Modern Romance Collection February 2025, #5-8

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

‘W HEN WERE YOU going to tell me?’

He was opening the door to the clinic for her. To give Dom credit, he’d recovered more quickly than she had when she’d learned the news.

‘After the scan. After I learned everything was all right.’

‘You say that now.’

‘You know differently? How insightful of you,’ she said, and brushed past him, giving her name at Reception and taking a seat in the waiting room. What she really wanted to do was head to the bathroom, her bladder was filled to bursting, but the main cause for her aggravation had just sat down alongside her.

He put his elbows down on his spread legs, his hands clutched under his chin. ‘And you’re sure it’s mine?’

She rolled her eyes, sent him a blistering look and angled herself away. Tried to cross her legs and then gave up when it only put more pressure on her bladder.

‘If you’re trying to convince me not to sign those divorce papers,’ she hissed, ‘you’re barking up the wrong tree.’

‘I don’t know who you’ve been with.’

‘Likewise. Has the beautiful Isabela managed to weasel her way into your bed yet?’

He cocked an eyebrow. ‘You care?’

‘No,’ she said, cursing herself for giving herself away. ‘I left, didn’t I? Would I have left if I’d cared? If I’d given a damn?’

‘It felt like you cared.’

His voice was deep and measured and she knew exactly what he was remembering. The sex they’d shared. The sex that had resulted in this little one residing deep inside of her.

Her name being called saved her from answering. She sprang to her feet and approached the sonographer. Dom did likewise.

‘No,’ she said, except the sonographer got in first.

‘Ah, is this your partner? Lovely,’ she said, and Mari got the sense she was remarking about Dom’s looks rather than the proud father-to-be he presented himself as. ‘Come on through.’

She directed Dom to a visitor chair while she got Mari to lie on the bed. ‘So, not your first pregnancy?’ she said, looking at the notes while she positioned the equipment.

‘Second,’ Mari said. ‘Twins. Miscarried at five months. Twenty years ago.’

She pressed a hand to Mari’s shoulder. ‘So unfair. Let’s take a look at this baby and check everything’s okay.’

Mari bared her belly for the gel and the transducer. The screen on the ceiling was turned away. There was no point watching that, so she closed her eyes and tried to ignore Dom sitting beside her, tried to put him out of her mind. The gel was cold, the transducer pressure on her belly she could have done without, but the sonographer was efficient with her work. Moving the transducer over her skin, searching for angles and finding them, clicking to take measurements and even more measurements. It might have been twenty years ago, but Mari had been there before.

The sonographer stopped clicking. ‘Can you excuse me? I just have to check something with my colleague. I’ll be right back.’

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Mari, but the woman was gone. Mari looked at Dom. ‘Something’s wrong. Why would she leave like that?’

‘Because she had to check something with a colleague.’

‘About what?’

‘I don’t know. Why do you think there’s something wrong?’

‘Because otherwise she wouldn’t have to check. She says it’s a colleague, but she means a doctor. They only do that when there’s something wrong. Otherwise, she’d show me the pictures and send me home with a photo.’

‘You don’t know that,’ he said.

‘I know it. Something’s not right. Something’s wrong.’

He reached out a hand to her and she took it, clinging to it with both hands like a lifeline. And for the first time she admitted that she was glad that Dom was here, because this wasn’t just her child but Dom’s too. He needed to be here.

The sonographer reappeared, together with another white-coated woman who identified herself as a doctor.

‘What’s wrong?’ Mari asked. She was thirty-nine years old—a geriatric pregnancy as some called it, where any number of things could go wrong. Especially following a previous miscarriage.

The doctor smiled benevolently. ‘Don’t worry. Just checking a few things. It won’t take a moment.’

She took the transducer, moving it over Mari’s skin. Mari flinched at the pressure of both an overfull bladder and things unknown. When the hell would they let her pee? When the hell would they stop torturing her and tell her what was wrong? She was thirty-nine years old. She wasn’t a child that needed to be protected. If something was wrong, she wanted to know what it was.

