A troubling new intensity beamed from those midnight-blue depths—not the same kind of intensity she’d come to know. What did it mean?
She drew back nervously from his arms, found a tissue - in her slacks pocket—she’d been needing them quite frequently lately—and dried her face. “We...we can string lights on the tree, if you’d like.” “You’re pregnant,” he breathed.
Not a question. Not a suggested theory. A statement.
If that wasn’t just like him! She struggled to hold back tears again.
He grasped her face between his hands, and his gaze blazed a serious question—a demand for confirmation. “I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. Am I?”
Her heart stood still. She prayed to see joy. And love, please God. Was that asking too much? “No,” she whispered. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know. The circle on my test kit turned red this morning.”
Cort couldn’t stop himself from staring at her. Pregnant. With his baby. A sense of awe swelled to such immensity within him that he could barely breathe. His baby! He would be a father. And she, the woman he loved, the woman he would always love, was the mother of his child. Nothing had prepared him for the visceral shock of this moment. Crazy, he knew, since he’d suspected the truth before he’d even left Atlanta. And when he’d seen her, that suspicion had only deepened. Something in her gaze and manner had alerted him to a profound change in her.
Something about that change troubled him.
Anguish, he realized, putting a name to it with a sickening thud of his heart. He sensed a low-key but very real anguish in her. Did she not want this baby? He remembered then that she’d whispered something to that effect just before she’d left him. She wanted a baby from the man she would eventually fall in love with...not from him.
And now he saw unbearable sadness in her, and he thought that he might die.
“Cort, I’m so sorry it turned out this way.”
No. He didn’t believe it. The Laura he knew would not be sorry. She couldn’t possibly not want or love a baby she carried...and she would certainly cherish his. He had no doubt about that, just as he’d known that something was drastically wrong for her not to decorate for Christmas. He knew her. He might not know everything about her, having been apart for fifteen long years, but he knew the heart and soul and infinitely loving core of her.
Why, then, did anguish loom in her eyes?
“I was hoping so much,” she whispered, “that you’d be happy.”
For the second time in moments, he sat immobilized with shock. “Me? You hoped I’d be happy?”
“You don’t have to make it sound so unlikely.” A martial light ignited in the midst of her anguish, and Cort grappled with the realization that she thought he didn’t want this baby. “I know you offered to father my child as a...a favor to me....”
“A favor?”
“...because you feel guilty for hurting me and responsible for my so-called ‘fear of intimacy,’ and maybe for breaking up my plan with Fletcher. But this baby—this precious, beautiful baby that we’ve made together—”
“Laura!” He caught her face between his hands, swept his thumbs across her tear-dampened skin, gazed at her with all the love that burned for her in his heart. “You can’t believe that I don’t want this baby. Our baby. I’ve prayed that you’d conceive. I prayed for it, Laura...even while we were making love.”
She stared at him with astonishment, and his heart ached to think she hadn’t known.
“Maybe I did feel guilty for hurting you,” he said, “and responsible for the damage I’d done. But you don’t know the worst of it.”
“The worst?” she repeated. And he sensed she was bracing herself.
He, too, braced himself—for the possibility that the heartrending emotion he read in her face had to do with the baby and not with him at all. “I don’t know how you feel about me, or if what I’m about to say will make you shut me out of your life. But I have been lying to you, Laura. Not only about the furniture in my house, or my reason for wanting you there. I’ve lied from the very first day I met you. I lied every time I kissed you, every time we made love. Because I let you think it was sex—only sex—when it never was to me.” He scoured her face, her eyes, in a desperate search for tenderness, praying harder than he ever had. “I just love you so damn much.”
A great, hot surge of joy rose in Laura, and her feelings for him radiated like a power source. How could he not have known that she loved him? How could he believe she would shut him out of her life for loving her? Too overcome to speak, she answered him with a kiss—a deep, joyous, needful kiss. Ah, yes, needful. She needed him as a vital, integral part of her heart and soul.
But the kiss wasn’t enough, she knew. She had to tell him; to leave no doubt. Drawing back, she smiled lovingly into his eyes, and saw pain-filled questions still lurking there. “In case you’re wondering, I did find my true love,” she whispered. “At the Hays Street house. He owned the place, you see. I gave him my heart along with first month’s rent. And he never gave it back. So I’ve been avoiding intimacy with other men because they’re all the wrong men. Hell always be the only right man for me.”
The finest, warmest happiness blazed in his gaze, burning away all doubt. Thrusting his fingers into her hair, he tipped her back against the sofa and kissed her with poignant, eloquent longing. “Marry me, Laura,” he implored in a devout whisper. He kissed her chin, her cheeks, her eyelids—slow, deliberate kisses, and between each one, he repeated, “Marry me.”
She recaptured his mouth and drew him into a deeper, wilder celebration.
He really hadn’t needed to ask twice.
ISBN : 978-1-4592-5768-9
THE DADDY DECISION
Copyright © 1999 by Donna Fejes.
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