The Secretary's Secret

He raked both hands back through his hair. In the warm spring sunshine his skin started to prickle beneath his suit jacket. ‘Why don’t I come back tomorrow at, say, 10:00 a.m.? It’l give you a chance to think over my offer. You’re obviously busy here and—’

‘No!’ She surged to her feet. ‘I don’t want to drag this out. Alex, I wil not be returning to Sydney. I mean to make this place home. I grew up in Tuncurry and I’ve missed it. This is where I want to live. The lifestyle, the people, the pace, it suits me more than Sydney ever did.’

Didn’t she care that her talents would be wasted here?

‘Your offer was more than generous—’ she hauled in a breath ‘—and I do appreciate it, but…’

She didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t have to.

Her shrug said it al . Bile rose up to burn his throat, his tongue. His recklessness, his weakness, had made this woman’s life worse and there was nothing he could do to make amends. ‘What wil you do?’

‘I’l get a job. I have a lot of contacts here and the tourism industry is thriving. With my qualifications, it’l be a piece of cake.’

She had every right to that confidence. Whoever was lucky enough to employ her would find they had a gem.

‘You’re sure you won’t reconsider?’

She shook her head. And then she went so pale he found himself stepping forward to take her arm.

She lifted her hands to ward him off. Stepped away so he couldn’t touch her. As if his touch would poison her. Just for a moment he had to rest his hands on his knees.

‘Alex, I don’t want to raise my children in the city. I want to raise them here.’

He flinched at that word— children—and then straightened, but part of him was glad—fiercely glad

—that she’d uttered it. It reminded him of the impossible gulf that lay between them.

Her lips twisted and her eyes hardened at whatever she saw reflected in his face. But her colour didn’t return. He noted the way she twisted her hands together. To stop them from shaking?

‘Alex, I didn’t resign from Hal am Enterprises because I found it impossible to work with you. I resigned because I’m pregnant.’

He stared. For a moment it seemed as if time were suspended. And then her last two words hit him in the stomach like blows from a sledgehammer. I’m pregnant.

I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant.

No! He fel back. Not… No! ‘You can’t be serious?’ The words rasped from a throat that burned like acid.

‘I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.’

Her hands twisted and twisted. He stared at them and prayed they could save him. ‘With…?’

But he couldn’t finish the question. He reeled away from her, reeled al the way to the back fence away from her, reeled al the way to the back fence and the banksia tree. He dug his fingers into the hard bark of a branch and held on until the nausea passed. Anger pounded through him then, hot and thick and suffocating. At the edge of his consciousness he could hear Chad’s laughter taunting him like it did in his nightmares.

He swung around, strode back to where Kit stood and jabbed a finger at her. ‘You expect me to believe it’s mine?’ The words were harsher than anything that had ever scraped out of his throat before.

She folded her arms, moistened her lips and met his glare head on, although tears fil ed her eyes and he doubted she could see him properly through them. But she didn’t let a single one of them fal . ‘Just walk away, Alex,’ she whispered. ‘Just turn around and walk away and we’l pretend that none of this ever happened.’

His heart pounded in his throat, his pulse raced.

He’d come here to make her the offer of a lifetime.

Instead, she was extending that offer to him.

He could walk away.

He didn’t want to walk. He wanted to run!

CHAPTER THREE

ALEX lurched across to the nearest azalea bush, where he promptly and comprehensively vomited. Kit had to sit again and focus on her breathing to avoid that urge herself. Up to this point, her pregnancy had been remarkably nausea free.

She rubbed at the niggling ache in her back. In her free moments, when she’d tried to picture tel ing Alex he was going to be a father, she’d expected yel ing and shouting, accusations and disbelief, even a hard, angry silence.

Shock—yes.

Vomiting—no.

Had her father vomited when her mother had told him she was pregnant with Kit?

She shook the thought off and deepened the massage to the left side of her back, her fingers doing what they could to shift the pain there and their own nervousness. With Alex, she’d have preferred the shouting and anger. A part of her would have preferred it if he’d taken the out she’d offered him and had walked away without one single backward glance. She flicked a quick glance in his direction.

He stil might yet.