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Given the way he was behaving, she wondered how to talk to him about her concern about raising another’s woman’s child and all that meant for her. How could she get him to see her point of view? If they were to get through this with their marriage intact, she and he both had to be totally honest about how they felt.
Hours later, she pulled into the driveway she’d left so hurriedly yesterday. Aidan met her at the door, his arms outstretched. “Oh, Grace. I’ve missed you so much. So much.”
She walked into his embrace feeling his warmth, breathing in his scent. He held her tight as he rocked her back and forth.
“I missed you, too, Aidan. Last night was the loneliest night of my life,” she whispered into his cotton shirt, soaking in the newly scrubbed scent of his body. “Where did you stay last night?”
Still holding her tight, he led her into the house and along the hall to the kitchen. “I stayed here. Lisa thought it might help if I was around when Emma got up this morning. Lisa has gone shopping and Emma is at kindergarten. We’ve got the house to ourselves. Larry Knowles called to say he’d like to see me to start the process of working out the estate details. I want you to go with me,” he said, drawing her into a kiss that made her knees weak with desire.
He smiled. “I’ve got coffee ready to go, and I went to the local bakery and got your favorite sandwich—Swiss cheese and ham with mayo and mustard.” Without waiting for her reply, he moved to the counter and began making coffee, his back to her as he worked.
“I’m famished. Did you get yourself a sandwich, as well?” she asked, slipping into her old behavior of thinking about him first. Yet it felt so easy, so natural. She shrugged off her concern that he might expect things to go back to the way they were. That couldn’t happen.
He got two plates out of the cupboard and put them on the island. “I did. I ate earlier. The lawyer appointment isn’t until two o’clock, so we have time.”
Grace watched her husband as she organized her thoughts, what she wanted to say. She knew how important Emma was to him, but she needed him to understand how she felt about it all. “Aidan, I think we need to be very clear on what we want to do.”
He looked up from cutting her sandwich in half. “Of course we need to be clear. But I’m not sure if you mean it the way I do.”
“I mean Emma is a little girl who has never lived anywhere but in this house. We live miles away, with a life that we’ve made for the two of us, a life that never included a child, despite our wishes. At the very least, we will have to childproof the house. We’d have to find a pediatrician, a dentist who is good with children—”
“But once she’s over the worst of it, Emma will be fine. Children adapt easily,” Aidan said, as he studied her. “You don’t see it that way, do you?”
“What I see is a child who will need a lot of care and attention in a loving, familiar environment. That environment isn’t our home where nothing is familiar to her. It’s here with her nanny.”
“But what about us? We have been waiting most of our marriage for a child. Now we have one,” Aidan said, a bewildered look on his face.
“It’s not just about having a child in our lives. It’s about doing right for her and for us. That all takes planning and caring, Aidan. And so far we’ve done none of it.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, his eyebrows drawn together as he poured the coffee and brought the cups and cream to the counter between them.
“This is a huge change for both of us. We’ll have to make sacrifices to make sure that Emma is cared for and happy.”
“But that’s the whole point. We now have a child. We are a family,” he said, leaning on the counter.
