From Sydney With Love: With This Fling... / Losing Control / The Girl He Never Noticed

‘And also your fiancé.’

‘No,’ said Charlotte. ‘I’m currently fiancé-less. As is Greyson.’

‘And you want him back?’ asked Derek.

‘Hard to say,’ murmured Charlotte. ‘I never really had him in the first place. Let’s just assume that I don’t really know what I want from him at this particular point in time.’

‘Do you want financial assistance when it comes to raising this child?’ asked Derek.

‘No.’ Charlotte shook her head emphatically. ‘I don’t need Greyson’s money. That’s the last thing I need.’ She picked up her glass of fizzy water, wishing it were wine. ‘Is that really one of the first things that came to mind?’

‘Yes,’ said Derek grimly. ‘Not everyone can afford to be blasé when it comes to ongoing monetary commitments, Charlotte, and raising a child very definitely qualifies as that.’

‘So maybe she tells him she doesn’t want his money before she tells him she’s pregnant,’ said Millie.

‘How?’ asked Charlotte. ‘How do I do that?’

‘Maybe you start with what you do want from him,’ said Millie. ‘Which would be …?’ And when Charlotte remained silent, ‘This is your cue. What do you want from him?’

But Charlotte didn’t know. ‘Maybe, apart from the knowing … maybe some level of participation?’

‘You mean marriage,’ said Derek.

‘No! Not necessarily.’ Charlotte was starting to tremble now. She countered by crossing her arms in front of her. ‘I don’t know. This isn’t going well, is it?’ she said in a small voice.

‘You’re telling a man he’s going to be a father, Charlotte,’ muttered Derek. ‘How do you expect it to go?’

‘Better,’ she said and choked down her rising panic. ‘I just assumed that breaking the news to him in person would be better, but maybe it’s not. I could email him with the news, or text him, and then arrange a meeting …’

But Derek was shaking his head. ‘I didn’t say don’t give him the news in person. I said give him some thinking time once you do. Don’t analyse his initial response. Like as not, it won’t be the one you want. Give him some space with this. Let him know your thoughts on marriage and motherhood, and then let him be.’

‘I can do that,’ said Charlotte faintly, and turned to Millie. Millie who’d been judging her presentation and hopefully taking notes. ‘Millie, so how did it go?’

‘Fine. Just fine,’ said Millie a little too readily. And then, ‘I need another drink.’

Charlotte waited until the following morning to email Greyson. A beautiful late-summer’s morning with not a whisper of a cloud in the sky. A good day, she decided, for sharing unexpected news. Nonetheless, her email to Greyson still took her all morning to construct and finally consisted of three short words. ‘Where are you?’

Greyson’s reply pinged back within ten minutes. ‘Hawkesbury river.’

‘Dinner at my place this evening?’ she wrote back, before she lost her nerve entirely. ‘Seven p.m.?’

This time his reply came almost instantaneously. ‘Why?’

Not a man bent on being amiable. Not entirely unexpected, given that her parting words to him two months ago had been, ‘Don’t call me and I won’t call you.’

‘Need to talk to you,’ she wrote back. Now there was a phrase guaranteed to send a chill up a man’s spine.

Charlotte sat back and stared at the computer screen after that, sat there for ten minutes with her heart in her throat, waiting for a reply that did not come. When the phone rang, she almost slipped her skin. Charlotte reached for it gingerly, hoping it was Greyson, hoping it was not.

‘Charlotte Greenstone,’ she said as evenly as she could, while her hands shook and her knees shook and she tucked her free hand between her knees in an effort to stop the trembling of both.

‘So talk.’ Greyson’s voice; deep and gravelly and riddled with wariness.

‘Hello, Greyson,’ she said, in a voice that wobbled only faintly. ‘I half expected you to be in Borneo.’

‘No.’

‘No.’ She ran through the script she’d prepared in her mind. Some sort of compliment was supposed to come next, but her brain had gone blank the minute she’d heard that familiar deep voice.

‘What do you want, Charlotte?’

‘Not money.’ She remembered Derek’s words of last night and figured she might as well get that one out of the way. ‘You don’t ever need to worry on that score.’

‘I wasn’t,’ he uttered dryly.

‘Because money’s not the problem here.’

‘So what is the problem here?’ he said. ‘I’m assuming you’re not ringing because life felt empty without me and you want to pick up where we left off? Am I wrong?’

Charlotte closed her eyes. She hadn’t armoured herself properly against Greyson’s thinly veiled hostility. She should have. ‘Never mind,’ she said raggedly. ‘This was a really bad idea. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have bothered you.’

‘Charlotte, wait!’

She waited in silence. Trembling. Quailing.

‘Dinner, you said,’ he muttered, and his voice was as ragged as hers.

‘Yes.’

‘You should know that I’ll not be able to keep my hands off you if we have it at your place. You should know not to be with me in private right now. I’m telling you this as a courtesy.’

‘Somewhere else, then,’ she managed, while his words seared through her, bringing equal parts heat and apprehension. ‘There are dozens of restaurants nearby.’

‘Name one.’

She did. A steakhouse slash cocktail bar. Nothing fancy but there was privacy to be had in darkened booths if conversation demanded it, and this conversation surely would.

‘I’ll meet you there at seven,’ he said. ‘And, Charlotte?’

‘What?’ she said faintly.

‘If you want me to be at all civilised, you’ll be letting me pay for the meal.’

Greyson Tyler was no stranger to trouble. He knew the ways in which it crept up on a man. He knew how it smelled. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that meeting Charlotte again for a meal and whatever else she had in mind spelled trouble for them both. His needs were a little too intense when it came to delectable yet thoroughly unsuitable Charlotte Greenstone. There was no telling what he might demand of her, or the concessions he might make in order to get those demands met.

He’d stayed away. He’d been the gentleman and kept his distance. He’d done everything she’d asked of him and, dammit, he’d been hurt in the process.

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