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“Of course she does,” Holly said equably. “Why shouldn’t she?” Her own mother doted on Holly’s brother Greg’s two kids. She had been sad when Holly and Matt hadn’t had kids. Holly had been sad, too. “You seem to like children,” she added.
“It’s no reason to get married!” Lukas strangled the steering wheel. “And I’m not marrying to please my mother.”
Holly thought it unlikely that Lukas would do anything to please anyone but himself. “I’m sure you won’t,” she said mildly.
Lukas’s jaw bunched. He stared straight ahead. “You like kids?”
Where had that come from? Holly nodded. “Yes.”
“You don’t have any.” He sent a quick glance her way. His words were more question than statement. Holly wanted to say it was none of his business. But before she could, Lukas grimaced. “Sorry. None of my affair.”
“We wanted kids. Lots of kids. Not at first. After Matt finished his PhD. But we didn’t have any. Two years went by and I didn’t get pregnant, so we went for tests. Everything seemed okay. The doc said we were ‘trying too hard.’ He said, ‘Relax. You can’t plan everything. Some things happen when you least expect them.’”
She glanced at Lukas. He didn’t say anything, didn’t even glance her way. But she was sure he was listening even though she wondered why she was telling him any of this. It was something she hadn’t told anyone at all, not even her mother.
“He was right. Matt died—definitely unexpected.” Holly’s fingers knotted in her lap. She could hear the blood rushing through her veins, could hear the quickened beat of her heart. “And I miscarried the next week.”
His gaze was on her then, searching her expression.
She looked away. “I was a month along. I...I didn’t even know I was pregnant until...until I lost the baby.”
There was a moment’s silence. He didn’t say a word. Then he reached over and wrapped his hand around hers.
It was the last thing she expected—warm physical comfort from Lukas Antonides. For once, Holly didn’t pull her hand out from his grasp.
“I didn’t have any idea,” Lukas said at last, his fingers still wrapping hers. “I’m sorry.” He hesitated. “No one said. After Matt died, I talked to my mom now and then. She said you were coping. She never said anything about...” His words dried up. His thumb rubbed the back of her hand.
Holly wetted her lips. “She didn’t know. No one did.”
“No one? Why not?”
“It was...too much.” She sighed and tried to explain. “Everyone was already devastated by Matt’s death. If I’d said...about the baby... They all knew how much we wanted a family. If they found that I’d lost the baby, too...” She just shook her head. “I couldn’t tell them. I couldn’t bear any more sympathy.”
She knew it sounded strange. Ungrateful.
But Lukas just nodded. “I get it.”
She raised her gaze to look at him, surprised. But Lukas’s tone was quiet and calm and his fingers continued to squeeze hers in silent commiseration.
Oddly, it felt as if he really did understand. She supposed he might. Lukas had known her—and Matt—for a very long time. And while he might not know them the way their parents had, in some respects he knew them better.
Maybe, too, she had had enough space and time between herself and both excruciating events to actually speak of them and not have the emotions destroy her.
After Matt’s death, friends and acquaintances had sympathized fervently, and often awkwardly, unsure what to say to “make things better.”
Nothing could. But Holly didn’t say that because that would have been rude. Instead, she was the one who ended up comforting them. She couldn’t do more of the same after her miscarriage. She didn’t have the strength.
Now she didn’t need to have strength. Lukas gave it to her. He kept her hand wrapped in his, holding on firmly.
She was holding hands with Lukas Antonides. Who’d a thunk it? Holly thought with a wry inward smile. He had rough hands, workman’s hands, calloused and competent, quite different from her husband’s hands. But even though Holly knew from the article that Lukas’s work now was largely behind a desk, he still clearly spent a lot of his time doing physical labor.
“Are you doing all the work on the building yourself?”
He slanted her a quick glance, and seemed to sense that she didn’t want to talk any more about Matt or their unborn child. He nodded. Then his gaze grew self-conscious as it dropped to their linked fingers. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” he said wryly. “But I’m only doing the grunt work. Painting, hauling, whatever the professionals don’t do. My cousin Alex is an architect. He did the design for the renovation. And I’ve got a contractor now. He hires the workers we need. I do the rest.”
