by Dani Collins
“Does sleeping with me make you hate me less?”
Yes, it did. Which scared him even more and made him profoundly aware of his inability to love. He’d said something crude at that point, infuriated that he could never be what she needed and deserved. The futility of their relationship had struck home and he’d wanted quite desperately, just for a second, to bind her to him in the most irrevocable way possible.
He watched her work the room filled with screen stars, diplomats, business magnates and overgrown titled children. For the first time he didn’t see a spoiled girl demanding attention. He saw a young woman who ensured everyone was noticed, greeting individuals affectionately and putting them at ease.
He did his duty, distantly thanking people for coming, but he couldn’t help acknowledging what a perfect foil Rowan made for his innately brisk demeanor, brimming with natural warmth and beauty. If their lives became bound by a child—
He refused to let the thought progress, still disturbed by the near yearning he’d felt as he’d contemplated becoming a father while saying goodbye to his own. He tracked down Franklin Crenshaw instead, waiting out the requisite expression of sympathy before nodding at the elegance of the wine and cheese reception.
“I appreciate all you’ve done. Please send me the bills.”
Frankie shook his head. “Rowan made all the arrangements. I only opened an account for her.” A rueful smile twitched the man’s lips. “But I’m not surprised she’s asked you to settle up for her. She doesn’t want to owe me, does she?”
Nic slipped into his investigative reporter guise. “Why do you say that?”
“Because she knows how I’ll ask her to repay me.”
“She can’t dance,” Nic asserted, instantly protective of her injured leg.
“No, but she can act. Look at her. What a way to spend your birthday,” Frankie said under his breath, stealing a glass of wine from a passing tray.
The date struck Nic like a bludgeon, taking his disgraceful behavior this morning to a new realm of discredit. “Never a good morning or a thank you...” His insides clenched against more evidence that he failed at interpersonal relationships.
“She’s hanging by a thread,” Frankie said with pained admiration. “No one else sees it, but when that girl can’t find a smile you know she’s on her last nerve.”
Nic took it as judgment. He was the reason her stress level was through the roof.
“I bet she hasn’t eaten either,” Frankie mused.
With a soft curse, Nic excused himself.
* * *
Rowan was wrung out by the time they returned to Nic’s suite. She could barely unzip her boots and pull them off her aching feet.
Nic shrugged out of his suit jacket, then poured two drinks—brandy, she assumed. He brought them to her and she did what she had done with the coffee, tea, and plates of food he’d handed her throughout the long day. She set it down on the nearest surface.
He sighed.
“Don’t be mad, Nic. I can’t do it,” she said lifelessly.
“I’m not mad, but we have to talk.”
“Not now. I just want this day to be over.” She saw him wince, and regretted being so blunt, but the service had been hard enough without the undercurrents between them. He’d never left her side and she was at the end of her rope. “I’m going to bed.”
Nic picked up her untouched drink as she walked away, considering going after her. But why? So they could continue battling to keep their emotions in check? He was done with crumpled tissues and weepy embraces. His wall of imperviousness couldn’t stand another hit. Ro had it right. Finish the day and start fresh tomorrow.
But his tension wouldn’t ease until they’d talked through the various scenarios and how they’d react to them. He couldn’t imagine sleeping with so much on his mind and resented her for dragging this out. How could she be so calm about it? Didn’t she realize what was at stake? That their lives could be changed forever?
Look who he was dealing with, though. Rowan was the first to turn anything into a joke.
Frustrated, he carried his drink in one hand and tugged at his tie with the other, heading for his bedroom and a fruitless try at sleeping. As he passed Rowan’s door he heard a noise. A deep, wrenching sob.
His heart stalled, then kicked in with a painful downbeat. Filled with dread, he slowly pushed the door open. She sat on the side of the bed, one arm out of her shirt, the fabric bunched around her torso as she rocked, keening, her face buried in her white hands.
The jagged pressure that swelled behind his sternum threatened to clog his lungs. Something between an instinct and a memory pushed him further into the room, even though his feet had gone so cold he couldn’t feel them.
He set aside the glass and touched her arm. “Ro, stop.”
She clutched at him, face running with makeup. “I’m trying,” she choked. “But nothing will ever be the s-same again...”
Her distress threatened his shaky control, urging him to run before his defenses fell completely, but he couldn’t leave her like this. Actress, he thought and felt like a heel for thinking she wasn’t affected by all that had happened today. Of course she was. Beneath the beautiful armor and impudent wit was a scared kid who kept taking on more responsibility than was hers to carry.
It struck him that he’d taken advantage of her when he took her to bed. She’d been at a very weak moment in her life. This was why she’d given herself to him. She was losing the life she’d known and now faced even bigger changes.
“It’s okay,” he lied, brushing away her ineffectual hands, desperate to sop up his guilt. He never should have touched her. He smoothed her hair, releasing the scarf when he came to it. “You’re going to be okay, Ro.” His shoulders throbbed with remorse. He stripped her to her undies and eased her beneath the sheet, desperate to tuck her in and close this day for her.
