by Penny Jordan
The bitter acceptance he read beneath her mask of self-possession, her trounced distress, was so tangible, he reached across to cover her shaking hand where she gripped her knife. Her knuckles felt sharp as barnacles where they poked against his palm.
He would give anything to spare her this anguish.
“Having children was a condition that came from your side of the table. It’s not a deal-breaker for me,” he reassured her.
If anything, she grew more distraught. “You never wanted children?”
Tread lightly, he cautioned himself, touching a thoughtful tongue to his bottom lip. “It’s not that I never wanted them. If that were true, I’d be a real monster for putting you through all you’ve suffered in trying to have one. I’m very—” Disappointed wasn’t a strong enough word.
“I’m sad,” he admitted, drawing his hand back as he took the uncharacteristic step of admitting to feelings. He’d been powerless at sea in a storm once and hadn’t felt as helpless and vulnerable as he had each time she’d miscarried. This one he’d learned about today was the worst yet, filling him with visions of coming upon her dead. It was too horrifying a thing to happen to a person even once in a lifetime and he’d been through it twice already. He couldn’t stomach thinking of finding her lifeless and white.
Then there was the bereft sense of loss that he’d known nothing about the baby before it was gone. He hated having no control over the situation, hated being unable to give her something she wanted that seemed as if it should be so simple. He hated how the whole thing stirred up old grief. He ought to be over forming deep attachments. He’d certainly fought against developing any. But he wished he’d known those babies and felt cheated that he hadn’t been given the chance.
He swiped his clammy palm down his thigh.
“I’m sad, too,” she whispered thickly, gaze fixed on her sweating glass of ice water. “I wanted a family. A real one, not a broken one like I had.”
“So, it wasn’t just pressure from your father to give him the heir your brothers weren’t providing?”
She made a motion of negation, mouth pouted into sorrow.
Damn, he swore silently, thinking his version of her as merely ticking children off the list with everything else would have been so much easier to navigate.
“I thought you were like my father, not really wanting a family, but determined to have an heir. A boy.” Of course, her tiny shrug added silently.
He could see wary shadows in her eyes as she confessed what had been in her mind. She wasn’t any more comfortable with being honest than he was. He sure as hell didn’t enjoy hearing her unflattering assessment of his attitude toward progeny.
“I wasn’t taking it that lightly,” he said, voice so tight she tensed. “But I didn’t know how much it meant to you.”
Any other time in his life he would have swiftly put an end to such a deeply personal conversation, but right now, unpleasant as it was, he had to allow Adara to see she wasn’t the only one hurt by this. She wasn’t the only one with misconceptions.
“I never knew my father, so that gave me certain reservations about what kind of parent I’d make. You’re not anything like my mother, which is a very good thing in most ways, but she did have a strong maternal instinct. I never saw you take an interest in other people’s children. Your family isn’t the warmest. Frankly, I expected you to schedule a C-section, hire a nanny and mark that task ‘done.’”
He’d seen this look on Adara’s face before, after a particularly offside, cutting remark from her father. Her lashes swept down, her brow tensed and her nostrils pinched ever so slightly with a slow, indrawn breath. He’d always assumed she was gathering her patience, but today he saw it differently. She was absorbing a blow.
One that he had delivered. His heart clutched in his chest. Don’t put me in the same category as that man.
“I’m just telling you how it looked, Adara.” His voice was gruff enough to make her flinch.
“Like you’re some kind of open book, letting me see your thoughts and feelings?” She pushed her plate away with hands that trembled. “I’ve told you more about myself today than I’ve ever shared with anyone and all I’ve heard back is that you’re sad I miscarried. Well, I should damn well hope so! They were your babies too.”
She rose and tried to escape, but he was faster, his haste sending his chair tumbling with a clatter, his hands too rough on her when he pulled her to stand in front of him, but her challenge made him slip the leash on his control.
“What do you want me to say? That I hadn’t believed in God for years, but when I took you to the hospital that first time, I gave praying a shot and felt completely betrayed when He took that baby anyway? That I got drunk so I wouldn’t cry? Every time. Damn it, I haven’t been able to close my eyes since the beach without imagining walking into your bathroom and finding you dead in a pool of blood.” He gave her a little shake. “Is that the kind of sharing you need to hear?”
Her shattered gaze was more than he could bear, the searching light in them pouring over his very soul, picking out every flaw and secret he hid from the rest of the world. It was painful in the extreme and even though he would never want to inflict more suffering on her, he was relieved when she crumpled with anguish and buried her face in her hands.
He pulled her into his chest, the feel of her fragile curves a pleasure-pain sting. She stiffened as he pinned her to him, but he only dug his fingers into her loose hair, massaging her scalp and pressing his lips to her crown, forcing the embrace because he needed it as much as she did.
“It’s okay, I’m not going to mess it up this time.” His body was reacting to her scent and softness, always did, but he ignored it and hoped she would too. “I’m sorry we keep losing babies, Adara. I’m sorry I didn’t let you see it affects me.”
“I can’t try anymore, Gideon.” Her voice was small and thick with finality, buried in his chest.
