by Lucy Monroe
He'd gone back to looking at Aaron. "Is he afraid of strangers?"
The question sent an arrow of guilt to pierce her heart. Marcus shouldn't be a stranger to his own son and it was all her fault.
She swallowed before speaking. "Not usually."
As Marcus moved farther into the room, closer to the baby, she prayed Aaron would react favorably.
Marcus hunkered down beside Aaron and reached out to touch the baby's soft blond hair with one tentative finger. "He's beautiful."
Her heart was breaking. "Yes."
"Does he walk yet?"
"No, but it isn't for lack of trying. I expect he'll be early. He has been on just about everything else. He got his first tooth when he was four months old and he already saysno, mama andjen-jen ."
Aaron turned to study the blond giant beside him with open curiosity. He reached out one pudgy hand and touched a blue flower on Marcus's shirt; then he smiled and Veronica felt tears fill her eyes.
"Hi, buddy. I'm Daddy. You'll learn to say that too."
As Marcus introduced himself to their son, she had to suck in air to stop a sob from escaping. How could she ever have believed Marcus wouldn't want to know about his child?
"I'm sorry, Marcus." Tears thickened her voice.
He shook his head, as if dismissing her words. "Not now. I don't want to get into this in front of him."
"Yes. All right."
He sat down and picked up the plastic plane she'd been flying over Aaron's head earlier. Making the sound of a jet engine, he pretend flew it in front of Aaron's rapt gaze.
Landing the plane on Aaron's corduroy-covered legs, Marcus allowed the baby to grab the toy and shove it into his mouth.
"I should have waited to come over until I had myself completely under control, but I couldn't. I've already missed ten months. It probably sounds crazy, but I couldn't wait even another twenty-four hours."
She bit her lip until she tasted blood. "No, not crazy."
The next hour and a half flew by as Marcus and Aaron got acquainted. They played on the carpet, at one point Marcus lying down to let Aaron climb all over him and explore to his heart's content.
Veronica made dinner while Marcus held the baby on his hip and watched. After they had eaten a late meal and Marcus had fed Aaron, the baby almost falling asleep in his high chair, she decided it was time to put him to bed.
The last ninety minutes had exhausted Aaron and she felt limp as a wet dishrag herself. She'd been going through the emotional wringer since finding out about Marcus's role as a corporate investigator, and this evening had only added crushing remorse to the list of emotions vying for supremacy in her overburdened heart.
Every time the baby smiled at his daddy, every time Marcus's eyes misted over, she felt a burden of guilt that weighed with ten months' worth of memories she'd denied them both.
Surprisingly, Marcus didn't argue when she said it was time to put their son to bed.
He helped her dress Aaron in his jammies after changing the baby's diaper. As in every other aspect of his interaction with Aaron that evening, Marcus showed himself to be truly proficient with little people. He hadn't been exaggerating when he had said he was a stand-in uncle for Alex and Isabel's baby girl.
He laid their son in the crib and then stood with his hand on Aaron's back for several silent minutes while their child slipped into the oblivion of sleep.
Blinking back more stupid, useless tears, she led Marcus into the living room. "We need to talk."
He nodded but asked, "Where's your sister?"
"At the library. She's researching a paper. She should be home between eight-thirty and nine."
Thankthe Lord Jenny had gone. Veronica could not imagine what the evening would have been like considering Marcus's antagonism toward her and Jenny's similar feelings toward him.
"That doesn't give us much time to talk."
She bit her lip and winced when she encountered the abrasion she'd caused earlier.
No it didn't, an hour, maybe an hour and a half. But then it wouldn't matter how much time she had, saying she was sorry would never be enough for keeping Marcus in the dark for the first ten months of his son's life.
"Bo you want coffee?"
He sat down on one end of the sofa. "No."
She took her usual place, moving her bag of crochet to the floor. "I know it doesn't make up for not telling you about him, but I'm so very sorry."
Marcus's jaw hardened. "Why?"
She didn't pretend to misunderstand what he was asking. "I didn't think you'd want to know. I mean you had this thing against commitment and you'd made it clear we didn't have any kind of future. I just assumed you'd feel the same way about a baby."
He fixed her with disbelieving eyes and she blurted out the rest of the truth. "And I was afraid."
"Afraid of what?" he demanded, his tone raw.
He was only at the other end of the sofa, but she felt as if he was on the other side of an uncrossable abyss.
"That you would try to take him from me. I'd betrayed you, sold company secrets, and I knew you didn't love me. It's no excuse, but I wasn't thinking straight at the time. I was too distraught about Jenny to consider your rights as a father rationally when my whole world was falling apart."
