Midwife's Longed-for Baby & the Prince's Cinderella Bride & Bride for the Single Dad (9781488022142)

by Anderson, Caroline; Berlin, Amalie; Taylor, Jennifer

  Relief to rage.

  Her still lovely features twisted and, with a sound caught somewhere between a scream and a sob, she took three wide steps across the room and returned with the wrought iron poker which had been leaning beside the fireplace.

  He tensed, ready to defend himself, even if the very idea that she’d actually attack him was so alien it made the world tilt.

  She lifted the thing and brought it down with all her might on the glass-topped table where the unsigned divorce documents rested. Once. Twice. Again. Again. Punctuating each swing with a word either grunted or screamed. “I. Hate. This. Table.”

  White spots in the shape of the poker appeared with each swing until finally a resounding crack announced a split in the top. He flinched and leaned back as she brought the iron rod down again.

  Another smash shattered it, leaving the documents lying amongst the broken shards.

  He made it up and around the table’s remains as she shifted her attention to the metal base and brought the weapon down again. “I. Hate. This. Table. Hate. Hate. Hate.”

  When she changed her swing, Quinn took the opening and shot out his left damaged hand, stopping her swing. The force of the impact sent a spike of pain spreading through what remained of his palm and up his arm.

  The shock of hitting something living made her let go, and she froze on the spot, looking at him, looking at his hand. He flung the rod down and then swept her up in his still aching arms to track away from the coffee table carnage.

  “What are you doing? Put me down!” She squirmed until he released her across the room, away from any shattered glass spray. Before she could get any distance, he locked his good hand around her wrist, and felt her fist ball.

  The pit that had opened in him as he saw her destroy the coffee table began to make his guts swirl. “More violence? This is not you.”

  Anais was gentle. Tender-hearted. She didn’t go on destructive rampages when upset. She got very quiet, she spent time alone. Sometimes she cried. She didn’t break things.

  At least this smashing spree was easier on his equilibrium than watching her cry had ever been, but he still felt the need to stop it. He raised his voice. “Stop fighting. I’m no danger.”

  “Every second I’m with you I’m in danger!”

  Reactive words to make him back off. Part of him even wanted to, but the biggest thoughts echoing in his mind refused to let him leave.

  She hadn’t broken them. She’d just been the one to walk away from his mess.

  “I could never be a danger to you,” he said softly, holding her gaze, praying she actually heard him. He’d heard her—even if it’d taken nearly eight years if he counted their marriage.

  He’d always known they’d been in trouble, but he’d also thought they’d have more time. He’d thought he’d be able to get her to stay until the tide turned, that something would happen, that opinions would change. Because they had been in trouble, but he’d still wanted her with every piece of him.

  He still did. Yes, they’d changed. She was a doctor now. He was a man, not just walking around in a man’s body. Surely the people wouldn’t see them the same way.

  “Let me go.”

  The demand came, and neither of them pretended it didn’t mean more than a simple request to release her wrist.

  “No,” he said, keeping eye contact and his hold on her arm. “It was a mistake last time.”

  “I don’t want to be your wife.”

  “I didn’t want to go into the military. Or get divorced. Amazingly, both of those things worked out well for me. I’m not the same man I was, Anais. Tell me what you were afraid of.”

  “That’s nothing you need to know anymore,” she said through gritted teeth. “What I’m currently afraid of? Staying married to you. I don’t want to be part of the PR parade that is being a princess. I hated it the first time, and this time it will only be worse.”

  She swung her arm up to her face and, with her free arm, grabbed his wrist in return. Without missing a beat, she turned out to the side, twisting his arm at the shoulder.

  He wasn’t ready for it, and the twist and sharp stab of pain made him let go of her wrist. Just as she’d wanted.

  “I never fit. I could never fit or be accepted—it was futile. All I ever was, all I could ever be, was a stain on you and your family. That’s still what I’d be.”

  Stepping away from him, she grabbed her bag and swung it over her shoulder, but paused when she looked at him, at the shock he could feel written on his face. She’d easily slipped his hold and, more importantly—she could’ve really hurt him if she’d wanted to. Did Gray’s Anatomy include a section on self-defense and the best way to dislocate a shoulder? What, in God’s name, had she been up in the States?

  “You never fought for us, Quinn,” she said, plucking his thoughts in his face. “You never fought for me. You never even met me on the damned battlefield. After you, I had to learn to fight for myself.”

  She was nearly at the door. Leaving a conversation she didn’t want to be part of—something she’d probably learned from him. Fighting might make her stay. “Looks to me like you learned to hide yourself.”

  “I did that too.” She swung the door open and looked back at him. “Do yourself and your whole family a favor. Sign the papers.”

  She didn’t blink, and there was a warning in her stare: get ready for a fight.

  * * *

  “What are we doing here, Doc?” Ben asked, sounding tired already even though Quinn knew this was the first time during his stay at Almsford that he’d been to the gym. Physical therapists were required to ask every day but, since his attempted hanging, they hadn’t been pushing anything. Not that he couldn’t still be tired; emotional exhaustion was more insidious than the physical variety.

