And it had hurt far more than it had had any right to.
More than her parents’ betrayal. More than Andy’s betrayal.
Her feeling of rejection had terrified her. Because if he could hurt her that much in a matter of months, what would it be like to marry the man and submit to the illusion that they were more than just co-parents to a baby conceived on a one-night stand?
So Saskia opened her mouth and uttered the only objection she could think of, under the circumstances.
‘Why?’
He blinked.
‘Why?’ he echoed, and the hint of disbelief was almost her undoing.
‘Why do you want to marry me, Malachi?’
And she was ashamed that it was less a stalling tactic and more a plea. As if a part of her really believed he would say the words she needed to hear.
‘Give me a real reason.’
For a moment he seemed at a loss for words. And then he regrouped.
‘This conversation again, zvyozdochka?’ He managed to inject as much of a yawn into his voice as possible without actually yawning. ‘It is becoming boring.’
‘Maybe for you,’ she shot back, determined to appear undaunted. ‘But since I haven’t had a straight answer out of you yet, I can’t agree.’
‘You’re the mother of my unborn baby, Saskia.’ His voice was low and even, if a little surprised. ‘How much more “real” a reason do you need?’
She didn’t know if it was the words or the easy control in Malachi’s voice which cut through her most sharply. Surely if he felt anything towards her whatsoever there would be at least a hint of emotion in his words?
‘I want...more,’ she whispered at length.
‘More?’
His gaze darkened, his forehead knitting together. She could almost feel the coldness beginning to roll off him.
‘Like meaningless declarations of love, perhaps?’
‘Why do they have to be meaningless?’ Saskia asked, not sure whether she meant it as a plea or an accusation.
‘Because they’re just words,’ he growled. ‘They bring nothing to the table.’
‘They do for me.’
Before she realised what she was doing she was moving her hand across the table. Stopping it halfway between the two of them. He stared at it for a moment, as if actually trying to work out what she was doing. But he didn’t reach his own hand out. Instead he placed his fingers together and dropped his hands to his lap.
‘Not if they came from me.’
He shook his head, and the words were so harsh, so threaded with pain, that it almost broke Saskia apart.
‘I doubt I even have the capacity for love.’
‘I think you do.’
Again he shook his head, and when he spoke, his voice was so raw and rough she was sure she could feel it actually abrading her.
‘No. And even if I did it would be so fractured, so tainted, that it would do more harm to the recipient than anything else.’
‘No...’
There had to be more. They hadn’t spent the past few weeks getting closer just for nothing. Surely?
‘Love from someone like me wouldn’t be a gift, zvyozdochka. It would be a curse.’
‘You make it sound like you’re a victim of your past, but the truth is that you’re a liar.’
She had no idea where the strength had come from, but Saskia seized it with both hands and let it drag her along. Because it was easier to bear than the pain.
‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t complicate things further by proposing marriage when all I am to you is a complication.’
‘We aren’t a couple. We had a one-night stand—uncharacteristic for both of us, but there you have it—and now you’re carrying my child. What else would you call it, zvyozdochka?’
Saskia opened her mouth to reply, but the words didn’t come. Or at least the words that did come sounded distasteful on her tongue, and she couldn’t bring herself to utter them.
Malachi had a point. Their baby wasn’t planned, and the circumstances weren’t enviable, which made it a complication. The difference was that, to her, it was an unexpectedly joyous complication, whilst to Malachi it was apparently on a par with the irritations he experienced in business every day.
His solution was typically practical and logical. But it wasn’t emotional. And that was what she wanted it to be more than anything else.
Without warning, all the air seemed to whoosh out of her. It was all she could do to hold her head up and not deflate right there in front of Malachi.
‘We had passion,’ she whispered.
His face hardened, the angular lines of his jaw suddenly becoming harsher. Almost cutting.
‘That was about sex. Not love.’
‘How do you know it isn’t both?’ She knew she was clutching at hope but she couldn’t stop herself. ‘If you won’t ever give love a chance?’
‘I don’t believe in it. It’s an illusion,’ he refuted fiercely. ‘Passion comes with a price, and it’s always one that’s too high. I won’t do that to you, or our child.’
‘Malachi—’
‘I told you that from the start,’ he cut in, refusing to listen to her.
It was like a howl inside her. Long and low, tugging at her very soul. She’d laid it out there—laid herself out there—and he didn’t want her. He never had.
‘You’re right.’ How her voice managed to sound so calm, so neutral, was a small miracle. ‘You told me from the start that you couldn’t offer me more than your duty. Your responsibility. But I thought there was more to us than that. Or at least I wanted to believe that there was.’
‘Because you’re carrying around some non-existent romantic notion based on what you want to remember about what your parents had. You compare everything to that. And there’s no way anything you find will ever match up. It’s impossible.’
‘This is what you were saying this afternoon,’ she ground out. ‘Telling me that my parents didn’t care enough when I remember how much they loved me.’
