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I’m sorry. The words formed on her lips, so that she could almost taste them, sweet and tempting. But she refused to speak them. She was used to saying what other people wanted to hear and the habit was hard to break, but the truth was she wasn’t sorry. She was glad.
Her own parenting, by a mother who was barely out of her teens, barely able to cope, had been haphazard and inadequate, but it had only fuelled Lily’s need to nurture. Her dolls had always been care fully dressed in pyjamas, lovingly tucked into their shoebox beds and read to, even when she had not. For as long as she could remember, the need to love and to nurture had been there inside her, beating alongside her heart, echoing through the empty spaces in her life and in her body. She hadn’t wanted to listen to it until that moment in Dr Lee’s office when he’d told her the news. The news that should have horrified her, but had actually filled her with a profound, primitive joy.
She wanted this baby. More than she’d wanted anything, ever before.
Slowly Tristan turned round. The expression on his face was like a January dawn in Siberia—dark, bleak, and utterly forbidding.
‘Congratulations,’ he said, very softly. ‘To you, and to the father.’
‘What?’ With a gasp of incredulity she leapt to her feet. ‘No! You don’t understand. I—’
He turned away from her again, looking out over the garden as he cut through her heated protest. ‘I have to warn you to think very carefully about what you’re just about to say, Lily.’
His voice was quiet, but there was an edge to it that was like sharpened steel against her throat. Lily felt the sweat cool to ice water on the back of her neck, and clenched her teeth against their sudden chattering, dropping back down onto the bench as her knees gave way beneath her.
‘You can’t intimidate me.’
To her surprise Tristan laughed; a hollow, humourless laugh, tinged with despair. ‘You really don’t understand at all, do you? I’m not trying to intimidate you. I’m trying to save you. I’m trying to give you a chance. To give you the freedom to make your own choices, because—’ He broke off suddenly. Dragging a hand through his hair, he sat down wearily beside her and dropped his face into his hands for a moment. When he lifted it again the dead expression in his eyes turned her insides to ice. ‘Because the second that you say this child is mine, all that will be taken away from you.’
Lily clasped her hands together in her lap, twisting and kneading at her own numb fingers as panic made the words tumble from her mouth. ‘I don’t want anything from you, Tristan. I don’t want your money, or any kind of recognition or admission of responsibility. I was on the pill, but I was ill when I was in Africa, so it’s my fault, I accept that completely, but I thought you ought to know that the baby is yours.’
‘Who else knows?’
‘N-no one.’ Despite the mildness of the evening she was shivering violently now. ‘I haven’t told anyone. Not even Scarlet yet, but I can’t hide it for much longer.’
‘You’re going ahead with it?’
‘Yes!’ A white-hot spark of anger glowed in the dark void of her mind at the casual brutality of the question. ‘Yes, I bloody well am!’
Nothing penetrated his terrible, glacial calm. ‘And you intend to name me as the father? On the birth certificate?’
‘Of course!’ Her chattering teeth were so firmly clamped together that she spoke almost without moving her lips, her voice a low, furious rasp. ‘I won’t have my child growing up without a name. An identity.’
‘No?’ He leaned back on the bench, lifting his head and inhaling deeply before turning towards her. His eyes were cold and measuring. ‘How much would it take to make you reconsider, Lily? I’m only going to say this once, so I advise you to think before answering.’
‘You want to pay me off?’ Lily gasped, torn between laughter and the urge to do something violent. ‘You want to bribe me to keep you out of your own child’s life? My God, Tristan, you cold, cold, bastard! Never. No way!’
His eyes narrowed, but they stayed fixed on hers. ‘You’re quite sure? Even if it was for your own good?’
She shook her head determinedly as strength and assurance ebbed back into her frozen body. She was on firmer ground here. ‘I’m not interested in what’s good for me now, Tristan. All I care about is my baby. I want it to know who it is, to have a history. An identity. Roots.’
Things that she’d never had.
In one lithe movement he stood up. The gentle evening seemed to darken as his broad shoulders blocked out the cloud-marbled sky. Slipping her feet from their high-heeled shoes, Lily tucked them up on the bench and wrapped her arms around her knees, hugging herself for warmth and subconsciously closing herself around the tiny, tentative life inside her.