Tomorrow they’d talk. What he needed now was time to come to terms with the injury he’d done her if he’d got her pregnant.
“Don’t leave, Nic, please,” she pleaded, pressing his fingers to her soaked cheek.
He wavered. She was an iceberg. He compromised by toeing off his shoes and dragging his belt free one-handed, remaining clothed as he moved under the covers. With a tight embrace he tried to keep her shuddering frame from falling apart.
“Just until I fall asleep,” she murmured. “Then you can go. I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” he said with deep anguish, and soothed the fresh tension that gathered in her. “Shh. Go to sleep. It’ll be okay,” he lied again, while the possibility of an unplanned pregnancy circled in his mind like a shark’s fin. “You’ll see.”
CHAPTER TEN
ROWAN STRETCHED AND the hot weight of blankets surrounding her moved.
When she opened her eyes Nic’s arresting blue eyes were right there, hooded and enigmatic, fixed on hers. His jaw was smudged with a night’s growth of bronze-gold stubble, his hair glinting in the morning sunlight pouring through the uncovered window.
Her breakdown last night came back to her in a rush. The day had been an endurance event of fielding enquiries about her leg and her future. She didn’t have any pat answers, and through it all Nic had loomed over her like a giant microscope, seeming to watch her every move.
The tension hadn’t let up, so it was understandable that after holding them back all day she had let her emotions get the better of her when she was finally alone. Letting Nic find her at such a low point and grasping at him like a lifeline, however, made her feel more raw and exposed than after the wicked things they’d done to each other in the throes of passion.
Flinching in vexation, she sat up to let her hair curtain her face while she tried to minimize how defenseless she felt. “Gosh, was that your virginity I just took? I can’t imagine you’ve
spent many nights fully clothed in bed with a female without the precursor of sex. Be honest—not counting this one, how many?”
“She’s back,” he remarked under his breath, pushing away the covers and rolling to sit on the far edge of the bed. “As it happens, you’re not my first,” he stated flatly. “I used to let my baby sister snuggle up to me when she’d had a bad dream.”
Rowan stared at the wrinkled back of his shirt, barely able to process the information through her sleep-muddled brain. “You have a sister? But you said— On your mother’s side? Is she younger?”
“And two half-brothers, if you’re taking a tally.”
No surprise to learn he was the oldest, but the rest stunned her. “That’s a big family. Why do you never talk about them?”
His shoulders jerked, then he stood abruptly. Maybe she’d imagined his flinch.
“I don’t talk to them.” He stretched his arms toward the ceiling and his shirt came loose from his waistband while his joints cracked. “My aunt used to bring us together for a week in the summer when she lived in Katarini, but once she moved to America my mother’s husband put a stop to my seeing them. He didn’t like them coming home and talking about me.”
“That’s mean!” Rowan’s already peeled-thin heart was abraded further by his casual reference to what amounted to outright cruelty. “Your poor mother,” she couldn’t help adding, sitting in the pool of rumpled blankets and retrospective empathy.
“My poor mother?” Nic swung around with a harsh expression of astonishment, arms lowering.
“Well, yes.” Rowan shrugged, her hand imperceptibly tightening on the edge of the sheet. “Having to stay married to someone like that. He’s probably the reason she didn’t see you at school. He sounds controlling.”
“She didn’t ‘have to’ stay married to him. She chose to. She chose him over me.” His flash of rejection was quick and deep, so swiftly snatched back and hidden behind chilling detachment she could only guess how much practice he’d had at stifling it.
Rowan’s heart, ravaged by all that had happened in the last week, finished rending in two. She ached to offer him one of those ragged halves, the one beating at a panicky pace, but doubted he’d take it. No wonder he held himself at such a distance. Distance was all he’d been taught.
There weren’t any platitudes that could make up for what had been done to him, so she tried to offer perspective.
“What other choice did she have?” she asked gently. “She already had your sister and the boys.”
“One boy. She was pregnant with the other,” he admitted, one hand rasping his stubbled jaw as though he wanted to wipe away having started this conversation.
“There you go. How does a woman with three children and about to give birth to a fourth hold down a job? Who nurses that baby while she’s at work? It sounds like her choices came down to destroying the lives of all her children or just one. I’m not saying she made the right choice, but I don’t think she had any good ones. It was an awful position to be in.”
“She could have chosen not to get into that position. She married knowing I was on the way.” His eyes were so dark they were nearly black. “She could have broken her engagement and asked Olief to support her. For that matter, given they were both committed elsewhere, they never should have made me in the first place!”
Suppressing a stark pang of protest against his never being born, Rowan only said, “Because every pregnancy is planned?” She choked that off, appalled she’d started to go there. She only wanted him to see everyone was human. “It happens, Nic,” she rushed on, fixing her gaze blindly on the blurred pattern of the curtains. “Sometimes the choices you’re left with are tough ones. Judging by your reaction to my efforts toward you, you’re not interested in having a family, so what would you do?” she challenged with a spurt of courage. “Marry me anyway?”
It was a less than subtle plea for him to qualify his feelings toward her. He’d been so solicitous, holding her close all night. It made her heart well with hope that something deeper between them was possible.
