With This Fling... (14 page)

‘Somewhere else, then,’ she managed, while his words seared through her, bringing equal parts heat and apprehension. ‘There are dozens of restaurants nearby.’

‘Name one.’

She did. A steakhouse slash cocktail bar. Nothing fancy but there was privacy to be had in darkened booths if conversation demanded it, and this conversation surely would.

‘I’ll meet you there at seven,’ he said. ‘And, Charlotte?’

‘What?’ she said faintly.

‘If you want me to be at all civilised, you’ll be letting me pay for the meal.’

Greyson Tyler was no stranger to trouble. He knew the ways in which it crept up on a man. He knew how it smelled. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that meeting Charlotte again for a meal and whatever else she had in mind spelled trouble for them both. His needs were a little too intense when it came to delectable yet thoroughly unsuitable Charlotte Greenstone. There was no telling what he might demand of her, or the concessions he might make in order to get those demands met.

He’d stayed away. He’d been the gentleman and kept his distance. He’d done everything she’d asked of him and,
dammit,
he’d been hurt in the process.

Cancel.

That was what he
should
do. Tell her she’d been right all along about them wanting different types of lives, and that he couldn’t see any reason to meet up with her again. No reason at all.

Cancel.

But he did not.

Greyson arrived fifteen minutes early to the restaurant Charlotte had suggested: a scarred and bluesy corner bar with a blackboard menu promising quality fare that didn’t cost the earth. A quick glance around told him that Charlotte
hadn’t yet arrived. He ordered a beer, found a shadowy corner booth with a view of the entrance and settled down to wait.

Charlotte the wilful, the reckless, the vulnerable. Best lover he’d ever had. Unstinting in her responses and mesmerising in her sexual abandon. Not a woman any man would forget in a hurry and he cursed her afresh while he sat with his beer and waited, and nursed the scars she’d given him.

He didn’t know why he was here—lining up for another serve of nameless sorrow—except that she’d asked him to meet her and she’d sounded so unsure of herself and that in itself signalled trouble. Maybe her workmates had found out about her fictional fiancé. Maybe she’d lost her job and her reputation—
her
problem, not his—but he would hear her out and help if he could. He could do that much without letting bitterness hold sway.

They’d only been on a handful of dates. Hardly her fault if her withdrawal had come too late to save him from going under. He could give her that much.

Honour demanded it.

Grey saw Charlotte before she spotted him. Small woman with generous curves and a waterfall of wavy black hair pulled back off her face with a vibrant silk headband. She wore tailored
black trousers, dainty high-heeled sandals, and a sleeveless vest top in the same pinks, purples, and greens as her headband. A purple leather handbag completed the outfit, and she looked more like the pampered socialite he’d taken to his mother’s barbecue than the experienced Associate Professor of Archaeology he knew her to be.

He stood as she approached him. Stood because a woman who expected a man to open car doors for her would surely expect that as well. Stood because the fighter in him demanded he pursue any advantage he could with her and size was one of them.

She cast him a quick smile and slid into the bench seat opposite. A waiter materialised and took her order for mineral water. Greyson’s beer stood mostly untouched and he left it that way.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she said politely.

‘I’m a sucker for punishment.’ Nothing but the truth. ‘I’m also curious as to what you have to say to me.’

‘Ah,’ said Charlotte. ‘Yes. That. I kind of need to work my way up to that particular discussion. How’s your mother?’

‘My mother’s well.’ Not where he’d been expecting this conversation to go. ‘Why?’

‘No reason. How’s the Sarah situation?’

‘I’ve seen her once since we spoke after the barbecue. We talked. She left. She blames you, by the way, for my newfound insensitivity.’

‘Handy,’ she said quietly.

Charlotte’s drink came and the waiter directed them to the blackboard menu. Neither he nor Charlotte was ready to order. ‘You’ve lost weight,’ he said. She still took his breath away with her perfection of form and features, but there was no denying she’d dropped a few kilos from her slender frame. Kilos she could ill afford to lose.

She’d lost weight; she looked wan. He was the son of a doctor. ‘Charlotte, are you sick?’

Grey watched in horror as tears swam in Charlotte’s eyes and threatened to overflow.

Oh, God, she
was
sick. ‘What is it?’ Information. He needed information.

