Bound By Their Nine-Month Scandal

But it was impossible. Her cycle had arrived the day after the masquerade ball. That ought to mean she wasn’t pregnant. However, she realized with another roll of her tender stomach, she hadn’t had a period since.

She couldn’t be pregnant. Couldn’t. Her mother’s top tier, preferred choice for Pia’s husband was in the dining room right now.

Think, she commanded her rattled brain, but she was too shaken and confused to even recall the dates and count the weeks properly.

She would put off reacting until she’d had it confirmed, she resolved. And she would take a test immediately.

She fought her composure back into place and returned to the dining room, but didn’t retake her seat.

“I’m very sorry, Mother. I’m not feeling well and have to go home. May I call you later in the week to try this again, Sebastián?”

“Let me drive you home.” He rose and set aside his napkin.

“I wouldn’t want to impose. Mother’s driver collected me. I’ll have him run me back.”

“Not at all. Thank you for lunch, La Reina. I look forward to seeing you again soon.”

Pia’s mother offered a meaningless smile and tilted her cheek for his air-kiss, but her glance toward Pia warned that a lecture would be forthcoming.

Moments later, Pia was beside Sebastián in his sports car.

Through lunch they had established that they both enjoyed scuba diving and beachcombing. He mostly worked out of Madrid, but had holidayed as a child in Valencia and would love to settle in this area once he was raising a family. His mother bred show dogs and he had taken a runt out of pity. He admitted to shamelessly spoiling it, which had made her mother smile stiffly while Pia had experienced a weak ray of optimism. Perhaps they could have a successful marriage after all.

“I’m very sorry,” she apologized again. “I’ve been fighting something all week and should have canceled.”

“In sickness and in health, right?” His bold calling out of today’s less than subtle agenda made her stomach roil all over again. She couldn’t lead him on if she was carrying another man’s child.

“Sebastián, I think we should slow down.”

He took his foot off the accelerator, instantly alert. “Oh, you mean—” He glanced at her, then made an abrupt turn into the parking lot of a mechanic’s garage. “Did I say something to offend you?”

“Not at all. But something has come up that makes me think it’s best if we put off discussions until the new year.”

She tried for a polite smile and a poker face, but the longer he searched her expression, the more culpable she felt. She had to look away.

He cleared his throat, then spoke carefully. “It may surprise you to hear there are very few circumstances that would put me off what we’re contemplating.”

She licked her numb lips. “You don’t realize how serious this circumstance might be.”

“I think I do.” He sounded so grave, so sure, she closed her eyes in dread.

Was it obvious? Would rumors circulate before she’d had a chance to confirm it? To discover the identity of the father and tell him?

For the first time since she was a child, her eyes grew hot and her throat swelled with the urge to cry.

“My family wants this alliance quite badly, Pia. I’m not without a checkered past that you would have to accept. Offering solutions and protection to one another is the point of this sort of partnership. Please talk to me about anything you view as an impediment to our moving forward. I’m quite sure I can accommodate you.”

She wanted to goggle at him, unable to believe he would be willing to take on another man’s child, but he reached across and squeezed her hand with reassurance.

She swallowed and found a faint smile. “Let me call you later in the week, after I’ve had time to think some things through.”

“Of course.”

He took her home, but she only stayed long enough to double-check her dates and call her sister-in-law.

An hour later, she was halfway up the coast. She stopped at a village market and bought an off-the-shelf pregnancy test, took it into a service station restroom and sat in her car a long time afterward, absorbing the fact that she was carrying a baby.

The baby of a man she didn’t know. At all.

She was a smart, responsible woman. How could she have been so careless?

She didn’t let herself dwell on the fact that both her brothers had been through this. That maybe some dark and desperate part of her had sabotaged herself into this position, hoping to find a version of the happiness Cesar and Rico had both found.

That sort of thinking was beyond illogical. It was self-destructive.

And genuinely impossible when she didn’t even know her lover’s name.

But that was why she wanted to see Poppy.

She put her car in Drive and returned to the scene of the crime.

Half an hour of mutual admiration with her two-year-old niece restored a little of Pia’s equilibrium.

Despite the circumstances, she looked forward to motherhood, she realized with a small bubble of optimism. She wouldn’t be a distant, coldly practical woman like her mother, even though she already knew La Reina would judge her harshly for showing affection toward her child. She scolded Sorcha and Poppy for it often and Pia could still hear her mother rebuking her own nanny for hugging her.

Don’t spoil her. She’ll become dependent.

Yes, it must have been the early hugs, not the lack of them thereafter that had turned Pia into the withdrawn, insecure, social-phobic person that she was.

“Will you go with Nanny while I talk to your mamà?” Pia asked Lily.

Lily gave Pia’s neck a fierce hug and said, “I yuv you,” in English, bringing tears to Pia’s eyes as the small girl waved bye-bye on her way out the door.

She would have that soon—someone who would say those words and mean it, every day.

“I think I got some good ones,” Poppy said, setting aside her camera as they entered the lounge. “Thank you. I’m making an album for Rico for Christmas. I don’t know what else to get the man who has everything.”

Pia’s brother Rico had been in a bad place after his brief first marriage had ended in tragedy. Then he had discovered that Poppy had had his daughter in secret. Since locating them, he’d become more like the brother Pia recollected from her earliest years, before he left for school; the one who was patient and protective, willing to sit with an arm around her so she felt safe as she watched an evil witch in a children’s movie.

“Coffee? Wine?” Poppy offered.

Pia faltered as she realized she was off alcohol and likely coffee, as well. Good thing she had barely touched what her mother had served.

“I came from lunch at Mother’s. Nothing for now, thank you.”

“Did she say something about the auction? Is that why you’re here?” Poppy winced as she sat. “When you said you wanted to ask me about it, I thought you wanted the auctioneer’s card.” She picked it up from a side table. “Am I in trouble?”

“No. But I would like that, if you don’t mind.” Pia pocketed the card. “No, Mother is quite pleased you broke records on the fund-raising, even if she doesn’t agree with your methods.”