by Valery Parv
He looked genuinely shocked. "I never used it to control you. You enjoyed our lovemaking as much as I did and you were more than willing to take the initiative on occasion."
Her blood throbbed through her veins as she remembered only too well how much she had enjoyed it. He had taken her to heights she had never dreamed were possible. And he was right, she couldn't claim to have been passive, either. He had said he liked a woman who was prepared to go after what she wanted.
He had spoiled her for any other lover, she conceded unwillingly to herself. As with the best of anything, once you had known it, there was no settling for less. "You can hardly doubt how I felt," she reminded him, blushing as she remembered how he had carried her to climax after shuddering climax until she was left raw and aching, but fulfilled beyond her wildest dreams.
He was not above exploiting his effect on her to get his own way, she remembered. She had never made any secret of wanting a deep and lasting commitment, but had settled for what she could have with Zeke because his passion was so addictive that she had allowed it to drown her deeper needs. Well not anymore. "You didn't trust me enough to know what was best for me then, and you obviously don't now."
"I'm a reporter. I deal in facts," he said. "Trust is an intangible."
"So is love," she reminded him. "But you need both to make a relationship work."
He let his gaze settle on her for a long time until she felt her skin growing hot under his scrutiny. "We managed very well with what we had."
She leaned forward, placing her palms flat on the desk, feeling a need for something solid beneath her touch. "We didn't manage, as you put it. As I recall, we broke up."
"It wasn't for lack of trust, at least not on my part."
Her blood cooled as she remembered the story he had been out working on when she'd come looking for him. Was he trying to tell her that he knew her secret? Dear Lord, not so soon, she prayed silently. She had feared that she couldn't keep the truth from him forever, but she had hoped for more time to prepare herself. "What are you saying?"
"All this talk about love and trust is a blind, isn't it? You wanted an excuse to stop seeing me and, fool that I was, I provided one by accepting a job overseas. If I'd rejected the offer, you'd probably have invented some other reason to walk out."
She knew confusion showed on her face. "You make it sound as if it was my decision alone."
"Wasn't it?" he demanded with the sound of a trap snapping shut. "Can you deny you were already pregnant when I asked you to come with me?"
She felt her spine crumble and only years of modeling discipline kept her upright in the chair as the room whirled around her. "Oh, no."
She saw his face turn ashen and realized she had just confirmed what had probably been little more than suspicion before. "Then it's true." His voice came out like the sound of a winter gale whipping over a barren landscape. "I'm investigating a baby farming racket at a private hospital. A source on their staff gave me access to their computer files and I found your name on a list of women who'd been admitted to the maternity section of the hospital during the time I'm investigating. We were interrupted before I got the whole story, so I didn't know what to think. At first I thought it was a mistake, or someone else with the same name, but it was neither. You had a baby, didn't you?"
She hesitated. Since he'd left, she had replayed over and over in her mind the moment when Zeke found out. Much as she yearned to, she had never been able to imagine him simply taking her in his arms and holding her in understanding and support. It wasn't going to happen now, she judged by the cold fury on his face. His hands were balled into fists and he looked as if he had trouble keeping them at his sides.
His even features twisted in anguish. "Dear sweet heaven. All these months you let me torture myself, wondering if I should have stayed, when you were already pregnant by another man."
The thought that he had actually regretted his decision to leave gave her a small measure of comfort, but it was quickly overtaken by the white heat of anger, giving her the strength to fight back. "You're doing it again, aren't you?"
"Doing what, for pity's sake?"
"Pushing away good, honest emotion by turning it into something else."
"You're not making any sense."
"I think I am. You never wanted closeness, Zeke. Not with me or anybody. After the way you were brought up, it makes you feel too threatened, too vulnerable. The longer we were together, the more that feeling grew. I know because you weren't the only one feeling the closeness, the longing for forever. But it isn't going to happen as long as you respond to closeness by pushing me away. Accusing me of seeing someone else is part of that."
"I'm not accusing you, dammit. You just admitted to being pregnant by another man."
"I admitted to being pregnant," she said in a voice barely above a whisper.
She had reached him at last, she saw when his hard expression started to crumble. If he had considered that the baby might have been his, he had dismissed it as impossible. "You had my baby? But how? We took precautions."
"The doctor told me they failed after I had that bout of flu," she said hoarsely. "It was nobody's fault, just one of those things."
"A child is hardly one of those things," he said in a tone that could have cut glass.
She shook her head. "I didn't mean it like that. Our baby meant everything to me. You must believe that."
He heard the catch in her voice but the dark fury that ignited his gaze showed that he had put his own interpretation on it. "Meant? Oh, no, Tara, you didn't … you wouldn't…"
In a blinding flash, she understood what he thought she was trying to say and felt mortified that he would consider her capable of such a deed. "Of course not. How can you possibly think I could do such a terrible thing?"
"I apologize," he said stiffly, but with heart-wrenching sincerity. "I do know you better than that, or at least I thought I did. You'd better tell me everything."
