Chapter 15
MOLLY
“What? No!” I’m not in control of the volume of my voice.
Marry me. Two words, delivered with the absolute certainty of a man who has made a decision and considers the deciding the end of the matter, which is exactly how Pavel Strakov does everything, and which is exactly the problem.
I stand in the gray afternoon light of his office with my bag still in my hand and the news of two heartbeats still reverberating through every bone in my body, and I look at his face—that beautiful, terrifying, certain face—and I know the answer the way I know that I love him. Pure instinct.
“But—”
“No.”
He looks at me with those pale blue eyes, and the certainty in them doesn’t waver, which tells me he heard the word and has decided it doesn’t apply to him. “Molly—”
“No.” I set my bag down on the chair beside me because my arm is tired and I need both hands free for this conversation. “I heard you. The answer is no.”
The certainty in his expression shifts into something more careful, like he’s not sure what he’s dealing with from me. I get it. He probably thought I’d be grateful or happy or some other obvious thing.
Right now, I want to put the desk between us. Anything to get some distance. I know we have to talk about this, and now is better than later, but for fuck’s sake, I just want some space. Not a damn proposal.
“You are carrying my children,” he says, with confidence that his point will close the argument. “Two of them. That changes everything, Molly. The security I can provide, the—”
“I’m aware of what I’m carrying. I’m the one who told you, remember?”
“What is the meaning of this? You come into my office and tell me this… this enormous thing, and now I’m the bad guy for wanting to marry you?”
Something pulls tight and sharp in my chest, and it has nothing to do with him and everything to do with a kitchen in a house I grew up in and a mother who cried at the sink when she thought no one could hear her. “Pregnancy is not a reason to get married. Not for me. Not ever.”
“It’s not only the pregnancy, Molly.” He leans back against his desk, and his eyes flicker. He’s hiding something else from me. “I want you with me. The children accelerate a conversation I was already intending to have.”
“You were going to propose.”
“Yes.”
“When?”
He’s quiet for a beat, which tells me he hadn’t gotten that far in the planning. Maybe he wanted to marry me “one day,” and had never gotten around to figuring it out. Or maybe he’s just saying this to get his way on the matter.
This calls for a serious talk, because I don’t want to ruin things between us, but I also need him to hear me rather than simply wait for me to finish talking so he can say what he already wants to say.
“Fine, this isn’t just about the babies.
But what you just did—the way you just did it—I cannot say yes to that.
I cannot say yes to a proposal that comes as though the twins are the reason. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I understand that you are frightened—”
“I’m not frightened.” The sharpness in my voice surprises both of us. “I’m not a woman who needs to be managed through her fear right now. I’m a woman who is telling you something important about herself, and I need you to stop being a pakhan for thirty seconds and listen to me like a person.”
He straightens slightly, something in his posture shifting from command into something quieter, and he looks at me and waits, which is what I asked for but still feels strange.
I’m so used to him controlling everything between us—our conversations, my employment, our sex life—that it feels odd to truly hold the floor. Like I’m wearing the wrong skin.
But I have the floor, and I will use it. “My mother was forced to marry my father.”
His brow drops immediately. “What?”
“They ran away together. She was fifteen. He was twenty-four, and he didn’t know how old she was—she’d lied to him, because she was desperate to escape her home life.
” I look at the surface of the desk rather than at his face, because what I am about to say is easier to say to a neutral surface.
“Her father caught up with them three days after they left. He was a terrible man. The kind of terrible that lives inside the walls of a house and poisons everything in it slowly, the kind that nobody outside ever sees clearly enough to fight. No one was coming to help her, so she did it herself.”
“How did she manage it?”
“My mother would have done anything to get out of that house. She did do anything. She found the first man who showed her any real kindness, and she held on with both hands, and she ran.”
I stop for a moment. Outside the window, the city continues its indifferent gray business, and I am briefly grateful for it, for something that doesn’t require anything from me.
“She didn’t want to marry him,” I continue.
“She wanted out. Those are two different things, and she was fifteen years old and didn’t have the language to explain the difference, and even if she had, her father had a gun and a fury that had been building for years and a daughter who had shamed him, which was the only part of the situation he was capable of seeing. ”
Pavel’s frown deepens. “He forced them at gunpoint to marry?”
