Faltering a little in five inch heels she moved down the wet pavement with agitated steps. Drizzle clung to her overheated skin as she blinked rapidly to clear her vision.
Justin’s words buzzed like relentless bees in her mind. Rick would be ashamed of her?
Trembling fingers pressed against her lips to prevent her screaming with the terrible agony she fought each and every day to keep at bay.
‘Becca?’
She closed her eyes as the deep voice with the hint of Spain spoke from a distance behind her.
God, no. No way could she cope with Lucas. Not now.
With a small cry in her throat, she picked up the pace desperately seeking a taxi.
Swift footsteps came closer and she went faster.
Panic gripped her lungs, thundered in her ears.
Those footsteps kept up and she started to run.
Damn her shoes.
She kicked them off, bent to retrieve them, gathered herself to race and strong fingers gripped her arm.
She whirled around, ready to use a shoe as a weapon, when a firm hand grabbed her wrist.
Desperate now with her head splitting, Becca strained against his iron grip.
‘Let me go,’ she panted desperately.
‘
Madre de Dios
. It is me, Lucas.’
She gazed up into the fabulous face that haunted her dreams.
He was too pale. She read concern, absolute fury and something else she couldn’t identify in those dark eyes. The world tipped sickly and her heart sounded too loud in her ears along with a roaring sound.
Everything went black.
A cloth, damp and cool was placed on Becca’s throbbing forehead.
She didn’t want to think or to feel. Where was the darkness? She wanted it back. She needed to embrace it again. A familiar masculine scent tickled her senses.
Her eyelids fluttered.
The cloth was turned to the cool side and placed on her forehead.
A voice sighed. ‘Becca?’
With a feeling of inevitability, Becca watched Lucas through her lashes. She told herself the heart-stopping face and those marvellous shoulders didn’t make her heart stumble.
‘Lucas.’ She attempted to sit but his hand pressing her shoulder held her down.
‘Stay there.’ The voice was cold now, the tone harsh and she was seriously annoyed that both brought a teary lump to her throat. ‘I’ve sent for a doctor.’
What?
Her eyes flew to his and she read a cool disdain and detachment in those dark eyes. Quite different to the relaxed sexy man she’d first met and she shivered.
‘There’s no need.’
‘You are unwell. You have lost weight. You are not leaving here until a doctor has seen you.’ The tone brooked no refusal and she didn’t have the energy to fight. And he was right she felt bloody awful.
She lay on a spacious bed under a sheet of white heavy cotton.
Her gaze wandered around the unfamiliar bedroom. Dimmed down-lights lit a couple of ruthlessly modern oil paintings in shades of vivid purples and orange. Tall, narrow windows were dressed in heavy silk curtains the colour of dark chocolate.
‘Where am I?’
Those sculpted lips almost smiled. ‘Not an original question. My house in a guest bedroom. In answer to the next obvious question, John drove us here.’
The sharp clip of annoyance in his tone brought a hot flush to her cheeks.
‘If you call a taxi I’ll get out of your hair. I ...’
His finger jab stopped her as did his furious face.
‘You are not going anywhere until you and I have had a talk ...’
The knock on the door brought a swift end to the discussion. She tried to assimilate why on earth he was so angry? What had she done? Was it because she’d been annoyed with him in her email and turned off her phone?
A blonde woman in her late forties, slim and attractive, entered the room.
‘Hello, Lucas.’
Lucas smiled and Becca’s breath caught in her throat.
How could she have forgotten how potent that smile was?
‘Becca, this is Dr. Marchford.’
An hour later, Becca decided she was living in a weird parallel universe.
The world she now inhabited couldn’t possibly be real. But it was. And now she’d need to account to Lucas for her actions. Explain to him why she hadn’t taken the morning after pill and why she was pregnant with his child. They’d forgotten to use protection once but as the doctor explained as if she was talking to a simpleton, once was more than enough.
