No Longer Forbidden? (17 page)

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.”

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.”