She couldn’t be in love with him.
Get used to it, she heard the voice say. Why else are you so jealous?
She hated that voice. Hated what it was telling her. Hated more than anything that she suspected it was right.
She sniffed. He was taking Simone away with him. Why shouldn’t she be jealous?
The woman was beautiful. Sleek, dark-haired and gorgeous, just like his first wife. How could he not be attracted to her? How could he not choose her to be his life partner?
And now they had a week away together. Damn it all, she didn’t want Dominic to marry someone like Simone. He had a baby to think about—a tiny baby who would need a mother. This baby. And Simone had struck her as someone as maternal as a viper. Surely he could find someone altogether more… nurturing?
She heard her name. Looked around to see piercing dark eyes following her fork, which was tracking idly around the edge of her spaghetti. ‘You’re not eating.’ He was watching her carefully. Closely.
She pushed the bowl away. ‘I’m not very hungry.’
His frown deepened. ‘You’re not sick?’
Heart-sick. Devastated. Green with jealousy. And shell-shocked beyond belief. ‘I’m fine.’
If he believed her it didn’t show. ‘So your scan. I won’t miss it?’
She searched through her shattered thoughts for his meaning, remembering the appointment for her twenty-week scan. Twenty weeks already. Which meant twenty weeks until the birth. Twenty weeks until it was time for her to leave. So soon. She shook her head. ‘It’s not till the twenty-first. But I wasn’t expecting you to come with me.’
The look he sent her was one hundred per cent ownership, one hundred per cent proprietorial, and all clad in black-as-night eyes that she would miss more than she wanted to admit when she was gone. ‘I’ll be there.’
Auckland was a grind. Normally he thrived on the cut and thrust of doing business face to face. Normally he relished the challenge of negotiating and securing a deal. But here he’d endured meetings that had gone around and around in circles; he’d spent hours locked away in offices in negotiations and he’d suffered long lunches and long dinners, where Simone had been the only person who understood. Stoic Simone who had stayed by his side and said all the right things and smiled to all the right people and laughed at all the lame jokes.
Thankfully, it was the last night. One formal reception and he could escape. He studded cufflinks through shirt cuffs, wondering if he really needed to be here, wondering how things were at home.
Wondering if he’d notice any changes in Angelina’s shape when he got back.
Angelina.
The name suited her so well. It hadn’t at first, when she’d been merely Angie. The name had seemed wrong to him then. But Angelina. That was her. Long limbed and lithe, her sun-kissed hair layered around her face, her lips wide and lush, her eyes so blue he was tempted to dive right into their depths.
A picture flashed into his mind. Angelina standing by the pool, her hands in her hair, her skin honey-gold from the sun and her breasts like an invitation. And lust speared into him again, just as it had that day, hot and hard.
Damn. He grabbed his jacket and frowned, wondering just when it was that he’d stopped thinking of her merely as an incubator and more as a woman? And why now, when he had an evening of dreariness right here to look forward to?
Maybe because you’ve never had any reason to look forward to going home before, said a small voice in his head. Because when Carla was there…
He shrugged the jacket on and just as easily shrugged those thoughts away. Carla was gone. Never again would he make that mistake. Never again would he fall for a woman who was so shallow.
Angelina wasn’t shallow. Angelina was there now. Angelina and his child.
And deciding he wasn’t really needed here wasn’t such a difficult decision to make at all.
The room was perfect. Almost perfect, Angie realised, as she noticed the row of teddy bears lining the floor instead of sitting atop the shelf that had been purpose-built for them. Darn, how had she missed them?
She snagged a bunch of teddies under one arm and dragged a nearby chair. The bears were an easy fix although the chair could do with being a few inches higher. She was up there on the chair, stretching high to place them. She loved the bears. She loved their faces, some hand-stitched, some machined, but all of them with some kind of expression. She loved them all.