She’d gone to the trouble to go to the chemist and taken the box home, sat on her couch with a glass of water and not taken the pill. Why? Deep down Becca knew exactly why. She’d played Russian roulette with her future and had lost. And now she must face the consequences.
According to the doctor her blood-pressure was dangerously high, which explained the continual underlying headache. Rest was prescribed which meant no work and she’d need to avoid stress. Oh, God.
Clutching the note with the number she was to ring for an appointment with a consultant obstetrician, despair washed over Becca. She couldn’t go into hospital again with the memories and the smell.
Closing her eyes, she curled up into the foetal position. Fat tears pooled and spilled from her eyes, seeping into the pillow.
Intellectually, Becca knew that painful, agonising emotions do not go away if you refuse to deal with them. They multiply, breed and eventually consume a person.
But grief is a trap.
It isolates a person leaving them vulnerable. Abrasive words and acts of unkindness were too difficult for her to accept or to cope with these days. And grief was a room with no doors or windows, with no way out. A person needed to deal with it or stay trapped in eternal despair.
They say there are five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
Becca needed to be honest with herself and admit she’d never moved on to acceptance. But pain, soul deep, battled every logical thought. Even now she refused to acknowledge all she’d lost. The dark anger that threatened to devour her roared into her psyche. Utter fury with God, with life, with fate, attempted now to consume her.
Where was the darkness?
She wanted the numbness, the feeling of floating above life and its petty issues. No Justin, no Lucas, no pregnancy - just nothingness.
She wanted it back.
Someone listened, because she dropped like a stone into sleep and into the black embrace of oblivion.
To a place where hell and horror reigned.
Becca glanced at the time on the kitchen clock, again.
Two hours late. Where was Rick? Probably got his nose stuck in some system glitch. Smiling, she dialled his cell phone. It rang repeatedly before going to voicemail.
The baby kicked and she rubbed loving fingers in big circles on her swollen belly.
Even the sprout was concerned. ‘We’re going to give your daddy a piece of our mind when he gets home,’ she told her daughter. Lily, they’d named her after her mother’s favourite flower.
Humming a tune to a routine she was working on, she turned down the oven.
Rick never managed to get anywhere on time. That was the trouble with being married to a nerd and technological wizard; you needed to think creatively when it came to meals.
The man, she decided, would be late for his own funeral.
The doorbell rang and she padded on bare feet down the hallway. He’d probably forgotten his keys, again. What was he like?
She opened the door and smiled. ‘Honestly, Rick, what are ...?’
Two policemen, a woman and a man, stood before her.
The policewoman stared at her belly and paled visibly as her young colleague took a shocked breath. The look in their eyes said more than words ever could.
Death.
When grief arrived, it arrived with a cunning stealth. There had been no blue lights or sirens when death took her husband. It had killed him with a single pop of a blood vessel in his clever brain. A massive stroke. Caught in Death’s dark embrace in two seconds and a single breath as he’d stood to come home.
Time seemed to stand still, everything was happening in slow motion for her now.
She spun to run but the sharp stinging pain stopped her. Fluid ran down her legs.
She couldn’t breathe.
Her heart broke into two pieces, she actually felt it happen.
And then the agony hit her.
She couldn’t catch a breath to scream as her belly went too hard too fast.
Chaos reigned in her world now, slashing and burning everything she held dear.
Her mind took pity on her, flew her to a place where she floated above reality, torment and a river of blood.
The flashing lights and relentless sirens came for her now.
A too loud voice told her to hold on.
But then the fragile wail of a life born too soon had her roar in agony like a tortured beast.
All she heard was the erratic too fast beat of her heart.
She smelt the metallic odour of her blood and the sound of her tormented cries for her mate and her baby sent her howling into Hell.
A mask was put over her face as the too loud voice told her to take deep breaths.
Becca plunged into darkness, down and down.
Someone was screaming in the distance.
