More than a Convenient Marriage?

by Dani Collins

  Sadly, a nasty element working the docks had decided she didn’t have to accept money for her body. It could be taken anyway. Adara cried as she read how the young woman had met such a violent end. She cried even harder, thinking of a young boy seeing his mother like that, beaten and raped and left to die.

  Blowing her nose, she moved on to the account of Delphi’s friends from low places doing the improbable: going to the police and demanding a search for Delphi’s son. Here Nic had done the legwork on a trail that the police had let go cold. Taking the thin thread of Delphi’s last name, he had tied it to a crew list from a freighter ship dated years later. The name Vozaras was there too, but the first name was Kristor.

  A side story took off on a tangent about smuggling, but nothing had been proven. The only charges considered had been for underage labor and somehow that had been dropped.

  Adara wiped at a tickle on her cheek as she absorbed the Dickensian tale of a boy who should have been in school, learning and being loved by a family. He’d been aboard a freighter instead, doing the work of a man. No wonder he was such a whiz with all things sea related. He had literally grown up on a ship.

  Considering the deprivation he’d known, the loss of his mother and lack of—as he’d told her himself once—anyone caring about him, it was a wonder he’d turned into a law-abiding citizen at all. When she thought of all the little ways he had looked out for her, even before Greece, when he’d do those small things like make sure she was under the umbrella or huge things like finagle her into running the hotel chain despite her father’s interference from the grave, she was humbled.

  Perhaps he had been self-serving when he’d agreed to marry her, but he’d treated her far better than the man who was supposed to love and care for her ever had.

  She’d been avoiding thinking back to Greece and all that had happened since, but she couldn’t ignore his solicitude and protectiveness any longer. He could have let her risk her neck climbing down that cliff alone; he could have sent her to her brother’s alone. His actions had gone above and beyond those of a man only wanting to manipulate.

  And when she recalled the warmth in his smile when he’d gazed at Evie, the pained longing in him when he’d talked about the loss of their own babies...

  Even after that, when they’d been waiting out this pregnancy here, more than once she had glanced up unexpectedly and found a smile of pride softening his face. Half the time his eyes were on her bulging stomach, not even aware she was looking at him. Other times he was looking at her and always seemed to grin a bit ruefully after, as if he’d been caught in a besotted moment and felt sheepish for it.

  He couldn’t fake all of that. Could he? His shattered control, just from touching her that last night, hadn’t been the response of a man who was unmoved and repulsed. He’d been as swept away as she had. Laughing, teasing, pulling her into him afterward as though she was his cherished stuffie.

  She swallowed.

  Theo was right about a few things. Despite the lack of a truly legal marriage, Gideon had been behaving like a husband and father so well, even she had believed they had a chance for a lifetime of true happiness.

  Perhaps they had.

  If she hadn’t ruined it by throwing him out for daring to reveal the darkest secrets closest to his soul.

  She bit her lip, distantly aware of the physical pain, but the emotional anguish was far sharper. It wasn’t fair to imagine there had been another time in their lives when they’d been close enough to risk telling each other something so deeply personal. Look how long she’d masked that her father was a brute. If Gideon hadn’t followed her to Greece, she might never have told him about that last miscarriage. He’d had as much right to know about their loss as she had to know his name.

  Oh, God.

  Scanning the scattered papers with burning eyes, she wondered if he even knew this much about himself. She hurt so badly for him, completely understanding why he’d wanted to escape being the boy who had gone through all this and become someone else.

  She hadn’t even given him a chance to tell his side of things. She was just like their father—a man she had never forgiven for the hurts he’d visited on all of them.

  But after acting just like him, she couldn’t ask Gideon for another chance. Not when he’d taken such a huge risk and she’d condemned him for it. How could she expect him to forgive her when she’d never forgive herself?

  * * *

  It killed Gideon to do it, but he put together the necessary declaration of his identity and the rest of what was needed to dissolve their fake marriage. Then he had the paperwork couriered to the penthouse.

  Adara wasn’t taking his calls. The least he could do was make things easier on her. Karen was reporting that everything was progressing fine, but all he could think was that Adara must be devastated by the loss of her mother on top of what he’d done to her. He was eating his heart out, aching every moment of every day, but he couldn’t badger her for a chance to explain himself. What was there to explain? He’d lied.

  He wasn’t her husband.

  So why was he personally reframing the apartment below their penthouse, executing the plans his architect had drawn up once they’d decided to stay in the city and expand their living space to two floors, creating a single master bedroom with a nursery off the side?

  Because he was a fool. It was either this or climb on the next boat and never touch land again. The option kept tapping him on the shoulder, but for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to take it.

  He couldn’t be that far away from the woman he regarded as his wife.

  He stopped hammering, chest vibrating with the hollowness of loss.

  Actually, that was his cell phone, buzzing in his pocket.

  Setting aside the hammer, he saw the call was from Adara. His heart stopped as he hurried to remove his leather glove and accept the call.

  “Babe?” The endearment left his lips as if he was sleeping beside her.

