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Bile burned her throat and she swallowed. “Pregnancy was not going to be the reason I got married. Not then. Not now. Not ever.”
Ross regarded her snidely. “How’d that work out for you? You are still single? Or perhaps there’s something else you need to tell me?”
His harsh question had her head jerking towards him again. “What is that supposed to mean? You know exactly how it worked out for me. You left me. And, no, I am not married.”
“I didn’t leave,” he corrected in a treacherous tone. “You drove me away.”
She gasped, jumped back up from the sofa and glared at him. He was going to blame her for his decision to leave? Hardly. She had made mistakes, lots of them, but she hadn’t wanted him to leave, far far from it. “I did no such thing.”
“Sure you did. With the sudden constant tolling of wedding bells and the bridal magazines left on every flat surface in our apartment, you wouldn’t stop going on about marriage and weddings. You stopped talking to me about anything but marriage and weddings and then you stopped talking to me altogether, Brielle. You were too busy being angry at me to talk to me. Say what you will, but you drove me away.”
She shook her head, not willing to accept the blame. “I was trying to give you a hint.”
“If you’d wanted to get married perhaps you should have been leaving baby rattles and packs of diapers around instead of bridal magazines. I might have picked up on what you were really trying to tell me.”
Acid hit the back of her throat. “I told you that I didn’t want to get married because I was pregnant.” She knew first hand what those marriages usually led to. An unhappy life together and eventual divorce. “I wanted to get married because I was loved.”
“I did love you!”
Brielle’s legs gave way and she flopped onto the sofa. She’d never heard him say those words. He never had.
She’d believed he’d loved her but never had he said them.
Until just now. In the past tense. Perhaps it would have been better to have never heard them than to feel the aching sense of loss that now swamped her. She dropped her head into her hands, feeling lost and overwhelmed.
“You never told me that,” she reminded him. “Not ever.”
“Like I told you earlier, I shouldn’t have had to say the words.” He sounded annoyed, but at least he had lowered his voice again. “Words weren’t necessary. Not between us. I showed you every day how I felt about you.”
“You did. You left me.”
“Because you drove me away.”
“Because you wanted to go to Boston. Tell me, Ross, how long before another woman was warming your bed? Because we both know it wasn’t long.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
When she didn’t answer he walked over to the sofa and sat down beside her, not touching her but close enough that she felt his body heat, felt the anger emanating from his every pore.
“Explain that comment, Brielle.”
Hadn’t she already said too much? But realistically she might as well tell him everything at this point. “I came there.”
That took the wind out of his sails. “What?”
“I bought a ticket and I flew to Boston. I came to tell you about our baby, that I missed you more than I knew how to say.” Her voice broke and she hated her weakness, hated how much he affected her, especially hated how much her next words hurt. “I was almost seven months pregnant and I came to tell you everything, but I saw you with another woman.”
She couldn’t keep the pain from her voice. She tried, but failed miserably.
“And then what? You judged me unworthy and left without telling me because I’d moved on? I dated other women, Brielle. That didn’t give you the right to leave without telling me I was going to be a father.”
His words hurt. Hurt deep. Deep down she’d wanted a movie moment, one of those where he cleared up what had really been happening that night, that the woman had been a long-lost cousin, that what she’d thought had looked like a romantic embrace hadn’t really been anything of the sort.
“I left because when I saw you with her, I knew I’d been foolish to come there, that you’d meant what you’d said. I left because you put to rest any doubt I had about us and I had to move on with my life, too, without you.”
His gaze narrowed. “I didn’t have all the facts when I said what I said. You know
that.”