‘But not enough for them to stick around.’
‘They were in a car crash. They couldn’t help that.’
‘Zvyozdochka, they were arguing. I looked into it after that night in my apartment, when you refused to see sense and just marry me. They were having another of their infamous fights which blazed almost as brightly as their so-called great love. They were drunk, and fighting, and people had heard them threatening to harm each other. And then your father apparently ran into a tree on a straight, well-lit stretch of road, with no other cars in sight. Your mother, supposedly unable to bear the pain of his death, took an accidental overdose.’
‘Accidental!’ she cried, anguished. ‘You just said it yourself. They were both accidents.’
‘No, zvyozdochka, they were covered up and sold to the grieving public as accidents. But I think we both know the truth.’
‘You’re wrong!’ She shook her head, but the shaking that had started from her toes and was working its way up her body told her differently.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said quietly. She might have thought even sadly. ‘You know exactly what happened and so do I. Yet you’ve put them on a pedestal and sold it to yourself as some grand love affair, when the truth is that you’re using it as some impossible standard you know you can never achieve because it’s a way for you to stay emotionally out of reach.’
‘That’s insane,’ she muttered.
Only she had a feeling it made awful, terrible sense. How had she never realised this before? Or had she, on some level?
‘You say you want what they had, but you don’t, zvyozdochka. You’re not capable of it because you aren’t as selfish as them. You could never do to your child what they did to you. You could never leave our daughter.’
‘That makes no sense...’ whisp
ered Saskia.
‘It does—and you know it does.’
She didn’t want to answer. She didn’t want to engage with him. But she couldn’t help herself.
‘I think you’re attacking me because it’s easier than looking at yourself,’ she challenged, not caring that her breathing was shallow and fast, or that she sounded as though she’d run a marathon. ‘You’re pretending you don’t feel something I know you feel.’
‘You’re mistaken.’
‘You and I had an arrangement that was all about practicality. We didn’t need to...to sleep together, but we did. Because we wanted to. You might tell yourself that you aren’t capable of love, but you are.’
He glared at her for a long moment, and Saskia realised she couldn’t even breathe.
Until, at last, he spoke. ‘Then perhaps I’m just not capable of loving you.’
Rejection lodged in her throat, thick and bitter-tasting. Saskia struggled to swallow it down.
‘Perhaps not,’ she rasped out. ‘But I don’t think it’s that. And I don’t think you do, either.’
‘All I can offer you is everything I’ve already promised. I will be the best father anyone could possibly be to this child. And I will be the best provider. I will take of my family the way I have always done. You’ll want for nothing—I can promise you that. But I can’t promise you love, or happy-ever-afters. I can’t pretend this is some great love story. I am who I am, Saskia.’
‘You’re so much more than you think,’ Saskia whispered. ‘But if I can’t make you see that then perhaps I’m wrong for you.’
‘Perhaps you are,’ he gritted out, thrusting his chair back abruptly and standing. ‘But I will not see our child suffer for our mistakes. We will marry, and we will provide a united front for this child.’
* * *
Malachi had no idea what had just happened. Or, more to the point, what he had just allowed to happen.
His head told him that he had done the right thing, but his chest was tight and angry. Full of a churning sense of remorse. Both for what he’d said and the way he’d spoken to her.
But it was for the best, he told himself furiously.
Everything he’d said was the truth. He couldn’t be the man she wanted him to be—the kind of man who professed love—he could only be who he was and hope that was enough.
Evidently it wasn’t enough for Saskia.
She wanted the words. The flowers. The poetry. All the things he couldn’t—wouldn’t?—give her.
He stalked the grounds of his castello, glaring into the darkness to see if perhaps the night sky had fallen in. After all, what other reason could there be for what was going on here?
His head was constantly full of thoughts of Saskia. And it wasn’t helped by the idea of her soft, wet body against him, on him, around him. Even at work the meatiest of contracts hadn’t been able to distract him from her.
He scowled at the sky even harder—but, no, it was most certainly up where it should be. What was more, it positively twinkled with the prettiest stars, free of urban light pollution, almost as if it were entertained by his uncharacteristic reverie.
It was galling.
He could take off for a night run, go a few rounds in the castello’s well-appointed gym, or swim lap after lap until his body ached. But he suspected it would do little to numb his brain from the effect Saskia was having on him.
How was it that she could make him feel powerful and powerless all at the same time?
This wasn’t him. This wasn’t the untouchable man he’d turned himself into once he’d finally dragged himself and Sol from the bowels of a childhood caring for their junkie mother.
He’d sworn to himself all those years ago that he would never let another person get under his skin like that. Aside from his brother, he’d vowed he would never permit anyone to venture this far into his life. A wife, a family, children. It was never going to be for him. He’d never wanted it.
Yet here Saskia was. Pregnant.
He had no name for this heavy, full feeling which was building in his chest with every passing day, but it didn’t seem to be regret. Or resentment.
