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Shamed, I pulled the beautiful ring off my finger and handed it over. I didn’t know what kind of diamond it was, only that Étienne had said it was a fallen star, big and translucent, with all different colors that danced inside it—sunset reds and oranges and summer sky blues and buttercup yellows and cow-cream white.
He shoved the ring in his pocket, and it felt like the baby and I were already being erased from his life.
I was trembling from head to foot, still so shell-shocked that I could barely speak.
To have Étienne turn on me, Étienne who I loved more than anyone else in the world. . .
“If I can prove to you that you’ve been lied to, that I am innocent—”
My husband’s hands were tapping impatiently on the side of the car, and he was looking off into the distance, back up those mountains.
“Réjean is arrogant,” he said, the confrontation with my brother clearly uppermost in his mind. “Small-pricked soft-bellied dog.”
“And yet you’ve brought his unfaithful sister and her bastard baby out here,” Placidie said, glancing over at me.
“Please, my love—”
Étienne slammed his hand into the side mirror, sliding his eyes over me as he stalked back around to the driver’s side of the big SUV.
“I should have listened to my mother.”
For several long moments as the SUV started to move I was frozen in shock and horror, forcing myself to breathe as the emotional blow reverberated through my body.
He regretted our marriage. He regretted choosing me.
And then I turned around to see the lodge, the evening shadows creeping over it, the windows dark and shuttered.
What was in there?
Panic engulfed me. I couldn’t be left alone here!
Clutching my swollen belly, I headed down the driveway, really more of an overgrown path, waddling as fast as I could after the SUV.
But it was already at the end of the drive.
The gate was already open.
And then he was already gone.
There were little tight pulses all over my belly and I was cramping up, gasping for breath.
When the gate clanged behind my husband, I sunk to my knees and slid down through the overgrown meadow to the ground on my hands and knees.
My ribs were aching and it was like I couldn’t catch my breath. The wild night smells of the mountain filled my nostrils, and for the first time, they frightened me.
He had abandoned me. To be without Étienne for a single night gave me anxiety. To be without him for even longer—it was unendurable.
“Let me help you up,” an unfamiliar voice said. “it will do you no good to lie on the ground in your condition.”
I knew it was true, and wearily I dragged myself up and turned around.
But the person who met my eyes was so unexpected and so impossible, that all I could do was open my mouth and scream.
CHAPTER 4
Léonie
This man in front of me looked almost exactly like my husband, tall, pitch-black hair, strong brows, that unmistakably hard and sensual Bastide mouth. Only this man had a dark beard. And his eyes were kind.
