“Don’t come to London. Promise me. It’s not worth it.”
“You’re worth everything. Everything.”
She disconnected the call before she could sob, or scream, down the line.
He heardher at the front door, a muffled curse and the sound of fumbling, so he gathered she was swiping her key fob and not having success. He cut through the corridor quickly, opening the door inwards. “Elodie, you’re back.”
But her skin was pale, covered in a sheen of perspiration. While it was a warm day, the sun was low now, and she wasn’t over-dressed.
“Excuse me,” she said, moving past him quickly, towards the stairs.
“Can we talk?”
She glanced over her shoulder and said something inaudible, her mobile phone clutched tightly in her hand.
“Elodie?” He didn’t mean his voice to sound so sharp. He didn’t mean to sound angry with her. He wasn’t. He was angry with himself, the whole situation, and he couldn’t fathom why, let alone articulate it. But if they sat down and talked, looked into each other’s eyes, he knew the truth of their situation would wrap around them both, bringing calm to the storm he’d created with his marriage proposal.
“Can you give me a minute?” she muttered, but he heard her clear as a bell.
He stared after her retreating back, torn between following and doing as she’d asked. Ultimately, of course, he opted for the latter. He could have strong-armed Elodie into marriage from the beginning, except he hadn’t wanted to. Not necessarily because the tactic had been abhorrent to him, but because he hadn’t wanted to get married again. At any point, though, he could have pushed his hand, reminding her that he would fight for total custody of the baby unless she agreed to live with him. Marry him?
But he’d never wanted to force her to do anything that wasn’t right for her, and with regards to marriage, that felt particularlyimportant. He’d already fundamentally changed the direction of her life by getting her pregnant. Wasn’t that enough?
“Raf!”
It wasn’t just the volume of her cry, though that split through the house like a bomb siren. It was the tenor of her voice, the panic he heard, that had him breaking into a sprint, before he could even contemplate what was happening. He took the stairs two at a time, turned the corner to where he’d heard her voice—her room. Not his, he noted, in the back of his mind. But that didn’t matter.
“Elodie?”
She appeared at the door, her face even paler. “I’m bleeding, Raf,” she whispered, but she might as well have hammered the words into his skull. It was like a kaleidoscope of his past, his present, his fears, his trauma, all winding together, forming one awful, suffocating rope. But that thought was only a fraction of a second. His action was to reassure Elodie, who looked as though she were about to pass out.
“It’s okay,” he said, when he didn’t feel anything close to that. He picked her up more gently than he would a two-day old, lifting her against his chest and staring down at her heartbroken face with something shifting inside of him that was impossible to contain. “It’s okay,” he repeated, as he walked carefully down the stairs and towards the garage.
“It’s not okay. I shouldn’t have gone walking. I shouldn’t have left the house. I shouldn’t have?—,”
“Hey,” he squeezed her hip lightly. “This isn’t your fault.”
If anything, it was his. He shouldn’t have upset her. He shouldn’t have pushed her. God, he hadn’t been treating her with any consideration of the pregnancy. They’d made love, travelled, lived like two normal people. He hadn’t done enough to protect her.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, shaking her head, as tears fell from her eyes.
He didn’t want to hear her apology, he just wanted to get her to the hospital and one way or another, no matter what happened next, to be by her side to pick up the pieces from this.
CHAPTER 17
IT WAS THE MOST excruciating fifteen minutes of Elodie’s life. As Raul drove them through London, to the hospital, all she could think about was the little life inside of her that she’d loved so much. The little life that had burst into existence without any invitation, so determined to be born, to be a part of their world.
Their family.
Except, they weren’t a family.
And if anything happened to the baby, they’d be…nothing.
She would no longer be in his life, in his family’s life. She’d just be another woman in his past, someone he’d slept with and moved on from. The thought made her chest feel as though it were splitting open, an enormous chasm forming where her heart had once been.
But what kind of relationship did they have, anyway, if it was all predicated on the baby?
One of convenience, and nothing more. Just like she’d suggested—they’d be parents with benefits.
