Surprise Baby, Second Chance

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And suddenly he was planning to expand his firm to Cape Town.

How was he supposed to tell her all that?

‘Oh, look,’ she said softly, her gaze shifting to behind him. The pain had subsided from her face—had been replaced by wonder—tempting him to keep looking at her.

Dutifully—though reluctantly—he followed her gaze and saw that she was watching the rain. He didn’t know what she found so fascinating about it. Sure, it was coming down hard, fast and every now and then a flash of lightning would streak through it. But still, it looked like rain to him. Regular old rain.

And yet when he looked back to Rosa’s face he could have sworn she had just seen the first real unicorn.

She got up and walked in her beautiful gown to the glass doors, laying a hand on them as though somehow that would allow her to touch the rain. It was surprisingly tender, but he refuted that description almost immediately. What he was witnessing wasn’t tender. How could his wife watching the rain be tender?

But he couldn’t get the word out of his mind as she spent a few more minutes there. Then she walked to the light switch in the kitchen and turned it off. The entire room went dark and she murmured, ‘Just for a moment,’ before returning to her place at the door.

He still wasn’t sure what was so special about it. About watching the rain in the dark. But her reaction had cast a spell around him. And now he was walking towards her, stopping next to her and watching the rain pour from the sky in torrents.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a storm more beautiful,’ she said softly from beside him.

‘An exaggeration,’ he commented with a half-smile.

She laughed. Looked up at him with twinkling eyes. ‘Of course it is. But I like to think that I use my opportunities to exaggerate for effect. Is it working?’ she asked with a wink.

His smile widened and, though his heart was still broken from her leaving, and his mind was still lapping up every piece of information she’d given as to why, as they looked at each other, he was caught by her.

He told himself it was the part of him that wanted things to go back to the way they’d been before. The part that mourned because it was no longer an option. Not with how things had shifted between them. Not when that shift had confirmed that they were no longer the same people they’d been before she’d left.

And still he was caught by her.

By her brown eyes, and the twinkle that was slowly turning into something else as the seconds ticked by. By the angles of her face—some soft, some sharp, all beautiful.

He didn’t know why he still felt so drawn to the woman beside him when she wasn’t the woman he’d fallen in love with any more. Or was it himself he didn’t recognise? He’d spent the four months since she’d left racking his brain for answers about what had gone wrong. And what he’d come up with had forced him to see himself in a new light. A dim one that made him prickly because it spoke of things he’d ignored for most of his life.

‘Why do you still make me feel like this?’

He hadn’t realised he’d spoken until her eyes widened. His gaze dipped to her mouth as she sucked her bottom lip between her teeth. It instantly had his body responding, and he took a step towards her—

And then suddenly there was a blast of cold air on him and Rosa was on the balcony in the rain.

‘Rosa! What are you doing?’

But she turned her back to him and was now opening her palms to the rain, spreading her fingers as though she wanted to catch the drops, but at the same time wanted them to fall through her fingers.

‘Rosa!’ he said again when she didn’t answer him. But it was no use. She didn’t give any indication that she’d heard him.

He cursed and then took off his shoes and stepped out onto the balcony with her, hissing out his breath when the ice-cold drops immediately drenched his skin.

Her eyes fluttered open when he stopped next to her, and he clearly saw the shock in them. ‘What are you doing?’

‘The same thing as you, apparently,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘Care to explain why we’re out getting soaked in the rain?’

‘I didn’t think you’d—’ She broke off, the expression on her face frustratingly appealing. Damn it. How was that possible when their lives were such a mess?

‘Rosa,’ he growled.

‘I wanted to get out of that room,’ she said. ‘I wanted to breathe in proper fresh air and not the stifling air in that room.’

‘That room is over one hundred and fifty square metres.’

‘You know that’s not what I meant,’ she snapped. ‘I just felt...trapped. With you. In there.’

‘You felt trapped with me,’ he repeated.

‘No, not like that,’ she said. ‘I felt... It’s just that room. And the fact that resisting you—resisting us—is so hard. Everything between us is suddenly so hard.’ She let out a sound that sounded suspiciously like a sob. ‘Mostly I feel trapped by what I did to us.’ She closed her eyes and when she opened them again he felt the pain there as acutely as if it were in his own body. ‘I threw what we had away.’

