LITMIR.BIZ

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turned out Ben had only been engaged for five minutes before he’d got cold feet and dumped the poor woman. Commitment phobic, the gorgeous ex-model had explained, but the real breaking point, she had confided, had been his refusal to have a family.

      You had to admire the woman. She’d have been perfectly justified, in Lily’s opinion, if she’d chosen to stick the knife in. But instead she’d displayed a really healthy attitude focusing on the future, her career change and plugging her new cookery book that was to hit the shelves soon.

      That had sealed the deal for Lily. She’d known then that she couldn’t tell him.

      ‘But I knew how you’d react,’ she continued.

      He arched a sardonic brow and ground his teeth in reaction to this claim of psychic abilities. ‘And how is that?’

      Lily studied his face, her heart clenched in her chest. Even mad, he was beautiful. She spread her hands in an expressive gesture. ‘Pretty much like this.’

      Before she had become pregnant Lily had never asked herself if she wanted to be a mother. Unlike Ben, who it turned out had decided never to be a father. A man who broke off an engagement because having children was a deal breaker was not going to be happy to learn he was about to be a dad by a one-night stand.

      ‘So how did you find out?’

      ‘How did I find out?’ He shook his head and looked at her as though she were insane. ‘I saw her, I saw me...’ he ground out, shaking his dark head in an incredulous motion from side to side. ‘Your mother doesn’t know?’

      She swallowed, thinking of all the occasions when she had been tempted to confide in someone, wishing she could.

      ‘Not Mum, not... You can relax, I didn’t tell anyone.’ Not even her twin actually. Especially not her married twin, who was desperate to get pregnant and not having any luck. Having always been able to confide in Lara, Lily found it hard to deal with this new reality. She just hoped that the wall that had built up between them would be removed when Lara finally got pregnant.

       ‘Relax!’

      Lily could feel the anger rolling off him in waves. She struggled to show she was not intimidated by it, but it was not easy when it was buffeting her like a storm-force wind. She bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself physically retreating from his anger, focusing on the metallic taste of blood on her tongue.

      ‘No one else needs to know, nothing needs to change,’ she assured him earnestly.

      Lily could hear his white teeth grind as he closed his eyes and muttered under his breath. He opened them again and she staggered from the contemptuous blast of his deep blue eyes. ‘It already has changed.’

      She opened her mouth to contradict him and her glance connected with his relentless stare. Lily was the first to look away.

      ‘How the hell is it possible for your mother—for everyone—not to see?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. On this one point they were on the same page. ‘It’s always seemed obvious to me but no one else seemed to notice. So I thought why—’

      ‘Bother?’ He cut across her, his voice a furious growl. ‘I am a father!’

      ‘Biologically.’ She lowered her lashes to hide the hurt and sadness that surfaced when she thought of her little girl, who deserved a father who loved her.

      Ben flicked her a look of incredulous scorn and lashed back accusingly, ‘You don’t think a child needs a father?’

      Lily almost laughed, but she felt suddenly like crying. ‘It depends on the father.’ Better her baby had no father, than one who didn’t want her.

      Lily knew that her own dad had loved her and her twin, but the argument she had overheard the night before he’d died still haunted her. Looking back with adult eyes, she was able to see it for what it had been—a couple with money problems fighting, saying things they didn’t mean. But she still remembered how it had felt when her dad had yelled, Why do you think we’ve got no money? You’re the one who wanted to keep them.

      Lily shook herself free from her silent depressing reverie. At her sides her hands clenched. No. She would protect her baby from ever feeling unwanted.

      Just the baby?

      Hadn’t there been the smallest hint of self-preservation in her decision? Having Ben in her life, a constant reminder of her romantic self-delusion, would not have been easy to deal with.

      It would have been agony. Just looking at him, she thought it was! She was no longer naïve enough to call it love, but the primal reaction she had to him was not something she could control, even if it was just sex.

      * * *

      The quiet rebuttal caused Ben to draw a breath. His smouldering gaze dropped, his lashes brushing the slashing angle of his cheek that hid the flicker of uncertainty in his blue eyes. He wondered, wasn’t she right?

      His own father had been marginally more involved in his life than his mother, not because of any genuine fatherly feelings but only in the sense that he’d cared more about appearances.

       Would he be any better?

      Self-doubt was not something that kept Ben awake at night. He’d made his share of bad decisions. The secret was being prepared to take responsibility and live with the consequences of those flawed decisions, even life-changing ones.

      But this hadn’t been his decision.

      But it had happened, so deal with it, Ben!

      ‘So you decided to take me out of the equation.’ Just saying it out loud made his anger spike hotly. That it was an equation he had never wanted to be part of did not lessen his sense of outrage or his determination to do the right thing, for his daughter.

      ‘I didn’t think of it quite in those terms, but yes...if you like.’

      ‘And you were only thinking of Emily Rose?’

      The underlying mockery in his voice brought her rounded chin up. ‘It’s my job.’

      ‘And you decided that her life would be better without me in it...?’

      * * *

      Not fooled by his light conversational tone, Lily didn’t react. She stood there watching him warily, determined not to let him see that his comment had slipped under her defences.

      ‘What about what she wants?’

      She angled an uneasy look up at his lean face. ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘A child shouldn’t grow up feeling unloved or unwanted.’

      ‘She isn’t!’ Lily shot back, furious at the suggestion.

      ‘You were happy to let her think her father doesn’t love or want her. Did you pause when you were making your unilateral decision to think how she might feel a few years down the line thinking that her father had rejected her? How that might affect her emotional development, her future relationships? You’re willing to deprive her of what you had...what you took for granted... Well, I’m not.’

      The statement had more impact because Ben clearly wasn’t canvassing for the sympathy vote; he was simply stating a fact. Despite this, or maybe because of it, Lily felt her own tender heart soften. A child herself at the time, it had never occurred to her to wonder why Ben had come to live with his grandfather. That he had been unwanted had not even crossed her mind.

      ‘I’m going to make damned sure that my daughter isn’t going to grow up thinking she’s to blame. She’ll have what every kid deserves. What I—’

      Didn’t have, Lily completed silently as he paused for breath. She trawled her memory trying to think of a single occasion when she had seen Ben’s parents

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