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She met his gaze, hers suspiciously glossy. “Yes, we’re either very unlucky or wildly fortunate, depending on how you want to look at it.”
“How do you look at it?” he demanded.
“Wildly fortunate? How else? I’m thrilled to be having your baby even if this whole situation scares me to death.” She looked ready to shake apart.
Damn it. He would have noticed how fragile she was earlier if he hadn’t been working through his own turmoil. He did not want to tell her the plans he’d been making when he first arrived, but would she give him a choice?
Hoping to convince her of their best option yet, he pulled her into his arms, keeping their gazes connected even as their bodies pressed together in comfort. “What are you so frightened of?”
“A lot of things.”
“What scares you the most?”
“That I’ll agree to marry you, we’ll do the deed and then you’ll finally fall in love—with someone else.”
That was at the top of her fear factor list? He couldn’t have been more stunned if she said she was terrified of an alien invasion snatching their baby from her womb. “I am not going to fall in love with another woman.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“Yes, I can. Trust me, Piper. It is not even a possibility.” Of all the things he’d been considering over her week-long silence, that was not one of them.
“Do you think there is even a tiny chance that someday you might fall in love with me?” She buried her face against his chest and waited for his answer.
He wanted to lie; it would make things so much easier, but he could not. “If I was capable of falling in love, I already would have.”
“You really believe that?”
“Absolutely.”
Her head tilted back so he could see her glare. “Everyone is capable of love.”
“That is debatable.”
“Yes, I guess it is.” She grimaced. “There are certainly people that make a great case for that point of view anyway. I never considered you one of them, however.”
He could not help that. He shrugged. “What else scares you?”
“Oh, the usual, what will happen to my business, what if I lose the baby, what if I’m a terrible mother, am I going to turn into a whale, can I learn Greek?” Her litany of worries came out in a voice garbled by suppressed tears he did not know what to do about.
“You are going to marry me.” Why else would she need to learn Greek?
“How can I do anything else? I’ve looked at this situation from every side until I’m sick with it. If I don’t marry you, we’ll have to share custody and I’m not naive enough to think you are going to settle for being a weekend dad. You’ll fight for at least equal custody, if not majority custody.”
He was shocked. She realized that. “I…”
“Don’t try to deny it.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
Her lips trembled, but she blinked away the incipient moisture in her troubled blue eyes. “Good. We can’t build a marriage on lies.”
“I agree.”
“The custody issue wasn’t even the most distressing.”
“It was not?” What could have worried her more?
“No. It was the certainty that if I didn’t marry you, one day you would marry someone else and build a whole family with them.”
“The thought of me married to someone else bothers you?” he asked, just to clarify. She had left him without any sort of contact for almost a week after all.
“Of course it does. I love you.”
Something inside his chest stuttered. “You love me?”
“Yes.”
“Like a friend.” He attempted to qualify.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and shook her head, those terrifying tears of hers spilling over now. “No, not like a friend.”
“You won’t convince anyone you love me like a brother.” Maybe there was some special kind of love women left for the father of their children.
She shook her head again, a mysterious smile flirting with the edge of her lips, despite the sadness in her eyes. “Like the only man in my universe, like the other half of my heart, like the part of my soul that’s been missing my whole life but I didn’t know it.”
He would have staggered if they hadn’t been holding each other so tightly. “Is that how you loved Art?” He did not know why he asked except for as some form of penance, because one thing he never wanted to hear was that she had loved her ex like that.
“My feelings for Art weren’t even a shadow of what is in my heart for you.”
Could he believe that? And if he did, what difference did it make? His mother had loved him, too, but she’d walked away when a choice had to be made. “And yet, you did not call.”
“Loving you doesn’t make me perfect, or even perfectly unselfish. In fact, it makes me terribly self-focused because it makes me so vulnerable to being hurt by you. I want to marry you so I know you won’t—can’t—leave me.” The tears were in her voice now. “I want to be with you for the rest of my life and I wanted to be pregnant so bad, it was an ache in my gut that wouldn’t let me sleep at all the night before the doctor’s office called. I spent the darkest hours of that night in a perfect agony of guilt and unable to change my desires one jot even because of it. Did you hear all those I’s and me’s?”
“You wanted to carry my child?” he asked, ignoring self-flagellating guilt.
“Yes, more than anything. Which probably makes you wonder if I lost my patch on purpose, but I swear to you that I didn’t.”
“Of course not, but why did you want to?”