I nod once. “In a courthouse, with her father standing behind them, and my father not fully understanding what he was standing in the middle of because he was twenty-four and terrified of the man who swore he’d shoot him if he didn’t marry his daughter.”
Pavel has not moved. He’s watching me with an attention so complete it has its own weight.
“And then they were married,” I say, “and my grandfather went home, and my parents were left with each other, and my father—he wasn’t a bad man in the conventional sense.
He wasn’t cruel or violent or any of the things her father was.
But he had been lied to about something fundamental, and he had been forced into something he hadn’t chosen, and he never fully forgave either of those things.
Not her, not himself, not the the baby who came within the first year. ”
“He blamed you?” Pavel’s voice tumbles to a low growl.
I shrug. I’m mostly over it these days. No sense on dwelling.
“Me, Mom, my grandparents, anyone but himself. And that trend carried through the rest of his life. Everything was someone else’s fault.
My mother had escaped one household and walked directly into another one where she was tolerated rather than wanted. ”
Pavel takes a deep breath, letting his thick shoulders fall. “That… that will not be your fate.”
“No, it won’t.” I finally look up at him. “They were forced together. Stayed together. Quietly, consistently, thoroughly miserable.”
The office is very quiet.
“I will not walk through a door because I’ve been pushed,” I tell him.
“Not by a pregnancy, not by twins, not by any of it. If I ever say yes to you—if—it will be because I chose it freely, on a day when there is no external pressure shaping my answer. Because I want to, not because I’m supposed to.
Not because it makes logistical sense or because you’ve decided the situation requires it. ”
Pavel is quiet for a long moment. The kind of quiet that isn’t emptiness but density, that means he is taking in something that has rearranged the furniture of his understanding. “She was a child.”
“She was. A terrorized, terrified child who did the only thing she could think to do. My father never saw that because, to him, she was the trickster woman who brought shame to his name.”
“Because he couldn’t bring himself to accept that he had bedded a child.”
I gulp to keep myself from vomiting. “Yes.”
Something shifts in his expression then. He looks at me like I am something he’s holding very carefully in both hands, and he’s terrified of dropping it. “I’m not your grandfather.”
“I know that.”
“And I’m not asking because of the children. Or not only because of the children. Or—” He stops, and something almost uncomfortable crosses his face, which is remarkable on a man whose face is professionally uncomfortable to read. “I’m saying this badly.”
“You are,” I agree. “You’re saying it like a man who just got news that rearranged his entire world in thirty seconds and responded by proposing, which is a very you response, and I understand the impulse, and the answer is still no.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he steps closer to where I’m standing, and he doesn’t reach for me or try to close the distance in any way that would constitute pressure.
He simply stands close and looks at my face with that careful, complete attention.
“Tell me what you need from me right now.”
My throat tightens unexpectedly, and I breathe through it for a moment before I answer.
It’s not what I expected to hear, and now that we’re connected through the twins, I imagine a lifetime of unexpected things from Pavel, and I suspect none of them are accurate.
If I can figure out what to expect, then they’re not unexpected, are they?
I force myself back into the present to answer him, but a lingering part of my mind still wonders what’s in store for us.
“I need you to not propose to me again until the twins are old enough that they have nothing to do with your reasons. I’m not going anywhere, and I’m not walking out of this office and out of your life because of one badly timed proposal. Does that work for you?”
“I do want you,” he says firmly. “That is not in question.”
“I know.” I hold his gaze. “So wait. Let it not be about this. Let it be about that instead.”
He’s quiet for a moment, and then he nods once, but I see him calculating something he won’t verbalize.
“I need to sit down,” I say. “I’ve had a very big morning.”
The corner of his mouth moves, just barely, in the way it does when something has gotten through.
He pulls out the chair across from his desk, and I sit in it, and he sits across from me, and for a moment we are simply two people in an office at the end of a day that has rearranged the world, and the city darkens around us.
He’s still thinking, though. Something lingers in his mind about all of this, and I pray I didn’t hurt his feelings. A refused proposal has to hurt a guy, doesn’t it? No matter how much he might say he’s okay, tension radiates from Pavel.
I think I’m going to be sick.
That doesn’t change my answer, though.