Ben had called several times, suggesting they go to dinner and talk, but she had been putting him off. It wasn’t something she could do indefinitely, but she found she couldn’t think about Ben without getting angry over his initial offer of money to relinquish his responsibilities. It wouldn’t serve either of them if they met and she was angry, so she felt as though she needed to work through that before she saw him.

Not to mention, she had the sneaking suspicion he wanted to leap right back into bed with her, which was not going to happen.

Sighing, she clicked on Damien’s next e-mail. It was a link to childbirth classes at the hospital.

Have you signed up yet? Most seem to last six to eight weeks and suggest starting at twenty-eight to thirty weeks gestation.

She almost wanted to laugh. If she didn’t know how to categorize Ben, she sure in the hell didn’t know what to do with Damien.

And while she knew they couldn’t renew their physical relationship, and that it wasn’t practical that they could be friends when he was her boss and she was pregnant with another man’s child, they had slept together. She thought about Damien nonstop. She cared about him a great deal, which she could admit when she was feeling honest. And she worried that he needed something more than she had been able to give him.

He needed to relax, not work so hard. He needed a distraction, and not one that was her baby. Because that was driving her batty.

His final e-mail was actually work related, of all things, and Mandy was typing a response to his inquiry when her instant message window popped up. She knew it was Damien before she even read it because of the ring tone she had set up exclusively for him.

Have you thought of any names?

Names for what?

She lost the thread of what she’d been typing in the e-mail and sighed with frustration. Maybe she needed more sleep. Her ability to do two things at once seemed to have disappeared lately.

The baby.

Of course. Why didn’t she think of that? It made perfect sense for her to discuss naming her child with her male boss. She debated telling him she hadn’t thought of any, but she did want to put out feelers about a couple of names. Somehow it seemed more natural to do that with Damien than it did with Ben, which was completely wrong, but it was too late to fix that.

I was thinking about Cecilia for a girl and Simon for a boy.

Her heart swelled a little at the thought of giving a name to her child. Giving him or her an identity.

I don’t know…those sound very British.

All the good feelings she’d been having fled.

I am British!

“Bloody idiot.”