CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER THREE

Three months later

I T WAS A miracle she’d even kept the business card, because Lord knew she’d had no intention of calling Raul for help. Perhaps it had been a sort of talisman, proof that she hadn’t imagined the whole thing. Yet she hadn’t looked at it again. She’d placed the card into her wallet and then ignored it.

Every time she’d gone to pay for something, her fingers might have glanced over the edges of the thing, but she’d never once weakened and removed it, looked at it and invoked an image of Raul Ortega. Then again, she hardly needed a business card for that.

He was burned into her brain in a way she found quite frustrating, given the brevity of their acquaintance. She only had to close her eyes to see his, to remember the way he’d felt, smelled, tasted...

And now, she thought, with a whole heap of butterflies terrorising her belly, what was she to do?

She glanced down at her lap, to the white stick with two bright pink lines, and felt a desperate sense of panicked disbelief rising inside of her.

Pregnant!

How could it be?

They’d used protection!

It had only happened once!

They barely even knew each other!

It was... She shook her head. Inevitable?

Even as she thought it, she knew it was stupid, and wrong. Nothing about this should have been inevitable. It shouldn’t have happened.

She groaned, pressing her head back against the threadbare sofa cushions, tears filling her eyes even as a protective hand shifted to cover her still-flat stomach.

It was history repeating herself, she thought with a groan. Libby had been an accident too. She’d been raised by a single mother, had never known nor met her father. She’d never even been sure her mother knew who he was. If she had, the older woman had scrupulously avoided revealing that to Libby.

She patted her stomach, the connection she felt to the burgeoning life unmistakable and immediate. It was something she’d never really felt before.

She’d loved her mother, almost out of a sense of obligation. Children loved their parents—that’s just how it was. Only they’d never been close, and now that Libby looked back she recognised that she’d been the responsible person of the household for almost as long as she could remember. Grocery shopping and meal preparations had mostly fallen to her, so too the cleaning. Between school and those domestic duties, Libby had been too tired for a normal teenage experience, and as for thoughts of university...? No way. It wouldn’t have been possible.

And now, just when she felt like her life was stabilising, she was looking down the barrel of single parenthood, with no possible support network, no safety net.

Just like her mother had been, she realised with a groan. After all her best endeavours to be different , to make different choices, to live a different life, here she was facing the exact same predicament.

It horrified her.

Libby wrapped her arms around her chest, shivering despite the warmth of the day, then flicked another glance at Raul’s business card.

She was terrified to tell him, terrified not to tell him: she was simply terrified in every way.

New York glittered like a million stars, bright and beautiful, but Raul barely saw it. He’d sworn he’d never take things like this for granted. Not when he was working his ass off to get ahead, not when he was on his way up. But success and wealth were impossible not to become accustomed to, and after almost a decade as a billionaire, nowadays, Raul didn’t tend to see the opulence and rare privilege afforded to him.

The stunning vista was simply a backdrop to the work he was doing, and he had more interest in his computer screen than the Empire State Building.

When his phone began to ring, he was tempted to ignore it, except it was his most private line, the number he gave out only rarely.

If someone was calling him on this number, it was important.

He reached for the receiver, cradling it beneath his chin. ‘Ortega,’ he grunted into the phone, eyes still lingering on the screen.

Outside, it had begun to snow, little drifts of white dancing in front of the window, but he didn’t notice. If he’d moved to the glass and looked all the way down, if he’d been able to see so far beneath him, it would have been to appreciate the looks of wonder on children’s faces, delight all ’round.

‘Hello?’ he prompted, impatient now. He had until midnight to file these documents; he didn’t intend to miss the window.

‘Erm, hi.’ The voice was soft and familiar, even though he couldn’t immediately place it. Yet his body reacted, his gut tightening, something popping in the depths of his belly.

‘Who is this?’ he asked, guarded. Anyone who could make him react so instinctively deserved his wariness.

Silence.

Heavy breathing.

He gripped the phone more tightly, but then there was simply a dial tone.

Whoever it was had hung up.

Now he did stand, jack-knifing out of his chair and striding towards the window, standing with legs wide and hands in his pockets, staring out, not seeing. A sense of unease slipped through him, as though he’d just missed something, or someone, important.

Libby knew she was being a coward, but hearing his voice again had flooded her with such a ball of tension she could hardly think straight, much less speak.

On the day they’d met, she’d been blown away by his sense of command and authority. But those same things had flown down the phone line when she’d called him, and they’d knocked her sideways.

