CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER NINE
She stared after him , a stone sinking heavily in her stomach.
He was in the wrong.
He had lied to her.
To Avery.
To the world.
He had jeopardised his reputation, again. And hers.
He was bad news. Literally.
But none of that seemed to matter. All she could think about was that look on his face.
Thanks to its proximity to the equator, the sun was already starting to sink. The first few days in St Barth’s it had surprised her that the evening light disappeared sooner than in New York.
Now it filled her with panic. Not like in the apartment when she’d found out she was pregnant. This was the wordless, slippery kind that made thinking impossible. She’d felt it at the hospital when her world had expanded and then devastatingly contracted in front of her eyes.
There was nothing she could have done differently to keep the baby. She knew that now. Or rather, thanks to Harris, she had accepted it.
And in accepting it, she understood the difference between having a say in the outcome of something and having no choice. Here, now, she had a choice, and she was choosing to go after him. She had left a linen shirt of his that she was using as a cover-up by the pool, and she slipped it over her bikini, and then ran lightly down the steps to the beach.
She walked swiftly along the shoreline using the reflection of the moonlight on the water to find her way. She had expected to find him quite quickly, but it was a good ten minutes before she saw him sitting on the sand, his gaze fixed on the stars.
She felt suddenly fragile and untested. In his room, on his bed, she felt strong and sexy and insightful. She knew instinctively how he liked to be touched. Knew that if she caressed the flat of his stomach, his breath would go shallow, and he would grab her wrist as if he wasn’t quite in control of his body’s responses.
She loved the power he let her take in those moments. Loved giving power to him too. Being subservient to each other’s needs was not just an aphrodisiac, it was a shared moment of vulnerability, and responsibility when they revealed and unlocked themselves.
Only looking at him now, she felt that confidence falter. He looked barricaded and yet desolate and, until recently, she’d had so little experience of addressing her own demons, was it likely she would be able to help him face his?
But she had to try. It was as simple as that.
So, in the spirit of that simplicity, she walked up and sat down beside him. He didn’t react. Didn’t acknowledge her in any way but she felt his body tighten.
‘When I went to the hospital, they were kind about it but when they told me that I was…’ she frowned ‘…that I had been pregnant, I could tell they were surprised I didn’t know. Because I was a college graduate with a job and a partner. I felt so stupid. Not just about the baby, but about Liam, and I felt like I was being punished for my stupidity. I felt like the worst person in the world. The worst mother,’ she said slowly. ‘But I wasn’t to blame. I didn’t deserve to lose my baby—’
‘Of course not.’
He spoke now as she’d hoped he would, his arm brushing against her leg as he twisted towards her. ‘You didn’t deserve that lying jerk of a boyfriend either.’ Against the pale sand, his profile looked bleak suddenly. ‘But then I’m no better.’
He turned away, or tried to, but she reached for his arm, curling her fingers around his elbow.
‘I can assure you, you are. And I’m not the only person to think so. Avery thinks you walk on water. All your staff do. And no, I didn’t ask them. I eavesdropped in the restroom and in the elevator and I didn’t hear one bad word about you. You’re a good person who did a bad thing but you’re not a bad person.’
Hunching his shoulders, he shook his head. ‘You only think that because you don’t know what else I did.’
‘You mean the details?’
‘I’m not talking about the hacking.’ He ran his hands over his face, pressing the palms hard against the temples as if he wanted to crush his head to a pulp.
‘Harris, don’t.’ She moved to kneel in front of him, reaching for his hands.
‘It’s not just the baby I don’t deserve,’ he said tiredly. ‘I don’t deserve you. I don’t even know why you’re here.’
‘I’m here because you’re not the only one who lied, remember? I did, back in New York. I told you I’d had other partners. But I didn’t. There was only you.’
My one and only , she thought, replaying the moment when they had been teasing each other earlier.
‘Which makes you the father of this baby.’
‘Which is the reason you should leave.’ His voice was barely a whisper now. ‘I don’t have what it takes to be a father. If you don’t believe me, ask Jasmine.’
The silence that followed that statement seemed at home with the darkening sky and the stars. But Harris was staring at them as if they were a judge and jury combined.
‘Who’s Jasmine?’ she said softly.
