The Package Deal: Nine Months to Change His Life / From Neighbours...to Newlyweds? / The Bonus Mum

Was that sentiment? Was it hope?

He couldn’t get his head around it.

He didn’t have to, he told himself. For some reason Mary had come halfway around the world to tell him, yet she was proposing leaving again on Monday. He never needed to see her again. He could pay into a trust account once a month. He could stop thinking about it.

How could he stop thinking about it? He slammed his fist down on the desk so hard it hurt, and suddenly he wished he could talk to Jake. Ring him. ‘Jake, I’ve screwed up...’

In his present mood Jake could well say he should tell someone who cared.

In this position Jake might do better, he conceded. Jake would be able to play the caring dad. He was great at acting.

If he himself was better at acting, maybe he could pull this off.

Pull what off? Being a caring dad?

He couldn’t do it. He didn’t know how. He thought back to the rages and the coldness that had been his childhood. He tried to think how he could possibly relate to a child.

He could try, but he couldn’t act, and if he felt nothing...

His father had felt nothing. His mother...she’d told them she’d loved them but in different ways all the time. Like she was playing different roles.

‘I won’t act,’ he told himself. ‘I can only do what I can do, and I won’t put myself in a position of power.’

So what could he do? Send money? That felt so much like what his father would do. Send money and get rid of the problem.

On impulse he hit the internet, heading for the site where Smash ’em Mary flew round the track, dodging and weaving, leading her team to victory.

It was a rough game, and that was putting it mildly.

Surely she wouldn’t be able to play now she was pregnant.

The words of the lawyer he’d sent to help her echoed in his ears as well.

‘We’ve won her monetary compensation, and she’s been reinstated in her position as district nurse, but there is local antagonism,’ he’d told him. ‘Her father and stepmother are wealthy. They control much of the commerce in the town and people are afraid to upset them. Her stepmother is vindictive, more so now that we’ve forced this resolution. Life’s not going to be easy for your Mary.’

Your Mary. The words had swept over him then, but they came back to haunt him now.

She wasn’t His Mary. She was a woman he scarcely knew. He’d been stranded with her for two days. Two days was tiny.

She was a woman who’d come half a world to tell him she was pregnant because it was the right thing to do.

His fist slammed on the desk again. Lucky the walls were solid. Lucky Mary was sleeping three bedrooms away.

He needed to get away. Think. Go back to the office? Do something to stop him going mad.

He headed back to the living room. He’d carried Mary’s duffel into her bedroom for her but her capacious purse was still on the bench. It looked shabby, worn, and it pricked his conscience as nothing else could.

A folder was edging out the top.

And suddenly he was back at the cave, waiting for Mary to come back from her interminable search of the island, hating himself that he couldn’t be with her. Distracting himself by reading Mary’s make-believe. He’d been the hero.

‘I wonder what I’ve done now?’ he said aloud, and looked at the purse again.

She knew he’d read the beginning. It was sitting on the bench, an open invitation. She’d said he was facing dragons.

He could just...read.

But not here. The proximity to Mary—to a woman he hardly knew, he reminded himself—was doing his head in.

He lifted the folder from her purse and put it in his briefcase.

He’d just go...somewhere and disappear into Mary’s fictional world.

Maybe Jake was right. Maybe reality had too much to answer for.

CHAPTER TEN (#ulink_a909bf68-5c70-5ffd-8159-7b45dea6f81a)

SHE WOKE AT MIDNIGHT, thirsty beyond measure, and also hungry. She woke regretting those nibbled lunchtime sandwiches.

She headed out to the kitchen. The apartment was in darkness—or maybe not. Back in New Zealand the darkness at night was absolute. Here, the lights of the city glimmered through the drapes. Glamorous footlights were placed strategically around the skirting boards so no one could lose their way at night. There was a light on in the sitting room.

She was in New York. More, she was in Ben’s fabulous apartment. Marble, glass, discreet lighting, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Central Park...

Money plus.

Her inheritance gaffe was still smarting. ‘I never should have come,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Of course he’ll think I’m after his money.’

But it had seemed wrong not to. She’d needed to tell him and for some reason she’d felt she had to do it soon. Before the time had come where she could terminate?

Not that she’d considered terminating. She wasn’t sure why this little life was so precious, why she’d discovered she was pregnant and felt joy rather than dismay, but she had.

‘And maybe I sort of wanted Ben to feel that way, too,’ she muttered.

‘Feel what way?’

He was on a window seat in the sitting room, working on his laptop. Wearing a bathrobe. Silk. She was in a T-shirt and jogging pants.

She felt like a poor relation.

He looked...hot.

Put it aside, she told herself, and somehow she stopped looking at him. It took an effort.

‘I’m hungry,’ she said, heading for the kitchen. She hauled open the massive refrigerator doors and thought, Whoa... ‘How many people live here?’

‘My housekeeper caters for every eventuality.’

Yep, money.