His eyes lifted to hers, bore into them for a long beat. “You are not the only one with a messy past relationship,” he said. “After my divorce, I swore I’d never have kids. Never settle down. This is quite clearly the opposite of that.”
Surprise lashed through her. “You were married?”
He turned away. His expression, even in profile, taut. “Yes.”
“Wow.”
He angled his face to her, as if reading her like a book. “Wow?”
“You just really don’t seem like the marrying kind.”
His lips compressed into a grim half-smile. “I’m not.”
“But you were?”
The air between them was charged with something she hadn’t experienced before. A tension hummed and zipped between them, but it was emanating purely from Raf. This conversation was almost impossible for him; she could tell, yet she didn’t offer him an easy way out.
They were going to have a baby together. Whether or not they were capable of compromising and co-parenting would be determined by how well they got to know one another. Shecouldn’t let him off the hook, in the same way she knew she had to be more honest with him about her own past.
“I’ll go first, if you’d like,” she said, reaching out and putting a hand on his forearm, then wishing she hadn’t, when a surge of desire lashed her whole body. Inwardly, she trembled from head to toe. Working out how to conquer that reaction was going to be one of the most important things she could do to make this situation work.
He dipped his head once, his features so taut she thought that they could snap apart.
“I was with Aaron for a long time. Almost ten years,” she admitted. “He was my high school sweetheart, my first crush, first kiss, first everything.” She turned her attention back to the view, because it was easier to speak when she wasn’t looking at Raf. “I know now that it was a far from perfect relationship, but at the time, I thought we were happy enough. I thought we made sense. We’d always talked about getting married ‘one day’, having kids. I just didn’t realise that for him, it was more out of obligation than anything else.”
She didn’t see the way Raf’s brows furrowed together, nor hear the curse he smothered behind his lips.
“We got engaged forever ago. Honestly, I guess he felt sort of pressured into it. That wasn’t my intention, I just thought we were on the same page, working towards the same goals.”
“And you weren’t?”
She shook her head.
“Even when we were engaged, it took a long time to set the date. Again, I think I probably steamrollered him into that, by finding the venue I loved and locking in their availability. In hindsight, I guess he saw it as an ultimatum.”
“On the contrary, it sounds to me that you were acting on the assumption that he’d proposed because he wanted to marry you.”
“I thought the hold up was to do with money,” she agreed, nodding quickly. “His work was unreliable at best, so we were living off my income alone, and splashing out on a wedding was going to put a huge dent in our savings.” She bit into her lower lip, as she remembered how many conversations they’d had around budget and the expense of hosting even their closest family and friends for an evening.
“I worked extra hours, saved everything I could, and then, right after we’d sent out the invitations, he told me he couldn’t go through with it.”
Raf’s curse was not smothered this time. He let it slam into the air with a harshness that perfectly showed his feelings. She jerked her gaze to him in reaction to the strength of his response.
“What a piece of shit thing to do.”
It was such a perfect description of Aaron’s actions that she let out a bark of laughter. “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I thought, too.” She ran her fingers through the ends of her hair, that were damp from the pool water. “It was the worst timing. We couldn’t get refunds for our downpayments. Some vendors even made me pay off the full amount, which is why my savings were completely decimated, and I was starting from scratch when we met.”
“And why you didn’t know where your life was going,” he prompted.
“Right.” It felt a little like having all of the sun’s warmth poured into her, to hear him understand the predicament she’d faced. “One minute, everything—and I do meanevery detail—was firm in my mind. I’m actually a planner, you know? I like to have an idea of what I’m working towards. And then, bam. It was like a bomb went off and everything flew into the air and didn’t really come down again. Everyone has been sosorryfor me, and that just makes it worse. My mum didn’t stop crying for a full week, my dad was a mix of fury and confusion, and I spentthe first few days afterwards oscillating between shell shock and needing to comfort and reassure everyone.”
He shook his head with the same violent disgust he’d cursed with a moment earlier.
“The worst thing, though, was that we lived in a small town, soeveryoneknew. There was just no escaping it.”
“And what about him?” Raf demanded. “I presume the whole town recognized what a bullshit thing he did?”
“We just said it didn’t work out,” Elodie mumbled, her eyes not quite meeting his.