“I know.” He rubbed his chin on the silk of her hair, distantly aware how odd this was to hold her like this, not as a prelude to sex, not because they were dancing, but to reassure her. “I don’t expect you to try. That’s what I’m saying. We don’t have to divorce over this. We can stay married.”
She lifted her face, her expression devastated beyond tears, and murmured a baffled “I don’t even know why you want to.”
Under her searching gaze, his inner defenses instinctively locked into place. Practicalities and hard facts leaped to his lips, covering up deeper, less understood motivations. “We’re five years into merging our fortunes,” he pointed out.
Adara dropped her chin and gathered herself, pressing for freedom.
His answer hadn’t been good enough.
His muscles flexed, reluctant to let her go, but he had to. Feelings, he thought, and scowled with displeasure. What was she looking for? A declaration of love? That had never been part of their bargain and it wasn’t a step he was willing to take. Losing babies he hadn’t known was bad enough. Caring deeply for Adara would make him too vulnerable.
He reached to right his chair, nodding at her seat when she only watched him. “Sit down, let’s keep talking about this.”
“What’s the point?” she asked despairingly.
The coward in him wanted to agree and let this madness blow away like dead ashes from a fire. If he were a gentleman, he supposed he’d spare her this torturous raking of nearly extinguished coals. Something deeply internal and indefinable pushed him to forge ahead despite how unpleasant it was. Somehow, giving up looked bleaker than this.
“You don’t salvage an agreement by walking away. You stay in the same room and hammer it out,” he managed to say.
“What is there to salvage?” Adara charged with a pained throb in her voice. Her heart was lodged behind her collarbone like a sharp rock. Didn’t he understand? Everything she’d br
ought to the table was gone.
Gideon only nodded at her chair, his expression shuttered yet insistent.
Adara dropped into her chair out of emotional exhaustion. For a few seconds she just sat there with her hands steepled before her face, eyes closed, drowning in despair.
“What do you want, Adara?”
She opened her eyes to find him statue hard across from her, expression unreceptive despite his demand she confide.
He was afraid it was something he couldn’t give, she realized. Like love?
A barbed clamp snapped hard around her heart. She wasn’t brave enough to give up that particular organ and had never fooled herself into dreaming a man could love her back, so no, she wouldn’t ask him for love. She settled on part of the truth.
“I want to quit feeling so useless,” she confessed, suffering the sensation of being stripped naked by the admission. “I’m predisposed to insecurity because of my upbringing, I know that. I’m not worthless, but I feel that way in this marriage. Now I can’t even bring children into it. I can’t live with this feeling of inadequacy, Gideon.”
He stared hard at her for a long moment before letting out a snort of soul-crushing amusement.
Adara couldn’t help her sharp exhale as she absorbed that strike. She tried to rise.
Gideon clamped his hand on her arm. “No. Listen. God, Adara...” He shook his head in bemusement, brow furrowed with frustration. “When you asked me to marry you—”
“Oh, don’t!” she gasped, feeling her face flood with abashed color.
He tightened his grip on her wrist, keeping her at the table. “Why does that embarrass you? It’s the truth. You came to me with the offer.”
“I know. Which only reminds me how pathetically desperate I must have seemed. You didn’t want me and wouldn’t have chosen me if I hadn’t more or less bribed you.”
“Desperate?” he repeated with disbelief. “I was the desperate one, coming hat in hand to your father with a proposition I knew he’d laugh out of the room. All I had going for me was nerve.”
“Someone else would have taken up the chance to invest with you, Gideon. It was a sound opportunity, which Papa saw after he got over being stubborn and shortsighted.”
“After you worked on him.”
She shook that off in a dismissive shrug, instantly self-conscious of the way she’d stood up for a man she’d barely known simply because she’d been intrigued by him. It had been quite a balancing act, truth be told.
“Don’t pretend you didn’t have anything to do with it.” He sat forward. “Because this is what I’m trying to tell you. You came to me with things I didn’t have. Your father’s partnership. Entrée into the tightest and most influential Greek cartels in New York and Athens. I needed that, I wanted it, and I had no real belief I could actually get it.”
“Well, I didn’t have much else to offer, did I?” she pointed out in a remembered sense of inadequacy.
“Your virginity springs to mind, but we’ll revisit that another time,” he rasped, making her lock her gaze with his in shocked incredulity.
Suddenly, very involuntarily, she flashed back to her wedding night and the feel of his fingers touching her intimately, his mouth roaming from her lips to her neck to her breast and back as he teased her into wanting an even thicker penetration. She hadn’t understood how his incredibly hard thrust could hurt and feel so good at the same time. Instead of being intimidated by his strength and weight, she’d basked in the sense of belonging as his solid presence moved above her, on her, and within her so smoothly, bringing such a fine tension into every cell of her being. His hard arms had surrounded and braced her, yet shielded her from all harm, making her feel safer than she’d ever felt in her life, so that when she’d shattered, she’d known he’d catch her.
Her body clenched in remembered ecstasy even as she was distantly aware of his hold on her gentling. He caressed her bare forearm and his voice lowered to the smoky tone he’d used when he’d told her how lovely she’d felt to him then. So hot and sweet. So good.