  “What do you think we’re doing?”

  “Some kind of lesson on perseverance, I guess.” The disgruntled tone at least sounded a little more energetic than it had seconds before.

  Quinn parked the wheelchair where they could both watch an amputee patient using the parallel bars for stability while he walked on a new prosthesis under direction from a physical therapist.

  “Nailed it,” Quinn said.

  “Not exactly the same situation,” Ben said after spending a few brief seconds watching the man. “He’s still got a functioning leg. I’m missing two.”

  “One and a half,” Quinn corrected, fetched himself a chair and sat down beside Ben. “With a prosthetic on your longer leg, you could use crutches and get out of this chair. Then, after you got used to one, you could go for the other.”

  “Your wife feed you that line?”

  “Gave me the literature. Why? Would you be more willing to hear it if it came from Rosalie? I’m sure she’d tell you the same, if you’d see her.”

  Ben eyed him sideways, “Don’t make this harder. She deserves better and you’d feel the same way.”

  He was talking about his other injury, the one he didn’t discuss directly. And, since he didn’t, Quinn didn’t tackle it head-on either. In a way, this not talking felt productive and safe, but he could see it being too indirect to deliver any results either. “There’s a fix for everything, brother.”

  “You tell that whopper to your wife too?”

  He didn’t really want to talk about Anais, but Ben had brought her up twice. “Haven’t exactly. Woman damned near broke my hand, and then my arm last night. Right after she obliterated my coffee table with a fireplace poker.”

  Ben’s brows shot up. “Guess I’m lucky she didn’t have a weapon handy yesterday when I called her a bad princess.”

  There was no containing his wince. “She wasn’t a bad princess. She just never had a chance. Starting to think it was my fault too. Philip told me to clean it up. He meant to settle the divorce, make
it official, but I don’t want to.”

  “Because she didn’t have a chance?”

  “No. I don’t know. I just can’t wrap my head around the idea of letting her get away a second time.” If they were doing this about Anais, he wasn’t backing off Rosalie. “I never could let her go. Neither will Rosalie. If you keep on, you’re sentencing her to a half-life. She’ll never get over you, and you know it.”

  “She’s stronger than you.”

  “Tell yourself lies, if that’s what you’ve got to do,” Quinn muttered. “She said I never fought for her. Don’t know what irritates me more—the idea of it, or that she’s right. I’m not making that same mistake again.”

  * * *

  “Helen’s going to be so happy to see us. You should’ve heard her when I called to say we were coming.”

  Anais checked the rearview as Mom spoke, noting the long string of cars still following all the way from her townhouse to the main street in Easton.

  Security? Media? She didn’t know who they were, just took a small amount of comfort in the distance between her back bumper and their front. All the while trying not to let on to Mom how nervous they made her. “It’s good of her to be willing to open the shop on her day off.”

  “Are you worried about coming?”

  Of course she’d noticed. Even with seven years of ocean between them, Mom had been able to read her through nothing but a phone line. Sometimes less. Sometimes she’d known when to call.

  This was supposed to be a happy visit for Mom, and Anais didn’t want to ruin it. “I’m glad we decided to come. It’ll be nice to see everyone, and maybe Aunt Helen can help me peel away another layer of Anna and look more myself. It’ll be nice to see me when I look in the mirror.”

  “That won’t be a problem. At least with your hair. I don’t know about your skin, though.”

  “She might have some tricks. People will have come to her about an overly orange experience before. But I’ll exfoliate later. Always makes it fade faster.”

  Anna’s look no longer served her, and might never serve her again—even if she truly needed it. If she couldn’t get this marriage situation smoothly and quickly sorted out, she might need to run again. The thought shot a pang through her belly. What could she do then? Cut her hair off? Gain weight? Plastic surgery? Would Mom come too next time? Anais couldn’t leave her behind again. Not now.

  The small inner-city salon came into view; directly in front of the building was an empty parking place. Anais darted into it and parked before looking up and down the street to take inventory.

  Cars lined both sides of the street, nowhere else to park. Maybe that would work in their favor—deter some of the vehicles following them.

  They bundled out of the car and Anais waited for her mother to go into the salon ahead of her, then turned to track the progress of the vehicles, making mental note of the makes and colors.

  One of them squeezed into a spot just after another car pulled out, but the other four picked up speed and headed uptown.

  “Must have found a better headline than Princess Visits Salon,” Mom said from beside her, arm coming around her waist. “Well, most of them. That one black car probably hasn’t heard about whatever is happening yet.”

  She was trying to help, and that defeated the whole point of Anais’s plan to give her mother a good day with her sister and friends, since moving in with Anais had separated them. To take her mind off their uncertain future, and how that might increase the distance between them if they were forced to leave. “Go say hi to Aunt Helen. She’s probably about to explode in a shower of fabulous glitter by now.”

  They’d no sooner stepped inside and away from the door than Anais heard a click behind her and a spike of fear had her spinning to face the danger. A pink-smocked woman she didn’t recognize had locked the door. “To keep them cameras out, Princess.”

