AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’ve been...a stranger to myself,” he said, after what felt like an eternity, “for eight years. Once I’d recovered from the coma, I’d wake up every day with this hope in my chest that something would trigger all my memories back. I’d look at my face in the mirror and hate that blank stare of a stranger. Each hour, each day passed was excruciatingly slow. Each sunrise felt like a...curse.
“After the first couple of years of that, I used to wake up wishing for no hope at all. I thought that would be easier to bear. For the last two years, I... I think I was done. I didn’t even know when I gave up. I wasn’t happy but I’d made my peace. I was starting to let go of everything, I think.
“And then suddenly, there you were... When I saw your picture, it brought me to my knees. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking as I went about my day, terrified that it was all going to disappear again. I’ve never been so scared in my life... Not even the day I woke up alone in the hospital do I remember feeling that fearful. I kept thinking what if...”
Priya pushed up between his legs. Her breath shuddered out in strangled relief when he didn’t push her away. She laced her fingers through his and held on tightly. So many questions rose, and she swallowed them all away.
“On the flight here, I was on pins and needles, jacked up on excitement and hope. Now...to learn the sheer amount that I’ve lost, to learn that life has moved on so completely without me... It feels as if I still don’t know myself. As if I’m walking through a stranger’s life.” He turned to the framed picture of Jayden, his eyes deep blue pools. “The uncertainty... I haven’t gotten used to it even after all these years.”
“Especially for a man who liked to lord it over everybody else with his whip-smart brain, his dazzling good looks and easy, seductive charm,” she added, determined to pull him out of the murky depths of grief.
Her reward was a sudden wicked grin. “And yet, I don’t remember making much of an impression on you.”
Priya heard the undertone of dissatisfaction in it. As if he didn’t like that he hadn’t left an impression on her.
Intense Christian was...intense.
She let it go, for now. Because he wouldn’t believe it even if she told him that the opposite was true. Did the past even matter anymore? Was it anything but a weight dragging them down?
She sat back on her folded legs, keeping their fingers clasped together. “So how about, between you and me,” she said, adopting a casual tone she was far from feeling, “we only think of you as a work in progress?”
He communicated what he thought of that with a single, raised brow.
“Just hear me out, okay?”
“I can’t wait,” he said. The exaggerated roll of his eyes undercut the sarcasm. Not that anything would stop her.
“What if we agree...” She was the one to swallow now; a part of her felt as if she was losing him again already... “that you’re not committing to a life with us?”
He flinched as if she’d punched him. Or called him half a man. Or whatever it was that this new Christian found insulting. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Not forgetting that it’s damned unfair to...him.” Another nod toward Jayden’s pic. “What are we going to do—not tell him that I’m his father? Ask him to wait a couple of years before he could call me dad? Or just don’t tell him I’m alive?”
Hurt pinged in her belly that he didn’t consider himself returned to her, only to his son. Which was ridiculous because he was being sensible and considerate and cautious about him and her. She had to acknowledge that. Reckless Christian had always driven her nuts.
“I can’t just ask...you to sit on the sidelines while I figure out myself. I can’t.”
“You aren’t asking, Christian. I’m offering. At least with me, you don’t have to... There are no expectations between us. No certainties I’m demanding of you.”
He banged his head against the wall, tension bracketing his mouth. “This from the girl who always dealt in absolutes, who saw the world in black and white, as right and wrong?”
She cringed at his description of her. “If you were a reckless, arrogant idiot, I was a self-righteous prude who preferred to hide in the margins of life. No wonder we drove each other up the wall.”
His mouth twitched. “Did we?”
“Our marriage...” She looked down at her hands, pushing away all the little wishes and hopes of her heart into one corner and locking it away. “...it’s just a piece of paper, Christian. It’s always been just that. Nothing more than a partnership—two friends saving each other. That’s what you called it, remember? All that’s different now is that we share an additional responsibility—Jayden.”
He swept his fingers over his face. “And if I hurt him, Pree?”
The pain in those words threatened to tear Priya apart. “You won’t. However you’ve changed, whoever you are now, I know, here—” she brought his hand to her chest to feel the steady rhythm of her heart “—that that will never happen. I’m here, Christian, to help. With everything.”
Blue eyes held hers, inscrutable. Studying. Searching. He pulled his hand away from her. “Tell me about... Jayden.”
Crawling on her knees, she pulled out an album she’d made of Jayden’s photos by month ever since he’d been born. Midnight came and went as they pored over the pictures. As she described to him what a curious, sensitive boy their son was. How much she’d already told him about Christian and her and Jai. How very cunning and cute he could be, depending on his mood. How precocious he was on an emotional level.
Her legs were numb when Christian pulled her up after what felt like more than a few hours. “We won’t make a big deal of who you are when he gets here. I mean, he already knows you from your pictures. He’s a happy, well-adjusted child but it still might take him a little time to warm up to you. Just be...yourself.”
He looked so concerned about that Priya immediately added, “Trust me, Christian. Even if you don’t trust yourself right now.” She plucked a stuffed toy—a triceratops—and ran her hand over the soft beak and frill jutting out of its head. “Do you... Do you need anything more for bed?”
Just as the silence began to inch into awkwardness, he said, “I have one more question for you. Since you seem to be the one with all the answers right now.”
