chapter TEN
STEPHEN could hear Colette behind him as she closed Emma’s door with a soft click. Uncomfortable with the frustrated desire he always, always felt for her, he strode down the muffled carpet of the hall toward the staircase. Though he’d been able to keep himself in check these past few weeks, doing so had proven to be a special kind of hell.
No torture the Whitfield family had ever devised came close to the hours he’d spent with Colette without touching her. Without kissing her.
“Where’d you learn to interact with children?” she asked, stopping a couple of treads above the base of the staircase.
He turned to find her face at eye level with his, far closer than he’d anticipated. A few strands of hair had slipped their moorings to curl around her jaw, and the urge to tuck them back into the neat coil at her nape roared through him with the force of a hurricane.
Knowing that he didn’t dare touch her sent a sharp spike of irritation through his gut and sharpened his tone. “Why? Because a man like me shouldn’t know the first thing about how to behave around his own daughter?”
Her eyes widened in surprise while her skin blushed a soft, delectable pink. “I didn’t mean it that way,” she protested.
Feeling unreasonable, and not caring, he bit out, “No? Then how did you mean it, exactly?”
“Don’t bark at me for being curious, Stephen.” Her hand had tightened against the banister, her knuckles and fingertips white even though her voice remained calm. Oh, yes. That was his Colette. Eternally in control and calm. It made him want to shout at her, to shake her, to kiss her until ragged emotions made her hands and voice and flesh tremble. “Some men can be uncomfortable around kids,” she continued, unaware of the firestorm of longing, of pure, unadulterated want simmering beneath the surface of his skin. “And the world knows that caring for a child is hardly innate for a man who spends all his time—”
“I’m not that kind of man,” he snapped.
Though she stiffened, she didn’t back down. “It still doesn’t mean you’ve had experience with children.”
He glared at her for a moment, before biting out, “My mum’s family is big. Dozens of cousins all over the place, and most of them with a couple of kids apiece. Between holidays and Sunday dinners spent tending children while the adults gossiped, I probably have more experience than you.”
She stared at him, her mouth slightly parted and her eyes wide with shock.
“What?” he sneered. “Not convinced? Shall I tell you about all the nappies I changed, the bottles I heated, the—?”
“No,” she rushed to say. “It’s just … I have a hard time picturing you as the family nanny.”
“Only because you can’t see beyond your own prejudices,” he ground out.
“I don’t—”
“You do. You look at me and see a playboy.” Defensiveness and righteous anger flared hot within his chest. “A selfish, self-centered man incapable of commitment or fatherhood.”
“No,” she protested. “I don’t. Not anymore. I mean, I did at first, but I’m beginning to realize I never really knew you at all.”
“And whose fault is that?” he asked.
When she stared at him, stunned and silent, he turned on his heel and strode toward the wing that housed his master suite.
“Certainly not mine!” she finally blurted, clambering down the remaining steps and hurrying after him. “You’re the one who never told me anything about yourself beyond the most superficial of details!”
He stopped at the door to his bedroom, turning to face her with fury tightening his lungs. “Would you have been interested if I had?”
She stiffened as if he’d slapped her. “How can you even ask such a thing?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He leaned over her until she arched her neck to maintain the distance between them. He could see the fragile beat of the pulse in the side of her neck, the dilated pupils of her wide, distressed eyes. Knowing he’d disconcerted her made him viciously, irrationally glad. “It could be that talk about your past was strictly off-limits,” he reminded her in a low, menacing voice. “Or have you conveniently forgotten about your demand for no commitments, no strings, and no questions?”
She pressed her mouth shut to conceal its faint hint of trembling.
“You wanted nothing beyond hours of mind-altering sex and culinary abandon,” he continued cruelly. “Which I provided. Without complaint.”
A crimson blush streaked northward from her neck. “We didn’t share a child then.”
The air between them heated with his frustration, his banked arousal, and an anger he didn’t dare analyze. “Are you telling me that now we have Emma you’re suddenly going to tell me all about your past and answer all of my questions?”
Hazel eyes flared in alarm before she shuttered them behind a sweep of lashes. “Is that what you want?”
