘A baby…?’

      She nodded, sympathetic to his traumatised condition.

      He shook his head from side to side in the hope the action might kick-start his numb brain.

      ‘So you weren’t taking the pill…?’ He saw the pain flare in her eyes and thought, Good move Luc, let her think you’re blaming her, you insensitive bastard.

      ‘I’m afraid I didn’t think…I should…’

      ‘Neither of us thought, Megan.’ His expressionless voice cut into her disjointed stream of self-recriminations.

      Megan lapsed into unhappy silence. Through the mesh of her lashes she watched his chest lift as he sucked in a deep breath.

      ‘I’m sorry, you must be—’

      ‘I’m not asking for anything from you,’ she interrupted quickly. She saw some emotion, indefinable but strong, flare briefly in his eyes before she ploughed heavily on. ‘I appreciate this is my responsibility. Of course, if you want to have some input, that is fine.’