Tristan was standing with his back to her, looking out over the garden to the dark tower. ‘Well, then. I hope you’re prepared for the alternative.’
‘The alternative?’ Something about the way he spoke made the hair stand up on the back of Lily’s neck. ‘What do you mean?’
He turned. ‘It’s all or nothing, Lily. If you name me as the father, we have to get married.’
‘Married?’
The tenuous thread of certainty that had anchored her a moment ago snapped, leaving her with the feeling that she was plummeting through space, and all logic, all familiarity had diminished to a tiny point in the distance.
Married. The word that, when she was growing up, had always filled her with such wistful hope now sounded cold, comfortless, businesslike.
‘But why?’
‘Illegitimacy isn’t an option,’ he said flatly. ‘You have to understand that. My family bloodline stretches back, unbroken, for six hundred years. It’s my duty to respect and preserve that line. I can’t…’ here he faltered, but only for the briefest second ‘…I can’t knowingly let a child of mine be born and brought up outside of its heritage.’
Stiffly, shakily, Lily got to her feet and walked slowly towards him. Standing in front of him, she looked into his eyes, trying to read the emotion that darkened them. ‘And yet a moment ago you wanted to pay me off?’ she said quietly. ‘You wanted me and this baby out of your life and your family. I don’t understand, Tristan. Why would you do that?’
Their eyes met across the chasm that separated them. His gaze was unutterably bleak, achingly cold, but in that moment she forgot to be frightened or angry and wanted only to hold him. She wanted it so much that she almost felt dizzy.
His lips quirked into a bitter, heart breaking smile. ‘You want your child to have a history?’ he said in a voice of mesmerising softness. ‘In my family you get six centuries of it, and roots so deep they’re like anchors of concrete, holding you so tightly that you can’t move. That doesn’t give you an identity, it makes it almost impossible to have one. That is why I never, ever intended to have children.’ He paused, passing his hand briefly over his face in a gesture of eloquent hopelessness. ‘I have no choice about the family I was born into, but you can still choose something different for your baby. Cut your losses, Lily. Get out while you still can.’
Lily’s heart felt as if it were being seared with a blowtorch. Slowly, deliberately, she shook her head. ‘Our baby,’ she said quietly. The ground was cold beneath her bare feet and she was shivering, but her voice was strong and steady. ‘Our baby. I believe in family, Tristan. I believe in marriage.’
Tentative butterfly wings of hope were beginning to flutter inside her. He was offering her the thing she’d always longed for. Marriage; a proper family for this baby—not like the inadequate, truncated version she had grown up in. Not quite a fairy tale happy ending, but a version of it. Hadn’t she always vowed that she would give her own children the family life she had never had?
‘This won’t be that kind of marriage,’ Tristan said coldly. ‘This will be in name only.’
‘What do you mean?’ she whispered.
He made a brief, dismissive gesture. ‘I have a life. A life that I have carved out for myself against all the odds. A life that I won’t give up and I won’t share. You’ll be my wife, but you’ll have no right to ask anything about where I go or what I do.’
‘That’s not a marriage,’ she protested fiercely, feeling the emptiness beginning to steal through her again. ‘That’s not a proper family.’
As she spoke he shrugged off his dinner jacket and now he laid it around her trembling shoulders, tugging the lapels so that her whole body jerked forwards. ‘No. But it’s the best I can offer,’ he said harshly. ‘I can’t make you happy, Lily. I can’t be a proper father to this child. Find someone who can.’
The deliciously scented warmth of his body lingered in the silk lining of his jacket, and she pulled it closer around her. The unexpected thoughtfulness of the gesture he had made breathed life back into the fragile hope inside her. Looking up into Tristan Romero’s dark, aristocratic face, Lily saw the pain there, and instantly she was transported back to the tower; to standing at the window as the rain fell on the lake outside and looking at the watery moonlight washing his sleeping body on the bed. She remembered exactly the muscular curve of his back, the small, shadowy indentation of his spine at its base, the ridges of his ribs. She remembered the tracery of long, pale scars that cut across his shoulders and she remembered the suffering etched into his sleeping face and the anguish in his voice as he’d cried out…
