Chapter Eleven #3
She’s not just asking the surface question. I see it in her stormy, wounded, beautiful eyes, searching for something deeper. For something that I’m loath to admit I’m terrified won’t be enough.
Yet, like I’ve done so many times in my life, I don’t dodge.
So, yes, I’ll meet this challenge head on. Let the cards fall where they will.
‘I had thought, all these weeks, that it would’ve killed me.
If you’d chosen someone else, it would’ve fucking killed me.
But then…’ The words feel like they’re being dragged from somewhere deep and unguarded inside me.
‘I finally realised it wouldn’t have mattered whose name was on that damn file.
I would’ve loved that child anyway. Because it would’ve been yours.
Because anything that came from you, Tessa…
’ I exhale hard, shoulders bowing under the weight of what I’m finally admitting.
‘It would’ve been mine to cherish, too, whether fate or blood agreed with me or not.
’ The silence that follows is brutal. Absolute.
Her lips part, her face pales, as if the floor’s been yanked out from under her.
‘Again,’ she breathes, voice breaking. ‘Why?’
I take a step towards her. Then another. Until I’m in front of her, close enough to see the pulse hammering in her throat, close enough to breathe her in like oxygen I’ve been denied.
‘Because you’re mine,’ I say, each word gravel and truth. ‘Just as you were four years ago. Two months ago. Now. You’ve never stopped being mine, Tessa. And more than anything on this earth, it was my honour to give you what you wanted. What we both wanted.’
Her face crumples, but it’s not softness or a yielding at hearing what she yearns for.
It’s a prelude to gathering the corner of her devastation. Her utter fury.
‘Mine.’ She spits the word back at me like poison.
‘Do you hear yourself? You sound exactly like a Biney. Wanting to own everything. To put your stamp on it, buy it, control it.’ Her voice cracks as her hand flies to her belly.
‘Well, congratulations. You may have bought your way into my womb, Theo, but you will not buy me.’
The words scorch me to the bone, leaving ash and nothing else.
I stand there, gutted. Her condemnation a stab to the heart.
And for the first time in my life, I don’t have a plan. No calculated move or a fallback. Only the bare truth, stripped raw and bleeding between us.
She turns away, shoulders trembling, the sound of her ragged breath slicing me open deeper than any family treachery ever could.
And still, even as I feel the ground splitting under my feet, one truth roars louder than the rest—
I will not lose her to pride, to grief, to the ghosts of the Bineys, or to the shadows of her past. Hell, I won’t lose her even to the desperation of wrong steps taken at the right time.
And if I have to tear myself open to prove it, then so be it.
Tessa
‘Theo.’
His name slips out of me like a prayer and a curse in one. He’s standing across the room, tall and unshaken on the outside, but I can see his hands balled into fists, his chest rising too sharply, the faint tremor in his jaw.
‘This is—’
‘No. I know what you’re thinking,’ he says, his voice so low it rasps, as if it’s been torn up on broken glass. ‘That I schemed. That I manipulated. That it’s unforgivable. That I’ve repeated every mistake you think my name stands for.’
I cross my arms, nails biting my skin to keep from folding in on myself. ‘And you haven’t?’
His eyes close briefly. When they open, they are finally stripped of the formidable Biney invincibility.
What I see before me is…just a man, tall, endlessly proud and yet…battered and holding on by a thread.
‘I have,’ he admits. ‘I did. Because I’m a man whose mother tore him apart piece by piece until the only way he could survive was to believe everyone was like her.
A faithless, selfish woman who wore devotion like a cloak she shed whenever it became inconvenient.
I let that blind me to people’s true motives.
To your motives. I thought I saw lies around every corner, because that was safer than hoping for the truth. ’
The words hit harder than I expect. Because they sound like my own.
I swallow, hating the tremble in my voice. ‘And you think laying your mother’s sins at my feet will fix this?’
‘No,’ he says, his voice cracking on the single syllable. ‘But I need you to understand why I did what I did. Why I panicked and put myself on the donor list. You were the most precious thing, and I was watching you slipping away from me. I couldn’t sit back and do nothing.’
I should hold onto my anger. I should. But watching him there, shoulders taut, confessing what it cost him—it’s unravelling me.
