The Wife He Couldn't Forget

“I got your message,” he said unnecessarily as he sat down opposite her at the table. “What do you want?”

“I’m glad you came. I didn’t want to tell you this in a message.”

“For two months you’ve held things back from me and now you want to tell me something? What is it?” he asked, not making any effort to keep the irritation out of his voice.

He wasn’t prepared for what came next.

“I’m pregnant.”

He stared at her in shock. Pregnant? Silence grew between them. A waitress came over to take their order, and he waved her away. Finally he found his tongue.

“What do you mean, pregnant?”

“What it usually means.” Olivia gave him a smile, no more than a twist of her lips really and certainly not the fulsome smile he was used to seeing on her face. It made him look at her more sharply and note the dark bruises of sleeplessness beneath her eyes and the pale cast of her skin. Concern for her swelled inside him, but he ruthlessly quashed it. It shouldn’t matter to him if she slept or ate or looked after herself. Unless what she’d just told him was true.

“We’re having a baby,” she affirmed.

Every cell in his body rejected the words. A baby. No. Not again. Never again. They’d used protection. Even in his amnesiac state he’d followed the protocol he’d instigated after Parker’s birth.

“But how—?”

“The condoms we used were expired,” she said by way of explanation, her eyes not leaving his face for a second.

“Did you know that before we used them?”

“No! Of course I didn’t. I’d forgotten all about them, to be honest. You must have bought them well before...” Her voice trailed off.

Before Parker died. And, yes, their purchase had been made well before then. There had been little intimacy between him and Olivia during Parker’s last year. Their son had been plagued with virtually every cold and flu known to man after he began preschool and was exposed to germs from the other children. Olivia had said his immune system would strengthen eventually. However, it had meant she’d spent more nights curled up in bed with Parker, trying to soothe him back to sleep, than she had with Xander. Their lovemaking had become sporadic at best as she’d poured all her care into nursing Parker to health.

Now she was pregnant again. An icy shaft of trepidation sliced through him. What on earth did she expect from him? Was she trying to manipulate him again? She said she hadn’t known the condoms were expired, but could he believe her? Maybe she’d planned to become pregnant all along, making the decision without him just like she had the first time. Binding him to her through an innocent baby when everything else she’d tried had failed, perhaps?

“You’re telling me you didn’t do this deliberately?”

“Of course I am. I swear I’m telling you the truth,” she said, her voice raising slightly and making heads turn toward them. She continued, “If you’ll remember, you were the one to initiate things the first time we—”

“I remember,” he said, cutting across the words she’d been about to say.

Words that all too easily painted vivid memories in his mind of every single exquisite moment they’d spent together. The sounds she’d made when they made love. The scent of her body. The feel of her as she climaxed around him and as he spent himself inside her. The intense sense of belonging as they came back down to earth and fell asleep in each other’s arms. He didn’t want to remember. He couldn’t risk allowing himself to feel.

“Is this why you haven’t signed the papers yet?” he demanded.

“No! To be honest with you, I forgot all about them.”

“Honest? That’s a novelty for you these days, isn’t it?” At Olivia’s shocked expression he huffed out a sigh. “I’m sorry—that was uncalled for.”

His mind scattered in a hundred different directions, but everything that passed through his thoughts settled back on one thing. Olivia was pregnant, and, if she was to be believed, they were equally responsible for this situation. The knowledge was a bitter pill to swallow. Either way he looked at it, another child of his would be on this earth, which meant he had responsibilities to that child. Responsibilities he had promised himself he’d never bear again.

Xander abruptly pushed his chair back from the table and stood. “Thank you for the information,” he said and turned to go.

He was forced to halt in his steps when he felt Olivia’s hand catch him on the arm.

“Xander, stay—please. We have to talk about this.” Her voice rose again, attracting the same attention as before.