More than a Convenient Marriage?

by Dani Collins

  His begrudging statement made Rowan feel like he’d shaken out a trunk of golden treasures and brilliant riches at her feet. But it was all glass and plastic. All for show, with no true value. Numbness bled through her so she barely heard the rest of what he said.

  “Don’t think for a minute I’d refuse to be part of my child’s life.”

  A choke of what felt like relief condensed in her throat. She wasn’t sure why hearing he would be a dedicated parent turned her insides to mush. Maybe because it was a glimmer of the diamond inside the rough exterior. Potential.

  She swallowed, but the thorny ache between her breasts stayed lodged behind her sternum. It didn’t matter what Nic was capable of if fatherhood was forced upon him. It wouldn’t happen. Not with her

  Their dishes arrived and she manufactured a weak smile for the waiter, but couldn’t unlock her fingers and pick up her utensils.

  “I didn’t realize your parents were married,” Nic said. “Why do you use your mother’s name?”

  “So no one would find out Mum was married.” Her voice sounded a long way off even to her own ears. All she could think was that keeping her mother’s secret had been one more accommodation to an overbearing woman whose constant nagging for results had put Rowan in this position: up for the part of Nic’s wife and yet not quite qualified.

  She ought to tell him she couldn’t conceive, but everything in her cringed from admitting it. Even though she could live without making babies. There were other options if she wanted children. She knew that. It was the fact she would never have children with him she wasn’t ready to admit aloud.

  “Is your father alive? Do you see him?” he asked.

  Why were they talking about her father? “Yes, of course.” Rowan picked up her spoon so she could fill her mouth with yogurt and end that subject.

  “Who was he? Why did their marriage put you off it? Was he abusive?”

  “Not at all!” Rowan swallowed her yogurt and sat back, surprised Nic would leap to such a conclusion. Perhaps she’d been vehement about what a mistake her parents’ marriage had been, but that was how her mum had always framed it. “No, he’s just a painter. An Italian.”

  “So you’re not completely without family?” Nic sat back too, wearing his most shuttered expression, not letting her read anything into his thoughts on this discovery.

  Rowan licked her lips and her shoulders grew tense. “True. But...um...he’s an alcoholic. Not that that makes him less family,” she rushed on. “I only mean he’s not exactly there for me.”

  Her helpless frustration with her father’s disease reared its head. She rarely mentioned him to anyone, always keeping details vague and hiding more than she revealed. Nic understood that relationships with your father could be complicated, though. That gave her the courage to continue.

  “He’s an amazing artist, but he doesn’t finish much. He’s broke most of the time. Olief knew I bought him groceries out of my allowance and paid his rent. He didn’t mind. Nic, that’s why I did that club appearance. With my leg and everything I hadn’t seen my father much, and when I got there—”

  She took a deep breath, recalling the smell, the vermin that had taken up residence in his kitchen. Setting down her spoon, she tucked her hands in her lap, clenching them under the table, managing to keep her powerless anger out of her voice.

  “It seemed harmless—just one more party and for a good cause.” Her crooked smile was as weak as her rationalization had been. “Afterward I realized how easily I could spiral into being just like him and I decided to come back to Rosedale to regroup. I wasn’t dancing on tables so I could buy Italian fashions. He needed help.”

  “You said the marriage ruined your mother’s life, but it sounds like it affects you more than it ever did her.”

  His quiet tone of empathy put a jab in her heart.

  “Well, he was my father regardless, and he would have needed my help with or without the marriage. And I do love him even though things are difficult,” she pointed out earnestly. “I’m not put off by marriage because he has a drinking problem. Mum just always regretted letting him talk her into making me legitimate, leaving her trapped when she wanted to marry the man she really loved. It made me realize you need more reason to marry than a baby on the way. You need deep feelings for the other person.”

  His gaze flicked from hers, but not before she glimpsed something like defeat in his blue eyes. Regret. His head shook in subtle dismissive negation—some inner conclusion of dismayed resignation.

