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‘Remind me never to upset you. You’re scary when you’re angry,’ he said softly.
She grimaced. ‘Sorry. It’s just…’
‘You love her, and it’s instinctive to be protective of your family,’ he said. ‘I’m the same with my sisters. And my little brother—though as he’s the same height as me now, he’s made it clear I need to stop thinking of him as “little”.’
She smiled ruefully. ‘Thanks. For understanding.’
‘I’m not an ogre, Maddie.’
‘I know.’ She paused. ‘So what happens now, Theo?’
‘I don’t know. I hoped my subconscious was going to come up with something this morning,’ he admitted, ‘but it hasn’t. I don’t want to offer you anything less than you deserve, Maddie—but I don’t know if I can give you what you want.’
‘Marriage and babies.’ She gave up the pretence of toying with her food. ‘Theo, you don’t panic about babies at work, do you?’
‘No.’ He knew what she was really asking. ‘But that’s because it’s different. They’re not my babies. I’m not in love with the mums. I can be calm and competent and reassure the mums in clinic or in a delivery room that everything’s going to be fine. Whereas if you had my baby…my heart would be overruling my head, Maddie. I’d be an emotional mess. Panicking that I was going to lose you. And in a way what I do for a living makes it worse, because I know all the fine detail of everything that could possibly go wrong.’ He blew out a breath. ‘And that wouldn’t be fair to you. You wouldn’t be able to enjoy your pregnancy because you’d know how I was feeling, even if I tried to hide it.’
‘And however much I reassured you, however much you knew intellectually that everything would be fine, there’s the gap between head and heart. It’s the same for me.’
He blinked. ‘You’re scared of being pregnant?’
‘No. I’m scared of ending up in another marriage that’s completely wrong for me,’ she admitted. ‘Last time, I was so sure. And I got it wrong. I can’t trust my judgement. So even though I know you’re an honourable man, Theo—that you’d never do what Harry did—the doubts still get in the way.’
He knew it wasn’t tactful to ask, but he asked anyway. ‘What happened with Harry?’
‘It was my own fault.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Kat told me not to marry him. She said she had a feeling he couldn’t be trusted and she didn’t want me to get hurt.’
‘But you were in love with him and didn’t listen?’ he guessed.
She nodded. ‘He swept me off my feet. We’d known each other all of three months when we got married.’
Three months? Lord. That was fast.
And he hadn’t even known Madison that long.
So he had a feeling that this was going to be as much of an issue for her as it was for him. A relationship that was going way too fast. Maybe they needed to slow things down a bit.
‘Looking back now, I can’t believe how stupid I was,’ she continued. ‘But at the time I thought we wanted the same things. A career and then children. Harry worked for a firm in the City. He wanted to be fast-tracked so he put in the hours, and I was working a junior doctor’s usual mad hours, so we didn’t get to see that much of each other—but it was great when he was with me.’
The flicker of jealousy shocked him. The man was clearly out of Madison’s life, so why on earth should he be jealous? Especially given his fears about marriage and babies.
But this wasn’t about him. It was about Madison. ‘So was Kat right?’ he asked softly.
‘Yes.’ She looked away. ‘I came home early from work one day—I’d picked up a bug and I was feeling lousy. I didn’t bother texting Harry to let him know I’d be home early because I didn’t expect him to be there.’ She shrugged. ‘I just wanted to take some paracetamol, crawl into bed and go to sleep. I was on autopilot when I opened the door, didn’t even notice a trail of clothing on the floor—and I walked in on them in our bedroom. My husband and his so-called colleague.’
Theo’s fists clenched and he swore in Greek. ‘How could he do that to you, Maddie?’
‘I got my own back,’ she said with a smile. ‘I threw up all over her shoes. Designer shoes. Completely ruined them.’
But the smile didn’t reach her eyes, and he could still see the flicker of hurt. Ruined shoes—no matter how expensive—didn’t make up for a ruined marriage.
