CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
The ride was only a couple minutes long, and Oliver hadn’t spoken. When we got to the house, I was prepared for rapid-fire questions, but he didn’t say a word.
I would rather have his viciousness now than remain on guard for who knew how long.
Just another thing to be waiting around on him for.
I did everything by the book. I was attentive to him when we got inside. I helped him out of his clothes and smiled every time he looked at me. I placed his glass of water on the nightstand beside his reading glasses and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.
I quickly checked the page he was on, my eyes skimming the lines he’d underlined.
One passage had been marked three times.
“A spider is proud when it has caught a fly, and another when he has caught a poor hare, and another when he has taken a little fish in a net, and another when he has taken wild boars, and another when he has taken bears, and another when he has taken Sarmatians.”
I closed the book.
Aurelius was a good read, but never in the hands of Oliver. When he was feeling magnanimous, he picked up that book and smiled like a Cheshire cat.
At the center of me, I knew why.
Lucy.
I swallowed and resumed my duties. I cleaned up his dirty clothes and jumped in for a quick shower when he was finished.
His quiet demeanor continued.
Even after I finished showering and changed into his favorite nightgown, he wandered the hallway outside the bedroom door, moving up and down repeatedly.
I took a deep breath and stuck my head out of the room. “Won’t you join me, Professor?”
He paused mid-step and stared at me.
His mask was slipping as he watched me. The emptiness in his gaze grew heavier with every passing second.
“What did you talk about with that boy?”
Expecting this, I rolled my eyes. “Hardly anything. He was a talker, Oliver. The trick was getting him to shut up.”
He didn’t react to my joke. “I’ve never seen someone look at you like that.”
“Like what?”
“With such greed.”
Greed?
I wanted to laugh at the absurdity. Tristan had appeared enchanted by me, not greedy. The reminder tugged at my heartstrings.
I schooled my expression. I had to rebound quickly.
“I didn’t even notice he was looking at me in any particular way. What does it mean when someone stares at another person with greed, Oliver?”
“It means they think you’re theirs already.”
I let out a disgusted scoff. “I’m married to a professor, and he sings at restaurants.”
Oliver frowned. “I should have mentioned what I do.”
“You didn’t have to. You were dressed like a god, and he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It’s very obvious you’re a high-caliber man, Oliver.”
“You smiled at him and laughed. You encouraged him to keep talking to you.”
I wasn’t naive enough to fall for his tricks. He had been absorbed in Angela and was trying to catch me doing something he could only speculate about.
I let out a laugh, and his face tightened in displeasure.
I didn’t care.
I had to be imperfect sometimes to hide the truth.
“I didn’t laugh at all. He asked if I minded that he smoked, and I told him I did. But then he smoked anyway, and I called him rude.”
The displeasure faded, and he seemed amused. “He wasn’t sweet to you.”
“Not at all! I can’t believe you invited him to the barbecue.”
He chuckled, and I knew instantly that I had dodged a bullet.
He came to me, wrapped an arm around my waist, and pressed a soft kiss to my forehead.
“That’s all right. He might not show up, and even if he does, he can watch my beautiful bride from afar, wrapped in my arms, in a house he will only ever dream of having. He can have his guitar and his voice. I’m the one winning at life.”
His words disgusted me.
If things were different and I didn’t fear being drugged and chained up and maybe even killed, I would have told him that the singer didn’t need those things to win at life.
Tristan might have been angry and hurting, but he was nothing like Oliver.
The certainty should have startled me. I had known Tristan for only minutes, yet my gut insisted he was more real and human than Oliver could ever be.
“You all right?” Oliver asked, studying me as he pulled away.
I hesitated.
I could dabble in this lie and see how far I could push it.
“I’ve been out of it. It’s why I had to take a breather during dinner. I felt nauseous…”
I paused, waiting to see if he would bite.
“Nauseous,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Are you late?”
I bit my bottom lip and slowly nodded. “I think so, but things have been crazy lately, and I haven’t really been monitoring the dates.”
If he hadn’t been so distracted, if he had been paying attention, he would have done the math and known I was actually a week away from my period.
“How long have you been feeling this?” he asked.
I could see the excitement in his eyes.
He wanted this badly, for reasons I would never understand.
“It came on last night.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” he admonished me. “I pushed it tonight. I never would have stayed so long had I known you were feeling this way.”
Excellent.
He was giving me the right responses.
Now I would redirect him.
“I wasn’t going to ruin your night, Oliver. You’ve been so busy lately, and with this student missing…I can tell it has taken a huge toll on you. I wanted you to have a good time with your faculty peers.”
Cue the lecture.
“Daisy, you come first. A baby would come first. You should never do that again.”
His eyes suddenly glistened with unshed tears.
“It’s been years. Don’t you miss the running around? The pitter-patter, the yelling, and the chaos?”
His words should have ignited pain in my chest.
Nothing stirred.
I was always on tenterhooks with this man. He was not welcome to my grief. He didn’t deserve to see that part of me.
I refused to let him in.
But I pretended to choke on my next words.
“I miss it, Oliver. I do.”
“What can I do to make you feel better?”
This was either going to backfire spectacularly or give me exactly what I wanted.
“We can find out. You can buy a test for me.”
He considered it, which meant he was tempted.
“If we’ve caught it too early, it’s more accurate with a doctor. I like to have it done the proper way.”
“Then take me tomorrow, and we can find out straightaway.”
He let out a long sigh.
I knew he couldn’t make it tomorrow. He had to go into work. It was a test day for his students.
“Is there an after-hours doctor?” he wondered.
“There might be. You can look it up.”
When he didn’t answer immediately, I smiled sweetly.
“Oliver, we can wait until the day you can take the morning off work.”
He continued to think as he moved around me and began getting ready for sleep.
I slid into bed while he brushed his teeth in the bathroom. I pressed my knees to my stomach and buried myself beneath the covers, giving him the impression I was in a poor way.
When he returned, he came to my side and brushed the hair away from my face.
He studied me.
I looked up at him groggily and smiled.
“I’ll keep the alarms down tomorrow,” he said. “Get ready for ten in the morning. If I don’t make it home by noon, there’s the walk-in clinic on Beauford Street by the shopping center. They’ll take your blood there.”
I pretended to consider it. “But don’t you want to be there when we find out?”
“More than anything, but if you’re suffering, I won’t let my work get in the way of you getting answers.”
It disturbed me how genuine he sounded.
The old me would have wanted to believe him. I might even have convinced myself that he was changing for the better.
But that was stupid, and I didn’t give a fuck even if he did have some small capacity for change.
He might have been a good father to Rowe in the beginning, but he could have easily turned on him the way he had turned on me.
All Oliver wanted was to possess.
People, objects, every corner of his environment—he wanted control over all of it.
A baby would not be someone for him to love. It would be another instrument to use against me. Something that bound me to him through parenthood, through the law, and through the knowledge that a piece of him lived inside me.
The thought truly did make me nauseous.
I felt so ill and trapped by the idea that I hurried from the bed and heaved into the toilet.
I thought of the birth control pills hidden in the laundry room and how grateful I was to have them.
They were saving me from that prison.
But they were also a death wish if he ever discovered they existed.