Christmas-Eve Baby Read Online Free PDF

child. ‘I don’t know. I would hope not, but I don’t know anything about your private life. Not any more,’ he added with a tinge of regret.
    ‘Well, you should know enough about me to know that isn’t the way I do things.’
    ‘So how do you do things, Lucy?’ he asked, trying to stopthe anger from creeping into his voice. ‘Like your father? You don’t like it, so you just pretend it hasn’t happened?’
    ‘And what was I supposed to do?’ she asked, her eyes flashing sparks again. ‘We weren’t seeing each other. We’d agreed.’
    ‘But this, surely, changes things? Or should have. Unless you just weren’t going to tell me? It must have made it simpler for you.’
    She turned away again, but not before he saw her eyes fill, and guilt gnawed at him. ‘Simpler?’ she said. ‘That’s not how I’d describe it.’
    ‘So why not tell me, then?’ he said, his voice softening. ‘Why, in all these months, didn’t you tell me that I’m going to be a father?’
    ‘I was going to,’ she said, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘But after everything—I didn’t know how to. It’s just all so difficult…’
    ‘But it is mine.’
    She nodded, her hair falling over her face and obscuring it from him. ‘Yes. Yes, it’s yours.’
    His heart soared, and for a ridiculous moment he felt like punching the air, but then he pulled himself together. Plenty of time for that later, once he’d got all the facts. Down to the nitty-gritty, he thought, and asked the question that came to the top of the heap.
    ‘Does your father know it’s mine?’
    She shook her head, and he winced. ‘So—when’s it due?’
    ‘The end of January.’
    ‘So you’re—’
    ‘Thirty weeks. And two days.’
    He nodded. That made sense, but there was another question that needed answering. ‘You told me you were on the Pill.’
    She bent her head. ‘I was, but because it was only to regulate my periods I probably hadn’t been as punctual all the time as I should have been. I used to take it in the morning, but I didn’t remember till the Tuesday, by then it was too late.’ Because she’d been crying since the moment she’d closed her front door behind her on Sunday morning and retreated into the sanctuary of her little home, wearing his shirt day and night until she’d had to take it off to shower and dress to come to work after the bank holiday, and then she’d found the pills…
    ‘So why not take the morning-after pill just to be safe?’
    Why not, indeed? She shook her head. ‘I didn’t have any, and by the time I was able to get them from the pharmacy it would have been too late. And anyway, I thought I was safe,’ she told him, and wondered, as she’d wondered over and over again, if there’d been a little bit of her that had secretly wanted to have his baby. And when her periods had continued for the next two months, she’d put it out of her mind.
    Not for long, though. Eventually it had dawned on her that things were different, that the lighter-than-usual periods had been due to the hormones, and she’d kept it a secret as long as she could. Eventually, though, the changes to her body had become obvious, and her father had been shocked and then bossily supportive.
    And he hadn’t asked about the father, not once she’d told him that he was out of her life for good and she didn’t want to think about him any more. Not that she had wanted Ben out of her life, but he was, to her sorrow and regret, and she didn’t want to think about him any more. She’d been sick of crying herself to sleep, missing him endlessly, wishing hecould be with her and share this amazing and fantastic thing that was happening to her body.
    Her stomach rumbled, and she gave the biscuits a disinterested glance. OK, she could eat them, but she really, really wanted something healthy, and if Dragan was held up…
    ‘Have you had lunch?’ she said suddenly.
    ‘ Lunch? ’ he said, his tone disbelieving. ‘No. I got held up