A minute later the doctor nodded to the sonographer as she pulled the device away. ‘I’m sorry to put you through that added stress, Ms Peterson, but we needed to be sure as it’s sometimes difficult to determine at an early stage. But my colleague here was right. I’m hoping this might make up for what happened in the past. Congratulations,’ she said, wiping the gel from her belly with paper towels. ‘There are two heartbeats. You’re expecting twins.’

Shock ricocheted through her.

‘No!’ she heard herself calling as she curled into a ball on the bed. If she could squeeze her eyes shut long enough, she might wake up and find this had all been a dream, a horrible, ghastly dream. Discovering she was pregnant, Dom turning up on her doorstep unannounced, learning that she was pregnant with twins.

Again.

History was repeating itself. Mocking her. Congratulations had no place in the circumstances. Condolences would be more appropriate. One baby was bad enough, but two was akin to scraping away the scars of the past with a box grater and rubbing salt into them.

‘No,’ she said, tears streaming down her face. ‘I lost them before. I can’t go through that again!’

The doctor patted her shoulder. ‘I understand, but there’s no reason to think that what happened before will happen again. You were unlucky, that’s all. You’ll have the best possible care, I can guarantee it.’

‘But twins…’

Dom reached for her hand. ‘Our twins.’

But Mari just turned her head to the wall and sobbed.

Dom took her home to her flat. Put her to bed, tortured by the sound of the soft sobbing coming from her room.

Marianne was pregnant with his twins.

And didn’t that change things. Those divorce papers in his car were going nowhere. Everything had changed. Divorce was out of the question, even Marianne must realise that.

The evening was closing in, soft rain falling outside, spattering against the windows when Dom took Mari a tray with a bowl of warm soup from a can he’d found in the pantry, along with a handful of crackers. ‘You have to eat something,’ he said when she shook her head.

Her cheeks were puffy, there were dark circles under her eyes and her hair was a mess, but even so, she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. She always had been. Even more so now because she was carrying his babies.

He gathered pillows to put behind her back, placing the tray on her lap and sat down on the side of the bed. ‘Do I have to feed you?’ he asked gently.

‘No,’ she said, so softly it was little more than a whisper. She picked up the spoon, dipped it into the soup, and took a sip. ‘I’m afraid,’ she said, resting the spoon back on the tray.

‘Of course you are, but you heard the doctor. There’s no reason to think that what happened last time will happen again. Come on, eat.’

She stared into her soup. ‘That’s not the only reason I’m afraid.’

Her words barely made sense.

‘Why else would you be afraid?’

She licked her lips. ‘I miscarried my babies.’

‘My mother told me. She truly felt for you.’

She lifted her gaze, her eyes sorrowful, searching his. ‘Twenty years ago,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you? The twins I lost—they were your babies, Dom.’

Dom was reeling with shock. He stood up and gazed out of the window to the wet streetscape beyond, car headlights sending blurry beams along the bitumen.

His babies. Marianne had said as much to the sonographer, but his brain hadn’t let him connect the dots. He’d assumed that she’d been pregnant with her husband’s twins—that something had gone horribly wrong and he hadn’t wanted Marianne to try again. That he’d been happy with the two children he’d already had. Twenty years ago, she’d told the sonographer, and the babies had been five months gestation. And it was twenty years ago that Dom’s father had suffered his first heart attack and he’d returned to San Sebastián temporarily—until his father had died and temporarily had become permanently, and he’d put off his return to Australia again and again. Why hadn’t she told him? Why hadn’t he known?

He’d never had an inkling that she was pregnant. Why hadn’t she told him? If she’d told him he would have moved heaven and earth to get to her.

But he hadn’t known. And he’d lost her. He’d lost an entire family he didn’t know he had.

‘Where are they?’ he asked.

‘Sydney,’ she said. ‘Where I lost them. They’re buried together in a cemetery overlooking Bondi Beach.’

And Dom knew he had to go.

‘Take me there. Show me.’