Count Toussaint’s Pregnant Mistress by Kate Hewitt Read Free Book Online Page B

into a celebrity.’
    ‘Maybe I don’t want to be a celebrity.’
    Andrew shook his head. ‘It’s too late for that.’
    It was too late for a lot of things, Abby thought wearily. Too late for regrets. She thought of Luc’s wish to turn back time. Would she have turned back time if she could, wished last night into never having been?
    With a fresh wave of sorrow she realized she wouldn’t have. She’d have wished it into completion—which must make her truly pathetic. Despite the disappointment of this morning, last night had been magical—for a time. She was glad to have had it, even if it meant facing this morning and its harsh realities alone.
    ‘I need to shower,’ she told her father. ‘And change. After that we can talk.’ She saw surprise flicker across his face and knew he wasn’t used to her giving orders. She wasn’t used to it, either, but without another word she left the parlour in a swirl of silk and closed the door of her bedroom.
    In her en suite bathroom she turned the shower on full blast and stripped the gown from her body, kicking it into a corner on the floor. She never wanted to see or wear it again; it felt tainted. Everything did.
    She stepped into the shower and let the scalding water stream over her like tears. The beauty of last night, she realized, the promise and the potential, did not make up for the ugliness of this morning. Why had Luc left so suddenly, without a word of explanation or farewell?
    The answer was obvious—he didn’t want to be found. For whatever reason he’d changed his mind about being with her, and hadn’t wanted the confrontation of telling her so. Abby closed her eyes. Was she so undesirable, so gauche in the bedroom that he’d been able to leave in the middle of their encounter? She gave a little laugh of disbelief. Honestly, if he’d been able to leave so easily, she didn’t have what it would have taken to make him stay.
    Once she was dressed and showered, she returned to the parlour, where her father sat on the sofa, his mobile phone clenched to one ear. The expression on his face was grim, and almost idly Abby wondered to whom he was talking. The concert-hall manager? A reporter? Her agent?
    He snapped the phone shut and swivelled to look at Abby. ‘That was your mother.’
    She felt a faint flicker of surprise; as first violinist of an orchestra in Manchester, her mother had a busy schedule, and rarely rang while Abby was on tour.
    ‘Is everything all right?’
    ‘No, Abigail,’ her father replied tersely, ‘everything is not all right. Your mother read in the paper this morning about the Piano Prodigy’s mystery man!’
    The Piano Prodigy; it was how she’d been marketed since she’d started playing professionally at age seventeen. And, while she’d never particularly liked it, right now the words seemed so cold, so inhuman. Abby walked to the window, twisting a damp strand of hair around her finger as she gazed out at the city landscape of early spring. The trees lined the boulevard, still stark and bare against a dank, grey sky.
    ‘I don’t think,’ Andrew continued in that same tight voice, ‘you realize what last night meant.’
    A harsh bark of laughter escaped her. ‘I know exactly what it meant.’ Nothing.
    ‘For your career,’ Andrew emphasized. ‘Although also…’ he trailed off, and Abby could only imagine the questions he was unable to ask.
    Although her father had been both her manager and mentor for years, they’d never had the kind of relationship that encouraged personal revelation or intimacy. Abby still remembered getting her period in the middle of a piano lesson. She’d asked the mother of another pupil what to do, and kindly the woman had run out and got the necessary items at a nearby chemist. The woman had also told her father, who had looked stricken. They’d never spoken about it, of course, just as they wouldn’t speak of this. Abby wasn’t a woman, or even a daughter—she was a pianist. A