The hospital gurney in a sweat-soaked panic. Was she going to die? The niggling pain in her back that had started three days ago was getting worse. It was spreading to her abdomen tight, rigid bands that made it hard for her to breathe. Was it endometriosis? Or... cancer? She was only twenty-seven, how could she die of cancer? She had so much left to do. Her career was taking off. She had a book deal featuring her photographs—photographs she had yet to take in Paris in six weeks. This was the wrong time to contract a terminal illness.

The pain gradually subsided like a retreating tide and Harper flopped back on the pillow and let out a shuddering breath. But she knew it would be back. The time intervals between the spasms were shrinking.

A junior doctor had examined her so far and he had seemed a little baffled by Harper’s symptoms. The doctor took a blood sample for Pathology and told Harper the more senior emergency doctor would be back with the results, as soon as they came through.

Harper closed her eyes and tried to meditate while she waited for the results of the test. Not that meditation had ever been her forte. Her only visit to a health spa retreat had made her feel antsy and agitated the whole time, while everyone else was chanting and cleansing and rebalancing their chakras. Her chakras were obviously beyond repair. As for her mind? It was hardly ever still, which she put down to her turbulent childhood. All that time in foster care had made her hypervigilant. Every noise, every sound, every footfall, and she was wide awake and alert.

A and E were busy with the usual dramas of a Saturday night. Harper could hear the noise of someone coughing a couple of cubicles away. Not a simple virus cough but one that hinted at some sort of hideous lung disease like emphysema or cancer.

"Cancer."

Why could she not stop thinking about the C word?

A man was shouting in another cubicle about wanting more ********. Harper wondered if he was suffering from the same disease. Maybe the Swan women weren’t destined to live beyond thirty. Her mother had died young, and so too her grandmother.

Another band of pain tightened around her abdomen like an iron cable. Sweat poured like tears from her hairline, her teeth were gritted together so hard she was sure she was going to crack every one of her molars. But hey, if she was going to die, what would it matter if every tooth fell out?

"I don’t want to die!"

It was a scream inside her brain as if a panic button had been pressed in her head, a piercing siren of distress only she could hear.

The curtain was swished aside and a more senior emergency doctor came in. She placed a hand on Harper’s wrist, her expression grave. "Is your partner waiting outside?"

"I don’t have a partner."

"Oh, well, you're next of kin? Your mother?"

"My mother died when I was eight." Harper could say it without any trace of emotion but it had taken years of practice. Years of concealing her true feelings behind a mask of indifference. Years of blocking the vision of finding her mother lying lifeless on the floor of their cramped bedsit when she came home from school on that fateful day. Later than she should have come home. If she hadn’t stopped on the walk home to play with a stray kitten...

"A sibling?"

"I’m an only child." Which, strictly speaking, wasn’t quite true. Harper had several half-siblings she had never met because her father hadn’t wanted his dirty little secret—her, his secret love child—to be revealed to his wife and family. "Love child" was a bit of a stretch. Her father hadn’t loved Harper’s mother. He had used her to break his marital boredom and then left her when she got pregnant.

"Harper..." The female doctor’s voice was gentle as if she was preparing to deliver shocking news. "It’s okay, Dr. Praneesh," Harper said with a grim smile. "You can be straight with me. It’s cancer, isn’t it?"

Dr. Praneesh frowned. "No, you don’t have cancer." She moistened her lips and continued, "It’s a different type of growth—you’re pregnant."

Harper rapid-blinked. Her heart knocked against her ribcage with the force of a punch. "I—I can’t possibly be pregnant." Was she having some sort of hallucination? A bad dream? How could she be pregnant and not know? And more to the point—not show? Sure, she wasn’t the slimmest woman on the planet but she could distinguish a baby bump.

"When was the last time you had intercourse?"

"Erm... months ago."

"Nine months?"

Harper did the mental arithmetic, a worm of worry wriggling through her mind. Her stomach swooped and dipped and dived. Her one-night stand with Jack Livingstone. How could she be pregnant with a playboy? It was her worst nightmare. How could she tell him? How could she rock up to him carrying a full-term baby in her arms? How could she be having Jack’s baby? Is anyone’s baby? She hadn’t planned on having kids. She wasn’t the maternal type. She was a career woman. She had no room in her life for a baby. She hadn’t even held a baby since she was a kid. "Yes, but that’s ridiculous. I—I’ve had a period every month since." She looked down at her slightly rounded abdomen just as the pain began again. "Oh, God, here it comes again." She gripped the doctor’s hand so hard that Dr. Praneesh winced.

