The Bridesmaid's Baby Bump (11 page)

‘There must be such a thing as a third chance,’ he said.

She shook her head so vehemently it dislodged the clip that was holding her hair off her face and she had to push it back into place with hands that trembled.

‘No more chances. Not after what happened in that room today. You won’t break me. I will never forgive you. For the baby’s sake, I’ll be civil. It would be wrong to pump our child’s mind with poison against his or her father. Even if I happen to think he’s a...a bullying thug.’ Her cheeks were flushed scarlet, her eyes glittered.

Now he’d been kicked to a pulp—bruised black and blue all over. Hadn’t the judge used a similar expression when sentencing him to juvenile detention? The words
bully
and
thug
seemed to be familiar. But that had been so long ago. He’d been fifteen years of age. Why had those tendencies he’d thought left well and truly behind him in adolescence surfaced again?

Then it hit him—the one final blow he hadn’t seen coming. It came swinging again like that sledgehammer from nowhere to slam him in the head. This wasn’t about Eliza needing him—it was about
him
needing
her.
Needing her so desperately he’d gone to crazy lengths to try to secure her.

Just then the elevator arrived.

‘At last,’ Eliza said as she stepped towards it. She had to wait until a girl clutching a bunch of legal folders to her chest stepped out.

‘Eliza.’

Jake went to catch her arm, to stop her leaving. There was so much he had to say to her, to explain. But she shrugged off his hand.

‘Please, Jake, no more. I can’t take it. I’ll let you know when the baby is born. As per our contract.’

She stood facing him as the elevator doors started to slide slowly inward. The last thing he saw of her was a slice of her face, with just one fat, glistening tear sliding down her cheek.

Jake stood for a long time, watching the indicator marking the elevator’s progress down the twenty-three floors. He felt frozen to that marble floor, unable to step backwards or forwards.

When the elevator reached the ground floor he turned on his heel and strode back to his meeting. He needed to rethink his strategy. Jake Marlowe was not a man who gave up easily.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

T
HE
LAST
PLACE
Eliza expected to be a week after the lawyers’ meeting with Jake was on an executive jet flying to Europe. Despite the gravity of the reason for her flight, it was a welcome distraction.

Gemma had called an emergency meeting of the three Party Queens directors. Eliza’s unexpected pregnancy had tipped the problem of an absentee director into crisis point. And because Gemma was Crown Princess, as well as their Food Director, she had sent the Montovian royal family’s private jet to transport Eliza and Andie from Sydney to Montovia for the meeting.

Just because Gemma
could
, Eliza had mused with a smile when she’d got the summons, along with the instructions for when a limousine would pick her up to take her to the airport where she would meet Andie.

Dominic had decided to come along for the flight, too. He and Andie’s little boy Hugo was being looked after by his doting grandma and grandpa—Andie’s parents.

Eliza was very fond of Andie’s husband. But despite the luxury of the flight—the lounge chair comfort of leather upholstery, the crystal etched with the Montovian royal coat of arms, the restaurant-quality food, the hotel-style bathrooms—she hadn’t been able to relax because of the vaguely hostile emanations coming her way from Dominic.

Jake was Dominic’s best male friend. The bonds between them went deep. According to the legend of the two young billionaires they went way back, to when they’d been in their first year at university. Together, they had built fortunes. Created a charitable foundation for homeless kids. And cemented that young friendship into something adult and enduring.

In the air, somewhere over Indonesia, Dominic told Eliza in no uncertain terms that Jake was unhappy and miserable. He couldn’t understand why Eliza wouldn’t just marry Jake and put them
all
out of their misery.

Dominic got a sharp poke in the ribs from his wife’s elbow for
that
particular opinion. He was referring to the fact that sympathies had been split down the middle among the other two Party Queens and their respective spouses.

Andie and Gemma were on her side—though they’d been at pains to state that they weren’t actually
taking
sides. Neither of her friends saw why Eliza should marry a man she didn’t love just to give her baby Jake’s name when he or she was born. Nor did they approve of the domineering way Jake had tried to force the issue.

Dominic and Tristan, however, thought differently.

Dominic had an abusive childhood behind him—tough times living on the streets. He’d told Eliza she was both crazy and unwise not to jump straight into the safety net Jake was offering.

Tristan, a hereditary Crown Prince, also couldn’t see the big deal. There was only one way forward. The baby carried Jake’s blood. As far as Tristan was concerned, Gemma had told Eliza, Jake was doing the correct and honourable thing in offering Eliza marriage. Eliza must do the right thing and accept. That from a man who had changed the laws of his country regarding marriage so he could marry for love and make Gemma his wife.