He didn’t answer immediately but she could feel him sifting words inside his head, stacking up sentences then abandoning them just as she had done so many times when she’d tried telling someone about her miscarriage. Which was why she let the silence stretch because this had to be on his terms. If he wanted to go through every word in the dictionary she would wait.
‘She’s my daughter.’
A daughter. Her head snapped up.
Harris had a daughter.
He was still gazing up at the sky but there was a tightening around his mouth, and she knew that all of his senses were tuned into her reaction. She was shocked and yet part of her wasn’t. A part of her felt as if she had always known. Maybe it was the way he’d reacted to her pregnancy. He had been so focused and yet also on edge. Not because she might be pregnant with his child but because she might not be.
Harris was silent again, and again she waited, because that sentence and all that it implied deserved to be absorbed and acknowledged without some rushed and intrusive questioning on her part.
‘She could tell you exactly what kind of father I am because she’s never met me. Never spoken to me. I don’t even know if she knows what I look like.’
‘How old is she?’
‘She’s eleven.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Tasmania. She lives there with her mother.’ A pause. ‘And her stepfather.’
His voice was calmer now, but there was an ache beneath the calm when he said ‘stepfather’.
‘Were you married?’ She wanted him to say ‘no’ so badly it made her teeth hurt and she felt a mix of guilt and shame, but mostly relief when he shook his head, his expression bleak.
‘When Jessie found out she was pregnant, I think she thought we’d get married, but I didn’t want to do that. Not at first.’
His hands were clenching beneath hers, the whites of his knuckles visible through her open fingers.
‘But you did want to marry her later?’
She phrased it as a question because again she wanted him to say no, but instead he nodded, and she felt that jerk of his head skewer her heart. ‘I didn’t love her. But I wanted to give her security. To prove that I could commit. But it was too late. She’d already left the country and gone home.’
His mouth curved into a smile that made her eyes burn.
‘Maybe she would have stayed in the States if I’d stepped up immediately like I should have done. But I didn’t. So, she left and I never saw her again. Never talked to her again.’
There was a harshness to his voice now, an anger that she knew was preferable to pain. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly. Beneath her palms, his hands tightened a fraction.
‘How did you meet her?’
‘She was trying to parallel park her car and she reversed into mine. I’m not sure that she would ever have talked to me otherwise. I was eighteen when we met, and she was older than me. Twenty-two, I think. She didn’t do any damage, but she took my number anyway. I didn’t think she’d call but she did, and she was easy to talk to and cool about stuff that the girls my age weren’t.’
She felt a pang of jealousy. ‘You mean sex?’
He nodded slowly. ‘Yeah. That was pretty much the sum of it. I mean, I liked her, but it was the summer before I went to college. I didn’t want anything that serious. I never did, and she didn’t either. But then she got pregnant.’
‘And you’re sure that—’
‘She’s mine?’ He finished the end of her sentence for her. ‘I did a paternity test. That’s when Jessie talked about getting married. She arranged a scan, but I didn’t go. I couldn’t. I mean, I knew it was my baby except I didn’t really believe it, and I think I knew that seeing it on screen would make it impossible to deny,’ he said hoarsely. She thought back to the scan on St Martin and the way Harris had gripped her hand with emotion churning in his eyes.
‘And you wanted to deny it?’
She thought of her own baby, slipping from its moorings like a beautiful gemstone disappearing into a crack between the floorboards.
He nodded again. ‘Yes. I just wanted it all to go away. And then it did. Jessie left and I got what I thought I wanted.’ His voice was flattened of emotion, which only seemed to emphasise the misery burning in his grey eyes. ‘I went off to college and I told myself that I’d had a lucky escape. Because I knew, you see, that I couldn’t be a husband or a father.’
‘Why not?’
‘You know why. You told me. Some people just aren’t cut out for those kinds of commitments. You have to have luck or good judgement or both. My parents didn’t have either of those things. They met at college, got drunk and had sex at some party and she got pregnant. They had nothing in common. Not even me.’
He stared past her at the moonlit water.
‘They never said so, but I think I always knew that I’d messed up the lives they’d had planned. My mum was going to be a lawyer, but the pregnancy was really hard on her, and she had to drop out of college. They got married but I honestly can’t remember them ever being happy. She was quietly angry all the time and my dad was in the navy flying jets when I was really small, so he was away quite a bit. And then he became an astronaut, and he wasn’t even on the planet.’