‘Not sick,’ she murmured. ‘Not sick.’ She put her hand to her forehead for a moment, then changed her mind and put both hands in her lap. Not once did she meet his gaze. She stared at her coaster, the tabletop, the entrance to the bar as if she’d rather be anywhere else but there with him. ‘Pregnant.’

‘What?’

Charlotte glanced up at him then, startled and terrified and apologetic all at once and he had his answer.

‘Mine,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ He could hardly hear her for the thundering of his heart. ‘There’s tests we can do if that’s what you want,’ she offered. ‘But there’s been no one else.’

‘Forget the tests.’ Satisfaction flooded through him, as unexpected as it was savage.

Mine.

In which case … ‘Shouldn’t you be putting
on
weight?’ he said silkily.

‘I’m working on it,’ she said in a low raw voice. ‘I’ve also been thinking about what we might do. Greyson, I don’t want to raise this child all by myself. It’s not enough.
I’m
not enough. A child should have more than that. More family. More security.’

‘You want a termination?’ Hard to keep his jaw from clenching or his dislike of that notion from colouring his words. ‘Is that what you brought me here to tell me? Because it’s not going to enamour you to me, Charlotte. Not by a long shot.’

Mine.

‘That’s not why I asked you here,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve not considered that course of action. I don’t think it’s for me.’

‘Good.’

The waiter approached them again, took one look at Grey and kept right on walking.

‘I’m not asking for marriage or monetary support either,’ she said earnestly.

‘Tough.’ From one have-it-my-way child to another. ‘You’re getting both. And food. We’re ordering food
now.
Pick something.’

‘I’ll have the chef’s salad.’

‘Now pick something
else
.’

‘And the teriyaki chicken kebabs,’ she said with a roll of her eyes. ‘But only because I’m humouring you.’

Grey glared at her. Better that than leaning across the table and kissing her senseless. Or was it?

In the end he did lean across and kiss her, terrified that she wouldn’t respond to him, equally terrified when she did because it was still there, this all-consuming need to lose himself in her. ‘Pick a date,’ he murmured when his lips left hers. ‘Any date.’

‘I’m not marrying you, Greyson. There’s no need for that. Not in this day and age.’

‘If you really think I’m going to let my child be raised a bastard, you really don’t know me very well,’ he said grimly.

‘My point exactly,’ countered Charlotte. ‘Greyson, we hardly know one another. What I do know of you suggests that marriage is the last thing on your mind, and that you’d start to feel trapped within five minutes of taking that
step. You’ve already broken one engagement because you weren’t prepared to settle for a life based in Sydney.’

Grey stared at Charlotte broodingly. He couldn’t deny it. He liked his freedom, and he loved to travel, but, dammit, was it so wrong to want this child to be born within marriage?’

‘The baby could still have your name,’ said Charlotte. ‘Access wouldn’t be a problem. I
want
you in this baby’s life. But we don’t have to get married for that to happen.’

‘You think I’ll take it, don’t you?’ he said bleakly. ‘The easy way out. The half measure. You think I’ll be content to stand at the periphery of this child’s life, never quite giving or getting enough.’

‘Greyson, I—’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Lofty words for a man who intends to spend the next three years of his life in Borneo.’

‘I didn’t take that job,’ he said tightly. ‘Something you would have discovered weeks ago had you thought enough of me to stick around.’

‘I thought enough of you to bring you back, didn’t I?’ She looked mutinous, and scared, and sorry, and she made his heart bleed.

‘No. You’re scared enough of your inadequacies as a single parent to bring me back. You’re
looking for a back-up plan for this child in case something happens to you, and, unfortunately, I’m all you’ve got.’

If Charlotte had looked wan before, she now looked positively waxy. ‘This is never going to work,’ she said faintly.

‘Are you going to faint?’ Dear heaven, she looked fragile, and anxious, and perilously close to tears. ‘Don’t you dare faint!’

‘I’m not going to faint.’

‘Or cry.’

‘Or cry,’ she said in a voice that threatened exactly that.

Greyson eyed her grimly. ‘You should know something about me, Charlotte. I never give up. I make things work. It’s what I do.’ He cupped her neck in his hand and touched his lips to hers again, hard and fast and ruthless. ‘I’m free next Tuesday. What say we get married then?’