Still, I whisper, ‘We can’t get past this. You lied to me by omission. You should’ve told me.’
His eyes flash, but not with anger. With something like desperation. He lowers himself to his knees in front of me.
Shock births a gasp. ‘Theo—’
He shakes his head. ‘I didn’t take your choice away from you,’ he says, voice vibrating like he’s holding back a roar.
‘You had four files in your hands, but you made your own selection. All I did was make sure that when fate chose, it chose me. Because I couldn’t live another day without knowing I’d tried to make up for what you lost four years ago. ’
‘Theo—’
‘Answer me honestly.’ His gaze drills into mine, unrelenting. ‘Have you ever seen anyone but me as the father of your children? If my name had been on that file, would you have chosen me?’
I open my mouth to cling to the moral high ground I’ve been wielding like a weapon and shield because truly, isn’t it all I have?
But nothing comes out. Because at every turn, every fleeting image of the child I’ve longed for—it’s always been him.
His eyes. His smile. His impossible arrogance softened into something gentler.
And wasn’t all the stalling and discarding of perfectly suitable candidates I’d done because I’d yearned for the father of my child to be him?
He sees it in my silence, in the tears that burn my cheeks. His lips curve, broken but victorious. ‘Exactly. So yes, it was unconventional. Unorthodox. Hell, borderline insane. But won’t that make a spectacular story for our grandchildren one day?’
I clap a hand over my mouth, shaking my head. ‘I can’t—Theo, I can’t be with a man who only wants to own me.’
His eyes shutter and for one horrible second I think he’ll retreat. But then his jaw hardens. He reaches for my hands, clasping them so tightly I feel the heat of his pulse.
‘I don’t want to own you,’ he says honestly.
‘I want to love you. I do love you. God help me, I’ve loved you since the first time you looked at me like you saw beneath the mask I was so used to wearing.
I’ve loved you since you told me I was arrogant to my face and kissed me anyway.
And I was too much of a coward to admit it.
’ He spreads a large hand over my belly, his face wreathed in awe.
‘And I already love this baby, just because it’s yours. I love it because you’re its mother.’
I gasp again, but this time it doesn’t feel so hellish. So hopeless. ‘God, Theo—’
‘Look at me.’ His voice strains as he leans closer, pressing his forehead to my belly. ‘You told me I bought this baby. That’s not true. But if you need proof…’
Something flutters to the floor between us.
The paper I’ve been clutching—a print-out of the clinic’s photocopy of his donation, handed over because Theo didn’t sign an anonymity clause.
I bend, blinking through my tears, and finally see the note scrawled at the bottom in Theo’s hand.
Words I’d never noticed in my devastation.
If she picks me and she finds this one day, let her know I did this because she deserves to be the incredible mother I know she can be. She deserves that. She deserves everything. Because she’s the very air itself.
My throat closes. The room spins.
‘Theo…’
He presses a kiss to my belly, lingering, reverent. ‘I never thought I’d ever be a father. Or a husband. I never wanted either. But the moment I knew I did, it was with you in mind. Only you. Always you. My queen.’
The dam inside me shatters. I fall to my knees, clutching his shoulders, sobbing into his neck.
‘I think I fell in love with you four years ago,’ I whisper. ‘That night, before I ever knew what was coming. When I saw Tamara’s text…and when you didn’t answer mine… I thought I’d been a fool. Then losing that baby, losing that piece of you I’d come to love, it nearly killed me, Theo.’
He cups my face, kissing the tears as they fall. ‘Then let’s make this chance worth everything, baby.’
‘Chance?’ I choke out, half laughing through the grief. ‘You mean this miracle you wrought by staring down fate and ordering it to do what you wanted?’
His grin flashes, half cocky, all lovestruck. ‘Exactly that miracle.’
I laugh and sob all at once, collapsing against him as he kisses me, desperate and endless.
‘I love you,’ I whisper against his mouth.
‘I love you more,’ he growls back, crushing me closer. ‘I swear it with every bone in my body.’
Then he stands, lifting me high into his arms as his eyes blaze down at me, dark and shining.
‘The best cure for jet lag,’ he murmurs, ‘is to bury myself in the woman I love. Then spend the rest of the night planning the beautiful life we’re going to have.’
And just before his lips claim mine again, I think…
God help me, but I believe him.