‘Why would you think that choosing a dark, lifeless vacuum over everything on Earth would be a dream of mine?’ he’d asked her in the limo after they’d left the school, and she could still hear the anger in his voice. But now she could hear the pain layered beneath it. Understand it too.
‘I was so lonely growing up,’ he said then, and the stark honesty of his words caught her off balance. ‘My family wasn’t obviously damaged from the outside, so nobody really understood what it was like for me at home.’
‘And you didn’t want them to know anyway,’ she said quietly.
His eyes found hers. ‘No, I didn’t. I guess I felt ashamed. Like it was my fault that they were together and so unhappy. And that’s what I thought about when Jessie told me she was pregnant. The unhappiness and the loneliness. I couldn’t see past it, couldn’t see past the similarities between my parents’ situation with me and my situation with Jessie and the baby and I panicked.’
‘You were only eighteen, Harris, of course you panicked.’
‘I know it must sound crazy, but I was so desperate not to repeat my parents’ mistakes.’
It didn’t sound crazy to her. She had spent years chasing after a life that had eluded generations of the women in her family solely to prove that she was different from them. And like Harris she had gone and repeated exactly the same mistakes.
Except being pregnant with his child didn’t feel like a mistake. It felt like the most wonderful prize.
‘I did nothing. I just acted like it wasn’t anything to do with me. Only as soon as I got to college, all I could think about was Jessie and the baby, so I called her, but she didn’t pick up. And I left messages, but she didn’t reply and then her number changed so I came home from college and went to her apartment. That’s when I found out she’d left the country almost straight after the scan.’
He tilted his head, gazing back up at the stars. ‘Her flatmate told me. She’d given Jessie a lift to the airport. All she knew was that Jessie was going back to Australia for good. And then when I was walking out to the car, she ran after me. Said she’d forgotten to give me something. That Jessie had left it for me. She handed me an envelope and inside it was a photo. From the scan. The one I didn’t go to.’
His mouth twisted into a shape that made something cold and serrated slice through her.
‘There wasn’t anything I could do. She was gone. I went back to college and that’s when I met Tiger. Right from the start there was this rivalry between us but also an understanding that we both wanted the same things. It made me work hard and that was good because I didn’t have time to think about Jessie or the baby.’
He hesitated then, and breathed in sharply as though he needed more air to say what he had to say next.
‘And then about seven months later, out of the blue, she sent me a photo of the baby just after she was born and that’s when I realised what I’d done. What I’d given up. Who I’d given up. My daughter. Jasmine.’
Eden remembered her own devastation when Liam had sent her the photo of his child. How she hadn’t been able to eat, to sleep, to even get out of bed for days. She’d been dehydrated, her head had felt as if it were splitting in two, but that was nothing compared to the agony in her heart.
‘Did she want to get back with you?’
He shook his head. ‘No. She’d already met Eric by then.’
The name sounded painful in his mouth, as if just saying it was giving him ulcers. ‘I guess she thought I had a right to see the daughter I’d abandoned.’ His hands tightened again so that she could almost picture the nails puncturing the skin on his palms. ‘I think I had some kind of panic attack. I couldn’t breathe, I felt like I was going to throw up and I wanted to talk to someone—’
Fragments of an earlier conversation vibrated through her body and suddenly it all made sense. That random act of aggression from a man who was strong and domineering and passionate but never violent. She hadn’t understood it before but now she knew why it had happened.
‘Tiger. You wanted to talk to Tiger. That’s when you saw him with your girlfriend.’
He nodded slowly.
‘What did you do?’
‘Apart from punching him, you mean. Nothing. I wanted to do something, I guess I tried but there was nothing much to go on. All I knew was Jessie’s name and that she’d worked in a bar in town.’
He shivered.
‘I tried to find her for years. I even saved up some money and flew out to Australia, but it was only when the business took off that I was able to hire a private detective to look for her.’
‘And you found her. And Jasmine.’
‘It doesn’t change anything.’ He sounded exhausted and she knew without him even having to say so that, while this might be the first time he’d had this conversation with another person, he’d had it many times inside his head. ‘Jasmine is settled now. She has a life. A father.’
‘You’re her father,’ she said gently.