Both men had let Eliza know that they saw her stance as stubborn in the extreme, and contributing to an unnecessary rift between very close friends. They stood one hundred per cent by their generous and maligned buddy Jake. The women could not believe how blindly loyal their husbands were to the
bullying thug
that was Jake.

Of course Eliza was well aware that neither Andie nor Gemma had ever called Jake that in front of Dominic or Tristan. They were each way too wise to let problems with their mutual friends interfere with their own blissfully happy marriages to the men they adored. Besides, as Andie told Eliza, they actually still liked Jake a lot. They just didn’t like the way he’d treated her.

‘Although Jake
is
very generous,’ Andie reminded her.

‘Of course he is—exceedingly generous,’ said Eliza evenly.

Inside she was screaming:
And sexy and kind and even funny when he wants to be.
As if she needed to be reminded of his good points when they were all she seemed to think about these days.

She kept remembering that time in the ambulance, as she’d drifted in and out of consciousness and the man who had never let go of her hand had murmured reassurance and encouragement all the way to the hospital. The man who’d chartered a private boat for her because she’d said she wanted to dive on the Great Barrier Reef. The man who hadn’t needed angel wings to send her soaring to heaven when they’d made love.

Eliza wished, not for the first time, that she hadn’t actually called Jake a bullying thug—or told Andie she’d called him that. That day she’d got all the way to the bottom of the building on the elevator and seriously considered going all the way back up to apologise. Then realised, as she had just told him she hated him, that it might not be the best of ideas.

‘Do you ever regret not marrying him?’ Andie asked. ‘You would never have to worry about money again.’

‘No,’ Eliza replied firmly. ‘Because I don’t think financial security is a good enough reason to marry—not for me, anyway. Not when I’m confident I’ll always be able to earn a good living.’

What she couldn’t admit—not even to her dearest friend Andie, and certainly not to Dominic—was that these weeks away from Jake had made her realise how much she had grown to care for him. That along with all the other valid reasons for her not to marry Jake there was one overwhelming reason—she couldn’t put herself through the torture of a pragmatic arrangement with a man she’d begun to realise she was half in love with but who didn’t love her.

By the end of the long-haul flight to Montovia—Australia to Europe being a flight of some twenty-two hours—Eliza was avoiding Dominic as much as she could within the confines of the private jet. Andie was okay. Eliza didn’t think she had a clue about how much Eliza was beginning to regret the way she had handled her relationship with Jake. But she didn’t want to share those thoughts with anyone.

She hoped she and Dominic would more easily be able to steer clear of each other in the vast expanses of the royal castle. Avoiding Tristan might not be so easy.

* * *

The day after she’d landed in Montovia, Eliza sat in Gemma’s exquisitely decorated office in the Crown Prince’s private apartment at the castle. A ‘small’ room, it contained Gemma’s desk and a French antique table and chairs, around which the three Party Queens were now grouped. Under the window, which looked out onto the palace gardens, there was a beautiful chaise longue that Eliza recognised from her internet video conversations with Gemma.

What a place for three ordinary Aussie girls to have ended up for a meeting, Eliza couldn’t help thinking.

The three Party Queens were more subdued than usual, with the future of the company they had started more as a lark than any seriously considered business decision now under threat. It was still considered the best party planning business in Sydney, but it was at a crossroads—Eliza had been pointing that out with increasing urgency over the last months.

‘I thought it would be too intimidating for us to meet in the castle boardroom,’ auburn-haired Gemma explained once they were all settled. ‘Even after we were married it took me a while before I could overcome my nerves enough to make a contribution there.’

Andie laughed. ‘This room is so easy on the eye I might find it difficult to concentrate from being too busy admiring all the treasures.’

‘Not to mention the distraction of the view out to those beautiful roses,’ Eliza said.

It felt surreal to be one day in the late winter of Australia, the next day in the late summer of Europe.

‘Okay, down to business,’ said Gemma. ‘We all know Party Queens is facing some challenges. Not least is the fact that I now live here, while the business is based in Sydney.’

‘Which makes it problematical when your awesome skills with food are one of the contributing factors to our success,’ said Eliza.

‘True,’ said Andie. ‘Even as Creative Director, there are limitations to what I can do in terms of clever food ideas. Those ideas need to be validated by a food expert to tell me if they can be practical.’

Gemma nodded. ‘I can still devise menus from here. And I can still test recipes myself, as I like to do.’ The fact that Gemma had been testing a recipe for a white chocolate and citrus mud cake when she had first met Tristan, incognito in Sydney, had been fuel for a flurry of women’s magazine articles. More so when the recipe had become the royal wedding cake. ‘But the truth is both the time difference between Montovia and Sydney and my royal duties make a hands-on presence from me increasingly difficult.’