“Try to understand what it meant for me to form a connection to you.”
Her scattered faculties couldn’t tell if he was talking about her deflowering or the marriage in general. She shivered with latent arousal, pulling herself away from his touch to ground herself in the now.
“People knew I came from nothing,” he said. “You want to know why I only speak Greek when I absolutely have to? Because my accent gives me away as the bottom class sailor that I am.”
“It does not,” she protested distractedly.
He reached to tuck a tendril of hair behind her ear, his touch lingering to trace lightly beneath her jaw. “If you want me to talk, you’re going to have to listen. People respect you, Adara. Not because your father owned the company, not because of your wealth, but because of the way you conduct yourself. Everyone knew your father’s faults and could see that you were above his habits of lashing out and making hasty decisions. They knew you were intelligent and fair and had influence with him.”
“Now I know you’re lying.” She drew back, out of his reach.
“He didn’t sway easily, that’s true.” He dropped his hands to his thighs. “But if anyone could change his mind, it was you. Everyone knew that, from the chambermaids to the suits in the boardroom. And people also knew that you were being very choosy about finding a husband. Very choosy.”
He sat back, his demeanor solidifying into the man who headed so many boardroom tables, sharp and firm. Not someone you argued with.
“I didn’t appreciate what that choosiness meant until I was by your side and suddenly I was being looked at like I had superpowers because you’d picked me. Maybe it sounds weak to say my ego needed that, but it did. I went from being an upstart no one trusted to a legitimate businessman. I had had some success before I met you, but once I married you, I had self-worth because you gave it to me.”
“But—” Her heart moved into her throat. She wanted to believe him, her inner being urgently needed to believe him, but it was so far from the way she perceived herself. “You’re exaggerating.”
“No, I’m telling you why I’m fighting to keep you.”
“But people respect you. That won’t go away if we divorce.”
“Now they respect me. And perhaps that wouldn’t go away overnight, although I can guarantee I’d be painted the villain if we split. People would pin the blame on me because you’re nice and I’m not, but I’m not saying I want to stay married so I can continue using this knighthood you’ve unconsciously bestowed on me. It comes down to loyalty and gratitude and my own self-respect. I like being your husband. I want to keep the position.”
“It’s not a job.” She’d tried to treat Husband and Wife like spots on an organizational chart and it wasn’t that simple. Having a gorgeous body in a tux to escort her to fundraisers wasn’t enough. She needed someone she could call when her world was crashing in on her and she thought she was dying.
That unexpected thought disturbed her. She had learned very young to guard her feelings, never show her loneliness, be self-sufficient and never, ever imagine her needs were important enough to be met. Wanting to rely on Gideon was a foreign concept, but it was there.
Gideon was watching her like a cat, ready to react, but what would he have done if he’d come home to find her sobbing her heart out? He’d have tried to ship her into the sterile care of stiff beds and objectifying instruments.
And yet, if she had found the courage to ask, would he have stayed with her and held her hand at the hospital? Would it have made a difference if he had?
It would have made a huge difference.
Deeply conflicted, she pushed back her chair, fingers knotting into the napkin on her lap. She didn’t like feeling so tempted to try when there were so many other things wrong between them.
“You make it sound so easy and it’s not, Gideon.”
“We have a few days before your brother shows up,” he cut in with quick assertion. A muscle pulsed in his jaw. “I’ve cleared my schedule to the end of the week. We’ll spend time together and set a new course. Turn this ship around.”
She wanted to quirk a smile at the shipbuilder’s oh-so-typical nautical reference, but her system was flooded with adrenaline, filling her with caution.
“What if—” She stopped herself, not wanting to admit she was terrified that spending time with him would increase her feelings for him. He was trying to make her feel special and it was working, softening her toward him. That scared her. If she knew anything about her husband, and she didn’t know nearly enough, she knew he wasn’t the least bit sentimental. She could develop feelings for him, but they’d never be returned.
What was his real reason for wanting to stay married?
“Look how much we’ve weathered and worked through since this morning,” he reasoned with quiet persistence, showcasing exactly how he’d pushed a struggling shipyard into a dominant global enterprise in less than a decade. “We can make this marriage work for us, Adara. Give me a few days to prove it.”
Days that were going to be excruciating even without a replay of today.
Nerves accosted her each time she thought of seeing Nico again and in the end, her consideration of Gideon’s demand sprang from that. She would prefer to have him with her when she met Nico again. She couldn’t explain it, but so many things, from social events to family dinners, were easier to face when Gideon was with her. She’d always felt that little bit more safe and confident when he was beside her, as if he had her back.
“You’d really move over to my brother’s house with me?” she asked tentatively.
“Of course.”
There was no “of course” about it. He showed up for the events in his calendar because it was their deal, not because he wanted to be there for her.
At least, that was her perception, but she hadn’t really asked for anything more than that, had she? He’d offered to come to the hospital each time she’d told him about another miscarriage. She was the one who’d rebuffed the suggestion, hiding her feelings, not only holding him at a distance but pushing him away, too fearful of being vulnerable to even try to rely on him.
