The Innocent's One-Night Confession by Sara Craven

Author:Sara Craven [Craven, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarlequinUKLtd
Published: 2018-03-31T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

YET POLE-AXED WAS exactly how she’d felt, Alanna remembered wryly, standing there her mother’s sun-filled kitchen, already weighed down with guilt, and now hardly able to believe her ears.

She and Bella had been at school together, in the same year and the same class, but never that close although their parents were friends.

By sheer chance they’d also ended up at the same university, but there their paths had divided with Alanna reading English, while Bella had opted for History.

Their social lives were very different too. Alanna, naturally shy, had concentrated on work, while Bella, with her stunning blonde looks, had soon moved into the fast lane.

There she’d met Charlie Mountney, elder son of a viscount, already in his third year, and they’d instantly become an item.

‘Well, I hope she has fun,’ said Alanna’s roommate bluntly. ‘Because that’s all it ever is with Charlie. After his Finals he’s off to manage the family estate in Staffordshire and duly marry the girl next door.’ She paused. ‘If Bella’s a mate of yours, a word of warning might not come amiss.’

‘Oh, I think it might,’ Alanna had returned lightly. ‘I’m sure Bella knows what she’s doing.’

But she’d been wrong, because only a few months later, Bella had suddenly dropped out of her course and disappeared, allegedly suffering from glandular fever, while Charlie was soon seen around campus with a pretty redhead from the second year.

‘By all accounts, Bella was getting too intense,’ said the roommate. ‘And with no engagement in sight, she played the “I’m pregnant” card and Charlie said “Deal with it” and walked.’

She shrugged. ‘She’ll be back one of these days, sadder and wiser.’

But that hadn’t happened and when Alanna arrived home for the summer vacation, she learned that Bella had indeed undergone a termination and subsequently lapsed into an acute depression, screaming at her anguished parents that Charlie was the only man she would ever love. Begging them to contact him and tell him so, and, this time, to make him believe it.

‘But how can we?’ Hester Eastwood had sobbed to Alanna’s mother. ‘It’s obviously all over. She has to accept that and get on with her life.’

Yet, as Alanna had later discovered, this was easier said than done.

But at the time, she thought bitterly, smug little prig that I was, I actually wondered how Bella could have been such a fool. Taken such a risk with her future.

In fact, heaven help me, I treated her as a kind of Awful Warning.

Well, on that morning a year ago, she’d found out. Had become desperately, agonisingly aware that she’d been equally foolish—equally reckless. Equally lacking in any justification for her behaviour.

Because, for all she knew, she also could be about to break her parents’ hearts with the news that, having had unprotected sex, she too was expecting a child by a complete stranger, with hard choices to be made that would affect them all for ever.

As for Bella, discharged from the clinic, she’d moved to London, found a job with a publicity outfit, and re-started the high life.

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