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‘I guess.’ He smiled. ‘After all, you hid me in the bedroom.’
Candy nodded to his chest. ‘So I certainly wouldn’t be discussing my partner’s sperm count with them.’
Steele gave a low laugh.
‘You said that she’d been back in touch?’ she ventured.
‘Yep, her second marriage has broken up and she asked if I would consider giving us another go, though with one proviso—there have been a lot of advances in technology apparently...’
‘What a cow!’
He smiled. ‘My thoughts at the time—well, a little less politely put in my head. I just hung up on her.’
‘You didn’t consider it.’
‘I don’t love her any more,’ he said. ‘I haven’t for a long time.’
He looked a little more closely into the timeline of his marriage and divorce, something he rarely did. ‘When I found out that I probably couldn’t be a father and Annie had wrapped her head around the news, she lined us up for this battery of tests and investigations. She started to talk about donor sperm and, to be completely honest...’ Steele hesitated; it hurt to be honest at times. ‘I think I knew then that we had more problems than my infertility.’
‘Like?’
He had never really examined it. He’d just shoved that into the too-hard basket, but lying there, her fingers on his stomach and her breath on his chest, he felt able to go further. ‘Well, I’d always planned on being the complete opposite to my parents with my children. I didn’t want boarding school or that sort of thing. I wanted to be a real hands-on father. When we first started trying to have a baby, though I thought we were maybe jumping in rather too soon, I was also looking forward to it. I think we all assume, or at least I did, that I’d be a parent one day. When I got the results I suddenly lost all that. I told Annie and she sobbed and she cried and then she had to go to her family and wail with them. It went on for weeks, and do you know what, Candy?’
She heard the bitterness in his voice and now she could understand it. ‘What?’
‘I was feeling pretty awful at the time. Seriously awful. I wanted some time to get my head around it. I wanted to process the knowledge that I couldn’t have children. In hindsight we’d had it really good till that point. We’d never had to deal with anything major. And when we did, I found out that I didn’t like the way Annie dealt with the difficult things that life flings at us at times. She made it all about her, not even about us. It was all about Annie. I tried to understand where she was coming from, yet she never did that for me. I think I fell out of love. If I was ever properly in love in the first place...’ he mused. ‘So, yes, while I’ve always thought that it was infertility that broke us up, I don’t think it’s that neat.’
He loved it that she was still there. She hadn’t even jolted when he’d told her. Maybe because they were temporary, Steele pondered. Maybe because she wasn’t worried about his ability to make babies, but it was nice to have said it and to have got such a calm reaction.
‘Was she blonde?’ Candy asked, and it made him smile.
‘No.’
‘Tall and leggy?’
‘Go to sleep.’ He was really smiling now as he kissed the top of her head.
‘Can I ask another thing?’ she said sleepily.
‘You can.’
‘Why are we using condoms?’
‘Because I always have.’
‘So have I.’ She gave him a little nudge and Steele lay there smiling at the potential reward for his little confession. ‘Well, they do say that every cloud has a silver lining.’
Candy didn’t answer.
She was fast asleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CANDY HAD NEVER slept better than she did when Steele was beside her. His breathing, his heartbeat, the way he held her through the night were like a delicious white noise that blocked out everything else other than them. They wrapped themselves around each other, then unwrapped themselves when they got too hot and then when they got too cold found the other again. It was a seamless dance that lasted a full ten hours and had them on a slow sultry simmer that, by morning, started to rise to boiling point.