‘Biologically maybe, but there’s more to being a father than just getting someone pregnant.’
‘There is. But parenting doesn’t have a sell-by date. You still have time to be a dad to Jasmine. I know because I never spoke to my father until I was older than she is now.’
‘He wasn’t in your life at all?’
She shook her head. ‘He didn’t hang around when he found out my mum was pregnant with me. But then he turned up one day at the coffee shop where I worked after school. My mum had told him where to find me. I was so furious with her. And then he said he just wanted to talk and I lost it.’
In the event, she had done all the talking in a short, blistering monologue.
‘I told him where to go. But he didn’t give up. He sent me birthday cards and Christmas presents and postcards, and when I split with Liam and lost the baby he was the person I called. Not because I don’t love my mum or my gran. But my dad has different strengths. He can put his own feelings to one side and that’s what I needed. He made it bearable even though he didn’t know what had happened. He was there for me, and one day you’ll be there for Jasmine, and you will matter to her as much as she matters to you.’
Harris’s eyes fluttered shut just for a few seconds, as if the possibility of that being true was too painful to look at head-on.
‘What if Jessie doesn’t want me in her daughter’s life?’
‘She doesn’t have that choice. Any more than my mum did, because one day Jasmine is going to want to know who you are. But if Jessie’s anything like my mum she’ll want you to be in Jasmine’s life. Because there’s room for you in her life, and in her heart.’
The stars above blurred and there was a roaring in her ears that sounded like the sea. He wouldn’t be in just Jasmine’s heart, she realised, her stomach twisting with something that felt like pain only there was a sweetness beneath the sting.
Harris was in her heart too because she loved him. That was why she had gone looking for him, and probably in all honesty why she had agreed to come with him to St Barth’s. Yet it was terrifying. Too terrifying to even think, much less admit to the man sitting in front of her. The man who had become as necessary to her as the moon was to the ocean.
‘You’re a good person, Eden,’ he said quietly.
‘So are you. But most importantly you’re you. And the mistakes you make will be yours. Not your parents’. It’s the same for me.’ Only she hadn’t realised that before. After Liam, she had simply assumed that she was fated to tread in her mother’s and grandmother’s footsteps. But there was no curse. She was her own person, and most women had a Liam in their life, especially when they were young.
She thought back to Harris flying her to the scan in his helicopter. It was true that he had wanted to check the baby was okay, but he had also wanted to take care of her. To make her feel safe and certain, and she did feel certain now, and not just about the baby. She felt confident in her judgement too.
‘Both of us need to remember that, and if we do that and we keep talking then things will work out.’ She gave him a small, swift smile. ‘We’re a good team.’
She had been going to say partnership but that had ‘couply’ overtones. Team was a business word that she could say without revealing the hope in her heart.
‘We are.’ He held her gaze, and she saw surprise and acknowledgement and something else she didn’t recognise in his dark grey eyes.
‘Although I probably deserve most of the credit,’ she said, making a joke to cover up the way she was feeling. The way he made her feel.
‘I’ve never met anyone like you.’ His eyes were fixed on her face, and she felt something hot and liquid and electric skate across her skin as he reached up to brush his thumb across her cheek.
When he let his hand drop, she almost cried out in disappointment but instead she said quickly, ‘We should probably get back.’
Her disappointment multiplied exponentially as he nodded, but then he reached out and caught her arm, his warm fingers curling round her wrist, and the sound of the waves seemed to swell and double in volume, or maybe that was the beat of her blood.
‘Eden,’ he said softly, stretching out the first syllable as if he never wanted to finish saying her name, and then he pulled her forward, his grip firm even though his hands were trembling slightly, and he fitted his mouth to hers.
His mouth was gentle and yet she could tell how much he needed to kiss her, and she breathed him in, tasting him, her love mingling with her hunger in what had to be the most delicious, intoxicating cocktail ever invented.
She moved his hand to her waist. Her breath was hot against his mouth as his fingers moved over her bare skin in tiny concentric circles, and she had no idea how something so light and imprecise could feel so good. Now they moved up to cup her breasts then back to her waist, making her skin tingle with a pleasure that she knew he was feeling too. He was taking his time, and she knew that this was about more than sex and bodies and that feverish need they had felt before. It was about closeness and two hearts beating the same rhythm, merging into one.