She couldn’t help but feel that she was about to throw a bomb into his life, and all that natural authority would be turned on her. She needed to form a more definitive plan first, so that when she did tell him about the baby, and he asked what she wanted to do, she could respond with a degree of certainty.

It was in the small hours of the morning that the answer came to him.

Strangely, it wasn’t so much her voice as the husky little breaths she’d exhaled into the phone line. They’d been familiar in a primal way, triggering a sense memory that had lain dormant for months. But once back in the privacy of his home, naked in his bed, he remembered, and a hot flash spread through his body as every cell reverberated with surprise. Surprise at the pleasure he’d felt at hearing her voice, at the knowledge that she’d called him after all.

And then concern. Because if she was calling him, surely it meant something was wrong.

When he reflected on the details of the day, contemplated how traumatic it must have been for Libby, he knew he needed to make sure she was okay. He should have done so before now, he realised with a sense of shame, only he’d never taken her phone number, he’d simply given her his.

And she’d used it.

No longer tired, despite the fact he’d been up since early the previous morning, he pushed back the sheet and began to make plans, setting things in motion so that he could assure himself Libby hadn’t suffered as a result of that day...

So the morning sickness wasn’t just for mornings, Libby thought with a shake of her head as she gingerly straightened and stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Having battled nausea all day, finding her appetite almost non-existent, she’d forced herself to eat a piece of Vegemite toast when she got home from work, simply because she figured she had to have something for the sake of the baby, but it hadn’t settled her tummy as she’d hoped.

Quite the opposite.

The only silver lining was that she felt marginally better now, having showered and changed into a singlet top and floaty skirt. She was well enough, finally, to contemplate a cup of tea. Moving to her kitchen, she flicked the kettle to life and stood, waiting for it to boil, eyes on the view beyond the kitchen window. At first glance, it was hardly inspiring. Just a brick wall to the neighbouring building. But it was the details that made Libby’s heart lighten. The bougainvillea that clung to the sides, bursting with green leaves and bright pink flowers, the graffiti someone had done a few months back, a picture of a puppy dog in a hot-air balloon, and the way one of the residents had artfully strung their laundry from their window to a back fence, surely in contravention of some building code or other, but from where Libby stood, the sight of the summery linen clothes drying on the line was like a still-life painting.

The kettle flicked off and she splashed boiling water into the cup, watching as the colour seeped from the bag and into the tea, stifling a yawn. She was always tired at the moment, though doing double shifts at work every day for the last week hardly helped matters.

Nonetheless, Libby was abundantly conscious of the ticking time bomb of her pregnancy. She needed to start saving—and fast—if she was going to be able to take off a few months when the baby came.

And then what?

Her mind began to spin so fast she felt giddy.

She needed to find a job she could do from home, that much was clear. Cleaning for the agency was off the cards. She could take in ironing—another skill she possessed in abundance—but the idea was anathema to Libby. While she could iron, she hated it, and knew she’d turn to that only as a last resort.

So what else was there?

She flicked a glance over her shoulder at the fridge, where the pamphlet for the local adult education campus was printed. She’d circled the bookkeeping diploma months ago, even before she’d met Raul and shared that one fateful afternoon with him, but the idea of undertaking night school and picking up that skill was both terrifying and somehow imperative.

Could she do it? Libby bit down on her lip, pressing a hand to her belly.

The truth was, she didn’t know. She’d never had the luxury of pushing herself academically. Her mother had wanted her to drop out of school in grade ten, so she could start ‘contributing’ to the household financially. Libby had held fast though. There weren’t many things she’d been willing to go into bat for, but graduating high school was one of them. It had been exhausting and stressful, and she knew deep down that she could have got much better grades if she’d been allowed to study at night, but she’d had to content herself with passing.

But now? What was stopping her from enrolling in a course? True, it would be exhausting, but at least she’d have a sense of accomplishment, and the prospect of being able to support her child.

She pulled the milk from the fridge and added a splash to her tea, but midway through returning the bottle there was a sharp knock on her door. Her heart started at the unexpected interruption and she glanced out of the kitchen window, but whoever it was had moved into the alcove, shielding them from sight.

Desperate for her tea, she took a quick sip, exclaiming a little when it scalded her tongue, then moved through the small apartment to the door, wrenching it inwards with a polite smile on her face...

Which immediately dropped at the sight of Raul Ortega on the other side.

Her lips parted and everything went wonky in her mind. Libby’s eyes seemed to fill with bright, radiant light.

‘Raul,’ she breathed out, gripping the door more tightly, needing it for strength and support. ‘What are you doing here?’ she whispered, blinking quickly. Was she imagining this?

‘You called,’ he responded, and Libby’s heartrate ratcheted up.

