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‘No!’ He couldn’t even let her finish that sentence. The words, the thought that she would think him capable of such a thing, truly shocked him.
‘Don’t act all outraged. The lengths to which you have gone to get what you want are well documented by this point, don’t you think?’
‘Is that why you waited this long to tell me?’ He had turned away despite his probing question, unable and unwilling to see the look on her face, to read the truth in her eyes.
‘No. I waited this long to make sure my baby was safe.’
He heaved out a weighted breath which was half relief and half frustration. ‘Our.’
‘Our what?’
‘Our baby, dammit.’
* * *
Roman cursed, already feeling a step behind, already feeling cut from his own child’s life by her simple declaration, and it scalded him from the inside out. A child, the presence, the reality of which he simply couldn’t wrap his head around. His hand flew to his hair, sweeping it back from his forehead, only just resisting the urge to grasp it in a fist and display his frustration for the quick gaze of his wife, consuming his reaction to this sudden news as if it were a test. One that he really feared he might fail.
He had never wanted children. Couldn’t even fathom how it had happened because he knew they had used protection each and every time. But he also knew that protection failed, plans failed, and that nothing in Ella would have willingly bound herself to a monster such as him. And now he had somehow tied an irrefutable bond between him, her and...their child. An innocent child brought into his world, a world formed only from anger, vengeance, hurt.
He was going to be a father.
‘What are you planning?’ he asked, focusing his confusion on her rather than himself and the thoughts their child had conjured.
She sighed, delaying her response by taking a sip of the tea she cradled carefully within her hands. Refusing to let her hide from him, he stared her down, taking in all the emotions passing across her face. Emotions that echoed within him.
‘I honestly don’t know. I have a barely-off-the-ground business, half-signed divorce papers, no home of my own and a baby on the way.’ As if by listing her current predicament had somehow brought it all to bear down upon her shoulders, she swayed a little where she stood and he cursed. He reached for her then, stopping a few inches from actually touching her and guided her towards the small sofa and chair set of the open-plan living area.
The moment she sat down Dorcas resumed her guard of his wife, placing her large head in Ella’s lap and staring between them, adoringly and accusingly, depending on the focus of her gaze. He didn’t have to see where Dorcas placed the blame. He felt it down to his toes.
‘You are pregnant and will return to me,’ he asserted, as if it were that simple. As if that would somehow make sense of everything that was swirling through his mind and heart.
‘What will you threaten me with this time?’ she asked, her words at odds with the almost numbness of her tone.
‘I’ve never once threatened you. And you can say that I coerced you into marriage, but I sure as hell did not coerce you into bed.’ The lack of emotion behind her words somehow ignited his own.
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘I would never say that.’ The pretty blush on any other woman could have been considered coquettish, but in Ella he knew it to be real. As real as the baby that they were to have. That she could still prevent him from having access to. And though Roman might never have wanted even the abstract idea of a child—now that Ella was carrying his heir, his flesh and blood joined with hers, it was as if something primal, something raw and ancient had gripped his heart and made him more sure of this one thing than he’d ever been in his life. That he needed his wife and child with him. So, he would do, say whatever it was that Ella needed him to say in order to secure that.
‘You lost your parents at a young age. And I do not for one moment dismiss the tragedy of that,’ he insisted vehemently. ‘But my...father chose to take money instead of staying with my mother. He left her pregnant and alone. Knowing this, knowing that he chose her father over her and her child, it devastated my mother.’
* * *
Through his words, Ella heard and felt the echoes of pain that such a thing would have, in fact had, inflicted on Roman as a child. A pain that still held such a grip he had distanced himself from the effect of his father’s actions.
‘And you?’
‘Any finer feelings on the matter I have long since dealt with.’
‘Please don’t. Please don’t fob me off. I need to understand, to know what raising our child together means to you,’ she begged.
He exhaled harshly through thin lips, as if desperately fighting his own self-preservation instincts against giving her what she wanted. She could tell that this was a vulnerability that he didn’t reveal to many, if at all. But, from the look in his eyes, she sensed that he understood her need to know.
‘I grew up as the illegitimate son of a single mother. And, yes, there are many, many others who grow up exactly the same way. But it was different for my mother. She lost too much, sacrificed too much for me...’ He trailed off, shaking his head. ‘She blamed herself,’ he continued through gritted teeth. ‘I blamed myself, until I was old enough to understand the selfishness of my father’s actions. Growing up, my mother did everything she could to make sure that I was loved enough. She worked three jobs to keep a roof over our heads, to keep food in the fridge, and it was just us aga
inst the world. So when she got ill...’
‘It was just you,’ Ella concluded for him. And in that moment she realised why Roman had been so good at helping her with her grandmother. Why he had known and seemed to understand what she needed even before she’d realised it for herself. ‘And you were thirteen?’ she asked, pulling other details from their time together in France, adding it to what she knew had happened after Roman had gone to see Vladimir, and her heart ached for him. Ached not only for his loss and the cruel actions of his grandfather, but for what it had caused him to become, how it had forged the path his life had taken.
‘I was eleven when my mother first became ill. Tatiana had always been small, which was why she’d been such a wonderful dancer. Small but powerful,’ he added with a sad smile Ella was sure was purely unconscious.