He’d hardened into something utterly rigid, utterly unyielding. When he spoke, his voice was coated in broken glass. “The greater question is what would you do?”
His chilly withdrawal made her insides shrink. She wasn’t sure how to interpret his grim question, but his quiet ferocity gave her a shiver of preternatural apprehension. She was convinced he didn’t want her to be pregnant, so was he hoping to hear she wouldn’t go through with it? He would be vastly disappointed! Her heart hardened like a shield inside her. Nothing would make her give up her baby.
“It would be beyond a miracle if I got pregnant so I’d keep it, of course. But don’t worry,” she charged with barely restrained enmity. “I wouldn’t ask you to marry me. My mother’s shotgun marriage ruined her life. I’ll never repeat that mistake.”
She threw off the blankets and locked herself in the bathroom, shaken to the bone. She tried to regain control by reminding herself they were arguing about something that couldn’t even happen, but when she stood in the shower a few minutes later her hand went to her abdomen where a hollow pang of if only throbbed.
* * *
“I’d keep it, of course.”
There was no “of course” about it, but Nic was reassured that Rowan had said it. Which was crazy. The thought of making a baby with her should be putting him into a cold sweat.
He shifted in the back of the car. He had decided years ago not to have children. Partly it stemmed from spending years in Third World countries. After seeing children savaged by war and famine, their parents helpless to protect or provide for them, he’d concluded that reproducing was irresponsible.
An even deeper resistance came from his certainty that he wasn’t built for family life. Every time he’d had the hint of one it had been stripped away—most recently when Olief had flown into that storm. Nic didn’t buy into fate, but it really didn’t seem he was meant to lead the life of a domesticated man. He’d always been comfortable in that belief. What kind of father would he make anyway, incapable as he was of emotional intimacy?
Rowan would be a good mother, though. Her view of pregnancy was a bit romantic, but it thawed the frozen places inside him. He was reassured. Rowan would show him the way. She was affectionate and playful and knew how to love. His baby would be in good hands because she would love her child even if it was his.
The thought caught him by the heart and squeezed. It was such a tiny lifeline, thrown down a well—something delicate and ephemeral in dark surroundings. He wasn’t completely sure he’d discerned it. He didn’t even have the emotional bravery to reach out and see if it was real. It might not hold. But he wanted to believe it was there.
He glanced at Rowan, his ambivalence high. She’d accused him of not wanting a family and he didn’t, he assured himself quickly. The weight of responsibility, the vastness of the decisions and accommodations, were more than he could take. And winding through that massive unknown was a dark line, a fissure. Him. The unknown. The weakness. Could he hold a family together or would he be the reason it fell apart?
At the same time he was aware of his heart pounding with... God, was it anticipation? No. He tried to ignore the nameless energy pulsing in him, but he couldn’t shake the urge to push forward into the future and see, know, feel a sense of belonging after so many years of telling himself to forget what he barely remembered.
He and Rowan were both on their own and surprisingly good together in some ways. He couldn’t help wondering if that could extend to parenting a child, making a life together. He could easily stomach waking every morning the way he had today, recognizing Rowan’s scent before he opened his eyes. Something had teased at him as he had become aware of her warmth and weight against him. Something optimistic and peaceful. Happiness?
Whatever it was it wouldn’t happen, he
acknowledged darkly. Her hot statement about shotgun marriages being a mistake had spelled that out clearly enough. She was right; they were a mistake. He couldn’t even argue that he was good husband material. But her flat refusal to consider marrying him still put a tangle of razor wire in his chest.
She noticed his attention and her hand went to her middle. “Sorry,” she said.
They were halfway to the helipad. It took him a second to realize she wasn’t referencing a possible baby forming inside her. Her stomach was growling.
“You still haven’t eaten?”
“You said the car was ready.”
“Ready whenever you were,” he corrected, biting back a blistering lecture on taking care of herself and any helpless beings she might be carrying. “You’re a menace,” he muttered, and leaned forward to instruct his driver that they were detouring for brunch.
Minutes later they were sitting al fresco in the weak winter sun, a little chilly, but blessedly private away from the bustle of hungry diners. He’d ordered a yogurt and fruit cup for Rowan to eat immediately and a proper entrée for each of them to follow.
“I won’t get through more than the fruit cup,” Rowan warned.
“I’m hungry enough to eat whatever you don’t.”
“You didn’t eat breakfast either? Menace!”
She had her finger hooked in a wedding ring on a delicate chain around her neck. Her mouth twitched behind the back and forth movement as she rolled the ring along its chain. He was inordinately relieved to see the return of her cheeky smile, but still exasperated.
“I’m not eating for two, am I?” he challenged.
She sobered. “Neither am I.” She dropped the ring behind her collar.
“You don’t know that.”
A belligerently set chin and a silent glare was her only reply.
Time would tell, he supposed, dredging up patience, but his hand tightened into an angst-ridden fist. The knife in his belly made a cold, sickening turn as he recalled her rejection of marriage. He steeled himself against the rebuff and ground out, “Yes, by the way, I would marry you.”