“You look like shit.”
God, he loved her voice, even when she used it to slap him with insults like a glove across the face. Opening his eyes slowly, he looked at his watch nonchalantly as though he hadn’t spent the last hour doing so, then glanced in her direction. “Thirty seconds to spare, Bennie. No one likes tardiness.”
“Especially me.” She gestured to the chair opposite him. “May I sit?”
That was remarkably polite, he thought suspiciously. Wary of a trap even as his heart leaped like a welcoming puppy at the sight of her, he nodded. The night away from him had refreshed her, which was galling. She looked rested, calm, and he hated how it occurred to him now that his presence in her life made her otherwise.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked politely.
“Better than you. Did you sleep at all?”
His laugh was cold, edgy. “Didn’t really have time, what with chasing your ghost around the club. Fear does strange things to a man, Bennie.”
“What were so you afraid of?” For once since his return, Violet seemed interested in engaging with him. The lack of makeup told him she wasn’t here to intentionally battle things out, and she’d chosen to wear casual clothes instead of her Domme armor—the cream sweater and black yoga pants resulted in a softer, gentler image than he was used to when it came to the love of his life.
“What do you think? You’ve spent the past ten days running from me, Violet. All I could think about was you tearing off into the night, disappearing into the city, beyond. Doing something… drastic and irreversible to…” His voice choked as his throat tightened with the enormity of what he was suggesting.
“Boudreaux, look at me.” She waited for him to meet her gaze, and when he did, it was direct and honest. “I’m sorry you foundout about a certain situation the way you did. That was unfair; I shouldn’t have added undue pressure on Tabitha, and you did have a right to be made aware of things before anyone else.”
“So why did you?”
She sighed. “Her confession was frustrating and infuriating, to be honest. Lately, I haven’t been emotionally stable, especially when it comes to my temper. I suppose I wanted to make her aware of the consequences of her actions without traumatizing her—she’s had enough fear, pain, and negativity hammered into her than she deserves.”
“So you threw a potential pregnancy in her face.”
“Sometimes we all make choices without considering how the outcome will affect others.”
Yeah, that was some good aim she had there, he thought ruefully. It gave him the opportunity to open the door to his decision two years ago, but he didn’t take it. Instead, he acknowledged her with a nod, and bided his time to swing back to it—he wanted this pregnancy mess spread out in front of them so they could deal with it first. “Do you know if… if there’s a baby?”
“No. Not yet. I’ll have to wait a couple weeks before I can take a test.”
A couple weeks. A simple, relatively short period of time in the grand scheme, yet an interminable wait. Wondering every day if his child was growing inside her, how much bigger it was than the day before, all the little details he’d never thought about before… he might be obsessed by the time she took that damn test.
He nodded, apprehensive about his next question, hating that he needed to ask it. “And if there is?”
At first, Violet didn’t respond. She lifted her hand as the waiter walked past their table and requested that the food be taken back to the kitchen and warmed up. When the guy eagerlypicked up the untouched plate and hurried away, she finally met Reaux’s eyes. “I don’t know.”
“It was the dream once,” he reminded her quietly.
“Yes,” she agreed slowly. “Once. Now I’m approaching my forties instead of diving into my thirties. I’m single, I’m a long way from everything I love and am familiar with. The father is a man I’ve resented for two damn years; my heart still hasn’t recovered from that particular betrayal, and I don’t know if bringing a child into this world when I’m not sure I can love it the way I should is the best idea.”
A fist squeezed his heart, threatening to rip it from his chest.
“Those are the cons,” Violet murmured. “On the pros side, I have a career which provides an excellent income, that allows me to choose my own schedule, and move wherever I want. Thanks to the arrangement here, I’ve got enough savings to see me through the latter end of a pregnancy and into maternity leave. If I stay here, there’s a support system in place to help; if not, well, there are plenty of single mothers who raise their children to become incredible people.”
Whatever he’d done in the past, the hurt he’d caused, Reaux wasn’t sure he deserved this level of hell.
“Abortion isn’t an option, Boudreaux,” she continued, so matter-of-factly he blinked several times before the statement sank into his tired brain. “I cannot, will not, punish a child for the sins of its father. Not when there are others desperate for a family and, God help me, not when some semblance of that dream still remains.”
Hope blossomed. Stupidly, impossibly, it sprouted from the ashes of a conversation that felt horribly like she was severing him from her life permanently.
“I want to knowwhy, Boudreaux. Why it took you ten years to reach the conclusion I wasn’t enough for you. Why you chose to break my heart the way you did instead of just ending thingsamicably. Why you used Frank to stalk me the past two years when you were the one who ruined us.”
Ashes, he thought, with embers still glowing hot. “I’ve already explained why.”
“Perhaps you did, but I was not willing to listen to excuses. I’m ready for the truth.”
It dawned on him that this was his last shot at getting through to her, at winning her back. It didn’t matter that his truth, his line in the sand, never wavered an inch; his survival in this stuttering relationship came down to making a statement that blew this clusterfuck open and laid it at her feet, naked and vulnerable.
