‘I guess about a month ago, but I wanted to make sure before I spoke to you.’
Roman looked towards the drawer she had indicated, but made no move to check the truth of her words. That he didn’t touched her. Soothed her a little, fanning the dull flame of hope in her chest.
He poured the water from the kettle into the cup of tea she’d had waiting before he’d knocked on her door, before she had been ready for him, and set it on the counter top between them as if unwilling, yet, to risk any physical contact between them.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked finally, his focus laser-sharp as she nodded.
‘Have you seen a doctor?’
She sighed her yes more than said it.
He nodded once. ‘You will return to my side,’ he declared, inflaming the rage banked momentarily by their previous detente.
‘Why?’ she asked, genuinely curious.
‘Does everything have to have a damn explanation?’
‘Yes. In this case it does,’ she replied, choosing to ignore the angry outburst. ‘Because, really? There’s very little between us aside from resentment and lies. And that is not something that I will inflict on my child.’
‘So, you are keeping it?’
‘Of course!’ Ella’s outraged declaration thrummed through the air between them, beating at him accusingly. ‘You would ask me—?’
‘No!’ He couldn’t even let her finish that sentence. The words, the thought that she would think him capable of such a thing, truly shocked him.
‘Don’t act all outraged. The lengths to which you have gone to get what you want are well documented by this point, don’t you think?’
‘Is that why you waited this long to tell me?’ He had turned away despite his probing question, unable and unwilling to see the look on her face, to read the truth in her eyes.
‘No. I waited this long to make sure my baby was safe.’
He heaved out a weighted breath which was half relief and half frustration. ‘Our.’
‘Our what?’
‘Our baby, dammit.’
* * *
Roman cursed, already feeling a step behind, already feeling cut from his own child’s life by her simple declaration, and it scalded him from the inside out. A child, the presence, the reality of which he simply couldn’t wrap his head around. His hand flew to his hair, sweeping it back from his forehead, only just resisting the urge to grasp it in a fist and display his frustration for the quick gaze of his wife, consuming his reaction to this sudden news as if it were a test. One that he really feared he might fail.
He had never wanted children. Couldn’t even fathom how it had happened because he knew they had used protection each and every time. But he also knew that protection failed, plans failed, and that nothing in Ella would have willingly bound herself to a monster such as him. And now he had somehow tied an irrefutable bond between him, her and…their child. An innocent child brought into his world, a world formed only from anger, vengeance, hurt.
He was going to be a father.
‘What are you planning?’ he asked, focusing his confusion on her rather than himself and the thoughts their child had conjured.
She sighed, delaying her response by taking a sip of the tea she cradled carefully within her hands. Refusing to let her hide from him, he stared her down, taking in all the emotions passing across her face. Emotions that echoed within him.
‘I honestly don’t know. I have a barely-off-the-ground business, half-signed divorce papers, no home of my own and a baby on the way.’ As if by listing her current predicament had somehow brought it all to bear down upon her shoulders, she swayed a little where she stood and he cursed. He reached for her then, stopping a few inches from actually touching her and guided her towards the small sofa and chair set of the open-plan living area.
The moment she sat down Dorcas resumed her guard of his wife, placing her large head in Ella’s lap and staring between them, adoringly and accusingly, depending on the focus of her gaze. He didn’t have to see where Dorcas placed the blame. He felt it down to his toes.
‘You are pregnant and will return to me,’ he asserted, as if it were that simple. As if that would somehow make sense of everything that was swirling through his mind and heart.
‘What will you threaten me with this time?’ she asked, her words at odds with the almost numbness of her tone.
‘I’ve never once threatened you. And you can say that I coerced you into marriage, but I sure as hell did not coerce you into bed.’ The lack of emotion behind her words somehow ignited his own.
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘I would never say that.’ The pretty blush on any other woman could have been considered coquettish, but in Ella he knew it to be real. As real as the baby that they were to have. That she could still prevent him from having access to. And though Roman might never have wanted even the abstract idea of a child—now that Ella was carrying his heir, his flesh and blood joined with hers, it was as if something primal, something raw and ancient had gripped his heart and made him more sure of this one thing than he’d ever been in his life. That he needed his wife and child with him. So, he would do, say whatever it was that Ella needed him to say in order to secure that.
‘You lost your parents at a young age. And I do not for one moment dismiss the tragedy of that,’ he insisted vehemently. ‘But my…father chose to take money instead of staying with my mother. He left her pregnant and alone. Knowing this, knowing that he chose her father over her and her child, it devastated my mother.’
* * *
Through his words, Ella heard and felt the echoes of pain that such a thing would have, in fact