His blue eyes chilled her. "Actually, I can understand your initial panic. Youweren't thinking straight or you never would have sold out Alex, but I still don't understand why my son is ten months old and I had to find out about him from a personnel file."
A small measure of relief washed over her.
At least on this count, she wasn't completely guilty. "I planned to tell you about him tonight. That's what I was trying to tell you Friday."
"I thought…" his voice trailed off.
"You thought I was going to tell you I was guilty of espionage." She'd already worked that one out. "Well, surprise, surprise. I'm not."
"Finding out I had a son was a hell of a lot more surprising than discovering you were innocent." The slashing pain in his eyes made her regret her momentary lapse into sarcasm.
"I know. I'm sorry," she said again.
"Aaron was your idea of avisual aid ?"
Grabbing the bag of crochet, she pulled out Aaron's blanket and started working on it. She needed something to keep her grounded. It also gave her an excuse to avoid his gaze.
"I know it's hard for you to understand. You're so blatant about everything, but I just didn't know how to tell you about him. I couldn't get the words out and even if I could have, I didn't know what they should be."
"Marcus, you have a ten-month-old son?" he suggested, with biting irony.
She focused on the bright blue yarn in her hands and took a deep breath and expelled it slowly. "Yes, well, as I said, you're blunt."
"Honest."
That had her looking up from the blanket in a hurry. "Oh? And what aspect of honesty covers pretending to be a corporate information consultant when you were in reality investigating me as a suspected espionage agent?"
His blue eyes blazed with fury. "That was my job and don't you dare pretend it stands on par with you denying my paternal rights for ten months of my son's life."
Her hands twisted in the yarn. "How can you sit there in such sanctimonious judgment? You were preparing to rip apart the life I've worked desperately hard to piece together for my son and sister.
You used my desire for you as a weapon against me and you sit there saying—"
She stopped speaking midsentence when he jumped off the couch to tower over her. "I'm sick and tired of you accusing me of using sex as a weapon with you. Do you remember me telling you I hadn't been with another woman since you left me?"
She had no choice but to nod in agreement. He had said that and she had believed him. She still did, which didn't say a lot for her intelligence level.
"Do you remember me telling you I wanted to make love? That I didn't just want sex with you? That I was looking for a future?"
His voice grated r
awly against her nerves, and she gave a jerky nod of assent to each of his biting questions.
"I took you to my bed on Friday night because I wanted you. Because, God help me, I needed you."
"Marcus—"
His hand slashed the air. "No. I'm doing the talking now. You've accused me of using you when all I wanted to do was protect you. Even if you had been guilty, I had every intention of going to Kline on your behalf and begging for mercy to protect your reputation if I needed to. I understood the desperation and pressure you've felt since your parents' deaths. I wanted to help you, but you couldn't damn well trust me today any more than you did a year and a half ago."
His gaze burned down at her, his face taut with suppressed emotion. She could not discern in his current state even a shadow of the laid-back charmer she had always known.
"You lied to me," she said helplessly.
"I lied to myself, too. I told myself that you really cared about me and that your lack of trust eighteen months ago was the result of the tremendous stress you were under."
She was afraid to say anything else. He was so serious, so painfully angry.
He clenched his fists and turned away. "We're going to get married as soon as possible."
Chapter Seventeen
"We're going to what ?"
He couldn't have said what she thought he'd said. Not after telling her how little he thought of her, No way. A man did not jump from accusations of mistrust to proposals of marriage. Did he?
He spun around to face her again, the tenseness in his body exhibiting the same stress she felt. "You heard me. We are getting married."
Disbelief warred with hysteria as she tried to grasp what could be prompting him to make such a ludicrous statement. "We arenot getting married."
"Oh, yes, we are. And as soon as is humanly possible."
He sounded so certain, as if she had nothing to say in the matter, as if he took her agreement for granted.
"Marcus, this may have escaped your attention, but we are not living in the Middle Ages and you are not some despotic potentate that can order a woman to do his bidding. This is the twenty-first century and men have to ask women to marry them."
"Like you asked me if you could withhold my son from me for almost the whole first year of his life?"
She didn't want to go there. Too much guilt ran along that roadway and the potential for her defeat. She decided to take a different tack. Logic.
"Why are you saying this? You can't possibly want to marry me. You looked at me like you hated me when you came in here tonight."
"How did you expect me to look?"
She refused to answer that loaded question on the grounds that it might incriminate her, so she remained mute.