The sound came closer, louder and louder.
‘Hush,
querida
.’
Strong familiar arms held her, rocking her.
In her ear a deep voice muttered soothing sounds, words, in Spanish.
The trembling wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t stop it. Her teeth chattered. Cold sweat and nausea swept over her in wave after wave, leaving her clammy and disoriented.
‘It is not real, it is a dream.’ Pale, Lucas searched her face as he laid her down on the damp pillow, his dark eyes filled to the brim with anxiety. ‘I am calling the doctor.’
He reached for the phone and Becca’s trembling fingers touched his arm.
‘No, I’m okay now. I get nightmares when I’m upset, please don’t.’
She couldn’t bear talking to well meaning strangers.
Her heart rate calmed at last and she sat, pulling the sheet under her arms.
Lucas perched on the edge of the bed his dark eyes narrowing on her face.
‘We need to talk.’ He didn’t touch her and for that she’d be forever grateful. ‘You are pregnant?’
He looked as if he’d been hit by a truck and who could blame him?
How the hell hadn’t she known? But she didn’t have any of the signs she’d had before. Her periods were always irregular, especially over the past couple of years because she’d never quite got over the need to keep too close an eye on her weight after studying ballet.
With a shudder, she nodded and inhaled. ‘Six weeks.’
Those dark velvet eyes never left hers. ‘The child is mine.’ It was a statement of fact rather than a question.
She fought the hysterical need to scream
‘Of course it’s yours!’
With nerveless fingers she plucked at the sheet and cleared her throat.
‘Yes, it’s yours.’
She couldn’t read his eyes as he studied her face but his jaw tensed.
‘What are you going to do about it?’
Ice gripped her heart. He didn’t want the child? Her throat closed as she struggled with a maternal instinct so powerful it sliced through grief like a hot knife through butter.
She tried to read the expression in those dark eyes and failed.
The most important thing, Becca realised with an alarming clarity of thought that had been absent from her mind for far too long, was to get away from him.
She needed space and time to think.
‘I won’t have an abortion.’
Emotions whirled in his eyes and she couldn’t decipher them. He didn’t remind her that she was the one who said there was no way she wanted a baby.
Shame that she could play with a new life, even consider bringing one into the world when she was a psychological mess and not in a stable relationship hit her hard. But this was a precious gift and no matter how she’d come to receive it she would do everything within her power to keep it.
Lucas gave a single nod of his dark head.
‘Very well. But I will have an active part in the life of my child.’
Stunned, Becca simply stared at him.
One minute he’s asking her if she wanted an abortion and the next he wanted to be a part of the child’s life.
She shook her head, pressing shaky fingers into her eyelids. Why was he being so utterly cold to her?
But she lifted her chin and looked him dead in the eye.
The pulse hammering in her throat made it difficult to speak.
‘I’m going home.’
He shook his head and spoke slowly,
‘Not unless you have someone there to look after you. Is there?’
She thought of phoning Justin, but knew she couldn’t face him this evening.
There was her mother, but she was in the South of France. And how could she bring more heartache to her door?
Becca moved to get up and immediately wished she’d worn something less revealing. The fitted sheath made her feel too vulnerable under the intense scrutiny of those dark eyes.
‘No, but I can’t stay here.’
His gaze sharpened. ‘Why not?’
The tone made her eyes wide. Her mouth felt suddenly dry. She was so self-obsessed she’d forgotten about his feelings, his shock.
‘I’m so sorry about this, Lucas.’
He stood and thrust a hand through his hair, around the back of his neck as he paced to the window and back.
Those dark eyes stared at her now with such intensity she felt breathless.
‘I am assuming you did not take the morning after pill?’ At the shake of her head he ran the tip of his tongue over his teeth. ‘Care to tell me why not and why the hell you did not tell me?’
She cringed at the cold harsh tone.
Becca wasn’t ready to talk about what had happened to her and she wondered if she ever would be.