"You’re in labor, Harper. It seems you’ve had a cryptic pregnancy. It’s not as rare as you’d think. One in two thousand five hundred pregnancies in the UK, which is about three hundred a year. You can still have a light period each month and not have any other symptoms of pregnancy, or at least none that you notice, especially if the placenta is in the front of the abdomen, as it lessens the sensations of the fetus kicking and moving. I’ll have to examine you to see how close you are to delivering."

"Delivering..." Harper swallowed a lump of dread. "You mean, I’m having a baby? Now?" Her panicked shriek rivaled the volume of ******** Man in cubicle six.

"Your contractions are ten minutes apart, so it won’t be long now. From what you told the triage nurse, you’ve been in non-active labor for a couple of days. I’ll do an ultrasound to check the baby’s development, and the sex if you’d like to know, and then do an internal examination. Would you like to call a friend or the baby’s father to be with you?"

Harper gulped. Her two best friends and business partners were out of town—Ruby had only days ago gotten engaged to Lucas Rothwell and was spending the weekend with him in the Lake District. And Aerin was visiting her parents in Buckinghamshire for their thirty-sixth wedding anniversary. God only knew where Jack Livingstone would be—no doubt in bed with his latest hook-up in one of his plush hotels. But she had to tell him, right? He was the father and he had to be given the choice to be present at the baby’s birth, not to mention the choice to be a part of his child’s life.

Like her own father, he could always say no.

Jack was poring over some bookwork in his London penthouse at his boutique flagship hotel when his phone buzzed on his desk. He glanced at it and gave a slow smile when he saw who was calling him at this late hour on a Saturday night. Maybe the elusive Harper Swan had changed her mind and decided to see him again and collect the earring he still had in his possession. "Hello there."

He could hear her heavy breathing at the end of the line. "Jack, there’s no easy way to tell you this... but I’m in the hospital and—"

Jack sat bolt upright in his chair, something in his chest flapping like a wind-whipped sail. "Are you all right? What’s wrong? Have you had an accident?"

"Kind of..." Harper gave an audible swallow. "I’d like to explain in person... if that’s okay? Are you in London right now?"

"I am." He pushed back his chair and reached for his jacket and sports car keys. ‘Which hospital are you in?’

"St Agnes’s. I’m still in A and E but—"

"I’ll be there in a few minutes." Jack ended the call and then opened the second drawer in his desk. He took out the earring she had left behind after their one-night stand and slipped it into his pocket. At least now he would be able to give it to her in person.

Jack wasn’t a fan of hospitals but something about Harper’s call had set his nerves on edge. She had mentioned some sort of accident. A minor prang? A bump on the head? She must have a concussion if she’d changed her mind about seeing him. She had ignored his calls for months and, while he’d been disappointed, he hadn’t let it get to him. He wasn’t the type of man to get hung up on a woman. He had enjoyed their one night together and had hoped for a fling with her but she hadn’t seemed interested in a follow-up. Harper had been so adamant about not seeing him again she had refused to collect her earring. He knew he could have posted it or dropped it off at her office but he had kept it. He couldn’t explain why other than every time he looked at it, it reminded him of their explosive night of bed-wrecking, spine-tingling, mind-scrambling sex.

Jack also couldn’t explain why he hadn’t had a hook-up with anyone since. It was out of character for him to leave it so long but he’d been busy acquiring another property for development in Yorkshire. He hadn’t wanted any distractions while he secured the Rothwell Park deal. Turning the ancient estate into one of his boutique hotels was a dream he had harbored for months and now it was coming to fruition. Not that reliving every second of that night of passion with Harper wasn’t a distraction in itself. He had found it near impossible to get her out of his mind. Was it because she had walked away without begging for a follow-up date like every other woman he’d met? The challenge of winning Harper over was like a background thrum in his blood. He tried to ignore the niggling sense of failing at a goal he had set for himself. A box that hadn’t been ticked to his satisfaction. Not that he viewed any woman as a prize or trophy he could win, but because something about Harper got to him in a way no other woman ever had.

Once he arrived at the hospital, Jack was led by a nurse to the A and E cubicle Harper was in. "Here she is." The nurse gave a briskly efficient smile. "We’re waiting on an orderly to collect her. He shouldn’t be too long now."

