A choke of what felt like relief condensed in her throat. She wasn’t sure why hearing he would be a dedicated parent turned her insides to mush. Maybe because it was a glimmer of the diamond inside the rough exterior. Potential.
She swallowed, but the thorny ache between her breasts stayed lodged behind her sternum. It didn’t matter what Nic was capable of if fatherhood was forced upon him. It wouldn’t happen. Not with her
Their dishes arrived and she manufactured a weak smile for the waiter, but couldn’t unlock her fingers and pick up her utensils.
“I didn’t realize your parents were married,” Nic said. “Why do you use your mother’s name?”
“So no one would find out Mum was married.” Her voice sounded a long way off even to her own ears. All she could think was that keeping her mother’s secret had been one more accommodation to an overbearing woman whose constant nagging for results had put Rowan in this position: up for the part of Nic’s wife and yet not quite qualified.
She ought to tell him she couldn’t conceive, but everything in her cringed from admitting it. Even though she could live without making babies. There were other options if she wanted children. She knew that. It was the fact she would never have children with him she wasn’t ready to admit aloud.
“Is your father alive? Do you see him?” he asked.
Why were they talking about her father? “Yes, of course.” Rowan picked up her spoon so she could fill her mouth with yogurt and end that subject.
“Who was he? Why did their marriage put you off it? Was he abusive?”
“Not at all!” Rowan swallowed her yogurt and sat back, surprised Nic would leap to such a conclusion. Perhaps she’d been vehement about what a mistake her parents’ marriage had been, but that was how her mum had always framed it. “No, he’s just a painter. An Italian.”
“So you’re not completely without family?” Nic sat back too, wearing his most shuttered expression, not letting her read anything into his thoughts on this discovery.
Rowan licked her lips and her shoulders grew tense. “True. But...um...he’s an alcoholic. Not that that makes him less family,” she rushed on. “I only mean he’s not exactly there for me.”
Her helpless frustration with her father’s disease reared its head. She rarely mentioned him to anyone, always keeping details vague and hiding more than she revealed. Nic understood that relationships with your father could be complicated, though. That gave her the courage to continue.
“He’s an amazing artist, but he doesn’t finish much. He’s broke most of the time. Olief knew I bought him groceries out of my allowance and paid his rent. He didn’t mind. Nic, that’s why I did that club appearance. With my leg and everything I hadn’t seen my father much, and when I got there—”
She took a deep breath, recalling the smell, the vermin that had taken up residence in his kitchen. Setting down her spoon, she tucked her hands in her lap, clenching them under the table, managing to keep her powerless anger out of her voice.
“It seemed harmless—just one more party and for a good cause.” Her crooked smile was as weak as her rationalization had been. “Afterward I realized how easily I could spiral into being just like him and I decided to come back to Rosedale to regroup. I wasn’t dancing on tables so I could buy Italian fashions. He needed help.”
“You said the marriage ruined your mother’s life, but it sounds like it affects you more than it ever did her.”
His quiet tone of empathy put a jab in her heart.
“Well, he was my father regardless, and he would have needed my help with or without the marriage. And I do love him even though things are difficult,” she pointed out earnestly. “I’m not put off by marriage because he has a drinking problem. Mum just always regretted letting him talk her into making me legitimate, leaving her trapped when she wanted to marry the man she really loved. It made me realize you need more reason to marry than a baby on the way. You need deep feelings for the other person.”
His gaze flicked from hers, but not before she glimpsed something like defeat in his blue eyes. Regret. His head shook in subtle dismissive negation—some inner conclusion of dismayed resignation.
A thin sheet of icy horror formed around her heart as she realized she had admitted to wanting to marry for love. There was no shame in it, but she dropped her gaze, appalled that he had read the longing in her and now his hand was a balled up fist of resistance on the tabletop. Everything in his still, hardened demeanor projected that he couldn’t do it. Would never love her.
Rowan hadn’t imagined he loved her, but confronting the fact that he considered it impossible had her biting back a gasp of humiliation. She blinked hard to push back tears of hurt.
The waiter arrived with their entrées, providing a much needed distraction as he poured coffee and enquired after their needs. At the same time more diners decided to brave the gusting war of spring and winter breezes, taking a table nearby.
They finished their meal in silence.
* * *
Nic had locked up when they’d left, so Rowan dug her key from her purse as they came off the lawn from the helicopter pad. She supposed even this quaint touch that her mother had insisted upon—a real key—would go the way of the dodo in whatever high-tech mansion Nic had built.
They stepped into the foyer and both let out a sigh of decompression. Rowan quirked a smile, but the key in her hand dampened her ironic amusement. The jagged little teeth might as well be sawing a circle around her heart. She rubbed her thumb across the sharp peaks, then worked the key off its ring before she lost her nerve.
“What’s this?” Nic asked as she left it on the hall table and started up the stairs.
He stood below her, offering her a height advantage she never usually had over him. His thick hair was spiked up in tufts by the wind they’d left outside. She itched to lean down and smooth it.
“I won’t need it after I leave.” She had to leave. She accepted that now. She looked up the stairs, her mind already jumping back into sorting her mother’s things. Better that than hanging on to adolescent dreams that could never come true. Nic would never love her. She even understood why he was incapable of it. It was time to move on, no matter how hard and scary.
“Rowan.”
His tone stopped her, commanding yet not entirely steady. Height disadvantage or not, he still had the benefit of innate power and arrogance. He still managed to take her breath away with the proud angling of his head. But an uncharacteristic hesitancy in his expression caused her to tense instinctively.
“If you were pregnant...” he began.
She didn’t want this conversation, and tightened her lips to tell him so, but then she realized what he was intimating. She flicked her gaze from the muscle that ticked in his cheek to the bronze key he pinched in his sure fingers.
She felt the blood leave her face. Light-headed, she clung to the rail, trying to hang on to her composure, but it was too cruel of him to hinge keeping her home on something completely impossible.
“If I’m pregnant...what?” Despair gave way to pained affront. The high-ceilinged entryway exaggerated the quaver in her voice with a hollow echo. “I can have Rosedale as a push present? I’m not pregnant, okay? I can’t get pregnant!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE KEY IN NIC’S fist was hot as a bullet he’d snatched from the air to prevent it lodging in his chest. It was circling from another direction to make a precise hit anyway. His upper body was one hard ache of pressure as Rowan ran up the stairs.
He took a step, helpless to call her back when words were backed up in his throat behind shock. His foot caught on their bags and he stumbled. His legs became rubber, clumsy, and started to give out. He sank onto the stairs, elbows on his knees, and pressed the knuckles of his hard fists into his aching eye sockets.
Had he really let himself think it could happen? He was a fool! Of course it wasn’t meant to be if it was for him. His insides knotted in a tangle of sick disillusionment.
He swallowed, his chest so hollow it felt like a gaping wound had been cleaved into it. His reaction was as much a sucker punch as the news. When had he started to care?
He hurt for Rowan. For a second, as her defenses had fallen away and she had let him see to the bottom of her soul, she’d revealed such a rend in her soft heart...
The urge to go after her drummed in him. But what could he do about something as absolute and irreparable as infertility?
He rubbed his numb face, dragging at the torn edges of his control. He was fine with not getting the things that meant something to others. Mostly fine. He knew how to live with it. But it gutted him that Rowan, who openly yearned for a proper family, should be denied something that was such a perfect fit for her. He wished...
But he knew better than to wish.