I want a hell of a lot more than that, sweet. “You can’t even stomach the idea of kissing me again. Why would I be foolish enough to think you’ll answer questions you’d never answer before?”
“Because it’s your right to know about the mother of your child.” She swallowed, her hazel eyes filled with a dizzying combination of guilt and fear. “You deserve to ask any question you want, no matter how difficult it might prove for me to answer.”
Her response slugged him like a hammer to the chest. “You don’t mean that,” he finally said. “I do.”
He stared at her without speaking for several long seconds, her offer hanging suspended between them like a white flag of truce when he’d expected nothing but more walls and more weapons.
“Do you still see them?” she ventured, breaking the silence. “The cousins you tended?”
His jaw bunched and he averted his eyes, torn between the dual desires to glean information about Colette and keep the details of his own past buried. “No,” he said flatly.
“No?” She dipped to study his downturned face. “Why not?”
He lifted his chin and answered, his face and voice carefully blank. “After my parents died, my father’s family sent me to boarding school. It didn’t provide much opportunity for visiting.” And the rare days that were allocated for family visits had been, for him at least, achingly empty. He still remembered how alone and lost he’d felt, how he’d waited in the receiving room with his heart in his throat while he watched happy boys reunite with their adoring families. He remembered every Friday, when the post delivered gifts and cookies and newsy letters from home to everyone but him. Separate, forgotten and abandoned, he’d sworn never to need anyone ever again.
“Your parents died?” Colette asked, ripping his thoughts back to the present. “How? What happened?”
He’d spare her the details of his mother’s death and his father’s subsequent despair. “It was an accident.”
She reached for his taut forearm, her cool fingers like a brand upon his flesh. “I’m so sorry, Stephen. No one should have to endure a loss like that when they’re a child.”
He looked at her hand without moving. “I survived,” he said in an even tone, while deep, deep within the small boy he’d kept hidden from the world howled out his agreement.
“Of course you did,” she rushed to assure him. “How old were you?”
“Eleven.”
Her grip upon his arm tightened. “And your family sent you to boarding school? Alone?”
“Oh, there were plenty of Whitfield cousins there,” he said tightly, remembering anew the myriad tortures the more acceptable Whitfields had chosen to inflict upon him. “They went out of their way to make me feel … welcome.”
“What did they do to you?” she whispered.
He smiled, concealing the pain and resentment and buried hurt he refused to feel anymore. “Besides hate me and accuse me of stealing what they felt belonged to them? Nothing worth mentioning.”
“Nothing worth mentioning?” she gasped in outrage. “You were eleven!”
“True. But age doesn’t really matter when money’s involved, does it?” he asked as he disengaged his arm from her fingers.
“Money?” Her brow pleated with confusion and she stepped toward him, reaching for his withdrawn wrist. “Are you talking about the Whitfield Grand?”
For the first time ever, he avoided her touch. The note of concern in her voice was stinging the raw wounds of his past. “Of course. I own half the family hotel and they think I shouldn’t own any of it at all.”
“But why wouldn’t you be entitled to your share? You’re a Whitfield just as much as your cousins!”
“You’d certainly think so, wouldn’t you?” he said.
When she looked at him as if she wanted to pry deeper, to delve beneath the layers of hatred and revenge he’d carried for twenty-five years, he pushed his door open and stepped into his master suite, leaving her to follow if she dared.
Mustering her courage, Colette stepped in after him, suddenly feeling like an interloper in the navy and brown space that held not a hint of feminine softness. Though he’d answered every one of her questions, she couldn’t shake the impression that he was hiding something from her. It felt as if, despite his claims, he didn’t want her peering beneath his surface to the hidden hurts he kept locked away from the world. Hurts she knew they had to discuss if they were ever to move forward as parents for Emma.
“Is that why they didn’t let you see your mother’s family anymore? Because they were worried about the influence they might have over you?”
His eyes flashed, a lightning strike of vulnerability that vanished as quickly as it appeared. “The O’Fallons didn’t want anything to do with the Whitfields after my mother died.” His jaw flexed. “Especially me.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense.” She shook her head, her heart pinching at the image of Stephen abandoned and alone. “You were all they had left of your mother and I’m sure they loved you. There had to have been some sort of misunderstanding. Have you tried contacting any of them?”
