‘So do you keep in touch with the other parents?’
‘A few.’ Her eyes filled with tears again and he saw her try to rapidly blink them away.
Roman considered himself immune to female tears and the soul-baring and accusations they frequently preceded. He generally pretended not to notice them and made himself scarce; he certainly never had to fight an urge to hold someone and tell them it was going to be all right. Even Marisa’s prosaic sniff before she launched into husky speech again located an unexpected vulnerable spot inside him, awaking a tenderness he didn’t know he possessed.
‘Amy, she...’ She glanced towards Jamie and Roman noticed with a touch of amused pride that his son had appropriated yet another biscuit while they’d been distracted in conversation. ‘We were both single parents; everyone else was part of a couple.’ She saw him flinch. ‘I wasn’t trying to...you know...make you feel guilty.’
‘I know you weren’t.’ It was becoming more than clear to him that Marisa did not play the blame game.
‘Actually I think Amy and I were lucky.’ Marisa saw his eyes narrowed with scepticism and she hastily explained.
‘From what I saw an ill child often puts a relationship under a lot of strain. At least two couples I met while Jamie was being treated are in the middle of a bitter divorce now and another couple are giving it another go, so who knows?’
‘Maybe the cracks were already there in those relationships,’ he suggested, threading his long fingers together as he looked at where Jamie had crawled under a table and was happily building a tower out of bricks. ‘Or maybe most marriages, once you look beneath the surface, are pretty toxic.’
The cynicism in his voice drew a wince from Marisa—he really didn’t seem to have a high view of marriage, which begged the question why had he once proposed to her?
‘Why—’ She stopped and pushed away the question that felt as though it belonged in another life now; the person she had been then no longer existed, the things she had felt, longed for, all gone, like smoke on the wind. She had completely changed so maybe he had changed too. Maybe he was sitting there congratulating himself on his own lucky escape from marrying her.
It turned out it wasn’t his own escape he had been thinking of.
‘My mother only started living again when she escaped her marriage.’ Distracted for a moment from the shocking developments that were dominating his own personal life, it was almost relief for Roman to turn his inner anger and frustration to another situation that he had even less control over.
His mother had freed herself from her marriage to a man who wanted to control every aspect of her life, a man whose warped idea of love was to cut the object of his affections off from everyone else who cared for her, who was jealous of anyone who took her attention away from him—including his sons.
And here she was getting involved with a man with one failed marriage already behind him. The thought of the theatre director his mother had been with for the last two years etched a frown into his brow.
He didn’t give a damn that the man was twelve years younger than her; he didn’t care that he was successful enough not to be after her money. His mother was a happy, confident woman now but Roman couldn’t get rid of the image of her as the woman she’d been before, afraid to make any decision for herself, while seeming happy and content to the outside world.
What if history repeated itself with this other man and Roman couldn’t see past the happiness and contentment so he couldn’t protect her just as he hadn’t been able to protect her as a child?
‘Why did you ask me to marry you?’ Marisa asked, sounding as though she simply had to know.
His gaze slowly moved to her face.
‘Do you expect me to say I was in love with you?’
He had thought it back then, but he wasn’t about to admit to her something that even now he struggled to admit to himself.
His lip curled in self-contempt as he remembered thinking he had finally found his soulmate and the idea of losing her, of not spending every possible minute of the rest of his life with her, had seemed like an insanity.
She had had him at a golden glance, and he had run with reckless haste to claim the very thing he had spent his life avoiding, with consequences that only proved how right he had always been to avoid it.
‘No, I...’
‘Love can, I have heard tell, survive the cruel light of day. But what we shared was not love, it was likely just a...temporary insanity brought about by our seething hormones. We wanted to get naked a lot, so it’s perfectly understandable.’
Why it should hurt so much to hear him reduce what they had shared to a basic animal lust, Marisa didn’t know, but it did.
‘People get married all the time when they know they shouldn’t... How many people have you heard say, “I wish I’d never married you”?’
‘We didn’t get married,’ she said quietly.
‘Then you could call us lucky.’
A whoop of delight as Jamie’s tower toppled, scattering bricks across the wooden floor, broke the spell of Roman’s brooding stare, and she smiled at her little boy.
‘He seems to take some delight in destruction,’ Roman commented with amusement.
‘Yes, he is your average little boy, but so kind, as well. Last week his nursery visited a petting zoo and he was so gentle with the chicks and...’ She stopped, her reminiscent smile fading as she felt a self-conscious flush run up under her skin. ‘Sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘I can get a bit boring when I talk about Jamie.’
‘Mothers are meant to think their children are perfect and I am not bored.’
‘Does your mother know about—’ She glanced at Jamie.
Roman shook his head. ‘I haven’t told her.’ He supposed it was possible that Rio had told