His mouth twisted in something that might pass for a smile. "Exactly. My sonwill have my name. He will never doubt my desire to acknowledge himpublicly ."
'"You can acknowledge him without marrying his mother."
The blue in Marcus's eyes turned stormy with rejection of that idea. "No."
She felt helpless in the face of his blunt refusal to acknowledge her argument. "But, Marcus, we can't get married just because we have a child together. No marriage based on such a shaky foundation could survive."
His expression made her shiver. "I don't care how long we stay married. All I care about is becoming my son's legal parent, making sure he never suffers the pain of rejection I felt growing up the son of a prominent man and his mistress."
"I'm not your mistress and neither of us lives in a small town like the one you grew up in. No one in Seattle or Portland is going to care whether or not Aaron's parents are married."
"No one? Are you sure about that? Are you absolutely positive that Aaron won't be taunted by his schoolmates, that he'll never overhear himself referred to as an embarrassment or, worse, a bastard?"
"No, of course not. That's not the point—"
"That is precisely the point, Ronnie," Marcus said, interrupting her before she could finish her thought.
"Marcus…" Her voice trailed off as she marshaled her defenses in her mind. She couldn't marry Marcus. "You lied to me."
"I never will again." Sincerity rang through the anger still vibrating in his voice.
"How can I believe you?" she asked.
"I guess you'll have to start trusting me," he replied, with biting sarcasm.
She swallowed. According to him, that wasn't a likely possibility for the future.
"You despise me," she said painfully.
"If I despised you, I would be looking at fighting you for full custody of our son, not marriage."
His argument was irrefutable and such a terrifying prospect that she wouldn't willingly dwell on the subject.
"You don't believe in commitment."
"I've changed. I want my son."
"And to get him you have to marry his mother." she completed, her heart constricting at the thought.
Marcus shrugged. "Yes."
She wanted to hit him. "This is about more than giving Aaron your name, isn't it?"
He sat down and ran his fingers through his golden hair and then dropped both arms, allowing his hands to dangle between his spread thighs.
"Yes. I want to be a full-time father to my son and I can't do that with weekend visitations and split holidays. I don't want you marrying some other man a year down the road and letting him take my place in Aaron's life."
"So, when you said you didn't care how long the marriage lasted, you didn't really mean it, did you?"
Please say you didn't mean it, she pleaded mentally, still reeling emotionally from that cruel comment.
He turned to face her, reaching out to touch her face. She didn't flinch, but the touch unnerved her.
"No, I didn't mean it. I'm still pissed as hell at you and it just popped out, but I don't want to get married with you thinking divorce is the easy alternative to living with me."
Shaken, she realized that it was on the tip of her tongue to say yes to marrying him. She loved him, even after everything. She couldn't imagine her life without him. The past eighteen months, she had felt an empty, aching place in her heart that had not been filled until he had held her again.
"You really don't hate me?" Even loving him, she could not stand the thought of marriage to a man who hated her.
"No."
But he didn't love her either. Could she live with that? She didn't know. Her indecision must have shown on her face because he started talking again, saying things to convince her.
"You realize that when we get married, you can move back to Portland. Jenny can go back to her old high school."
She wiped at moisture that had somehow gathered across her lower lashes. "Jenny would like that."
"I'll help you put her through college as well."
She choked out a laugh. He was even willing to buy her cooperation if rational argument didn't do the trick.
"I don't expect that. Jenny's not your responsibility."
His mouth firmed into a now familiar grim line. "When we get married, your sister becomes my sister and since you are her guardian, she also becomes my ward. That makes her my responsibility. You've carried the burden alone long enough."
She swallowed a sob trying to crawl up her throat. How could he be so kind and so cruel at the same time?
"Have you thought about staying home with Aaron?" he asked.
She had and then dismissed it as impossible. The reality of her sister returning to school next year had been weighing heavily on her. She would have to find outside day care for Aaron and she didn't relish the prospect. She just shrugged.
"If you want to work, I'll support that decision, but if you want to stay home either half-time or full-time, I'll support that as well. Isabel went to half-time after maternity leave. She seems to like it."
With each word, Marcus embellished the already tantalizing lure of marriage to him.
He pulled the blue blanket from her nerveless fingers and inspected it. "This is nice. M
y mom used to quilt. I've still got the one she made me for my high school graduation on my bed."
Remembering the log cabin pattern beautifully done in fall colors, she thought his mother must be very talented. The quilt had looked like the kind that won a blue ribbon at the state fair and got auctioned off later for hundreds of dollars.
And despite his pain-filled childhood, Marcus must still have very tender feelings for his mother to keep the quilt out.