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And yet there was no way she could leave. Not to go to a hotel, and certainly not to return to the UK. Not after what she’d discovered today. The very life of her unborn baby now depended on Kaspar, and how he could help her, and she’d walk over coals searing enough to melt the soles of her feet if it meant not going through the agony of another hateful miscarriage.
She’d just have to find a way to seal her heart, her mind off from Kaspar. Think of him as a business deal. The father of her baby but, ultimately, nothing to do with her.
That couldn’t be too hard. Could it?
* * *
Kaspar dodged yet another nameless woman—he’d lost count of how many had tried to corner him this evening—and glowered at the auctioneer who was delighting the crowd as he chaired the charity auction.
It was a successful evening, even pleasant, but he couldn’t enjoy a moment of it. His thoughts were centred around Archie, their baby and the unwelcome news Catherine had delivered.
He wondered what Archie was doing now. Still working on her laptop, as she’d been when he’d left her? So focussed and wrapped up in her work that she hadn’t even noticed him leaving. It was ironic, the one thing he strived for in himself, admired in others, was the thing he was already beginning to resent in Archie.
Because he didn’t need her to tell him what that driven expression on her face meant. He recognised it. It told him she was determined to maintain her job, and therefore her life, back in the UK. That she intended to return with his baby as soon as she could, despite everything he’d said to her about not wanting to be an absent father.
He hadn’t even realised how strongly he’d felt when he’d first uttered those words. But the fact of it was that it was true. The idea of losing them was unimaginable. No. Kaspar pulled himself up short. It was unacceptable.
The temptation to go home and tell Archie exactly that was almost overwhelming. There was only one thing stopping him. He needed something more compelling than words. He needed to prove to her that he would do anything for this baby. He needed to prove to her that he wanted this baby.
No easy feat when, if anyone had asked him twelve hours ago how he felt about having a baby, he would have laughed in their face. He’d never wanted children, or a family, or a wife. He’d been content to play the genius surgeon, perennial bad boy, who would never inflict himself on anyone the way his parents had inflicted their distasteful, damaging vitriol on either their son or themselves.
For decades he’d told himself that the best thing he could ever do for any child was to ensure that he wasn’t their father. No child should ever have to endure the upbringing of his own youth. Pushed from one volatile parent to the other, a pawn in their explosive games. Unwanted and in the way, even when his mother had suddenly realised that it might help his father’s career, and hurt hers, if she didn’t drag her unhappy fifteen-year-old with her.
And then Archie had knocked on his door and his whole world had shifted on its axis.
He was going to be a father.
Possibly.
Without warning a terrible tightness coiled through him, as unfamiliar as it was uncomfortable. For a moment he couldn’t identify it at all, and then it dawned on him. It was fear. And powerlessness.
Everything that Catherine had said this afternoon had made sense to him medically. But now that the initial shock was wearing off, his brain was finally locking onto the fact that this wasn’t any baby they were discussing, this was his baby. His and Archie’s.
He wanted this baby to be safe and he wanted to provide the loving family he had never had.
The fact that Archie had made it abundantly clear that she would rather cross the Atlantic, swimming the entire way if she had to, than have him be a daily part of her baby’s life cut him deeper than he would prefer to acknowledge. It scraped at him like nothing else ever had.
He’d thought he’d long since got over the pain of not being wanted. By his mother, his father and, to some extent, his best friend Robbie when they’d fallen out over some girl whose name he couldn’t even remember any more. Sarah perhaps? Suki? Sadie? Not that it even mattered.
But Archie’s rejection of him ate into him far, far deeper. She’d done her duty by telling him she was pregnant, but she evidently now wanted to be as far away from him as she possibly could get. And he didn’t want to let her go. Not just, he suspected, as an image of her breathtaking smile and dancing eyes filled his head while his insides hitched, for the health of their baby. The restlessness he felt whenever he was around her was like an ache of desire.
It made no sense. He was losing his mind and Archie was the one making him lose it. She threatened the order he had created around himself, blurred his clearly set-out parameters, and blasted away his peace of mind.
He could pretend he had been strong all afternoon for Archie’s sake, but he was terribly suspicious that the truth was that he needed to stay strong for himself just as much. What he really needed was a plan. Something that would keep his unexpected family around him, allow him to be the father his baby deserved.
Something with which Archie couldn’t possibly argue.
* * *
‘Do you promise to love, honour, cherish and protect...?’
Archie stared at the registrar as though her soul was wholly disconnected from her body. As though she was one of the witnesses, who she didn’t even know but apparently Kaspar did, watching the brief ceremony, rather than the not-so-blushing bride standing opposite a grim-faced Kaspar and clutching a small bouquet that was so jaunty and bright it seemed to mock her.
She felt numb. As numb as she’d felt when Kaspar had returned home from the fundraiser early the other night and issued his edict.
Even now she could recall exactly how her body had felt, as though it had been too small to contain her, squeezing her until every last breath had been crushed out of her. And yet Kaspar had looked, for all the world, as though he was relaying something as banal as the weather.
‘Marriage?’ she had whispered, a lump of something that was halfway between desolation and fury, or perhaps a combination of the two, lodged in her throat. ‘We’ll never get a license.’