  A thin sheet of icy horror formed around her heart as she realized she had admitted to wanting to marry for love. There was no shame in it, but she dropped her gaze, appalled that he had read the longing in her and now his hand was a balled up fist of resistance on the tabletop. Everything in his still, hardened demeanor projected that he couldn’t do it. Would never love her.

  Rowan hadn’t imagined he loved her, but confronting the fact that he considered it impossible had her biting back a gasp of humiliation. She blinked hard to push back tears of hurt.

  The waiter arrived with their entrées, providing a much needed distraction as he poured coffee and enquired after their needs. At the same time more diners decided to brave the gusting war of spring and winter breezes, taking a table nearby.

  They finished their meal in silence.

  * * *

  Nic had locked up when they’d left, so Rowan dug her key from her purse as they came off the lawn from the helicopter pad. She supposed even this quaint touch that her mother had insisted upon—a real key—would go the way of the dodo in whatever high-tech mansion Nic had built.

  They stepped into the foyer and both let out a sigh of decompression. Rowan quirked a smile, but the key in her hand dampened her ironic amusement. The jagged little teeth might as well be sawing a circle around her heart. She rubbed her thumb across the sharp peaks, then worked the key off its ring before she lost her nerve.

  “What’s this?” Nic asked as she left it on the hall table and started up the stairs.

  He stood below her, offering her a height advantage she never usually had over him. His thick hair was spiked up in tufts by the wind they’d left outside. She itched to lean down and smooth it.

  “I won’t need it after I leave.” She had to leave. She accepted that now. She looked up the stairs, her mind already jumping back into sorting her mother’s things. Better that than hanging on to adolescent dreams that could never come true. Nic would never love her. She even understood why he was incapable of it. It was time to move on, no matter how hard and scary.

  “Rowan.”

  His tone stopped her, commanding yet not entirely steady. Height disadvantage or not, he still had the benefit of innate power and arrogance. He still managed to take her breath away with the proud angling of his head. But an uncharacteristic hesitancy in his expression caused her to tense instinctively.

  “If you were pregnant...” he began.

  She didn’t want this conversation, and tightened her lips to tell him so, but then she realized what he was intimating. She flicked her gaze from the muscle that ticked in his cheek to the bronze key he pinched in his sure fingers.

  She felt the blood leave her face. Light-headed, she clung to the rail, trying to hang on to her composure, but it was too cruel of him to hinge keeping her home on something completely impossible.

  “If I’m pregnant...what?” Despair gave way to pained affront. The high-ceilinged entryway exaggerated the quaver in her voice with a hollow echo. “I can have Rosedale as a push present? I’m not pregnant, okay? I can’t get pregnant!”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE KEY IN NIC’S fist was hot as a bullet he’d snatched from the air to prevent it lodging in his chest. It was circling from another direction to make a precise hit anyway. His upper body was one hard ache of pressure as Rowan
ran up the stairs.

  He took a step, helpless to call her back when words were backed up in his throat behind shock. His foot caught on their bags and he stumbled. His legs became rubber, clumsy, and started to give out. He sank onto the stairs, elbows on his knees, and pressed the knuckles of his hard fists into his aching eye sockets.

  Had he really let himself think it could happen? He was a fool! Of course it wasn’t meant to be if it was for him. His insides knotted in a tangle of sick disillusionment.

  He swallowed, his chest so hollow it felt like a gaping wound had been cleaved into it. His reaction was as much a sucker punch as the news. When had he started to care?

  He hurt for Rowan. For a second, as her defenses had fallen away and she had let him see to the bottom of her soul, she’d revealed such a rend in her soft heart...

  The urge to go after her drummed in him. But what could he do about something as absolute and irreparable as infertility?

  He rubbed his numb face, dragging at the torn edges of his control. He was fine with not getting the things that meant something to others. Mostly fine. He knew how to live with it. But it gutted him that Rowan, who openly yearned for a proper family, should be denied something that was such a perfect fit for her. He wished...