‘Oh...’ she mumbled, her tummy twisting painfully.

‘I presumed you needed something.’

Anxiety burst through her. He wasn’t supposed to be here! This wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have face to face. Or at all, if she could help it. Except she’d known, almost as soon as she’d discovered her pregnancy, that she wouldn’t keep her child from his or her father, nor the father from her child. While Libby intended to be the primary caregiver, she would never stand in the way of the formation of such an important, foundational relationship.

So of course she had to tell him, and she had fully intended to, when the time was right. She just needed to build her courage up.

Except he was standing right in front of her, staring at her, lips pursed with a hint of impatience, and all the air whooshed right out of her lungs.

‘Raul,’ she said, as though it were a lifeline. As though by repeating his name everything might start to make sense.

But it didn’t.

Had he come to Sydney just because she’d called? Or had he already been here? Surely the latter. There was no way he would have flown to Australia on the back of a ten-second call that essentially amounted to a prank.

Was it possible they’d been in the same city for weeks, months, and not known that a new life was forming of their inadvertent creation?

Sweat began to bead on the top of Libby’s lip. She thought longingly of her tea.

‘Why did you call?’

It was so imperious, so demanding. Just like she’d known him to be, only then his commanding nature had all been focused on the delinquent boys who’d stolen his yacht.

‘I—’ She darted her tongue out, licked her lower lip. Libby had never felt more terrified in her life. Strange, when she’d been mentally gearing herself up for this conversation for over a week. As Raul’s eyes dropped to her mouth and chased her tongue, though, something began to fizz in her belly then spread to her bloodstream, filling her with a tangle of emotions she couldn’t fathom.

She sucked in a deep breath, tried to steady her nerves. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said, aiming for decisive and coming off loaded with dread. She cleared her throat. ‘This...won’t take long.’

His brow furrowed and he jammed his hands into his pockets, but he nodded once, curtly.

Curtly!

Her stomach dropped to her toes. She spun on her heel and moved inside her apartment, immediately ashamed of how shabby and small it was, aware of how it must look to his eyes. It had come partially furnished, so the sofa and small table weren’t hers. She’d done her best to brighten up the place, covering the card table with colourful fabric and the sofa with a blanket she’d bought at an op shop, but it was, nonetheless, unmistakably cheap.

Not that she had any reason to apologise for her financial circumstances. If anything, Libby was proud of how she’d pulled herself up by the bootstraps. But Raul was...different...to anyone she’d ever known. Somehow, she didn’t want him seeing her through this filter.

‘I’ve just made a cup of tea. Would you like something to drink?’ she asked nervously, pacing into the kitchen and wrapping her hands around the mug.

‘No, thank you.’ His frown deepened. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine,’ she lied. ‘Just fine. And you?’

He paused. ‘Yes, also fine.’

But this was a disaster! Everything felt so strained and different to how it had been on the boat. Then adrenalin and adventure had been a great equaliser. She’d been emboldened by their shared experience, made brave and powerful by what they’d been through and how she’d shown her strength. Now her stomach was in knots and she had no idea how she could possibly get through the next few minutes. Only she knew she had to—somehow.

‘Why did you call me, Libby?’ he asked again, propping one hip against her kitchen counter.

The kitchen also showed signs of disrepair, but it was Libby’s favourite room of the house, for the view it had of the beautiful bougainvillea and the way she’d brightly accessorised it so every surface popped with colour.

Drawing as much comfort from her surroundings as she possibly could, Libby sucked in a deep breath. ‘I...thought you should know...’ she began, then sipped her tea quickly. It had cooled down just enough to be palatable without burning.

‘Yes?’

Her teeth pressed into her lip. ‘God, this is way harder than it should be,’ she said on a humourless laugh. If only he knew how much this was her worst nightmare. Not being pregnant, but all the circumstances surrounding it.

‘Libby, are you okay?’

‘No,’ she groaned, placing her tea on the bench. ‘Not really.’ She frowned. ‘And yes, at the same time.’

‘That makes no sense.’

‘I know,’ she said softly, sucking in a deep breath. ‘The thing is...’ She stared at her tea rather than into his eyes, which were too perceptive, too inquisitive. Too everything. ‘The thing is,’ she started again. ‘That day...’

Silence fell, except for the ticking of the clock, which sat on the kitchen bench. Strange, she’d never really noticed how imperious and loud it was before. Every second cranked noisily past.

‘Raul, I’m pregnant,’ she said finally, the words, now she’d committed to saying them, rushing out of her. ‘Three and a half months pregnant, in fact. You’re the father.’