Claiming His Pregnant Princess. Annie O'Neil
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obvious?”
“Mmm, ’fraid so.” Beatrice looked out toward the square as she spoke. “It would be a glass of Gavi di Gavi if you were finished, wouldn’t it? If...” She hesitated. “If memory serves me right.”
He nodded. Surprised she’d remembered such a silly detail. Then again, there wasn’t a single detail he’d forgotten about her. Maybe...
He rammed his knuckles into his thigh.
Maybe was for other people. He was all about sure things. And Beatrice wasn’t one of them.
Jamie scrubbed a hand along his chin, then scraped his chair around on the stone cobbles until he faced her head-on.
“What are you doing here, Beatrice?”
“Well, that’s a nice way to—” She stopped herself and lifted a hand so that he would give her a moment to think. Say what she really meant to.
Despite himself, he smiled. She’d always been that way. A thinker. Just like him. The more they’d learned about each other, the stronger the pull had been. Interns hadn’t been meant to date residents—but try telling that to two people drawn to each other as magnetically as iron and nitrogen. Weighted and weightless. He’d felt both of those things when he’d been with her. Secure in himself as he’d never been before, and so damn happy he would have sworn his feet hadn’t touched the ground after the first time he’d tasted those raspberry-ripe lips of hers.
“You have read the papers lately, haven’t you?” Beatrice asked eventually.
“I have a hunch that world peace is a long way off, so I tend to steer clear of them.” Jamie leant forward in his chair, elbows pressed to his knees. “C’mon, Beatrice. Quit throwing questions back at me. Why are you in Torpisi?”
She shook her head in disbelief. “You are the one person in the world I wish had read the tabloids and you haven’t!” She threw her hands up in the air and gave a small isn’t-the-world-ridiculous? laugh.
When their eyes met again there was kindness in hers. A tenderness reserved just for him that he might have lived on in a different time and place.
“I never got married.”
She took another sip of her soft drink and looked away as casually as if she’d just told him the time. Or perhaps it was guilt that wouldn’t let her meet his eye.
Jamie blinked a few times, his body utterly stationary, doing its best to ingest the news.
Despite his best efforts to remain neutral, something hardened in him. “Is this some sort of joke?”
She shook her head, seemingly confused about the question.
“Why did you do it?”
“Do what?” It was her turn to look bewildered.
“Oh, well...let’s see, here, love. Quite a few things, now that I come to think of it.”
He spread out his fingers and started ticking them off, his tone level, though his message was heated.
“Up and leave me for a man you didn’t love. Ruin the future we’d planned together. All that to never even see it through?”
He pulled his fingers into tight fists and gave his thighs a quick drumming.
“Is this some sort of cruel game you’re playing, Beatrice?”
He pushed back in his chair and rose, no longer sure he could even look her in the eye.
“If you’re here to rub it in and make sure you made your impact, you can count me out.”
* * *
“Jamie! Wait!”
Bea’s voice sounded harsh to her own ears. As quickly as she’d reached out to stop Jamie from leaving she wished she’d rescinded the invitation, tightly wrapping her arms around herself to brace herself against the shards of ice coursing through her veins.
She’d betrayed too much by calling out to him. Jamie would know better than anyone that there had been pain in her voice. The ache of loss. But what was she going to do? Explain what a fool she’d been? That she’d gone and got herself pregnant at an IVF clinic in advance of her wedding so her family, the press and the whole of Italy could coo and smile over the Prince and the Principessa’s “honeymoon baby”?
She was the only one in the world who knew that her fiancé—her ex-fiancé—was infertile, apart from a doctor whose silence had been bought. She was surprised he’d even told her. Perhaps their family get-togethers had begun to rely a bit too heavily on talk of children running around the palazzo, in order to cover up the obvious fact that neither of them were very much in love.
Their one joint decision: an IVF baby. Keeping it as quiet as possible. A private clinic. More paid-off doctors and nurses. An anonymous donor.
The less anyone knew, the easier it had been to go ahead with it.
Her sole investment in a relationship she had known would never claim her heart. A child... A child who had been meant to bring some light into her life.
Now it just filled her with fear. Confirmation that she’d been a fool to agree to the plan. She no longer had the support of her family and, worse, she would be a single mother in a world where it was already tough enough to survive on her own.
It hadn’t felt that way when she’d been with Jamie. With him she’d felt...invincible.
Relief washed through her when Jamie sat down again, pressing his hips deeper into the chair, his back ramrod straight as he drained his water glass in one fluid draught before deigning to look her in the eye.
“I’m in trouble, Jamie.”
As quickly as he’d tried to leave, Jamie pulled his chair up close, knees wide so they flanked hers, fingers spread as he cupped her face in both his broad hands, searching her eyes for information.
“Are you hurt? Did he hurt you?”
No, but I hurt you.
He used an index finger to swipe at a couple of errant locks of hair so his access to her eyes was unfettered. Against his better judgment—she could see that in his eyes—he traced his finger along the contour of her jawline, coming to a halt, as he had so many times before, before gently cradling the length of her neck as if he were about to lean in and kiss her.
It was like rediscovering her senses all over again. As if part of her had died the day she’d told him she was returning home to marry another man.
She blinked away the rising swell of tears.
Part of her had died that day. The part that believed in love conquering all. The part that believed in destiny.
“Beatrice,” Jamie pressed. “Did he hurt you?”
I was a fool to have left you.
She shook her head, instantly feeling the loss of his touch when he dropped his hands, sat back in his chair and rammed them into his front pockets, as if trying to hide the fact that his long surgeon’s fingers were balled into tight fists. For the second time in as many minutes. Twice as many times as she’d ever seen him make the gesture before.
He’d aged in the years since she’d seen him last. Nothing severe, as if he’d been sick or a decade had passed, but he had changed. His was a proper grown-up male face now, instead of holding the hints of youth she had sometimes seen at the hospital, when he’d caught her looking at him and smiled.
It felt like a million years ago. Hard to believe it was just two short years since he’d been thirty-three and she twenty-eight.
“Just a young lass, you are,” he would say, and laugh whenever she whined about feeling old after a long shift. “Perfect for me,” he’d say, before dropping a surreptitious kiss on her forehead in one of the busy hospital corridors. They’d been little moments