“Have you been listening to me at all? I knew a baby would tie you to me. Not because I’m not capable of being a single mother, but because you would not want me to be. I’m really ashamed of feeling that way, but I can’t change it. I never would have done it on purpose, but I won’t pretend I don’t feel wildly fortunate, either. Which probably should make you reconsider whether or not you should marry me.”
“So, if you wanted it so bad, why stay away so long?”
“Because when I got what I thought I wanted, I pictured a lifetime of being married to a man who is not in love with me and it terrified me.”
“You have been so unhappy these past months?”
“No.”
“Then, why should you be unhappy as my wife?” he demanded. Didn’t she see how illogical she was being?
“I’m hoping I won’t be.”
“I’ll make sure of it.” She was going to accuse him of arrogance again, but before she got a chance, he decided to offer his own truth. “I also wanted you to be pregnant and I am very glad you have decided to marry me.”
He could not resist the expression his words brought to her face, he kissed her and they spent several minutes lost in a very pleasant joint effort to leave an indelible mark on the other’s lips.
“Do you think our mutual selfishness negates itself?” she asked as if the answer really mattered to her.
“I think that as long as we are both pleased with the outcome, it does not matter.”
“I think maybe you’re right.” She looked up at him through her lashes. “Can we make love now?”
“Is it safe for the baby?”
“Very.”
“You asked?”
“Of course I did. I know what we’re like together and we are going to be together a lot now.”
He liked the sound of that, though a tiny voice inside warned him not to get too used to it as it could all be taken away. After all, she had cut herself off from him while making her decision, showing she did not need him even if she loved him. “You’ll move in with me?”
“This weekend.”
“We are not sleeping apart again meantime.”
“No, but I need to work and won’t have time to pack for the move until the weekend.”
“I’ll hire movers.”
“I’ll still need to be there to supervise.”
He could not argue that. “Do you want a big wedding?”
“No.” She gave him a nervous look complete with a bitten bottom lip. “I just want our families there.”
“I don’t have any family.”
“Oh, yes you do. I know your secrets now. Besides Neo, who is your brother in everything but genetics, there is your mother, her husband and your half siblings, et al. And I want them at our wedding.”
“Why?”
“Because someday, I think it’s going to matter to you that they were there. Besides, it will hurt your sister’s feelings if we don’t invite her.”
“Why do you think so?” Piper saw things so differently than he did; he didn’t always understand what made her say the things she did.
“She insisted on you meeting her children, didn’t she? She considers you her brother and she’d be devastated if she discovered you didn’t feel the same.”
“I do. For good, or ill, she is my sister.”
“It’s all to the good.”
“So you say.”
“I’m almost a mother. I’m practically an oracle now. It comes with the territory,” she said, tongue firmly in cheek.
And he laughed like he was supposed to before sweeping her into his arms. Making love sounded better than talking about his family. “What you are now, is mine.”
“You seem pretty pleased about that.” She didn’t sound too disappointed by the prospect herself.
“I am.” He carried her down the hall to his…to their bedroom.
“Are we really moving to Greece?” she asked between baby kisses smattered along his jaw.
“The island would be a good place to raise children.”
“Yes, but I’d marry you regardless.”
“You said you wanted it.”
“I do.” She grabbed his face, making him look her in the eye. “This isn’t a business transaction. I don’t love your money, or what it can buy for me. I love you, Zephyr.”
She said so, but she’d still left him and not called for almost a week. Maybe Zephyr did not understand love, but he did not think it should be so easy to hurt someone if you loved them. He wasn’t about to dwell on that now though, no more than he’d spent time pining over his mother’s defection once he’d learned he had to accept it. Piper had agreed to marry him, even though, technically, he had not asked.
That was all that mattered right now.
Without answering her assertion, Zephyr carried Piper into the bedroom and laid her on the bed oh, so carefully. She smiled up at him, but he put his finger up with the gesture to wait a minute.
He leaned over and grabbed the phone from beside the bed, then pressed two buttons.
“Memory” and “One” she would bet.
Someone picked up on the other end.
“Congratulate me. We are going to have a baby and Piper has agreed to marry me.” He smiled down at her while speaking into the phone.
Excited words in a definite masculine tone came through the headset, though they were too muffled to understand.
“Yes. I’ll call you with details tomorrow.”
Neo said something else.
“I will,” Zephyr replied. “Kalinichta.”
He hung up the phone.
“Neo?” she asked, just to be sure.
