Over the next two weeks, however, Kathy grew steadily more exhausted. Tigger died in his sleep without fuss or fanfare and she was inconsolable at the loss of her elderly pet. While she fretted about the future and grieved for her cat, her morning sickness spread to other times of day and she began lying awake at night worrying. Being pregnant and ill was more of a struggle than she had expected and she had to cut back on her hours at the café. Aware that Kathy was already struggling to pay her bills, Bridget offered Kathy her spare room, but Kathy was determined not to take advantage of their friendship.
Kathy would have vehemently protested any suggestion that she was waiting for Sergio to make another move. But when she discovered that Sergio was fully engaged in making moves that had nothing to do with her whatsoever, she had a rather rude awakening to reality. Travelling into work on the bus, she caught an infuriating flash of Sergio’s face on a newspaper page. She wasn’t close enough to see what the article was about and, while she told herself that she shouldn’t care, she was only human. As soon as she got off the bus she bought the tabloid and paid the price for her curiosity.
Sergio, she learned, was the owner of a giant yacht called Diva Queen and he had thrown a stag party on board for his friend, Leonidas Pallis, the Greek billionaire. An exotic dancer talked of a ‘non-stop orgy on the high seas.’ Kathy studied the grainy photo of Sergio, shirt hanging open, engaging in dirty dancing with a pneumatic semi-naked blonde. Even drunk and carousing he still looked gorgeous and she swallowed hard. He really did like blondes, she thought dully. He also looked as if he was having fun. No doubt it beat the hell out of chess.
This was not a guy any woman would choose to have an unplanned baby with, Kathy acknowledged heavily. Yet, how could she fault him when he had already accepted responsibility and was ready to help her financially? At no stage had he told her how he actually felt about the prospect of becoming a father and now she realised that he didn’t need to tell her when his behaviour spoke so clearly for him. He was trying to ship her off to France to live under an assumed name where their paths would only cross at his instigation. And Sergio’s riotous partying was making headlines round the world, while prompting an anonymous source to admit surprise at the sheer scale of his recent bad-boy activities.
Kathy believed that Sergio was reacting to the situation he had found himself in. He didn’t want to be a father and he was even less happy that the mother of his child was a convicted thief. Those were the unlovely facts and it was time she learned to live with them and matched his independence. A good first move would be sorting out her immediate future on her own, for at this stage of her pregnancy there was no need for Sergio to be involved. In any case, a cooling-off period would probably do them both the world of good, she reflected painfully. She needed time and space to make her mind up about what she wanted to do after the baby was born. Hanging around in the hope that Sergio Torrente would somehow provide an answer for all her doubts and fears was a sure path to disappointment.
That evening she ate with Bridget at her apartment and outlined her intentions. ‘I’ll have to leave London. If I stop working at the café I won’t be able to make my rent,’ she confided ruefully. ‘And I don’t want to depend on Sergio for help.’
‘Why not?’
Kathy dug into her tote bag and passed the newspaper across the table.
Bridget perused the article, raised her brows and set it aside without comment. ‘If you don’t mind kids and cooking, you can go to my god-daughter in Devon,’ she said abruptly.
‘Your god-daughter?’ Kathy repeated with a frown. ‘The estate agent?’
‘Nola’s energetic and practical just like you. You’ll like each other. Her husband’s a journalist and hardly ever at home. She’s heavily pregnant with her fourth child and desperate for help,’ the other woman said. ‘Her nanny got married, and in the past two months two au pairs have come and gone. The first was so homesick she couldn’t stop crying and the second quit because the house was too far out of town. What do you think?’
‘I’ll consider any option,’ Kathy answered. ‘There’s nothing to keep me here.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
KATHY had just walked into the estate agency where Nola worked when the first pain hit.
With a muffled gasp, she clutched the edge of a desk to steady herself. The fear that engulfed her was much worse than the slight cramping sensation that gripped her lower abdomen.
‘What’s wrong?’ Nola demanded, breaking off her conversation with another employee.