A Sicilian Husband - Kate Walker [48]
‘Four weeks?’
Foolishly, she hadn’t thought in terms of a set span of time. She knew that Gio wasn’t promising a lifetime’s commitment, but she hadn’t quite expected that their time together would be so clearly defined.
‘Why four weeks?’
‘I think that should be long enough to be sure.’
Sure? This time she swallowed the question down, afraid to voice it. A few moments ago she might have been naïve enough to think that Gio was talking about being sure of the way he felt about her, but now the sudden change in his demeanour, the subtle shift in his whole attitude to her was setting off warning bells inside her brain. Suddenly disturbingly ill at ease, she stiffened in Gio’s embrace, holding her body away from him.
‘Don’t you think?’
It was asked with such total calm, such a complete lack of any emotion that it made her blood run cold just to hear it.
‘And what precisely do you need to be sure about?’
‘Don’t play the fool, Teresa!’ Gio’s tone was a chilling mixture of cynical amusement and curt dismissal. ‘You’re not a complete innocent, so don’t pretend that you are. You know what happened that night we spent together. We didn’t take any precautions—at any time. You know—precisely—what might have happened. What the result of our affair might be.’
If Terrie’s blood had chilled a few moments before, now it felt as if it was turning to ice in her veins. And the cold seemed to have reached her brain, destroying any chance of thinking clearly enough to answer Gio in this form—once more Giovanni Cardella, counsel for the prosecution.
‘Nothing happened!’ she flung at him in a nervous rush, twisting against his loosened hold and freeing herself with a jolt that took her partway across the room away from him. ‘Don’t honour what we had with the title of an affair—it was nothing like! It was a sordid little one-night stand in a hotel bedroom after you picked me up in a bar, nothing more! And there won’t be any result!’
‘And you can swear to that, can you? Am I to take it that—?’
‘No!’
Even to outface him, she found she couldn’t lie to him about this. But all the same she couldn’t stop herself from taking several nervous backward steps, away from him. He was too big, too dangerous-looking to have towering over her like this. ‘If you’re trying to ask if I’ve had a period since last Saturday, then the answer’s no—no, I haven’t! But it’s nothing for you to worry about! It’ll be fine! I know it will!’
‘So you were on the Pill?’
He read the answer in her face before she managed to find the words to say it and his beautiful mouth twisted cynically.
‘No…’ he said grimly. ‘No Pill—no protection of any sort. And you still think you won’t be pregnant.’
Pregnant. The word seemed to hang in the air between them like an insurmountable barrier that had to be dealt with, got out of the way, before anything else could be said or even considered.
‘I’ll be fine…’
Terrie knew she was stumbling over the words, struggling to dodge the issue that had been preying on her mind all week. Time and time again she had reproached herself for her foolishness, her unthinking impulsiveness, the sexual irresponsibility that could have landed her in the worst mess she had ever experienced in her life—but never as much as she was doing now. And all the reproofs she had thrown at herself in the darkness of the night were as nothing when compared to the dark scorn, the bitter contempt that burned in Gio’s dark eyes as he fixed them on her flushed and uneasy face.
‘It was only one night.’
‘Madre de Dio!’ The words seemed to be torn from Gio’s lips, his exclamation a sound of such deep disgust that it ripped into her already vulnerable