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“I’m not—”
“You are. I knew it that first night. Everything about you was so, so right for me, and it scared the hell out of me. It sent me running away from you as far and as fast as I could go. And it would have been okay. If you had just stayed gone, everything would have been all right. Instead you’re here and you’re breaking my heart—”
“I don’t want to break your heart,” he told her, crossing to her because he couldn’t not touch her when he told her this. “And I don’t want you to break mine. I love you. I’m in love with you, Desi, and I want to be with you. I want to marry you. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”
“Because no one ever has.”
“Wanted to marry you?” He hoped not. He hated the very idea of her being close enough to another man to even entertain the idea.
“Loved me.”
“That can’t be true.”
She bowed her head, wrapped her arms around her stomach in a move that was so obviously self-protective that it broke his heart. “It is true. No one has ever loved me. I mean, except my mother and she died when I was nine, so…it’s been a while.
“My dad freaked out when she died. He couldn’t handle it and he certainly couldn’t handle me. He was a reporter, too. One of the best investigative journalists in the world. And the day after my mother’s funeral, he parked me with my grieving grandparents and took off to find a war to cover.
“He came back a few months later, just in time to have a fight with my grandmother and take me off her hands. Not because he wanted anything to do with me, mind you, but to punish her for saying he was being a terrible dad. Two weeks later, he dumped me on his college roommate and his wife, and took off again. Six months later he showed back up because they were having their own kid and didn’t want me around anymore. So he brought me to visit his sister and snuck out on her in the middle of the night.
“The night he left, I knew he was going to go. He called me sweetheart when I went up to bed. And I knew. He only ever called me sweetheart right before he left me. My aunt kept me for three months before she shipped me off to my mother’s brother. And that’s pretty much how it went until I graduated high school and left for college.
“And you know the worst part? At the gala last night, I realized I’ve done all this for him. I worked like a dog to get a degree in journalism from Columbia. I’ve spent two years writing ridiculous articles that I don’t care about for the Los Angeles Times. I took the assignment on Bijoux, even knowing that I shouldn’t have, and we all know how that turned out. I did it all, hoping that one day he’d be proud of me. That one day he would come back and see what I’d done and he’d tell me I’d done a good job.” Her voice broke. “How pathetic is that? How ridiculous and pathetic am I?”
“You’re not pathetic at all.”
She snorted. “Yeah, right.”
She wouldn’t look at him. He wanted, so badly, to see her face, but she wouldn’t lift her head. Wouldn’t let him see.
Jesus. He didn’t have a clue what he was supposed to say, how he could talk about this without sounding like a total douche. Sure, he’d had absentee parents—a father who cared more about screwing around with women half his age than he ever did about his family and a mother who cared more about status than she did about her husband screwing around on her—but through it all, Nic had always had a home. He always knew where he was going to be sleeping and what his routine would be like and whom he would see at school. And he’d always, always, had Marc. His brother might be a busybody with trust issues a mile wide, but he was a great big brother. He’d never once been anywhere but in Nic’s corner.
Who had been in Desi’s corner? he wondered as she put on the kettle for tea. Who’d had her back when she’d needed it most? The idea that there had been no one, that the woman he loved had essentially been on her own at the age of nine, wounded him on a visceral level.
“That’s why you kept the baby. So you’d have someone to love you.”
“Maybe.” She shrugged as she put a tea bag in a cup. “I thought about having an abortion but I just…couldn’t. And I could never give him up for adoption. I’d go crazy wondering if he was okay, if he was with someone who loved him or if he was just—” Her voice broke, but she swallowed. Tried again. “Or if he was just being tolerated. I can’t stand the idea of him being anywhere he isn’t loved.”
Nic did cross to her then, did pull her into his arms and let his hands rest on her tummy. On their baby.
“That will never happen to him,” he assured her. “We’ll never let that happen to him. He will know every day of his life that he is loved. And so will you, if you’ll trust me. If you’ll let me love you. I’m not saying I won’t make mistakes, as I’m pretty new to this serious-relationship thing, too. But I promise you, Desi, that if you let me, I will love you forever. I will be there when you wake up and I will be there when you fall asleep and I will be there all the times you need me in between.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know it, Desi.”
Another sob racked her body and she covered her mouth to silence the sound. “Don’t say that,” she said when she could speak again. “Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.”
“I never say things I don’t mean.” He got in her face then, circled her upper arms with his hands and waited until she looked up at him. Until she looked him in the eye. “I love you,” he told her. “I will love you tomorrow. I will love you next year. I will love you in twenty years if you’ll let me. I will—”
She stopped him with a kiss, one that stole his breath and most of the brain cells in his head. Which was why, when she finally pulled back, all he could do was stare at her dumbly.
“You should be careful what you promise,” she told him when they both finally caught their breath.
“I’m always careful with my promises,” he answered. “Because I never break them.”
“I know.” She pressed a soft kiss to his lips. “I almost never make promises, either, because I don’t believe in breaking them. But I’ll make a promise to you, if you’ll let me.”
Let her? He nodded eagerly. Too eagerly if her muffled laugh was anything to go by. But he couldn’t help it. He’d die to hear her tell him that she loved him. That she wanted him to be a part of her and the baby’s lives.
