Page 186

“You don’t make any sense. You said that you didn’t want to be with me for my own good.”

“If you wanted a romantic relationship with me, I would only be disappointed. I can’t… I don’t feel things like that.”

“That’s very original, Adonis. Somehow, your childhood wound prevents you, a handsome man, from having emotional connections with women. Sexual connections, though, you’re fine with. What a cliché. Aren’t you embarrassed?”

“You can be angry all you want, Esme. It doesn’t change that it’s the truth. I want you, I had wanted you for a long time. I didn’t touch you because—”

“You care about me? Right. Because the actions that you performed the night we were together were absolutely the actions of a man who cared about me.” She couldn’t help it. Her tone was dripping with sarcasm, and everything inside of her was riled up with disdain.

“I guess at least you didn’t ask me if the baby was yours.”

“Of course I didn’t. I knew that it was mine. I know you.”

“You know me, and yet here you are making an absolute ass of yourself.”

“There is no choice here. We are going to get married.”

“And move to a cul-de-sac? Am I joining the PTA?”

“Maybe. If you think that would help.”

She growled, and stood up from behind her desk, she began to take a step around it, and suddenly, she was almost burned by the full impact of him. By his beauty.

Oh, she had tried to forget it. And for a minute there, her shock, the overwhelmingness of all of this had blotted it out. But now, she couldn’t deny it. Because Adonis Katrakis was, now and ever, the most beautiful man she had ever seen. But it was something more than that. It was this fierce longing in her chest whenever she looked at him. She had thought for a while that it was love. A crush.

The idea that it was a crush had made her feel more comfortable.

But she could see it now for what it really was.

She wished that he could be a different person. Someone who was whole and…normal. Someone who could love her. But at the same time, she wished that she could be different. She wished that she could say yes to this proposal. She wished that she could imagine them taking a child to school together, living some kind of companionable life. She really wished that was the case.

But she only knew three ways of being with Adonis. She knew how to huddle together with him to survive. She knew how to scrape and scrap her way to the top with him by her side. And she knew how to want him, kiss him, touch him, take him inside of her body, and none of those things would help them be a family. None of those things would help them give their child the life they deserved.

“This isn’t a discussion,” he said. “I’m sorry if you feel that it is. Alex wants me to marry you.”

“Oh my God. You want to marry me because my brother is making you? That is actually the most insulting thing I’ve ever heard.”

“No. That isn’t… That is to say, your brother cannot make me do anything. But he is right. We have the opportunity to do something better. To do something right for this child. I will do that.”

She took a step forward. Feeling stubborn. Feeling defiant. “And what does that look like to you? What does this future that you are imagining we might have look like in your head?”

“I will protect you,” he said.

“While telling me that I don’t have a choice?”

“Yes. Because sometimes, Esme, that is how it has to be. Don’t you remember—” He cut himself off, and she stared at him.

“Go on,” she said.

“Don’t you remember,” he said, his voice low now, different, “when you were a girl, and you were climbing around that scrap heap, and I told you that it was dangerous, but you didn’t listen to me. Then you fell, and you cut yourself. And I…”

He didn’t have to finish it now. Because she remembered. There was no way for her to go get medical treatment. He had gone away to the store, and then he had returned later, pulling antibiotic ointment, sewing supplies and bandages out of his backpack. He had stolen them. She knew that. But he had cleaned her wound, and stitched her back together and she had thought that he was probably better than any doctor.

She didn’t think he was right just because he had reminded her of that. She knew that’s what he thought. That he was making the point that what he said was the truth, and when he demanded something it was good and correct.

But what it did remind her of was his goodness.

It had been lost in all of this.