  Nothing. Damn, he’d missed it. He started to lower the phone and reconnect, but heard a faint “You said you’d be here.”

  “What?” He brought the phone to his ear.

  “You said I wouldn’t have to go through this alone and that you’d be with me every second and the pains have started but you’re not here. You lied about that too.”

  Adrenaline singed a path through his arteries and exploded in his heart. “You’re in labor?”

  A sniff before she gritted out a resentful “Yes.”

  He threw off his hard hat and safety goggles. “Where are you?”

  Silence.

  “Adara!”

  “In the apartment,” she groused. “And you’re not.”

  “Where in the apartment?” he demanded, running up the emergency stairs two at a time to the service entrance. “Don’t scream if you hear someone in the kitchen. It’s me. Did you change the code?”

  “What? How are you in the kitchen? I’m in the bed—” She sucked in a breath.

  He stabbed the keypad and the light went green.

  He shot through the door, into the kitchen, and strode to her room, ears pounding at the silence. Her bedroom looked like a crime scene with clothes tossed everywhere, nylons bunched on the floor, slippers strewn into the corner, but no Adara. He checked the bathroom.

  “Where are you?” he demanded.

  “Here,” she insisted in his ear. “By the bed.”

  He’d been on both sides of her bed and rounded it again, but she wasn’t there. “Damn it, Adara.” He lowered the phone and shouted, “Where are you?”

  “Here!” she screamed.

  Her voice came from the other side of the penthouse. He ran through the living room to his room. Their room. A faint part of him wanted to read something significant into that, but when he entered, he didn’t see
her there either.

  Was she torturing him on purpose—?

  Oh, hell. He spotted one white fist clinging to the rumpled blanket. Her dark head was bent against the far side of the mattress.

  “Oh, babe,” he said, and threw his phone aside to come around to where she knelt, bare shoulders rising and falling with her panting breaths. She had a towel around her, but nothing else. Her hair was dripping wet.

  “Okay, I’m here. You’re sure this is just labor?”

  “I know what labor feels like, Gideon.”

  “Okay, okay,” he soothed. “Can I get you onto the bed?” He was afraid to touch her. “Are you bleeding?”

  “No, but my water broke. That’s why I had a shower.” She kept her forehead buried against the side of the mattress. “I’m not ready for this. It hurts. And I’m so scared the baby will die—”

  “Shh, shh.” He stroked her cold shoulder with a shaky hand. “Have you felt the baby move?”

  She nodded. “But anything could happen.”

  “Nothing is going to happen. I’m right here.” He prayed to God he wasn’t lying to her about this. Shakily he picked up her phone and ended their call. “Have you called the ambulance? Karen?”

  “No.” She swiped her eyes on her bare arm, and peeked over her elbow at him, gaze full of dark vulnerability and a frightened longing that put pressure on his lungs. “I just thought of you, that you said you’d be here with me. Where were you? How did you get here so fast?”

  “Downstairs,” he answered, dialing Karen’s personal line from memory. In seconds he had briefed her and ended the call. “She’ll meet us at the hospital. An ambulance is on the way.”

  “Oh, leave it to you to get everything done in one call.”

  “Are you complaining?” He eased her to her feet and onto the bed, muscles twitching to draw her cold, damp skin against him to warm her up, but he drew the covers over her instead. Sitting beside her on the bed, he rested one hand on the side of her neck and stared into her eyes. “You know me. I won’t settle for anything less than the best.”

  Her, he was not so subtly implying.

  Her brow wrinkled and her mouth trembled. She looked away.

  Now wasn’t the time to break through the walls she’d put up between them though. He reluctantly drew away and stood.

  “Where are you going?” she asked with alarm.

  “Have you packed a bag?”

  “No, but... You’re coming with me, aren’t you?” she asked as he moved to find an empty overnight case. “To the hospital?”

  “You couldn’t keep me away. Not even if you had me arrested.” She must have wanted to. Why hadn’t she? He glanced over and her hand was outstretched to him, urging him with convulsive clasps to return to her side. Her expression strained into silent agony.

  He leaped toward her and grabbed her hand, letting her cling to him as he breathed with her through the contraction, keeping her from hyperventilating, staring into her eyes with as much confidence as he could possibly instill while hiding how much her pain distressed him. He hated seeing her suffer. This was going to kill him.

  She released a huge breath and let go of his hand to throw her arm over her eyes. “I’m being a weakling about this. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t,” he growled. Her apology made him want to drop to his knees and beg her for forgiveness. He packed instead, throwing in one of his shirts as a nightgown, a pair of her stretchy sweats, her toothbrush and the moisturizer she always used. “Slippers, hairbrush, lip balm. What else?”

  Adara watched him move economically through the space they’d shared, demonstrating how well he knew her as he unhesitatingly gathered all the things she used every day: vitamins, hair clips, even the lozenges she kept by the bed for if she had a cough in the night.

  “I—” read about your mother, she wanted to say, but another pain ground up from the middle of her spine to wrap around her bulging middle. She gritted her teeth and he took her hand, reassuring her with a steady stare of unwavering confidence and command of the moment, silently willing her to accept and ride and wait for it to release her from its grip.

