26. Rowan
26
ROWAN
I stare at the pregnancy test for a long time. A weight seems to have settled in my chest, as if a fist has clenched around my heart and refuses to let go.
It’s over.
It doesn’t matter how I feel about her. It doesn’t matter that I’ve fallen in love with her—with every part of her—and that I can’t see how my life is supposed to look without her. That I can’t imagine raising our child alone, without her in our lives.
She made her position on it perfectly clear. She’s done her duty. She’s fulfilled her promise. And now she’s finished with me.
My hands clench into fists, my forehead dropping against them as I brace my elbows on the table. I’ve touched her for the last time, then. I was so detached during it, unable to come to terms with the fact that I wouldn’t be able to be intimate with her for another month. Unable to face the mounting frustration of only being able to touch my wife one week a month, and even then under parameters that make me feel as if I’m slowly going mad.
Now I’m never going to touch her again.
“ Fuck!” I swear aloud, shoving up from the table with a clatter of dishes. The sound just reminds me of how it felt to fuck her here, just a few nights ago, and I wonder if the sound of clinking china is going to remind me, for the rest of my life, that I’ve lost my wife.
I don’t know what I could have done differently.
I thought it would be enough to have her for a little while. I thought that would sate my obsession, that she’d be like every other woman. That I’d be bored of her within a week.
I couldn’t have been more wrong, and now, I’m fucking paying for it.
My phone goes off, startling me, and I swear aloud again, grabbing it to see Dimitri’s name popping up on the screen. “Hello?” I answer brusquely, and his voice comes over the line, tired and a little hesitant.
“Rowan. I just wanted to check in with you. I—” He pauses. “We haven’t been able to find Chris. Alek’s contact came back with information that makes us fairly certain that it was Chris who put out the contract. He traced the line, got some information on the location of the account that the money is supposed to come from. I’m all but sure that it is him.”
“I told you,” I growl into the phone, too upset to moderate my tone. “I fucking told you, Yashkov?—”
“We had to be sure,” Dimitri repeats. “And now we’re sure enough to go after him.”
“But you can’t find him,” I bite out, and there’s silence on the other end of the line for a moment.
“We will,” Dimitri says calmly. “I just wanted to make you aware.”
I hang up the phone before he can say another word, my hands shaking with helpless rage. I want to get on the jet and head straight back to New York, track down Chris, and strangle him with my own two hands. The thought of Genevieve harmed—or dead—makes me feel murderous in a way that I didn’t know I was capable of.
I should tell Genevieve what’s going on. But I can’t bring myself to worry her, especially in her condition. Now, more than ever, it’s important that she feels safe and protected. Telling her that Dimitri feels sure that Chris put out the contract, but that they can’t find him, will only do the opposite of that.
I go find Rory instead, giving him instructions to beef up security on the grounds. I call my father, checking in on things at home, and try to distract myself, but it feels impossible.
All I want is to go upstairs and check on Genevieve. I want to take care of her, to find out if there’s anything she needs, to talk to her. I want to know how she’s feeling, emotionally and physically. I want?—
I want my wife, in every possible way that I could want another person. It might be over for her, but it’s far from over for me.
I’ve never been more confused over something that I never thought I really wanted.
It doesn’t help that I still desire her, desperately. When she comes down for dinner, I can’t take my eyes off her. Every moment that we’re in the same room, I can feel the tension between us, thick enough to cut through. Everything about her turns me on—the way she looks, her scent, the way she moves. The salty, herbal scent of her perfume drives me mad, reminding me of every time that scent has ever clung to my skin and my clothes after I’ve touched her. The tilt of her lips when she smiles, the way she looks away when she wants to avoid a topic, the movement of her fingers and the shape of her body. I’ve learned more about her than I ever meant to, and I want to know her more intimately still—to claim her in every possible way.
I want to make her come undone, drag down her walls stone by stone until she gives herself up to me completely, and now I can’t touch her at all.
I feel as if it’s slowly driving me insane.
We go into Galway once again to shop, but I’m nervous the entire time, concerned that Chris might have figured out our location and extended the contract beyond the bounds of New York. Genevieve is cool toward me, as she’s been since she gave me the pregnancy test, and when I suggest going to the pub, she just shakes her head and says she’d like to head home.
The estate has always felt huge and expansive to me, but with every day that continues on like this, it feels as if it’s closing in around me. I wake up one morning, nearly a week after Genevieve told me the news, and all I can think is that I need to get out of this fucking house.
And I want to take my wife with me. Surely, what I have in mind is a place where no one would think to follow us, the sort of place where Genevieve and I could be alone, just for a little while.
Genevieve is already in the dining room when I come down. She looks up from the muffin that she’s nibbling at, and gives me a cool smile, the kind I remember from when I first met her. The kind that I now know is masking something else.
I’d give anything to know what she’s thinking beneath all of that.
“I thought we could leave the estate for the day.” I glance at her as I sink down into my seat opposite her. “You’ve seen the city, but there are other things that I’d love to show you. You haven’t begun to see the extent of how beautiful it is here.”
Genevieve looks at me, and I can’t tell what she’s thinking. It feels as if an ocean of space has opened up between us, and I don’t know how to close that distance again. “You think it’s safe to leave?” she asks finally. “You were jittery the other day, when we went into town.” She pauses, glancing back down at her breakfast before returning her gaze to mine. “What is happening back in New York, anyway?”
I hesitate, and her gaze sharpens. She hasn’t asked me about it again since we first arrived, and I asked her to let me handle it. Now, I can see that she’s not going to easily let it go.
“Dimitri is handling it,” I say as calmly as I can. “They haven’t found him yet. But he assured me everything is under control.”
Genevieve’s tongue sweeps over her lower lip, and it takes everything in me not to stare at her mouth. “You wish you could go back and handle it, don’t you?”
The question startles me into honesty. “Yes,” I say, before I can stop myself. “I do. But I also want to stay here, with you. And I can’t do both.”
Genevieve’s eyes widen. “Rowan?—”
I cut her off before she can say something that I know I don’t want to hear. “Just come with me today? I have something I want to show you.”
She bites her bottom lip, chewing at it in a way that I know now she does when she’s anxious about something. “What?” she asks finally, and I let out a slow breath.
“There’s an island off the coast that I liked to go out and visit when I was younger. When I needed to clear my head. It’s beautiful. You’ll never see anything else like it. I thought we could go down to the beach and I could show you that, and then we could go out to the island.” I take another breath and let it out. “A distraction. I think we could both use one, don’t you?”
Genevieve pauses, and for a moment, I think she’s going to tell me no. Then her shoulders relax, and she gives me that smile again—but I’ll take it, because at least she’s smiling at me.
“Alright. When do you want to leave?”