“No. And I won’t.” He turned his back on her and stalked farther into the room.
Her breath caught in her lungs, fear and pity and an urge to soothe him warring within her chest. No wonder he was so driven to create a family for Emma. He didn’t want his daughter to feel alone the way he had.
A fresh wave of guilt over the time with Emma she’d stolen from him brought a lump to her throat. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Emma before.” He went utterly still.
“It was wrong of me to keep her from you the way I did.”
Slowly, he turned to face her, his gaze delving into hers. “Why the change of opinion?”
She swallowed. “I didn’t think you’d want her. I was wrong.”
“Why on earth wouldn’t a father want his own child?”
Opening a window to her past that she’d always kept sealed shut terrified her, but she could no longer rationalize keeping her past buried. Stephen deserved to know why she’d kept Emma from him. She couldn’t expect him to trust her if she wasn’t willing to trust him in turn. So she hauled in a deep breath and confessed the truth that had shaped her entire life.
“My father didn’t want me,” she said. Before she could see pity on his face, she rushed to finish. “And, because of that, I believed you’d react the same way he did. I was wrong and I’m sorry.” Having divulged the reason for her reticence, she turned on her heel and strode back the way she’d come.
He stopped her withdrawal with a firm hand upon her elbow. Slowly, inexorably, he circled her until he faced her. “Your father didn’t want you?”
She forced herself to meet his eyes, feigning a strength she didn’t feel while her throat worked with the confession. “I was a burden he didn’t want, and the only reason he and my mother married.”
A hint of anger stole across his features. “Surely they didn’t tell you that?”
“They didn’t have to. They were miserable, and wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t been born.”
His nostrils flared while he regarded her in silence. After a taut moment, he asked, “How old were you when you figured this out?”
“I overheard them arguing about me when I was eight.”
Dropping his gaze to her mouth, he inhaled. Exhaled. And then raised his eyes back to hers. “It wasn’t your fault,” he told her fiercely.
Colette knotted her hands at her sides, hating the fact that they were trembling. Hating the fact that she felt so exposed. “My mother said as much, but I knew it was just to keep from hurting my feelings. I wasn’t blind. I knew my father hated her for getting pregnant and forcing him into marriage.”
The back of her nose burned as she remembered the way she’d tried so hard to be the perfect daughter, her hair neatly braided and her skinned knees hidden behind tight white socks. She’d wanted a daddy who loved her so badly.
“I knew he hated me.” She blinked back the stupid, stupid film of tears that had gathered and lifted her chin as if her father’s rejection no longer bothered her. “And I never wanted Emma to feel that way. I was afraid if you knew about her, you’d—”
“I’d never reject Emma.”
“But how could I have known that? My father wasn’t nearly the playboy you are—were—and he hated the obligation we forced on him. He hated that my mother and I stripped him of his future. He died a depressed, miserable man because of it. Because of me.”
“You ever think it was your father who was at fault for not crafting a better future out of the choice he made?”
“He didn’t make the choice,” she insisted. “My mother and I foisted it upon him.”
“I’m pretty sure you had nothing to do with your father’s decision to sleep with your mother,” he observed dryly.
She bit her lip and cast her gaze toward her shoes. “Even so, I was the unfortunate result.”
“Don’t say that,” he ordered, tipping her face back up. Anger radiated from his expression. “Ever. They were damn lucky to have you.”
She hadn’t relied on a man to validate her worth for a long, long time. And having Stephen do so made her feel off balance, as if the bedrock upon which she’d built her life had suddenly turned to quicksand. “I don’t want your pity,” she said, stepping back to create more space between them. “I only told you this because I wanted you to understand my reluctance to tell you about Emma.”
His eyes flashed. “I would never hurt our daughter.” He stepped closer, lifting both hands to her shoulders and forcing her to meet his gaze. “No matter what happens, I will never make her feel that I resent her for being born.”
She blinked, forcing her voice to remain steady. “Thank you for saying that.”