‘I want you so badly,’ he whispered.
‘I want you too.’ She buried her face against his throat, breathing in his scent. She could feel his pulse twitching against her cheek and then his fingers pulled at the string on her bikini, sliding over her thigh to where she was already soft and swollen.
‘Then tell me what you want from me.’
The roughness in his voice sent a charge of electricity down her spine that she felt everywhere, and she was suddenly so ready for him. She wriggled forward, clumsy, and uncaring of her clumsiness, pressing her body against the hard, straining shape of his erection.
‘I want this,’ she gasped.
‘Then take it. Take everything. I’m yours.’
His knuckles brushed against her labia just once, but it was enough and she pushed down the waistband of his swim shorts, freeing him into her hot hand and then guiding herself down onto him.
She moaned softly as she pushed against him. Her muscles clenched, and she started to shake with a pleasure that had no equal, and then seconds later Harris angled his hips and thrust up inside her, shuddering until finally he stilled against her. And they stayed like that for a long time, mindless and unravelled, clinging to one another beneath the moonlight.
The next day, their final day on the island, they both woke early for the first time in days. They made love slowly, taking their time, changing positions, their pleasure rising and tumbling them over like the waves outside their bedroom window. But his need for her never changed tempo and he found that thrilling and terrifying in equal measure.
‘What time are we leaving to go back to New York?’
Harris glanced over to where Eden sat in one of his shirts that she’d somehow appropriated as her own.
‘Whenever you want,’ he said, leaning across the mattress to pour out some juice. He handed her a glass.
‘Whenever I want? I thought the appointment for the paternity test was first thing tomorrow morning.’ She gave him one of those teasing smiles that showed her small white teeth.
‘It is. But we have a certain amount of flexibility, so you choose.’
She bit into her lip, and he felt a flicker of envy because her lips, her mouth, her body felt as if they belonged to him. ‘Aren’t you the boss?’
‘I’m into power sharing at the moment,’ he said, more to see her reaction than because he meant it. But maybe it was true, he thought, a moment later. With her, he was happy to give up control. Sometimes. Under the right circumstances , he thought, replaying the moment when she had straddled him on the beach.
Was it happiness he was feeling? He’d felt triumphant before when he’d won a big contract and obviously there was that calm that followed sex, although he’d never felt as sated as he did with Eden. But this feeling wasn’t so much to do with sex. It was about wholeness and certainty—or at least that was the closest he could come to describing it.
And it was because of her. She’d made him feel whole and certain and lighter today than he had for years, and hopeful in a way that he had never felt before. But then a burden had been lifted from his shoulders. By Eden.
He had felt that he’d given up any right to being in Jasmine’s life before she was born and that had felt unalterable. But Eden’s relationship with her father had given a kind of shape to how that might change. He hadn’t lost his daughter, just lost his way at the start of the journey to being her father. And no matter how many diversions or obstacles he met enroute, he wasn’t going to give up the chance to find his place in his daughter’s heart.
But he also wasn’t ready yet to stop this thing with Eden.
Her eyes held his for a long beat of silence and his pulse twitched as she sat back on her haunches and began to unbutton her shirt, because of course she knew what he was thinking, and what he wanted.
‘Then let’s go this evening.’
They spent the rest of the day moving easily between the bedroom, the pool and the beach.
It felt natural, this rhythm between them. Domestic almost, except this was a holiday and like all holidays it had little to do with real life.
And when they got back to real life in New York, what then?
Leaving the city, he’d been entirely focused on not letting her out of his sight until he could do a paternity test. Arriving in the Caribbean, he’d had a different question spinning inside his head. What if I’m the father, what then? This was the more nuanced version of that because he had, privately at least, accepted that Eden was carrying his baby so there was no longer a ‘what if’.
Which meant that their lives were going to be intertwined. But how?
On the flight back to New York they talked through how he could get back in touch with Jessie, and he realised once again how much he valued Eden’s opinion. And that he had got used to having her around.
‘Excuse me, Mr Carver, Ms Fennell.’ John, the air steward, was smiling down at him. ‘The pilot asked me to tell you that we’ll be touching down in New York in around twenty minutes so if you could buckle up, please.’
‘I was thinking we can drop by your apartment and pick up whatever you need and then go back to mine.’