D
INNER
wasn’t going well. Charlotte hadn’t anticipated that Greyson would see straight through to her fear of leaving this child all alone in the world should something happen to her. She hadn’t planned on his kisses reducing her to jelly and she certainly hadn’t anticipated that his heated insistence on marriage would wash over her like a panacea, or that the thought of marriage to this man would be so very tempting.

‘Greyson, I thank you for the offer,’ she said raggedly. ‘Truly, I do, but
think.
You’re talking about a marriage of necessity, not a union based on love. Is that really what you want?’

Greyson remained silent. Such a beautiful man, so hell-bent on doing the right thing by her and this baby, that he couldn’t see through to what he might need, and what he would lose if he insisted on a marriage of convenience.

‘What about your work?’ she continued.
‘If not Borneo this time, you’ll want to go somewhere else down the track. Greyson, you know my feelings on that kind of life.’

‘We’ll compromise,’ he said, in a voice that promised anything but. ‘I don’t have all the answers for you, Charlotte. I have three more months’ work here. After that I had planned on taking on a new project but it doesn’t have to be out of the country. Maybe it’s time I looked to my own backyard and reassessed my future direction. Maybe it’s time you did the same.’

‘I want to finish up at the university and set up a Greenstone Archaeology Foundation,’ she offered. ‘One that finances and manages archaeological projects and gets key people working together. I’d start small. One project at a time. If I can get the right people in place, I’ll be able to work part time from home.’

‘Or anywhere else,’ he said silkily.

‘Is that your idea of compromise? We traipse the world with you?’

‘Of what use is a father to a child if he’s never
there?
Jesus, Charlotte. What is it you
want
from me?’ Greyson glared at her, a man trapped.

Trapped because of her.

‘Not marriage,’ she said, and her heart bled for herself and for Greyson, and the baby they’d unwittingly made. ‘Not without love. Something
else. Something that love doesn’t necessarily have to play a part in. I’m arranging for my own work to become more flexible so that I can be a hands-on mother. You’ve no idea how relieved I am that you want to be a hands-on father. I’m just saying that there’s no need to rush into marriage. Truly. We have the time and the resources to come up with a solution that doesn’t necessarily involve for ever and ever, amen.’

Greyson closed his eyes, shook his head. Probably wishing himself halfway up the Sepik River. Anywhere but here.

‘My work’s probably going to get a little chaotic over the next few months while I set up a foundation blueprint,’ she began, and Greyson’s eyes snapped open.

‘As long as it’s not a dangerously exhausting plan, I’m all for it,’ he said smoothly. ‘Could you base your foundation headquarters at the Double Bay house?’

‘Yes.’ This was where she wanted this conversation to go. Exactly where she wanted it to go. ‘It’s the logical choice, especially if the baby and I lived there too.’ Tell him what you want, Derek had told her. Not marriage, not without love, but something that might suit them both and allow them to raise a child and still partake of the work they loved. ‘I don’t know that you’ve
been around the back of Aurora’s place but the grounds flow all the way down to the harbour. There’s a boat house down there—big enough for a speedboat, nothing more. There’s a jetty and a deepwater mooring there too.’

Charlotte thought she saw a flicker of interest in Greyson’s dark eyes but if he had any thoughts on how that deepwater mooring might best be put to use, he kept them to himself.

‘You’d be welcome there. Living in the house or on your boat. You might not always be there, what with your work and your travels, but you could base there. We could all base there. That’s kind of as far as I’ve gone with the thinking.’

‘It’s sound thinking,’ he murmured. ‘God, Charlotte. You’re going to have to give me some time with this.’

‘Of course.’ Charlotte picked up her mineral water and sipped it through the straw. She looked to the bar. She looked at the artwork on the walls. She’d known this meeting would be a hard one. But she’d seriously underestimated just how hard it would be, or how bad she would feel about being the tool of Greyson’s entrapment. ‘Greyson—I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t,’ he said gruffly. ‘Please, Charlotte. Just … I need some time to think.’

She gave him time. Seconds that felt like hours. Minutes that stretched into eternity.
Much more of this and she was going to start rocking back and forward keening, such was her nervous tension.