His Mistress with Two Secrets by Dani Collins

Author:Dani Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2016-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

CINNIA DIDN’T HAVE much to pack. Her sisters had been through her wardrobe like locusts once she had grown too big to wear most of it. Trella had been incredibly generous, bringing her maternity clothes and refusing to let her pay. Cinnia had given things back as she grew out of them.

She and Trella had been meeting in secret every other week and without her, Cinnia would have fallen apart by now.

Burying herself in work had also helped her cope. She’d busied herself with bringing on her partner who was taking over the payments on her start-up loan. Then there’d been all the arrangements to set up an office here at the house. For hours, sometimes days at a time, she could forget she was sitting on a ticking time bomb.

But she had always known that Henri would have to be told.

And that he would insist on her coming back for safety reasons. She didn’t blame him for that, she didn’t, especially after he had pulled back the curtain on how he really felt about the press.

She was still shaken by the bitterness he had revealed. And defeated. Her firm intentions to make her own way had buckled not from his show of temper, but from his helpless anguish. She couldn’t, absolutely couldn’t, make things harder for him. Not in good conscience.

But her life would change irrevocably now. It would have anyway, she supposed. Twins did that to a woman. But things with Henri would be profoundly different this time. She would no longer be his equal.

Not that she’d been his equal in the past, but she had been able to pretend they were traveling in parallel lanes, living their own lives and intersecting when it suited them for the same reason: sex.

Even before she had turned up pregnant, however, she had known she was following more than pacing. She was becoming more emotionally invested than he was, wrapping her life around his. She had hid it from herself as much as him, but the pregnancy had forced her to confront it. She’d had to ask herself, and him, how deeply he was involved.

“Do you love me?” she had asked him that morning in January, making sure to wait until they’d returned to London so she had an escape strategy that didn’t involve getting herself to the ferry.

In typical Henri fashion, he had dodged the question with a faintly bored “If you’re looking for a proposal—”

“I didn’t ask if you wanted to marry me,” she had interrupted sharply, hiding that his attitude stung like a scald. “I asked if you loved me.”

“And the reason you’re asking is because you want to change things between us.” He hadn’t even looked up from whatever he was reading on his tablet, like this was a tiresome conversation. “I told you I’d never marry you.”

She had sat there with her sip of orange juice eating a hole in her stomach.

Her pregnancy had already been weighing on her conscience for two weeks, earning her a few queries from him about why she was so withdrawn and distracted.

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