In someone else he might have thought it was...joy. Or happiness. Or even love. But this wasn’t someone else—this was him. And he didn’t feel those things. He never had. The closest he’d ever come to feeling love was for his kid brother, but it wasn’t the kind of unfettered, wholehearted emotion that normal people seemed to feel.
He wouldn’t know how to feel that way if he tried.
With a growl of frustration Malachi spun away from the lake, in which he could suddenly see his own reflection all too clearly, bright in the moonlight. He didn’t think he liked what he saw—and stalked back to his room.
He was hauling off his constricting shirt even as he pushed through the door to his suite. Minutes later he was beating a punching bag in the corner of the gym as though he could mete out punishment for his every last frustration and knock his self-doubt into submission. Banish the emotions he hadn’t felt since he was an eight-year-old boy, running errands for the local gang just to get enough money to put coins in the electricity meter and a scant bit of food on the table for five-year-old Sol.
He had no idea how long he stayed in the gym. After the boxing he took a long run on the treadmill, imagining in his head that he was actually running through the vineyards outside, which lay all around this stunning valley. Finally he dived into the still waters of the indoor pool and swam one hundred exhausting lengths, then a hundred more, and then another for good measure.
When he finally—finally—allowed himself to stop, to breathe, to look up, it was to see Saskia curled up on the window seat of the suite he had given her, a book in her hand.
But she wasn’t reading. She was watching him.
He could feel it.
Her eyes caressed his skin as surely as if it had been her hands themselves. How he wished that were the case. He wanted her. He hungered for her.
And he did not hunger. Ever.
Yet now it rolled through him like the thunder for which this valley was so well known at this time of year. Raw and uncontrollable.
It was all Malachi could do to keep himself in the water. To turn his back on the woman who affected him in such a primal way. To spin his body in the pool and cut through the water for another hundred lengths.
Because if he hadn’t he feared he would have hauled his body out and gone to find her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘WHAT IS THE matter with you, bratik?’ Malachi glared balefully across his office to where Sol was helping himself to Malachi’s freshly ground coffee and pastries, as he did every time he ventured across town to MIG International’s offices.
Malachi told himself he’d returned to the UK because he was needed at work. He knew the truth wasn’t anything like that. Still, he comforted himself with the assurance that he’d left Saskia in good hands, with the team of medical experts in Italy.
It wasn’t helping him to concentrate.
‘What?’ Sol cocked an eyebrow, before striding over to flop in a comfortable chair.
‘You’re full of the joys of spring,’ he grumbled.
‘And you’re grouchy and on edge.’ Sol eyed him shrewdly. ‘More so than usual, that is. Though I wouldn’t have thought that was possible.’
‘Funny.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Idiot.’ Sol shrugged, inhaling a couple of pastries, whole.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t happy to see his brother, Malachi decided, it was more that right now he would have preferred to be alone, to throw himself into the work he’d missed whilst he’d been in Italy with Saskia.
Or alone to stew, a cynical voice needled.
The past week had been hell. Like some kind of torture he hadn’t known existed. He saw Saskia everywhere he went. He c
ould hear her voice, gently teasing him about all the things he did. Like some kind of haunting such as he had never believed in.
But then, he hadn’t believed in a lot of things before Saskia had come along.
This intense, yearning sensation which barrelled around his chest, for one thing. Guilt, probably. Remorse. What else would have been mushrooming inside him for so long now?
He didn’t know and he didn’t care.
He was so lost in his own thoughts that he answered his brother’s next question on autopilot, not really paying attention to what was said until Sol’s next statement jarred him.
‘You and I have always said that we aren’t built for commitment or love...’ his brother began slowly. ‘That everything she put us through destroyed that in us. But what if we’re wrong, Mal? What if you and I have always been capable of love?’
‘This discussion is over,’ Malachi ground out.
It was as if his brother was echoing everything that had been going on in Italy, and right now it was the last conversation Malachi wanted to have with anyone. But still he didn’t move.
Did his brother know about Saskia?
Did the entire hospital?
Sol shifted, looking oddly uncomfortable.
‘There’s always been love between you and me,’ he said, as though he was repeating someone else’s words and wasn’t quite sure if he was doing it correctly. ‘It may be a different kind of love, but it’s love nonetheless.’
‘Where did those pearls of wisdom come from?’ Malachi tried to snort—but, inexplicably, he lacked the scorn that would normally have come so easily.
Sol paused, seeming to consider what to say. ‘I don’t know,’ he concluded at last.
And, despite his own worries, Malachi couldn’t help worrying about his kid brother, the way he always had as the big brother. Hadn’t he been mentioning Saskia’s flatmate a lot recently...?
‘A woman?’
‘No...’ denied Sol unconvincingly. Then, ‘Maybe...’
‘Anouk?’
‘Are you going to take the proverbial?’ He glowered at Malachi, clearly expecting the usual ribbing. But for once Malachi didn’t feel like it.
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