Free One-Night Pregnancy by Lindsay Armstrong Page A

them feel not wanted.
    As for marriage—was it enough to marry even a thoroughly nice girl to ensure you didn’t grow old and sad and lonely and ensure that you had heirs?
    It was from that thought that he recalled where he’d heard the thoroughly nice girl phrase. The drenched Numinbah Valley via Bridget Tully-Smith, of course. The irony was that he’d even agreed with her at the time—but now…?
    Bridget’s mother rang her that night, and when she asked Bridget if anything was the matter it shot through Bridget’s mind to tell her that she’d got herself pregnant by Adam Beaumont when she’d had no idea who he was. In the most amazing circumstances, granted, but that didn’t absolve her from having acted incredibly foolishly. And, on top of all that, he now viewed her with extreme suspicion.
    But common sense prevailed. The enormity of it all wouldn’t fail to hit her mother and hit her hard. Probably enough to make her come racing home, which would be a pity. Her mother had been heartbroken at her father’s death, and full of incredulity and anxiety when love had come to her again.
    It had taken quite some power of persuasion on Bridget’s part to get her mother to believe in this new love, and not to feel guilty about leaving her only child alone in Australia. Her mother’s new husband, RichardBaxter, was an academic, and he’d accepted a year’s fellowship at a Jakarta University.
    He had a grown-up family of his own: a son who’d followed in his footsteps and a married daughter who lived in Perth. Even more importantly, he was the perfect partner for her mostly delightfully, sometimes maddeningly vague and unworldly mother. He really looked after her and cared for her, and they had lots in common.
    The last thing she, Bridget, wanted to do was spoil that.
    That was why she reassured her mother again that she was quite fine before she put the phone down. But, sitting alone in her flat later that evening, after the call, she knew that she wasn’t fine. There were all sorts of moral and ethical dilemmas in front of her, not to mention getting her mind around a baby…
    This is probably where you finally grow up, she told herself. First of all, you can’t go on not believing it. And you probably shouldn’t go on berating yourself. It’s done now, and what is more important is that you don’t make any more dodgy decisions…
    She paused in her reflections as the word dodgy raised an echo in her mind—and that raised the other Adam in her mind’s eye. The unshaven one, the man who’d saved her life, whose hands on her body had been such a revelation to her and brought her so much joy. How could she not want this baby? it suddenly occurred to her. Not to want it would be like negating something perfect…
    She swallowed suddenly. But that perfection had been broken, she told herself. He didn’t trust her, and there was no indication he could ever care for her…
    She breathed in, distraught, and got up to get herself a glass of water.
    If she decided to have this baby, she had to concede that she might have to do it on her own. Even if she did tell Adam Beaumont she was bearing his child, it would not necessarily lead to marriage—although she couldn’t believe he would not offer some support. If she didn’t tell him…Well, that had to be thought through thoroughly. It might, for example, suit her in some ways, but what about raising a fatherless child? What would that do to it?
    She drifted over to the glass doors leading to the veranda and looked out at the night-time scene: the street lights, the garden inside the wall that protected it from the road, the cars, the wet slick on the road from an earlier shower. But she didn’t see it at all as she grappled with what came to her suddenly as a crucial part of her problem. Whatever she did, she could not go on featuring as the villain of the piece.
    She pulled a face at her turn of phrase, but it did clarify things for her. However she had this