Eliza swallowed hard against a dry throat. ‘Does that mean you want to resign from the partnership, Gemma?’

‘Heavens, no,’ said Gemma. ‘But maybe I need to look at my role in a different way.’

‘And then there’s your future as a sole parent to consider, Eliza,’ said Andie.

‘Don’t think I haven’t thought of the challenges that will present,’ Eliza said.

‘Think about those challenges and multiply them a hundred times,’ said Andie, and put up her hand to stop the protest Eliza was already formulating. ‘Being a parent is tough, Eliza. Even tougher without a pair of loving hands from the other parent to help you out.’

Eliza gritted her teeth. She was sure Andie had meant ‘the other parent’ in abstract terms. But of course she could only think of Jake in that context.

‘I understand that, Andie,’ she said. ‘And my bouts of extreme nausea showed me that even with the best workaholic will in the world there are times when the baby will have to come before the business.’

Andie raised her hand for attention. ‘May I throw into the mix the fact that Dominic and I would like another baby? With two children, perhaps more, I might have to scale down my practical involvement as well.’

‘It’s good to have everything on the table,’ said Eliza. ‘No doubt a royal heir might factor into
your
future, Gemma.’

‘I hope so,’ said Gemma with a smile. ‘We’re waiting until a year after the wedding to think about that. I need to learn how to be a princess before I tackle motherhood.’

‘Now we’ve heard the problems, I’m sure you’ve come armed with a plan to solve them, Eliza,’ said Andie.

This kind of dilemma was something Eliza was more familiar with than the complications of her relationship with Jake. She felt very confident on this turf. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘The business is still very healthy, so option one is to sell Party Queens.’

She was gratified at the wails of protest from Gemma and Andie.

‘It
is
a viable option,’ she continued. ‘There are two possible buyers—’

‘No,’ said Andie.

‘No,’ echoed Gemma.

‘How could the business be the same without us?’ said Andie, with an arrogant flick of her blonde-streaked hair. ‘We
are
the Party Queens.’

‘Good,’ said Eliza. ‘I feel the same way. The other proposal is to bring in another level of management in Sydney. Gemma would become a non-executive director, acting as ongoing adviser to a newly appointed food manager.’

Gemma nodded. ‘Good idea. I have someone in mind. I’ve worked with her as a consultant and she would be ideal.’

Eliza continued. ‘And Andie would train a creative person to bring on board so she can eventually work part-time. I’m thinking Jeremy.’

Freelance stylist Jeremy had been working with them since the beginning—long forgiven for his role in the disastrous Christmas tree incident that had rocked Andie and Dominic’s early relationship.

Andie frowned. ‘Jeremy is so talented... He’s awesome. And he’s really organised. But he’s not a Party Queen.’ She paused. ‘Actually, he’s a queen of a different stripe. I think he’d love to come on board.’

‘Which brings us to
you
, Eliza,’ said Gemma.

Eliza heaved a great sigh, reluctant to be letting go. ‘I’m thinking I need to appoint a business manager to deal with the day-to-day finances and accounting.’

‘Good idea.’ Andie reached out a hand to take Eliza’s. ‘But you, out of all of us, might have a difficult time relinquishing absolute control over the business we started,’ she said gently.

‘I...I get that,’ Eliza said.

Gemma smiled her friendship and understanding. ‘Will you be able to give a manager the freedom to make decisions independent of you? Not hover over them and micro-manage them? Like watching a cake rise in the oven?’

Eliza bowed her head. ‘I really am a control freak, aren’t I?’

Andie squeezed her hand. ‘You said it, not me.’

‘I reckon your control freak tendencies are a big part of Party Queens’s success,’ said Gemma. ‘You’ve really kept us on track.’

‘But they could also lead to its downfall if I don’t loosen the reins,’ said Eliza thoughtfully.

‘It’s a matter of believing someone can do the job as well as you—even if they do it differently,’ said Andie.

‘Of accepting help because you need it,’ said Gemma.

Her friends were talking about Party Queens. But, seen through the filter of her relationship with Jake, Eliza saw how she might have done things very differently. She’d fought so hard not to relinquish control over her life, over her baby—over her heart—she hadn’t seen what Jake could bring to her. Not just as a father but as a life partner. Maybe she had driven him to excessive control on his side because she hadn’t given an inch on hers.

In hindsight, she realised she might have thought more about compromise than control. When it came to giving third chances, maybe it should have been
her
begging
him
for a chance to make it right.