  The uniform marked her as an employee, which abated Anais’s alarm a little. She really had to do better if she wanted Mom to have a good day. “Thank you, that’s a good idea. Don’t…I’m not really a princess. It’s all a mistake. Please call me Anais.”

  She’d pretend the door locking would keep everyone out, not just the lawful people who wouldn’t break through the wide picture window upon which the salon name had been painted.

  Anais focused again through the window on the black sedan that had followed them; the window was rolled down, and she half expected to see Quinn sitting there, but she saw a man in a black suit instead, with an earpiece. He nodded once to her across the way, and the darkened window rolled back up.

  Royal Security.

  Great. Now the King had gotten involved. Was that better than cameras or worse?

  Worse, she decided. It validated the situation somehow. Made Quinn’s cooperation seem less likely.

  A flurry of greetings broke in on her thoughts and before long she’d been ushered out of her jacket, into hugs, and finally a spinning chair, and some nice person muted the still running television on the wall behind her. Although Easton had never fit her either, there was a homey feeling to her aunt’s salon—somewhere she’d safely spent hours with her nose in books and where no one had made fun or bullied the local Poindexter.

  Work, card games with her friends; Mom was there so much that Anais was practically related to their core group—they all thought she was brilliant, and had been proud of her marriage. People she’d let down in many ways—some they still didn’t know about and wouldn’t, so long as those pictures stayed private.

  She almost felt as if she belonged there, a feeling she’d been looking for when she’d set her sights and non-existent seduction skills on Wayne Ratliffe. The idea had been: community acceptance through the coolest guy in the neighborhood. Get him to like her; the rest would fall in line.

  It was everything past the idea that had gone wrong. Her teenage brain had no execution skills. Pretending to be cool meant drinking the alcohol he’d given her. Two drinks in, making out sounded like winning. Three drinks in, he’d convinced her that girls who took pride in their bodies shared them with boyfriends… And then the pictures…

  She should be paying attention to what they were saying.

  She felt Mom’s gaze before she saw it as Mom launched in with the talking Anais was failing to do. “Strip out the brunette…dye the proper shade back if needed…blah-blah-blah…spray tan removal…”

  Their excitement redirected easily enough, Anais settled in, with tired but genuine smiles dutifully mustered.

  Helen spun her so that she could watch the window through the mirror in front of her, and got to work, whisking a protective cape around her and snagging a bowl of foul-smelling chemicals with an applicator.

  No book today; she could either fixate on her past stupidity, stare paranoid out the window or listen.

  Or she could think about Quinn, since they were chatting about him now.

  It had been two days since she’d seen him and Hulk-smashed his coffee table. The urge to break it, or throw it off the perfect balcony, had been with her every day, starting about the fourth month of their marriage—when they’d been gifted with the keys. Prior to that, they’d lived in a small flat near the country’s best university—and social strata—a scholarship had granted her access to, and had come to the capital on the weekends to try and get his family used to her and for her to take some solace with her mom.

  Someone else had bought the penthouse.

  Someone else had decorated it.

  Someone who probably thought a microbiology major would want obsessively modern tastes, which had instead shocked her system. But their whole marriage had been a shock to her system. And they’d spent so much time in the bedroom, she’d convinced herself that the rest of the apartment didn’t matter. Just like she’d originally bought Quinn’s notion that the rest of the world didn
’t matter. Until it began to matter. Until she’d started seeing glimpses of Wayne. Until Wayne had made clear it was still true—that she’d never belong with Quinn any more than she’d belonged in Easton.

  She still didn’t know whether or not she’d actually seen him early on, or if it had just been her subconscious worrying her about that part of her past she’d been ignoring, that part which would come up and derail them. Corrachlean had remained a monarchy, steeped in traditional values through the centuries. It was a quaint culture that embraced certain modern notions—like equality—while still clinging to old values. A super-common princess raised by a single, never-married woman, who hadn’t even a father named on her birth certificate, was impossible to accept, even without adding low-class nudies.

  And Anais couldn’t even make an excuse for it—at least not one that made her seem less pathetic.

  They could never accept her and she still so desperately wanted them to.

  Even Quinn wouldn’t if he found out. He accepted her as she was, or as he thought her to be: sensible, with good judgment, highly intelligent—brutally intelligent, he’d once called her as a compliment. He loved that about her. Her act of extreme stupidity would counter that argument very effectively, even without introducing jealousy into the mix.

  “Anais…”

  Her mother’s voice broke in as her chair began to spin, and soon she was looking at Quinn in full regalia on the television while one of the women scrambled to find the remote they’d just had moments ago, and a chill shot through her.

  “Is he doing it?” Mom asked just as the volume returned and TV Quinn stopped nodding and waving and started to speak.

  “I don’t know. I hope so.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming today.”

  Quinn stood at a podium in front of a sea of reporters, cameras rolling and, with a patience she couldn’t believe he possessed, waited for them to get serious footage. She’d seen nothing of him on film—nothing past the grainy night shot of her giving him the documents for Ben.