“I didn’t just say it. I meant it. Emma’s my daughter, Colette. Mine. And I never intentionally wound what’s mine.”
She remained silent as her throat thickened, the icy barriers she’d nurtured for so long threatening to crack. To thaw.
His grip on her shoulders gentled. Turned into a subtle caress as his thumbs brushed over the knobs of flesh and bone. “Do you believe me?” he asked quietly.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“And just because I demanded marriage when I found out about Emma, it doesn’t mean we’d be unhappy the way your parents were.”
“We would be.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because you never would have asked to marry me if Emma weren’t in the picture.”
“How can you possibly know that?” “Don’t you?”
“No.” The word held an edge of finality she’d never heard from him before. “Neither of us does. Who’s to say what might have happened if you hadn’t conceived Emma? Maybe we would have gone together to Paris. Maybe instead of breaking things off with you I’d have decided I couldn’t live without you, child or no child.”
Confusion rioted in her chest, making it hard to breathe. “But you never—”
“My point is, you don’t know what might have developed had you not gotten pregnant. Nobody does. But looking backward instead of forward is getting us nowhere. We have Emma now, and we have to do what’s best for our child.”
“And you know what’s best?”
“I do.” His hands drifted up to the sides of her neck to cup her face. “Marry me, Colette.”
Her chest heated, dreaded warmth seeping through her limbs and her heart, unveiling the weak vulnerability she’d kept hidden for so long. “But how can a marriage without love be what’s best for our child?
“Do you think so little of our ability to make a marriage work without it?”
“How can I not? My father wasn’t a bad man. My mother wasn’t a bad woman. But they were miserable just the same because the foundation of love wasn’t there.”
“I would wager their misery had more to do with contempt and blame than with any lack of love.”
“Easy for you to say. You weren’t there.”
He stared at her for several long moments. “Do you respect me?”
Unwilling to lie, she swallowed and quietly admitted, “Yes.”
His thumbs grazed the ridge of her jaw, caressing the tip of her chin as he tilted her head back. “Admire me? Enjoy my company? Find me marginally attractive?”
The questions heated her like the kiss of flame, filling her with longing and fear. “You know I do.”
The press of his thumbs beneath her chin kept her from avoiding his eyes. “I’ve known successful marriages built on far less. Haven’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“While at the same time I can point to dozens of marriages supposedly built on love that deteriorated into horrible, messy, emotional train wrecks within six months.” When she might have countered his point, his fingers rose to cover the seam of her lips. “It’s respect, trust, and a willingness to compromise that build successful marriages. Not love. And you have to admit that things would be a lot less confusing for Emma if she had only one house, one home, and one unified parental front to contend with.”
Deep within, a small voice urged her to accept his logic, to claim whatever tiny piece of his life he was willing to share despite the risk to her wounded heart.
“It’ll be better for Emma if we’re together,” he said softly. “Can’t you see that?”
When she still didn’t answer, he leaned forward and dipped his head to hers. “Help me make a family for our daughter,” he murmured against her mouth. “Marry me.”
His lips were firm. Warm. And the tip of his tongue leisurely stroked her lips, as if he had all the time in the world to convince her to change her mind. A shudder of surrender ripped through her, eroding the walls she’d mortared together with hard won independence and salty tears.
“Say yes,” he urged.
A tremor started low, gathering speed as it worked its way up between her legs. And because it felt like he was giving her a choice, his proposal drawing heat from her toes to the straining tips of her breasts, her initial resistance wavered.
Could she agree to a marriage without love? Could she overlook the needs of her own damaged heart, her own pitiful, impossible desire to love and be loved, in order to make her child happy? Because, as awful as it was to admit, she knew if she refused him now it wouldn’t be because of Emma.
It would be because of her own fear.
She had the dizzying sensation of straddling the shifting fissure of an earthquake, not knowing which side to choose. Suspended in indecision, she withdrew enough to look at Stephen’s intent face, trying to read the future behind features that, until this point, could only be relied on for the here and now. Did she choose the security and safety of being always emotionally alone and separate, or did she choose Stephen and the dual pleasure and pain he was sure to bring?
“We can make it work, I promise,” he murmured as his mouth slowly returned to hers.