One Night to Risk It All

“We have to deal with it sometime.”

She had that feeling again. As if the pressure was too much. As if she was too full of...everything and as if there was no release on the horizon. As if she was drowning inside of herself.

“Not right now,” she said. She looked around and realized her clothes were in the living room. “Crap.”

She pulled the blankets off the bed and gathered them around her body, covering up her curves. “I’m going to bed,” she said.

“Fine.”

“And I’m not marrying you.”

“Yet,” he said, his blue eyes boring into hers. Oh, those eyes...

“Why does it matter to you? You don’t know anything about normal. You said yourself your experience with family is...is horrible, so why would you care?”

“Because I will give better than that for my child. I can’t fix anything that happened to me. I can’t...make it go away. But I can make sure no son or daughter of mine is exposed to what I was. That they’ll always know who their mother and father are. That we’ll both be there for them. If that’s not what you want...perhaps you should give custody of the child to me.”

Her entire body recoiled at the thought. “No. I would never give up my baby.”

“You said yourself you aren’t sure how you feel about it.”

“Because I’m afraid. Because I know what a huge responsibility it is! Because I don’t want to...raise a child who grows up like me and I don’t know how not to do that. How to protect a child without smothering them. How to guide them without making them feel like their choices are all bad....how to protect them when they genuinely are being an idiot. I don’t even know who I am, Alex. How am I supposed to deal with the life of another human being?”

“With me,” he said, his voice rough.

“No offense, but I’m not sure adding screwed up to screwed up is going to equal anything more than a mess.”

She turned and walked out of the room, her chest swollen, her body aching.

She didn’t know how to fix this. She didn’t know what she wanted. Right now she could hardly remember how to breathe.

CHAPTER NINE

IT HAD BEEN TWO WEEKS since Cannes. And two weeks since they’d last had sex. And Alex was pretty sure his head was going to explode, if parts farther south didn’t first.

He had no idea how to reach her. He’d never wanted to reach a woman before, not in any way beyond the physical. But Rachel... He wanted something more from her. Without having to give more than was comfortable. Surely that wasn’t completely unreasonable.

She didn’t want all he had to give anyway.

Not if she had any concept of what it might mean.

Hell, he wasn’t sure he had a complete concept of what it might mean and he didn’t aim to acquire one.

Still, she was staying with him, even if she was wandering around sniffing indignantly at him half of the time. She was hiding, and he knew it. But he found he didn’t care, so long as she was close. Barring the small blip of a headline about them cavorting in paradise, which had something to do with them being snapped together having dinner in Cannes, no one had picked up on what was actually happening, and considering the tenuous situation, that was fine with him.