Despite all the pain he had caused her, she wished there was some way to spare him the agony she knew she was about to inflict. "Our baby was a little boy. I called him Brendan. He … he was stillborn."
She saw him summon years of reporting experience to maintain control, but after all they had meant to each other, she recognized the facade for what it was and her heart lurched. He asked, "What went wrong?"
It almost broke her to hear the crack in his voice that belied his hard expression. "The umbilical cord caught around his neck and he couldn't get oxygen. It simply wasn't meant to be."
"I had a son."
The simple statement tore through her like a knife aimed straight at her heart. "We had a son," she corrected softly.
His eyes blazed havoc at her. "No, you had a son. You didn't see fit to include me, even though the baby was as much mine as yours."
She held herself from flinching beneath the angry words he hurled at her like lightning bolts. She had drained herself of anger months before, the fury of it gradually giving way to numb acceptance. To Zeke, the pain was new and raw. He would need time to come to terms with what, to him, was a fresh loss. And he was right, she had denied him the experience. Bearing the brunt of his anger was the least she could do. It couldn't fully make amends, but it was all she could offer him.
"Why?" he demanded. "If you had told me, I'd have stayed with you, been there for you."
She lifted her head. "It's precisely why I didn't tell you. I didn't want you to feel you had no choice but to stay."
"So you gave me no choice at all."
Unable to sit still a moment longer, she stood and began to pace. "I'm sorry for what I did. It was wrong to shut you out at such a time. But I can't go back and undo it."
"Are you sure you would, if you could?"
"No, I'm not sure. The fact that you were ready to believe I could be pregnant by another man tells me you haven't changed. It's still easier to believe the worst of me than to deal with your own feelings."
"I've said I'm sorry,"
he growled. She remembered an apology in there somewhere but was fairly sure it hadn't been for misjudging her. He raked long fingers through his dark hair. "Hell of a way to find out you're a father. Were a father."
It was her turn to say the words that had burned in her heart for so long. "I'm sorry, too, about everything." She half turned toward the door, unable to concentrate on business any more than she was sure he would be able to now.
His grating words stopped her. "Was the baby … did he … look like me?"
She turned slowly, feeling wetness fringe her lashes. Her thoughts spun back to that dark, rain-swept night only ten months ago. A hospital in chaos. Corridors clogged with accident victims on stretchers, too many to find beds for them all. Staff coping as best they could and extending their shifts far beyond the usual times, their replacements caught up in the traffic debacle outside the hospital. Despite being so harried, the midwife, a man named Ross, she remembered, had taken the time to place Tara's child in her arms and had sat with her while she wept out her goodbye to the son she had nurtured.
Many times she had replayed the scene in her mind, forever grateful that Ross had given her the chance to hold her baby. It had made her loss cruelly real and inescapable, but it had also provided a sense of closure.
Zeke would never have that chance and it was plain he resented her for it. She coughed to clear a clogged throat. There was one thing she could give him. "When I held him, he looked like a tiny, sleeping doll. He had a surprising amount of hair, though, and it was as dark as yours." It had been the only thing about the baby that reminded her of Zeke, she recalled, but didn't say so. She hated to hurt him any more than she had already, and it didn't change anything now.
"That's something, I suppose."
"Zeke, I really am sorry. I know it doesn't help and I should have told you, but at the time, I couldn't do it."
He lifted his head, the brightness in his eyes mirroring her own. "It's too soon for forgiveness, and that's what you really want from me, isn't it?"
"I don't want your forgiveness, Zeke," she flung back at him, fury sending spears of heat through her. "I don't want anything from you that isn't freely given. I never did."
He had always been light on his feet and now he shot out of the chair and across the room like an aimed bullet. Her hand had barely grazed the doorknob when he wrenched her around to face him. "I won't let you walk out of here as if nothing has happened."
"You can't stop me."
"Can't I?"
She tried to ignore the feel of his hand on her arm but a tingle raced along her veins, sending her heart rate into overdrive. Then he slid his free hand down her back and mice feet skittered along her spine. She gave a shiver, but whether with longing or fear, she wasn't sure.
He pressed her tightly against him as if he needed to hang on to something. His anchor, she thought again. How he must need one at this moment. She could only begin to guess at the distress his discovery had inflicted. She'd had ten months to mourn the baby he'd only just learned he had lost. Was it too much to lend him her support at such a time?
When his mouth found hers and she returned the pressure eagerly, she recognized the self-deception for what it was. She wasn't lending him support. She was taking what she had needed from him for a long time.
The sweetness of his hard mouth shaping hers stirred memories of kisses shared in the dead of night on a deserted beach, in a mountain chalet, almost anywhere sufficiently secluded. Their passion had run as hot as molten lava, she remembered, and Zeke had urged her to indulge it to the full. She'd been the prudish one then, fearful of being discovered.
"What if we are?" he'd said. "It's called freedom."
He may have called it freedom, but she had been a slave to ardor from the first. She felt the tug of it now as he pulled her against his hard body, making her tremble as a starveling might tremble at the promise of a feast.