  But he knew better than to wish.

  Slowly he stood and climbed the stairs, every joint rusted and stiff. His goal was the sanctuary of his office and work, but he found himself walking past it like a zombie. He followed noises down the hall beyond the open door to Rowan’s suite. The double doors to the master bedroom were thrown open and Rowan was taping a box propped on the bed.

  She paused briefly when he appeared, just long enough to betray that she’d noted his appearance before she continued screeching the tape gun.

  Nic took in the disarray. Boxes were stacked against the walls. Photographs and knickknacks were moved or had disappeared. He didn’t care what she was taking. He didn’t have any attachment to any of it. But it hit him how many decisions he’d burdened her with. She was a sentimental little thing. She wore a cheap wedding ring that had sealed an unwanted marriage, for God’s sake. Digging through all this couldn’t be easy for her. What had seemed like the right thing to do suddenly seemed wrong. Unkind.

  He wondered if it was his imagination that she looked as if she’d lost weight since yesterday. It might be the baggy T-shirt over braless breasts, but she looked incredibly slight and fragile.

  She set down the tape gun and moved to the corner near the balcony. “Did you know Olief was planning an autobiography?” Her sunny tone sounded forced as she pulled the lid off a box and retrieved a packet of yellowed letters. “These are to his wife, talking about the places he was in. There are other things. Photos, awards, columns. It’s interesting stuff.”

  She held out the letters but Nic didn’t take them. All his focus was on Rowan. She was so on edge the air was sharp. Her flash of wary vulnerability when she met his gaze was quickly tucked away as she replaced the letters in the box and closed the lid.

  “I thought it might give you a better understanding of who he was,” she said with stiff consideration and a never-mind shrug.

  Part of him was curious. Of course he was. And he could tell that in offering this up she was looking for a measure of forgiveness. It seemed so unnecessary now. She wasn’t the reason he had failed to form bonds with Olief. He was. Olief had reached out countless times. Nic had always held himself just beyond touching distance.

  He scowled as that hard truth sank like talons into his chest. He didn’t know how to be there for someone. He’d never wanted to know because no one had been there for him. So what had he thought to accomplish by coming in here? Raking her delicate heart over the smoldering coals of her lost dream of a family?

  The inadequacy that had been smoldering in him since she’d admitted she wanted to marry for love licked at him with thicker flames.

  “It made me realize I should do the same for Mum,” she was saying with a jerky nod at the boxes against the far wall. “Giving all that over to a writer would solve a huge problem I have with what to do with playbills and photos of her with other celebrities—”

  “I didn’t come in here to take book pitches,” he said quietly.

  “Well, I don’t want to talk about what you did come to talk about, so tell me you’ll do it or I’ll give it to the competition.” Her voice was flat, her spine like a thread of glass—deceptively stiff but innately brittle. “Proceeds to benefit a search and rescue foundation, I think, don’t you?”

  For a second he knew what other people saw when they looked at him: absolute disengagement. His heart gave a vicious twist inside his chest. He hated talking about the failed dreams that lived next to his bones. How could he ask her to show him hers? But he had to know more. He lifted a helpless open palm.

  “I had no idea, Ro.” It astounded him that he hadn’t known. Yes, he might have kept his distance from her through the years, but his ears had always been open, his brain quick to store the tidbits he’d gleaned from Olief. “Did Olief know? Did your mum?”

  Rowan’s chin jutted out stubbornly in profile before he saw her composure crack with a spasm of pain. She turned away to pick up a handtowel grayed with streaks of dust and wiped her fingers on it.

  Rowan couldn’t believe she’d blurted out the truth so indelicately. Her stomach was still spinning like a bicycle wheel, burning at the edges when she tried to slow it down. She wanted to make some comment like her sterility didn’t matter, but her lungs were wrapped in a tight spool of cord.

