November Harlequin Presents 1(39)

But now? Everything in his manner warned her there was more to this than met the eye. When was Nico ever so strung out, unless he was waiting for sex? Though she sensed something very different was driving him now.

‘Please disregard the mess left behind by a previous tenant…’

He was trying to make a joke of it, but even he couldn’t force humour into this situation. Noticing the jumble of unused articles stacked against the wall for the first time, Carrie realised that she had only seen the potential for an artist’s studio when she had walked in. Nico was right about the room being perfect for that. The views stretched for miles around, and space and light like this were everything she had ever dreamed of. But he knew it, and was using it as a lever.

A lever for what? To make her his official mistress, perhaps? Madam Carrie Pompadour of Niroli? Carrie tried to smile, but, like Nico, she was a million miles away.

As Nico stood watching her Carrie knew he was waiting for her to say something. What could she say? He was everything she had ever wanted; she didn’t need anything else. Her honest response to this clumsy gift was a heavy, leaden feeling in her heart. It wasn’t enough, and if it had been it had come far too late.

‘What do you think?’ he prompted.

‘I’m not sure what I’m supposed to think. What are you offering, Nico? A studio I can visit from time to time?’ Carrie shook her head sadly. ‘What?’

Nico’s eyes narrowed with affront, shattering her heart in a million little pieces. He wasn’t used to his gifts being rejected, and he’d had little time to organise this ‘gift,’ making it all the more valuable in his eyes. Perhaps if there had been more time he would have found an easel, palette and paints…a larger bribe. But a bribe for what? To accomplish what? For her to be in his bed when he wanted her? Had he even registered what she had told him about the baby?

‘I’ve ordered oil paints for you…’

The fact that he had read her so well only filled Carrie with more dread. Nico was always one step ahead of her. When she returned home she had planned to rent a small place, and had envisioned a north-facing room just like this one where she would paint in great swathes of colour…She was determined that her child would inhabit a brightly coloured world, not a dull grey world without the chance of a dream coming true.

She couldn’t afford to waste another moment of her time on pointless quests, Carrie realised. Hugging her stomach protectively, she took one last look around.

Her simple gesture caught him by surprise. Always, she thought first of the child, and only then herself. He found himself overwhelmed by emotion, so many of them, and all of them new to him…He felt wonder and tenderness and excitement, along with a deeply primitive urge to share the remaining months of Carrie’s pregnancy with her and then to raise their child and have the baby live beneath his protection. She couldn’t take that from him, he wouldn’t let her. ‘This is for you,’ he stressed impatiently when she didn’t turn to him right away. ‘I did it for you,’ he said again, waiting for her to enthuse. ‘I just want you to be happy.’

‘Happy…’

‘You’re going to be a mother soon.’

Carrie’s heart soared. So he had accepted that, at least.

‘And it is my child?’ His brows furrowed.

‘You must know it is…’ Her confidence faltered as she looked at him. ‘Nico, there’s something you aren’t telling me, isn’t there?’

‘Maybe,’ he admitted.

‘So what is it?’ She felt fear in the silence that stretched before he spoke.

‘After an illness I suffered as a boy the doctors told me I would always be infertile.’

Carrie’s eyes widened in amazement. It was Nico’s turn to be speaking too loud and too fast, but she now understood so much about him. ‘And now?’ she said gently.

‘Now I know I’m not.’

‘How?’ she asked, her compassion for him blinding her to the obvious.

‘A test.’

He was holding on to her gaze like a life raft, and then he grew guarded again, as if he expected her to find fault with him now.

But that was so far from her thinking it didn’t even register on the scale. Recognising his Achilles heel, she reached out to him. ‘Oh, Nico…’ Taking his work-roughened hands in hers, Carrie brought them to her face and laid her cheek against them.





CHAPTER ELEVEN




THE MOMENT Carrie softened towards him Nico rejoiced. ‘You could be carrying my baby…’As he said the words he barely knew how to contain his joy. The test had changed his whole outlook on the world…on Carrie, on him, on everything.