No matter how great her hunger, this feast wasn't for her, she told herself as her head started to spin. "This isn't right," she said, her lips moving weakly against his mouth.
He lifted his head long enough to respond. "It feels more right than anything I've done for months. I hate to think of what you went through alone, on my account."
"It wasn't only on your account," she said hotly. She had accepted his embrace to help heal his pain, not once considering that he might be offering it out of pity for her. Rejection coursed through her and she tried to pull away.
At once his hold tightened. "Considering I make a living out of words, they don't always work the way they're supposed to. I didn't mean to sound so condescending. I can't remember when my thoughts have been so tangled. This has come as a hell of a shock."
"I know." She rested her head against his shoulder and felt his fingers thread through her hair. Her soft sigh whispered against the open neck of his shirt. "In the heat of the moment, we all say things we don't mean."
"I meant it when I said this feels right," he said, gravel in his voice. "You can't deny it feels the same for you."
"I should."
"There are no shoulds," he said, quoting another Zeke aphorism.
She lifted her head slightly. "Not even when it came to telling you about the baby?" She almost wished he would go on berating her for keeping it from him. His compassion was far harder to endure than his censure would have been. She deserved his fury, she accepted, even while recognizing that he wasn't responsible for giving her either penance or absolution. They would have to come from within herself. Zeke was right. It was too soon for forgiveness, but too late for anger, as well.
"You did what you thought you had to do."
In spite of her advice to herself, his generosity only served to heighten her anguish. Then she noticed the overbrightness in his gaze. Zeke had never subscribed to the belief that real men didn't cry, but she had never seen tears in his eyes before and the sheen in his gaze cut through her like a razor.
"All the same, it hurts, doesn't it?"
"More than I would have thought possible."
"Oh, Zeke, I wish…"
"Don't, please." He silenced her by the easiest means, clamping his mouth over hers. She returned the kiss in full measure, sensing that he needed an anchor now more than ever before. She needed it, too, and for a moment couldn't have said who was clinging to whom.
When the kiss changed from despair to desire, she wasn't sure. One moment he was kissing her as if she was his lifeline, and the next he was plundering her mouth as if the world was about to end and there wasn't a moment to lose.
In an instant he became the Zeke she had both longed for and feared, because of the easy way he could make her lose control. Like a plane spinning out too close to the ground, she felt it happening all over again. Worse, she was going to let it happen. Resisting him once had cost them both so dearly that it wasn't in her power to risk it again, even had she wanted to.
She moaned as his lips traced a path across her forehead and down both closed eyelids. The feather-light touch was all it took to send waves of primitive need surging through her.
Instinctively she lifted herself to meet him but was stopped by the tightness of her miniskirt. He reached down and hitched it higher, letting his hand stray across her thigh until his fingers met the lacy edge of her panties. She gasped as he slid his fingers under the lace, caressing closer and closer to the center of her being. "You still wear these frivolous things?" he murmured.
Warmth pooled deep inside her as she arched closer to his questing fingers. "You never complained before."
"I'm not complaining now. I've missed you so much, Tara. You have no idea how much. Sometimes the need for you has been like a ravenous beast gnawing at my soul."
A specter rose up between them. "It didn't stop you turning to Lucy."
His teeth nipped the side of her neck and her moans redoubled, making the specter shiver into nothingness. "I was trying to quiet the beast. It didn't take me long to discover that only one person could do that."
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br /> Tara had endured her own beasts, tormenting her late at night from the cold, empty half of the bed. "The same for me," she whispered.
He let his hand fill her, making her arch her back so that only the hardness of the door behind her kept her from sliding bonelessly to the floor. She dragged air into her lungs in heaving gasps, wondering how much more of this sweet torment she could endure before she capitulated completely and begged him to make love to her properly. Now that he knew about the baby, she had no need to fear being betrayed by the changes in her body.
She opened her mouth to implore him to end this, when she became aware that he already had, but not in the way she craved. As he took his hand away and tugged her skirt down, she almost cried out in frustration until she saw that his face was set in an unreadable expression. "What is it? What's wrong?" she asked.
"You said you didn't want me using sex to control you, yet that's precisely what I was about to do."
He was so close she felt the caress of his breath against her cheek, but there may as well have been an ocean between them for all the warmth she felt from him now. "It was hardly one-sided," she pointed out, masking disappointment with a cold fury of her own.
He braced one hand against the door over her shoulder. "Why did you let me kiss you?"
Angry as she was, she couldn't bring herself to lie to him, not again. "You needed me."
He nodded as if she had confirmed a suspicion. "I sensed it, but instead of taking what you offered in the spirit you were offering it, I wanted more."
No more than she wanted, she all but cried out to him. "It doesn't make it wrong, surely?"
"Perhaps not now, but what about afterward, when you realize you've betrayed your principles with a man you don't trust."
"How can you think I don't trust you?" she asked, horrified.
"I don't think it, I know it. If you had trusted me, you'd have told me about the baby."
So this was to be her punishment, she thought as reality returned with a crash. He might understand her actions, he may even forgive her. But he couldn't overlook what it said about their relationship.