And then he turned as well and went after Kate.
Poor Kate, Bella thought. Oh, my God. Bella turned off the scorched sauce. She didn’t know what to do next because her world was falling down around her ears. Sothiswas what had been bothering Kate so much. Why she wasn’t so excited about the wedding. Neither of them wanted children. Was this a deal-breaker?
No. Please, no. Bella sank into a chair beside the kitchen table and buried her face in her hands. For some inexplicable reason it felt like this was all her fault.
* * *
‘I’m sorry, Connor.’ Kate’s heart was breaking. She could actually feel it splintering, the shards stabbing in her chest as she stood there in the garden, and Connor came up behind her and enfolded her in his arms.
She very badly wanted to turn into him and bury her face against his chest and give in to the pain that wanted to escape in gut-wrenching sobs, but Kate fought the urge. The battle was enough to make her tremble from head to foot.
‘I know it’s the very last thing you want.’ Her voice was trembling, too. ‘That you never want a child of your own because of Pippa.’
She drew in a shuddering breath as she felt the pressure of Connor’s arms turning her towards him. Pippa had been the baby of Connor’s family. The longed-for girl who had become sick with leukaemia and eventually died, fragmenting the family. The determination not to let history repeat had been born then for Connor even if he hadn’t realised it. What had he told her that time? That kids were a potential bomb waiting to go off and destroy a whole family. That it was a risk he was never going to take.
Connor had been a lost little boy. Forgotten and left to feel abandoned and unloved. Kate knew what that felt like, and the connection had been so powerful that hearing his story had been the moment she had realised how much she loved him. She wanted to hold him close and show him how much he was loved.
Incredibly, such a short time ago, it had seemed like she had her whole life to show him that love. But now she was pregnant and he wouldn’t want to cope with that. Maybe he wasn’t capable of coping, and the challenge would be too much. It would send him away.
Kate had her face against Connor’s chest now. ‘I know it should be easy to… to fix things,’ she said shakily, ‘but I can’t and I can’t even tell youwhybecause…’
The trembling in her body intensified to become shaking. Connor’s arms tightened around her and somehow he moved them so that Kate found herself sitting beside him, but she couldn’t look up at him because she was too scared of what she might see in his face.
He put his fingers under her chin, though, and lifted her face, and what she saw there wasn’t anger or rejection. It was… it was far more heartbreaking. He looked so sad.
‘Never say that, Katie,’ he said. ‘You can tell me anything.’ He touched her face gently. ‘I know that bad stuff happened to you. How could I not? You remember the first time we tried to make love?’
Of course she did. It had been a disaster.
‘That bad stuff – you getting raped by your so-called boyfriend – was in the way.’
‘In the way’ was an understatement. It had seemed to spell the end of a potential relationship. Kind of like the way this pregnancy was spelling doom for their impending marriage.
‘You still don’t know everything,’ Kate said, her voice breaking as she pulled her hand away from Connor’s.
‘So tell me,’ was all Connor said quietly.
Kate swallowed hard. ‘There were… repercussions from the rape.’
Connor went very, very still. ‘You gotpregnant?’ She heard the sharp sound of his indrawn breath. ‘You had an abortion?’
That would explain why she was so upset about Bella’s, albeit unspoken, plan to ‘fix’ things, wouldn’t it? But he still didn’t understand. It was worse than that.
‘I didn’t try to find a way out,’ she said softly. ‘I didn’t even tell anyone. I… I wanted that baby so much, Connor. It would have been someone to love. Someone who would…’ Her voice was almost inaudible. ‘… who would have loved me back.’
Connor’s voice was raw. ‘What happened?’
‘I was a bit over five months pregnant, I guess, and I got careless. My father saw me coming out of the bathroom in the T-shirt I slept in and he was so angry.’
Connor made a growling sound. ‘He hit you?’
‘He didn’t get a chance. I ran. I got as far as the front door but then I tripped on the step and fell… hard.’ There was no point going into the gory details. ‘I lost the baby,’ she finished quietly. ‘And that was when Mum shipped me off to my brother’s. I was sixteen.’
There was a long silence. Then Connor took hold of her hand again and she could hear the hint of a smile in his voice.
‘Do you remember when we did get to make love?’
Kate nodded. Of course she did. How could she ever forget? It had been in her office, no less. After he had saved her from her father’s violent attack.