Eden glanced over at him, her green eyes widening a fraction. ‘We don’t need to do that. I can just wing it until tomorrow morning.’
‘You’re right. You don’t need to worry about any of that. If you give me the keys, I can get someone to pack up your things—’
‘Pack them up?’ He saw her jolt of surprise, but he was distracted by the light flush of colour along the curve of her cheeks and that sprinkling of freckles that came from spending a week in the sun. She had never looked more beautiful and, impulsively, he leaned forward and kissed her, his body hardening as he felt her mouth soften. There was a bedroom at the other end of the cabin. Could they—
‘There’s not enough time,’ she whispered against his mouth.
He groaned. ‘I could be quick—’
She gazed up at him. ‘You don’t need to be if I’m moving in with you. That is what you just suggested, isn’t it?’
He nodded slowly, his need for her woven in with a relief that she seemed on board with that.
‘It makes sense,’ he said casually, his hand moving to caress her face.
Her eyes stayed steady on his but there was something vulnerable about her mouth. ‘What do you mean?’
What did he mean? In truth, he didn’t have a clear explanation, just that it felt like the right decision.
He shrugged. ‘Like you said back at the villa, we’re a good team. We like each other and the sex is incredible. I think we work.’
‘But I don’t work for you anymore, Harris,’ she said slowly.
He frowned. ‘That’s not what I said, or what I meant.’
She stared at him, her face unreadable, but he could see the tightness around her eyes. ‘No, you said that we like each other and that the sex is incredible.’
‘I did. It is,’ he said, her coolness kicking up sparks inside him. ‘Why is that a bad thing?’
‘It’s not, it’s just that it’s not really—’
Not really enough, Eden thought, her stomach tensing around something hard and cold and unyielding.
Harris was frowning, his handsome face defying logic and expectation to somehow look even more handsome. ‘It’s not what?’
‘It’s just not what I expected to happen,’ she said at last.
His frown darkened. ‘What did you expect? That you would just go back to your old life? We need to make this work. For our child’s sake. That’s what’s important, and I know you agree.’
She did. She knew what it felt like to grow up conscious always of the absence of her father but cohabiting with someone who only ‘liked’ you would be a different kind of absence.
An absence of love.
Back on the island, it had been easy to tell herself that love was not a word to be used lightly. Better to let Harris give a name to what he was feeling than force it on him, because she was certain that his feelings matched hers. He was simply a few steps behind, but he would catch up eventually, take her hand and pull her close just as he always did.
She wanted to ask him if that was true, but she also wasn’t quite ready for him to answer.
She cleared her throat. ‘I do want to make this work. But we can’t just go into this blind—’
‘We’re not,’ he said calmly. ‘We worked together for weeks.’
‘Worked, not lived together.’
‘We just spent a week doing that.’
‘That wasn’t real.’ She shook her head because she wanted, no, needed him to protest, and he did.
‘Not real. How wasn’t it real? We ate together. We slept together. We talked, we laughed, we had fun…’
It was fun, the most fun she’d ever had in her life and yet with anyone else it would have felt mundane. But it had felt miraculous and extraordinary and beautiful when she’d caught Harris watching her as she put on her make-up or when he reached out to brush sand off her ankle or as he stole a kiss when the security detail had glanced away to glower at a yacht that was too close to the shoreline and she’d forgotten where she was, and how to breathe, and even her own name.
And yet, it also wasn’t real, she realised, the chill in her stomach spreading.
‘Yes, because we were on vacation.’
His face shifted, and she felt a pang of guilt. She was being unfair, but something had shifted between them; there was an awkward pragmatism that hadn’t been there at the villa.
‘I didn’t realise that’s how you felt.’ He was staring past her, his grey eyes impenetrable. ‘But yes, I suppose that is what it was. Only we’re not on vacation anymore. You are still pregnant though. And if that is my baby you’re carrying then I don’t want to be cut out of his or her life.’
‘You won’t be. But living together—’
‘Will mean that doesn’t happen,’ he cut across her, his voice not the voice of the man who’d whispered her name as he’d lifted her onto his big body or the man who had wrapped her in his arms and comforted her. Instead, he sounded like the impatient, autocratic CEO who had turned up unannounced at her apartment and steamrollered her into coming with him to St Barth’s. Her wishes, her needs had been secondary to his.