  His focus allowed her to endure the pain without panic. As the contraction subsided, she fell back on the pillow again, breathing normally.

  “Those are close,” he said, glancing at the clock.

  “They started hours ago. I was in denial.”

  She got a severe look for that, but he was distracted from rebuking her by the arrival of the paramedics. Minutes later, she was strapped to a gurney, her hand well secured in Gideon’s sure grasp as she was taken downstairs and loaded into the ambulance.

  From there, nothing existed but the business of delivering a baby. As promised, Gideon stayed with her every second. And he was exactly the man she’d always known—the one who seemed to know what she wanted or needed the moment it occurred to her. When the lights began to irritate her, he had them lowered. When she was examined, he shooed extra people from the room, sensitive to her inherent modesty. He kept ice chips handy and gathered her sweaty hair off her neck and never flinched once, no matter how tightly she gripped his arm or how colorfully she swore and blamed him for the pain she was in.

  “I can’t do it,” she sobbed at one point, so exhausted she wanted to die.

  “Think of how much you hate me,” he cajoled.

  She didn’t hate him. She wanted to, but she couldn’t. She loved him too much.

  But she was angry with him. He’d hurt her so badly. It went beyond anything she had imagined she could endure. And then she’d found out why he’d lied and it made her hate herself. She was angry most about his leaving her. Living without him was a wasteland of numbness punctuated with spikes of remembered joy that froze and faded as soon as they were recalled. He’d left her in that agonizing state for weeks and...

  Another pain built and she gathered all her fury and betrayal, letting it knot her muscles and feed her strength and then she pushed...

  * * *

  Gideon stood with his feet braced on the solid floor, but swayed as though a deck rocked beneath him. His son, swaddled into a tight roll by an efficient nurse, wore a disgruntled red face. He wouldn’t be satisfied with the soothing sway much longer, not when his tiny stomach was empty. He kept his eyes stubbornly shut, but let out an angry squawk and turned his head to root against the edge of the blanket.

  Why that made Gideon want to laugh and cry at the same time, he didn’t know. Maybe because he was overtired. He hadn’t slept, his body felt as if he’d been thrown down a flight of stairs, his skin had the film of twenty-four hours without a shower and his own stomach was empty. This was like a hangover, but a crazy good one that left him unable to hold on to clear thoughts. And even though he had a sense he should be filled with regret, he was so elated it was criminal.

  “I know, son,” he whispered against the infant’s unbelievably tender cheek. “But Mama is so tired. Can you hang on a little longer, till she wakes up?” He tried a different pattern of jiggling and offered a fingertip only to have it rejected with a thrust of the baby’s tongue.

  The boy whimpered a little more loudly.

  “I’m awake,” Adara said in the sweet, sleepy voice he’d been missing like a limb from his body.

  Gideon turned from the rain beyond the window and found her lying on her side, her hand tucked under the side of her face as she watched him. The tender look in her eyes filled him with such unreasonable hope, he had to swallow back a choked sob. He consciously shook off the dream that tried to balloon in his head. Get real, he told himself, recalling why he was missing her so badly. His heart plummeted as though he’d taken a steel toe into it.

  “He’s hungry?” she asked.

  “Like he’s never been fed a day in his life.”

  Adara smirked and glanced at the clock
, noting the boy was barely four hours into his life. With some wincing and a hand from Gideon, she pulled herself to sit up.

  “Sore?” He glanced toward the door, thinking to call a nurse.

  “It’s okay. He’s worth it.” She got her arm out of the sleeve of her gown, exposing her swollen breast.

  “Do you, um, want to cover up with something?” He looked around for a towel.

  “Why?” She drew the edge of her gown across her chest again. “Is there someone else in here?”

  “No, just me.”

  “Oh, well, that’s okay then, isn’t it?” She started to reveal herself again, but hesitated, her confused gaze striking his with shadows of such deep uncertainty, his heart hurt.

  “Of course it’s okay.” He wanted to lean down and kiss her, he was so moved that she still felt so natural around him. It could only mean good things, couldn’t it?

  Adara could hardly look into Gideon’s eyes, but she couldn’t look away. He delved so searchingly into her gaze, as if looking for confirmation they stood a chance, but she’d treated him so badly, rejecting him for being as self-protective as she’d always been. She didn’t know how to bridge this chasm between them.

  Their son found his voice with an insistent yell and made them both start.

  And then, even though she’d had a brief lesson before falling asleep, Adara had to learn to breast-feed, which wasn’t as natural a process as some mothers made it look. She wasn’t sure how to hold him. Her breast was too swollen for such a tiny mouth.

  Their son surpassed his patience and grew too fussy to try. Gideon looked at her with urgency to get the job done as the baby began to wail in earnest.

  “What am I doing wrong?” she cried.

  “Don’t look at me, I’ve never done it either. Here, I’ll sit beside you and hold him so you can line him up— There, see? He’s never done it, either, but he’s getting it.”