Harper was lying on the hospital gurney on her side, she features pinched and white and racked with pain. Sweat poured down her face and in one of her hands, she had a blue stress ball that she was squeezing so hard it was bulging in between her fingers like a squashed plum. But then a flood of color entered her cheeks. "Jack..." Her voice was a strangled whisper, her grey-green eyes not quite willing to meet his. "I’m sorry..."

Jack took her other hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. "Hey, you. What’s going on?"

"I don’t know how to tell you this..." She bit her lip so hard he was worried it would split and bleed. "I thought it was backache. I had no idea. I truly didn’t. I didn’t think it was possible to not know, to not recognize the signs. I didn’t even have any signs that I can remember."

"Signs? What are you talking about?"

"I thought it was cancer. Can you believe that?’ She bit off a self-deprecating laugh and pulled her hand out of his and pushed her sweat-soaked hair back off her face. I thought the doctor was going to tell me I had inoperable cancer. That I was dying at the ripe old age of twenty-seven."

A fist of fear clutched at Jack’s guts. "You don’t have cancer... do you?"

"No..." She bit her lip again and squeezed the stress ball hard, her features contorting in pain. "I feel so stupid. How am I going to explain this to everyone? To Aerin and Ruby? We have weddings booked solidly for the next two months, including Ruby’s and Lucas’s. Summer is our busiest time of year. I mean, it’s like a bad dream or something. I can’t believe this has happened to me of all people."

The cubicle curtain was twitched aside and the nurse reappeared. "The orderly is on his way now to take you to the maternity ward."

Maternity ward? The words were like a bomb going off in Jack’s head. His thoughts flew everywhere like shrapnel. He whipped around so quickly to face the nurse he almost knocked over the portable blood pressure machine. He reached out to steady it with a shaking hand. "Maternity?" His voice came out hoarse, his heart thumping as if he needed to be admitted himself. To the cardiac unit.

"I was trying to tell you..." Harper said, with a frustrated eye-roll.

"Tell me what?"

"I’m having a baby."

Harper was pregnant?!

Jack let the words sink into his brain. She was having a baby. A sharp prick of disappointment stabbed him in the gut. Harper was having someone else’s baby. Not that he was keen on having a family or anything himself, but still. She had moved on and found someone else and got pregnant. But what did that news have to do with him? She didn’t look as if she was very far along. Was she in the early stages? He knew that pregnancy could trigger appalling nausea in some women that required hospital admission. Why, then, had she called him? He wasn’t her next of kin, he wasn’t her partner—he wasn’t strictly speaking even a friend. It didn’t make sense. She had friends and family, surely? And what about her partner, the father of her baby? That was who was supposed to be by her side right now. Not him. A casual lover she had cast off without a backward glance.

"Are you the proud father?" the nurse asked Jack with a beaming smile.

"No, I—"

"Yes," Harper said. "He’s the father."

Jack stared at Harper in a gobsmacked silence. How could he be the father? He hadn’t seen Harper in months. He had counted every one of them. He gave his head a shake, wondering if he was caught in some weird time warp. Nothing was making any sense. "I’m the father? How?"

But there was no time for clarification or explanation, for the orderly came in with energy efficiency and released the brake on the gurney.

"First baby?" the orderly said with a cheery smile.

"Yes... oh—" Harper’s voice was cut off by a spasm of pain that flashed over her features.

Jack glanced at the nurse, who was collecting Harper’s purse and phone from the table next to the gurney. "Can’t you give her something for the pain?"

"I don’t want anything," Harper said before the nurse could respond. "I want a natural birth.

Jack wasn’t exactly up to date on what was de rigueur around pregnancy and motherhood these days but he had heard the term "natural birth" bandied about and it sounded as if it could be extremely painful. "This is the twenty-first century, Harper," Jack said, following alongside her as the orderly wheeled the gurney towards the lift situated outside A and E. "There’s no need to suffer unnecessarily."

"I know, but I figure the only way I’ll accept this is happening to me is if I feel everything now."

"You’re not making a lot of sense. You’ve had nine months to prepare yourself." Jack had only minutes. It wasn’t enough. His head was reeling, he was light-headed, his pulse was racing, and his heart thumping with a host of emotions—panic, dread, fear. He was about to become a father. It didn’t seem real. It didn’t seem possible. They had used protection. He had never had a yearning desire to have children. He enjoyed his freedom too much. Why hadn’t Harper told him before now? Why hadn’t she given him the heads-up months ago? Or had she been worried he would pressure her to have a termination? He would not have done any such thing, but he would have liked to know he was to become a father well before the day of its freaking birth.

He never had felt so out of control.

