Читать книгу Santiago's Love-Child - Ким Лоренс, KIM LAWRENCE - Страница 8

THE silence that followed this barely audible announcement stretched until, finally unable to bear it, Lily begged, ‘Say something.’

‘You and Gordon…you mean Gordon wasn’t the father!’

‘Obviously not.’ Lily, her eyes closed, passed a hand across her face. She was unable to meet her friend’s eyes. ‘Nothing you can say could make me feel more wretchedly ashamed than I already do,’ she choked.

‘What I’m going to say…Oh, Lily, you don’t really think I’d pass judgement, do you?’

Lily heard the hurt in her friend’s voice and her head came up. ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you did,’ she said miserably. She began to rise, but had not managed to get to her feet before Rachel grabbed her by the shoulders.

‘You can’t drop a bombshell like that and walk away, Lily,’ she protested, still looking totally gobsmacked. ‘I want to know everything.’

‘There’s nothing to know.’

‘Nothing! You had an affair. You got pregnant. You, of all people. That’s not nothing in my book. I can’t believe that all this time you didn’t say a word,’ she reproached. ‘Who…?’ Her eyes widened. ‘Are you still seeing him?’

Lily involuntarily inhaled as Santiago’s dark, classically featured face appeared in her head.

‘Do I know him?’

The words dragged Lily back to the present; she willed herself not to glance towards the open newspaper. ‘No, and I’m not still seeing him.’

She didn’t add that she was pretty sure he’d cut her dead if he ever did see her, not that that was likely considering the different worlds they lived in.

If things had gone differently she supposed they would have had to meet…? A man had a right to know if he was a father. Very conscious of the leaden weight of misery in her chest, she wondered what his reaction might have been if the baby had survived, and she had told him.

It was possible he might not have wanted to have anything to do with a child conceived by accident, but if he had she supposed they would have had to hammer out some sort of arrangement. Now, though, the speculation was pointless; she’d never know, and neither would he.

‘It was a holiday romance, that was all, a fling…’ She took a deep breath. ‘It meant nothing.’ She’d told so many lies and half-truths that another one couldn’t matter and if she said it often enough she might even start believing it.