‘Oh, Bella…’ The words were a whisper. ‘Whathaveyou done?’
* * *
Connor felt terrible.
It wasn’t his hip that was bothering him. That felt a lot better. He’d been stood down from working today but he hadn’t gone home like he probably should have. He’d gone and got a few hours of restless sleep in an on-call room. Then he’d given in and taken a painkiller and had had a few hours of much better quality sleep.
Now he needed a shave and something to eat but he knew it wouldn’t make him feel good because it wasn’t anything physical that he was having trouble dealing with.
It was the fact that he’d been such a coward.
Kate had given him an easy way out and he’d taken it.
Not immediately, of course. He’d stayed there in her bedroom that night, having got dressed again, and he’d paced about, staring at the statement being made by the closed door of that en suite bathroom.
He would stay, he decided. They couldn’t leave things like this.
They needed to talk about it.
But where would he start?
How on earth could he hope to undo even part of so much damage? He’d been horrified enough that Kate had lived with an abusive father, but he’d been confident that he could handle that.
Fix her, even.
But this – the knowledge that she’d beenraped… that she could only bear a man’s intimate touch by distancing herself as though she was performing an autopsy?
That had been overwhelming. He didn’t think he could have been any more shocked, but he had been when Kate had mentioned the baby.
Pregnant as the result of a rape? Unthinkable.
What had she done? Had the pregnancy terminated? Had the baby adopted? Had a miscarriage because her father had beaten her up when he’d found out about the pregnancy?
Did it actually matter?
No. What mattered was that it seemed to have been as damaging as the rape because Connor had known that, however it had been conceived, that baby had been loved.
I lost it, was all she’d said. And she’d lost so much more than that, hadn’t she? She’d lost – or maybe she’d never discovered – the joy of sex. She’d lost a part of her family. She might have been broken in a different way from what he had been, but the result was eerily similar. An aversion to the kind of closeness that could bring pain in its wake. He was better off than she was, though, wasn’t he? At least the release and pleasure of sex was something he’d enjoyed all his adult life.
Yeah… Kate’s history was worse than his own. All the more disturbing because he could understand the space it had left her in. A walled-off space.
A barrier that was far more solid than the door of that bathroom.
Kate didn’t want him to still be there when she came out and Connor could finally understand why Kate had such a need to be in control of what was around her. It was why her house was so perfect and why she kept people at such a distance.
If he was still there, he would be undermining that control and that would hardly be a good place to start, would it?
Besides, he’d needed to think.
And think he did. Long and hard. His head told him to back away.
But his heart wasn’t going to let him do that.
Funny how you could see something when it was happening to somebody else and it was only then that you recognised it was happening to you.
Kate was crippled by the fear of emotional pain that came from loving someone and losing them. She couldn’t even go through the motions of expressing love physically because she had distanced herself from love far more than he had. But she was missing out on the most important thing that life had to offer.
Not sex, though that was a part of it, certainly.