Subservient, in fact. And now?
She shivered. Maybe they still were.
‘So, you want us to act like a couple. That’s your solution. To lie to our child. You want to pretend that we love each other.’ And it would be a lie on his part, she realised as his expression shuttered. Whatever it had felt like at the time, that closeness, that feeling of being connected was just a hoax, a shimmering mirage beneath the Caribbean sun.
‘I think it’s unhelpful to frame it in those terms.’ He sounded as if he were reading from a script. ‘What we’ll be doing is finding common ground and using it to act for the greater good.’
The greater good.
In other words, she was just a cog in a machine. Her moving in had nothing to do with her needs. It was about creating or simulating a family dynamic. She would be his partner but not really, just like with Liam, only then she had been ignorant of the deceit. This time she would be complicit.
‘And what about me? Where do I fit into this?’ Her voice trailed off as he met her gaze.
‘You’re the baby’s mother.’
Her throat tightened so that it was hard to speak, but she had to know, had to ask, ‘And if I wasn’t pregnant?’
In the heavy silence that followed her question she felt her heart, her stupid hope-filled heart, split in two and she stared at him, staggered by how much silence could hurt.
There was a bump as the plane’s wheels hit the runway and she was glad because it gave her an excuse to grip the armrest as she tried to breathe through the crushing pain in her chest.
‘We can—’
She shook her head. ‘There is no we, Harris. And I won’t be moving into your apartment. I need my own space.’
‘I don’t understand. I’m offering you security and stability. A life that most people dream of.’
‘And that’s very generous but I don’t just want those things.’
‘What else is there?’
Love , she thought. Reciprocal, equal, eternal.
But love wasn’t on offer here. It never had been.
‘There’s love,’ she said, lifting her eyes to meet his. ‘You see, I like you as much as you like me, Harris. You know I do, but what you don’t know is that I also love you. And I know you’re scared of loving someone. I know because I’m scared too, so scared that after Liam I made a promise never to let myself get that close to anyone. But I couldn’t not get close to you because you’re here…’ she tapped her forehead ‘…and here.’ Now she touched her stomach.
‘But most of all, you’re here.’ She pressed her hand against her heart. ‘At the villa, I thought there was a chance you might love me too—don’t worry, I know you don’t. But I want… I need to be loved, not just liked. And I don’t want to be a team player or act for the greater good. I want to have a partner. Someone who wants me for who I am and not because I’m carrying their baby.’
She waited, hoping, yearning, but after an interminable moment he nodded slowly. ‘I understand. And I’m sorry.’
Then he was reaching down and unbuckling his belt and he was on his feet and moving up the cabin to talk to the pilot. She stared after him, mute with misery, wondering how it was possible that in the space of a moment she had gone from talking about moving in together to falling into this deep and lightless abyss from which there was no escape.
Later she would wonder how she’d got off the plane. She had no memory of the car journey back to her apartment.
When the limo stopped, he got out of the car without a word, and she had no option but to stand beside him in an awkward silence that was almost as crushing as the sudden distance between them.
‘Thank you for taking me to the villa. Could you text me the clinic’s address and the appointment time for the test and I’ll meet you there?’ she added quickly because she’d had enough of this brutal, new version of their relationship.
‘I can pick you up.’
‘There’s no need.’ She turned quickly because it hurt too much to keep looking at him but as she began to walk away, she felt his fingers catch her wrist and she turned towards him, hope spiralling up inside her.
‘Eden.’ He was looking straight ahead but his hand tightened a fraction, and she heard the sudden hoarseness in his voice like a reprieve. It was going to be okay. He was going to admit that he’d spoken hastily, that he’d not understood what he was feeling. That he loved her and wanted her in his life because he couldn’t live without her.
‘I’ve got a conference call first thing, so I’ll make my own way there, but I’ll send a car for you. Please take it.’
His voice was calm and detached, as if their conversation on the plane had never taken place. As if nothing had ever happened between them. He leaned in and brushed her cheek lightly with his lips and then he let go of her wrist and walked over to the limo. She watched it drive away just as her mother had watched all those other cars back in San Antonio and as it disappeared round the corner, the wave of misery and despair that was rising inside her toppled over, swallowing her whole.