This Could Change Everything(84)

‘Keep going,’ prompted Lucas.

‘They moved to Italy to work together in a hotel in Florence, and eventually they broke up too. Then Gregor headed off to New Zealand . . . but six months ago his dad was taken ill and he moved back here to Kinlara. Which meant that when I came up for Christmas I saw him again for the first time in ten years.’

‘And you took one look at him and knew you still loved him.’

‘No!’ Giselle looked at him in anguish. ‘I loved you! It was great to see him, like catching up with an old friend . . . and there were a couple of other people from school, Jen and Jamie . . . it was just natural for the four of us to meet up and socialise together. Then on Christmas Eve, Gregor invited us over to his cottage for dinner, but Jen and Jamie had to cancel at the last minute when Jen’s gran was rushed into hospital. So I went on my own, and that was when it, you know . . . happened.’

‘You slept with him.’

Giselle flinched. ‘The snow was getting worse . . . Gregor’s cottage is a couple of miles outside Kinlara and Mum had given me a lift there. At ten o’clock she called and said she wasn’t going to be able to pick me up. Basically, I ended up having too much to drink with the boy who’d been my first love . . . and he told me how much he’d missed me and how he wished we’d never broken up, and it felt like I was finally hearing everything I’d always wanted to hear, and somehow . . . well, you already know the rest. It just . . . happened.’

Lucas shook his head in amazement. ‘How many times did you sleep with him?’

‘Just the once. When we woke up the next morning, I told him it must never happen again. I couldn’t believe we’d done it. I couldn’t believe I’d been unfaithful to you.’ She was looking pleadingly at him, willing him to understand. ‘It was the biggest mistake I’d ever made, the worst thing I’d ever done in my life. So we decided to put it behind us, pretend it had never happened.’

‘But it didn’t occur to you that you could be pregnant?’ said Lucas.

Giselle flushed. ‘My period had only finished the day before. I thought it would be completely safe . . . It should have been safe. I just convinced myself everything would be fine. Then I came back down to Bath, and to you, and it seemed as if none of it had ever happened. I’d never thought I was the kind of person who could do something like that, but . . .’

‘It turned out you could,’ said Lucas when her voice trailed away.

She nodded resignedly. ‘Well, yes.’

It certainly explained why their sex life had gone out of the window after her return. At the time, the excuses had seemed plausible – she’d either been exhausted or feeling off colour or needing to get up very early for work.

Now he understood the real reason why.

He also understood why she’d seemed so distracted once the pregnancy had been confirmed.

‘And the plan was to carry on letting me think the baby was mine?’ This was the hardest part to come to terms with.

‘I didn’t know what to do. I was so shocked and ashamed.’ Giselle sat back and let out a groan of self-loathing. ‘You were right there when I did the test . . . I didn’t have time to get everything straight in my head. If I hadn’t loved you, it would have been easier . . . but I did love you.’

Lucas noted the use of the past tense. ‘Enough to pass off another man’s child as mine.’

‘I panicked and I’m sorry. The longer it went on, the more impossible it became to tell you the truth. And inside my head, everything was just getting more and more tangled up.’ Fresh tears of anguish were sliding down her cheeks. ‘I thought I was going to go mad. My whole life I’ve been a good person and everyone liked me, then all of a sudden I’d turned into a bad person who’d done this terrible thing . . . and now here I was doing something even more terrible.’ Giselle’s voice cracked and she wrapped her arms tightly around her own ribcage. ‘By Friday I knew I had to sort it out one way or another, but I needed to do it myself, without you being there. And I had to tell Gregor, too. Whatever else happened, he deserved to know. So I managed to book a week off work and came up here.’

‘You’ve told him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was he shocked?’

‘That’s an understatement.’

‘Are you going to be . . . keeping the baby?’

Giselle looked at him steadily. ‘Oh yes.’

Lucas nodded. A lot of girls in Giselle’s situation might have taken the decision not to continue with the pregnancy. In a way, you had to admire her for choosing to carry on.

‘We’ve done a lot of talking,’ she went on, ‘me and Gregor. This afternoon he said we should give our relationship another go, see if we can get back what we used to have. For the sake of the baby.’

‘Do you think it’ll work?’

‘I have no idea. But it makes sense to try. I’ll need to work out my notice at the hospital, then I’m going to move up here and we’ll give it our best shot.’ Giselle wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her blue-and-white stripy sweater. ‘I know it sounds old-fashioned, but Kinlara hasn’t shifted into the twenty-first century quite yet; it’s what our parents would expect us to do. I also realise it doesn’t sound very romantic, but what other choice do we have? I messed up big-time and now I have to live with the consequences.’