Her Secret Pregnancy. Sharon Kendrick

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СКАЧАТЬ that. Why the big secret? Why wasn’t anyone allowed to know?’

      ‘It’s no secret any more.’ She smiled. ‘You can tell who you like.’

      He leaned across the table. ‘You told me that you’d never eaten here before.’

      ‘Well, I haven’t.’

      ‘But this isn’t the first time you’ve been here, is it?’

      Donna’s eyes narrowed with interest. She hadn’t been expecting perception. Not from him. ‘What makes you say that?’

      ‘Your body language. I spend my life observing it—goes with the job. I’m an expert!’ he boasted.

      Not such an expert, Donna thought, that he had been able to recognise that she was sending out don’t-come-close messages. Still, there was no point trying to exist with misunderstanding and deceit flying around the place. She knew that more than anyone. ‘I used to work here,’ she told him. ‘Years ago. When I was young.’

      ‘You’re hardly ancient now.’

      ‘I’m twenty-seven!’

      ‘Old enough to know better?’ he teased.

      ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ came a silky drawl from behind Donna’s right shoulder. ‘Not if past experience is anything to go on. Don’t you agree, Donna?’

      She didn’t turn around. She didn’t need to. She would have recognised that voice if it had come distorted at her in the dark from a hundred miles away. A split-second of dazed recognition stretched out in front of her like a tightrope. She moved her head back by a fraction—and she could almost feel his presence, though she still couldn’t see him.

      ‘Hello, Marcus,’ she said carefully, wondering how her voice sounded to him. Older and wiser? Or still full of youthful awe?

      He moved into eyeshot—though heaven only knew how long he’d been in earshot for. But he didn’t look at Donna straight away. He was staring down at Tony Paxman, so that Donna was able to observe him without him noticing.

      And, oh. Oh, oh, oh! Her heart thumped out of control before she could stop it.

      She had known that she would see him again, and she had practised in her head for just this moment. Some devil deep in her heart had wondered if his hair might be thinning. If he had allowed his wealth and success to go to his stomach and piled on weight. Or if he might have developed some kind of stoop. Or started wearing hideous clothes which didn’t suit him.

      But he hadn’t. Of course he hadn’t.

      Marcus Foreman was still the kind of man who most women would leave home for.

      ‘Tony,’ said Marcus easily.

      The lawyer inclined his head. ‘Marcus.’

      ‘Do you two know each other?’ Donna asked Tony in surprise.

      ‘Oh, everybody knows Marcus,’ he responded, with a shrug which didn’t quite come off.

      But Donna had detected a subtle change in her lunch companion. Suddenly Tony Paxman did not look or sound like the smooth, slick lawyer of earlier. He sounded like a very ordinary man. A man, moreover, who had just recognised the leader of the pack.

      Marcus turned to her at last, and Donna realised that she now had the opportunity to react to him as she had always vowed she would react if she ever saw him again. Coolly and calmly and indifferently.

      Her polite smile didn’t slip, but she wondered if there was any way of telling from the outside that her heart-rate had just doubled. And that the palms of her hands were moist and sticky with sweat.

      ‘So. Donna,’ Marcus said slowly, and she met his dark-lashed eyes with reluctant fascination, their ice-blue light washing over her as pure and as clear as an early-morning swimming pool.

      ‘So. Marcus,’ she echoed faintly, eyes flickering over him. Okay, so he hadn’t become bald or fat or ugly, but he’d certainly changed. Changed a lot. But hadn’t they all?

      ‘Do you want to say it, or shall I?’ His voice was heavy with mockery, and something else. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, but it told her to beware.

      ‘Say what?’

      ‘Long time no see,’ he drawled lazily. ‘Isn’t that the kind of cliché that people usually come out with after this long?’

      ‘I guess they do,’ she said slowly, thinking that nine whole years had passed since she had seen him. How could that be? ‘You could have said, “Hi, Donna—great to see you!” But that would have been a whacking great lie, wouldn’t it, Marcus?’

      ‘You said it.’ He smiled. ‘And you’re the world’s expert where lying is concerned, aren’t you, Donna?’

      Their gazes clashed and she found herself observing every tiny detail of his face; a face she’d once loved—but now she told herself that it was just a face.

      She’d known him at the beginning of his rapid rise, before success had become as familiar to him as breathing. Before he’d had a chance to fashion himself in his own image, rather than one which had been passed down to him.

      Gone was the buttoned down, clean-cut and preppie look which had been his heritage. The polished brogues and the perfectly knotted tie. The soft Italian leather shoes and the shirts made in Jermyn Street. The suit had gone, too. Now he wore pale trousers and a shirt. But a silk shirt, naturally. With—wonder of wonders—the two top buttons casually left undone. He looked sexy and sensational.

      He had let his hair grow, too. A neatly clipped style had once defined the proud tilt of his head. Now strands of it licked at his eyebrows and kissed the high-boned structure of his cheeks. Stroked the back of his neck with loving, dark tendrils. He looked as rugged and as ruffled as if he’d just tumbled out of some beautiful girl’s bed after an afternoon of wild sex.

      Maybe he had.

      Her smile froze as she found she could picture the scene all too clearly. Marcus with one of those long-legged thoroughbred type of girls wrapped around him. The kind who’d used to hang around waiting for him like groupies.

      She searched in desperation for something cool and neutral to say, her gaze fixing with a pathetic kind of relief on his shoes. ‘You’re obviously not working.’

      Only his eyes hadn’t changed, and now they chased away faint surprise. As if her reaction had not been what he had expected. He glanced down at the navy deck shoes which covered his bare feet. ‘What’s wrong with them?’ he demanded.

      ‘Well, nothing really, I suppose. Just not the most conventional of footwear, is it?’ she observed wryly. ‘You look like you’re about to go sailing, rather than running a business.’

      ‘But I don’t run a conventional business,’ he growled impatiently. ‘And I don’t feel the need to hide behind a suit and tie any more.’

      ‘My! What a little rebel you’ve become, Marcus!’ commented Donna mildly, noticing the watchful spark which darkened his eyes from aquamarine to СКАЧАТЬ