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

That was what he should do. Tell her she’d been right all along about them wanting different types of lives, and that he couldn’t see any reason to meet up with her again. No reason at all.

Cancel.

But he did not.

Greyson arrived fifteen minutes early to the restaurant Charlotte had suggested: a scarred and bluesy corner bar with a blackboard menu promising quality fare that didn’t cost the earth. A quick glance around told him that Charlotte hadn’t yet arrived. He ordered a beer, found a shadowy corner booth with a view of the entrance and settled down to wait.

Charlotte the wilful, the reckless, the vulnerable. Best lover he’d ever had. Unstinting in her responses and mesmerising in her sexual abandon. Not a woman any man would forget in a hurry and he cursed her afresh while he sat with his beer and waited, and nursed the scars she’d given him.

He didn’t know why he was here—lining up for another serve of nameless sorrow—except that she’d asked him to meet her and she’d sounded so unsure of herself and that in itself signalled trouble. Maybe her workmates had found out about her fictional fiancé. Maybe she’d lost her job and her reputation—her problem, not his—but he would hear her out and help if he could. He could do that much without letting bitterness hold sway.

They’d only been on a handful of dates. Hardly her fault if her withdrawal had come too late to save him from going under. He could give her that much.

Honour demanded it.

Grey saw Charlotte before she spotted him. Small woman with generous curves and a waterfall of wavy black hair pulled back off her face with a vibrant silk headband. She wore tailored black trousers, dainty high-heeled sandals, and a sleeveless vest top in the same pinks, purples, and greens as her headband. A purple leather handbag completed the outfit, and she looked more like the pampered socialite he’d taken to his mother’s barbecue than the experienced Associate Professor of Archaeology he knew her to be.

He stood as she approached him. Stood because a woman who expected a man to open car doors for her would surely expect that as well. Stood because the fighter in him demanded he pursue any advantage he could with her and size was one of them.

She cast him a quick smile and slid into the bench seat opposite. A waiter materialised and took her order for mineral water. Greyson’s beer stood mostly untouched and he left it that way.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she said politely.

‘I’m a sucker for punishment.’ Nothing but the truth. ‘I’m also curious as to what you have to say to me.’

‘Ah,’ said Charlotte. ‘Yes. That. I kind of need to work my way up to that particular discussion. How’s your mother?’

‘My mother’s well.’ Not where he’d been expecting this conversation to go. ‘Why?’

‘No reason. How’s the Sarah situation?’

‘I’ve seen her once since we spoke after the barbecue. We talked. She left. She blames you, by the way, for my newfound insensitivity.’

‘Handy,’ she said quietly.

Charlotte’s drink came and the waiter directed them to the blackboard menu. Neither he nor Charlotte was ready to order. ‘You’ve lost weight,’ he said. She still took his breath away with her perfection of form and features, but there was no denying she’d dropped a few kilos from her slender frame. Kilos she could ill afford to lose.

She’d lost weight; she looked wan. He was the son of a doctor. ‘Charlotte, are you sick?’

Grey watched in horror as tears swam in Charlotte’s eyes and threatened to overflow.

Oh, God, she was sick. ‘What is it?’ Information. He needed information.

‘Not sick,’ she murmured. ‘Not sick.’ She put her hand to her forehead for a moment, then changed her mind and put both hands in her lap. Not once did she meet his gaze. She stared at her coaster, the tabletop, the entrance to the bar as if she’d rather be anywhere else but there with him. ‘Pregnant.’

‘What?’

Charlotte glanced up at him then, startled and terrified and apologetic all at once and he had his answer.

‘Mine,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ He could hardly hear her for the thundering of his heart. ‘There’s tests we can do if that’s what you want,’ she offered. ‘But there’s been no one else.’

‘Forget the tests.’ Satisfaction flooded through him, as unexpected as it was savage.

Mine.

In which case … ‘Shouldn’t you be putting on weight?’ he said silkily.

‘I’m working on it,’ she said in a low raw voice. ‘I’ve also been thinking about what we might do. Greyson, I don’t want to raise this child all by myself. It’s not enough. I’m not enough. A child should have more than that. More family. More security.’

‘You want a termination?’ Hard to keep his jaw from clenching or his dislike of that notion from colouring his words. ‘Is that what you brought me here to tell me? Because it’s not going to enamour you to me, Charlotte. Not by a long shot.’

Mine.

‘That’s not why I asked you here,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve not considered that course of action. I don’t think it’s for me.’

‘Good.’

The waiter approached them again, took one look at Grey and kept right on walking.

‘I’m not asking for marriage or monetary support either,’ she said earnestly.

‘Tough.’ From one have-it-my-way child to another. ‘You’re getting both. And food. We’re ordering food now. Pick something.’

‘I’ll have the chef’s salad.’

‘Now pick something else.’

‘And the teriyaki chicken kebabs,’ she said with a roll of her eyes. ‘But only because I’m humouring you.’

Grey glared at her. Better that than leaning across the table and kissing her senseless. Or was it?

In the end he did lean across and kiss her, terrified that she wouldn’t respond to him, equally terrified when she did because it was still there, this all-consuming need to lose himself in her. ‘Pick a date,’ he murmured when his lips left hers. ‘Any date.’

‘I’m not marrying you, Greyson. There’s no need for that. Not in this day and age.’

‘If you really think I’m going to let my child be raised a bastard, you really don’t know me very well,’ he said grimly.

‘My point exactly,’ countered Charlotte. ‘Greyson, we hardly know one another. What I do know of you suggests that marriage is the last thing on your mind, and that you’d start to feel trapped within five minutes of taking that step. You’ve already broken one engagement because you weren’t prepared to settle for a life based in Sydney.’

Grey stared at Charlotte broodingly. He couldn’t deny it. He liked his freedom, and he loved to travel, but, dammit, was it so wrong to want this child to be born within marriage?’

‘The baby could still have your name,’ said Charlotte. ‘Access wouldn’t be a problem. I want you in this baby’s life. But we don’t have to get married for that to happen.’

‘You think I’ll take it, don’t you?’ he said bleakly. ‘The easy way out. The half measure. You think I’ll be content to stand at the periphery of this child’s life, never quite giving or getting enough.’

‘Greyson, I—’