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“I seduced a virgin into my bed and kept her there as my mistress,” he said with blatant self-condemnation.
But she’d never let anyone else take the blame for her choices. It wasn’t in Emma to pass the buck like that. “I wanted to be seduced. The mistress part I could have done without, but if I wanted to share even a part of your life, I knew I had to be available to you when you had time for me and that meant allowing you to support me. Again, a decision I made.”
A decision her parents had hated. Her coming up pregnant after moving home when he’d dumped her had been the final straw as far as Ansel and Belinda Sloan were concerned.
If Emma had been willing to give Mickey up, things might have been different, but she hadn’t been. Not then. Not now.
Her son was her life and Prince Konstantin of Mirrus had better realize that.
“You did not decide to get pregnant.”
“No. Even now I cannot credit that my IUD fell out without me being aware.” What were the chances?
According to her OB, very slim, but not nonexistent. Obviously. Emma had just been unlucky. Though it was impossible to think of Mickey as anything but a gift in her life. The unplanned nature of her pregnancy was something else.
Emma shook off her thoughts. “My OB said it happens, not often, but it happens. I was just so happy the pain had stopped, I didn’t question the whys.”
“You never told me the IUD hurt.”
“What part of the repressed, raised-to-ultraconservative-values me would have talked to you back then about something so private and embarrassing?”
“Sex is private and we talked about that.”
She rolled her eyes. “Saying I want you is not the same thing as saying the lower half of my body feels like someone kicked it because of my IUD.”
“It was that bad?”
“Yes.”
“No wonder you did not want sex sometimes.”
“No wonder.”
“I thought you were losing interest in me.”
“I guess that made you feel better about knowing you were going to dump me so you could marry another woman.”
His expression said it all. Konstantin’s belief she was losing interest had alleviated his guilt over making plans to marry Lady Nataliya.
That the woman had ended up married to his brother and not Konstantin was entirely beside the point.
“Five and a half years ago, that would have surprised me. I thought you were this amazing guy.”
“But now you know differently.” His tone was strange.
“You turned your ruthlessness on me when you excised me from your life. I’ve lived with the consequences of your selfishness every day since.”
“You consider our son a consequence.”
“I consider how hard it has been to provide for him with that stupid restraining order on my record a consequence. I consider how he has gone without any extended family since birth a consequence. I consider how he cried when he came home from school after they made gifts for their fathers a week after the ones done for Mother’s Day, keeping it even, you see. Only for a little boy without a dad just the first of many times he would be faced with the knowledge he did not have a father.”
“There are many single-parent households out there.”
“Yes, and children with two parents of the same sex. Schools should be more sensitive, but his was not and my son cried because he lacked.”
“And that was my fault.”
“Yes.”