It was like finding himself as a fully signed-up member of a club he had never expected to join—the Fatherhood Club. Once in, you couldn’t leave.

"I haven’t had nine months to prepare," Harper flashed back. "I only just found out half an hour ago."

"Cryptic pregnancy," the orderly explained. "It’s not common but it happens. I’ve seen one before. A teenage girl had no idea she was pregnant until she got to A and E with severe abdominal pain. She thought it was appendicitis. You should have seen her mother’s face when she was told she was about to become a grandmother."

A cryptic pregnancy. So, Harper hadn’t known? How could she not have known? Surely there had been a hint or two? Or had she been so determined to put everything to do with him out of her mind she hadn’t noticed the subtle changes in her body? But then, denial was a powerful mental tool. It could make normally rational and sensible people ignore things they didn’t want to face. Issues they didn’t want to deal with, truths they didn’t want to confront.

There was an issue Jack had to face and fast. He was going to be a father and he wanted his child to have his name. Marrying had not been part of his life plan but he was going to have to rethink that, otherwise his child would grow up without the protection and shelter of being a Livingstone. Marriage was a monumental step for any couple but for him and Harper, who had only met once before—the night they conceived their baby—it was off-the-charts madness to be thinking about tying the knot. But marrying Harper and raising their child together was the only option. He couldn’t see any other way forward. He had not had the happiest childhood himself due to his father’s long and painful decline in health but that didn’t mean Jack couldn’t give his child a wonderful childhood. But he couldn’t do it from a distance. He wanted to be a hands-on dad, involved from the get-go. Marrying Harper and providing a safe and secure home for their baby was the only thing he could control in this out-of-control situation.

The lift doors swished open. They all bundled inside and the doors closed again. Jack glanced at the sign reading Maternity Wing on the third floor and his guts turned to the gravy. He glanced at Harper but she was in the middle of another savage contraction. Her face was screwed up, her panting breaths sounding as primal as those of a cavewoman. He took one of her hands and she gripped it until he thought his bones would snap like twigs. He figured now was probably not the best time to propose marriage.

"Are you sure you don’t want some pain relief?" he asked with a concerned frown.

"If you can’t stomach seeing me in pain, don’t come to the birth," Harper said, through gritted teeth. "No one’s forcing you."

"You want me to be there?"

"Only if you want to be there." Her emphasis on the word "want" didn’t escape his notice.

Jack scraped his free hand through his hair. "It’s not something I’ve ever thought about before." Like marriage, like commitment, like settling down with one person for the rest of his life. But he had a child to consider, a baby who was about to be born in the next few minutes. A baby he was not prepared for in any way.

The lift doors swished open on the maternity floor and his heart gave another almighty lurch.

"Better hurry and make up your mind, then," Harper said on an expelled breath as strong as a wind gust. "I have a feeling this baby isn’t going to wait."

Harper was wheeled into the delivery suite and she mentally prepared herself for Jack abandoning her at the door. But to her surprise, he didn’t. It was obvious he was way out of his depth suddenly finding himself smack bang in a maternity unit, but then, so was she. His features were white with shock, his stance stiff and guarded as if preparing himself for an event he had never expected to experience.

The birth of a child.

His child.

Her child.

Their child.

Harper was still having trouble getting her head around the fact she was about to deliver a baby. A baby her body had harbored in secret for close to nine months. A baby she had done nothing to prepare for—no clothes, no toys, no accessories, no pastel-painted nursery, no pram or baby seat or changing table. She had done no emotional preparation, either. No sense of excitement or anticipation, so a sense of joy or wonder. No connection with the baby at all. Surely that was bad for the baby? Would her baby sense her lack of preparation? Her lack of anticipation and joy? Her lack of emotion?

Harper’s decision to refuse pain relief was her way of finally coming to terms with the reality of what was happening. Otherwise, she was worried she wouldn’t properly bond with the baby. She might not know much about babies but she did know bonding was everything. Some of the kids she had grown up with in foster care had not experienced secure bonding with their parents. Although on one level she knew her mother had loved her, she still had reason to question her mother’s overall commitment to her. Her mother had always seemed a little overwhelmed by being a single parent—it hadn’t been what she had been expecting, having loved Harper’s father and dreamed of them living happily ever after together. Harper had put her mother’s distant parenting style down to the fact that her father had left her mother holding the baby, so to speak, not supporting her at all, either financially or emotionally. That lack of support had led to her mother ending her life, the burden of bringing up a child alone too much for her to handle.