He took a step forward, the desire to take her into his arms, to comfort her compelling him. But then he stopped and told himself that he couldn’t comfort her when he didn’t know why. That he couldn’t comfort her when, by all rights, she was supposed to be comforting him.

She’d left him behind. She’d hurt him.

And yet there he was, outside, soaking wet in the rain because of her.

He moved back. Ignored the flash of hurt in her eyes.

‘We’re going to get sick if we stay out here,’ he said after a moment.

‘So go back inside,’ she mumbled miserably.

It was a stark reminder that she hadn’t asked him to come outside in the rain with her. And it would be logical to listen to her and go back inside.

Instead, he sighed and held his ground. Tried to commit the experience to memory. He suspected that some day he’d want—no, need—to remember this moment, however nonsensical it appeared to be.

To remember how she looked with her curls weighed down by the rainwater, the make-up she wore smudged dramatically on her face. How her one-of-a-kind dress clung to her beautiful body, reminding him of all that he’d had.

To remember how this—standing on a balcony while it poured with rain—spoke of her spirit. The passion, the spontaneity. How he’d never consider doing something like this and yet somehow he found it endearing.

Heaven only knew why he wanted to remember it. Because the feelings that accompanied it gutted him. The longing, the regret. The disappointment. Heaven only knew why he was thinking about how incredibly beautiful she was when empirical evidence should have made him think otherwise.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she demanded.

The misery, the pain in her voice had disappeared. Had been replaced with the passion he was used to.

‘Like what?’

‘Like that,’ she told him, without giving any more indication of what she meant. ‘You know what you’re doing.’

Was he that obvious? ‘I’m waiting for you to decide to go inside.’

She stepped closer to him. ‘No, you weren’t.’

‘You’ll get sick.’

‘And you won’t?’ He lifted his shoulders in response. She took another step forward. ‘You’re not helping me feel any less trapped than I already do, Aaron.’

Again, he shrugged. Again, she took a step forward.

‘And you’re not as unaffected by all this as you’re pretending.’

‘What are you doing?’ he asked, clasping her wrist just before her hand reached his face. Somehow, she’d closed the distance between them as she’d said her last words without him noticing.

‘I’m trying to show you that you’re not as aloof as you believe,’ she said, and dropped her hand with a triumphant smile. ‘I told you.’

He didn’t reply. He couldn’t do so without telling her that she was right—unaffected was the last thing he felt. But he showed her. Slid an arm around her waist and hauled her against him.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said, his voice slightly breathless, though measured, he thought. But he could be wrong. Hell, he could have been imitating the President of South Africa right then and he wouldn’t have known. ‘Maybe I was thinking about the first time we kissed.’ He dipped his head lower. ‘You remember.’

It wasn’t a question. And the way her breath quickened—the way her hand shook as she wiped the rain from her brow—confirmed it.

* * *

‘Aaron, wait!’

He turned back just in time to see Rosa running towards him. His stomach flipped as it always did when he saw her. And he steeled himself against it. He couldn’t fall into the attraction. He hadn’t for the last year. He could survive whatever she was running to tell him.

‘Would you give me a lift home?’ she asked breathlessly when she reached him. As she asked—as he nodded—a menacing boom sounded in the sky before rain began pouring down on them.

‘Here, get in,’ he said, starting towards the passenger’s side of the car. But she put a hand on his chest before he could make any progress, and he held his breath.

Control. Steel.

‘No,’ she replied tiredly. She leaned back against his car, dropping her hand and lifting her head to the sky. ‘No, this is exactly what I need.’

‘To be drenched in rain?’

She laughed huskily and need pierced him. ‘No. Just...a break.’

‘Hard day?’

‘Isn’t every day?’

She glanced back at the hospital where her mother was staying overnight. His mother had a chemo session but she’d left the book she’d wanted to read at home. And since Rosa’s mother—Liana’s usual companion—had started a new course of treatment, she wasn’t in Liana’s session to keep her company.

And because Liana knew Aaron would do anything to make what she was going through easier, she’d asked him to fetch her book.

‘But today was particularly hard,’ Rosa continued with a sigh. ‘I had to meet a deadline for a couple of designs. And my creativity hasn’t exactly been flowing over the last few months.’