  “Mum didn’t think it was a big deal,” she finally managed. She looked through the French doors, beyond the balcony, out to the beach. The tide was receding, leaving kelp on the dark, flat sand. Puffy clouds on the horizon promised a breathtaking sunset. Thanks, Mum. I didn’t get what you wanted and I don’t get what I want either.

  “Not a big—? Rowan, what happened?” Nic’s tone was outraged, but also bewildered. Worried. Closer.

  Rowan’s pulse sped up, but she didn’t let herself turn around and read anything into his nearness or concern. With great care she folded the towel, even though it would only be thrown down the laundry chute.

  “It’s not uncommon for women who don’t have much body fat to lose their periods,” she said, smoothing the blue nap of the towel. “I haven’t had one in years. I’ve gained a little weight since leaving school, but not enough for things to become normal. It might not ever happen.”

  She was proud of her steady tone, but his silence encased her organs in ice.

  “Mum said kids would ruin my career anyway. I guess I thought she was right. That if I was training and working and traveling I wouldn’t make much of a mother anyway. So it was for the best.” The words burned like a hot iron rod from the back of her throat to the pit of her stomach. “I didn’t let myself think of it much at all, to tell the truth. It was too big and—well, you know how doctors are. Quick to blame me because I wasn’t taking care of myself. I felt responsible, but also like I couldn’t change anything given the pressure I was under, so I ignored it. But with dance no longer being a part of my life and Mum and Olief gone...”

  She sighed and the weight on her chest settled deeper.

  “...I’m realizing that I would like a family.”

  She couldn’t help the yearning in her voice. This was the first time in her life that she knew what she wanted, deep down and without a doubt. A blanket of calm settled on her. Not peace. Not relief. She knew she wouldn’t get what she wanted—not the way she wanted it—but at least she knew what would fulfill her. The relief from fruitless searching allowed her to find a smidge of courage and acceptance.

  “Some day,” she emphasized with a glance over her shoulder.

  A light flush warmed her chest and moved outward to her fingertips. A poignant burn chased it. This was the kind of
conversation a couple with a future had, but she didn’t want Nic thinking she was begging for one.

  “Eventually,” she insisted, certain she’d revealed too much as she hugged the towel she held. She tried to cover her tracks and self-protect with a hurried, “When the time and the man are right. Obviously I’m not ready now. I’ve spent all my life pleasing my mother and I’m still responsible for my father. You’ve said yourself that I’m immature. I can’t even take care of myself. I don’t have a home or a job...” She stopped, in danger of sounding pitiful. “And it’s not like you want me to be pregnant, is it?” She mustered fake cheer as she made herself face him. “Sure, you would have made the best of it, but do you even want children?”

  A cold sweat broke out on Nic’s spine. Rowan had turned the tables so easily. One minute invoking his deepest empathy, the next putting him on the spot with eyes like deep green velvet, pale cheeks like wind-hollowed snow drifts and a wispy smile of brave fatalism softening her mouth. What heartaches did he harbor? she asked so ingenuously.

  How could he admit that he would have welcomed a baby with her? It would be brutally hurtful, given what she’d just revealed. And unwelcome. “When the time and the man are right.” A serrated knife of guilt turned in his gut at how comfortable he would have been trapping her to him. Him. A man who could never make any woman happy, least of all one who had been unfairly tied down for too long.

  “Do you want children?” she asked, her lips barely moving while a horrified shadow of inadequacy condensed in her eyes.

  He’d hesitated too long. She was reading his silent torment and coming up with failure on her part. What could he do except offer up the agonizing truth? His jaw opened, but his vocal cords were too thick. His hand turned ineffectually for a second before sound finally emerged from his throat.

  “I thought it might be a...second chance.” A satanic claw reached out and curled piercing talons into his heart, crushing the organ that had grown tender under Rowan’s influence. He instantly wished he hadn’t said that. A second chance? That was not how it worked. You didn’t reinvent your own childhood through your offspring.