‘Play?’ he asked, an arched eyebrow raised in a challenge.
‘You know what I mean,’ she dismissed.
‘No, I don’t,’ he said, leaning back from the breakfast bar. ‘The Maria I knew would never have kept such a secret to herself.’
‘The Maria you knew grew up after you left,’ she shot back, wishing his gaze wasn’t so unfathomable. ‘She stopped making assumptions long ago, so yes. Before I even consider agreeing to your proposal, I want to know what marriage looks like to you.’
She saw the muscle flex in his jaw, knew that his silence was not mutinous, nor malicious. He was struggling to formulate his words in that way that he sometimes did when his emotions became too much. The realisation, a knowing left over from a time when they had been close, when she had thought that perhaps they loved each other, hit her hard and took her own frantic pulse rate down a little. Because this wasn’t easy for him. And somehow that made it less painful for her.
‘I will not have our child growing up like you—watching your mother stand in silence while her husband flaunts his affairs for all and sundry,’ he announced, the verbal blow striking a bullseye. It had been that silence, that mute acceptance of the most awful carelessness that had driven Maria almost entirely through her life, determined never to be that person, never to let another person turn her into astatue, with no other purpose than to stand there and look pretty.
‘Nor shall it grow up like me,’ he continued, cutting into her thoughts, and stopping himself before he could describe a childhood that she already knew. It had never been a secret that his mother had been forced to sell herself on the streets after his father abandoned them the day Micha was born. Perhaps, she thought for the first time, it should have been. Perhaps his shame would have been easier to bear—not that she believed for even a second that heshouldhave been ashamed.
How on earth were they—two broken people—supposed to raise something so pure, so innocent and so utterly dependent on them? When they hated each other.
But you don’t. You don’t hate him.
She pushed her inner voice down where she couldn’t hear it any more.
‘What did you mean about my mother?’ she asked, wanting to know, needing him to be clear.
He frowned, the slash of his brow dark over his eyes.
‘Affairs?’ she forced herself to ask.
It was clear that Micha wanted a traditional marriage, but…
‘There will be no affairs, Maria.’
His words reverberated in the room with his vehemence.
‘I—’
‘So that there is no confusion, after our marriage you, and our child, will come to live with me. We will live together until our child is eighteen. We will appear united and very much in love to every single person that knows us. Family, colleagues, the journalists that swarm this family like wasps, even the parents of our child’s friends. The entire world will envy our marriage, Maria. So there will be no affairs. And before you can rage in accusation that I would have any different role in this marriage, I will never share my bed with another woman while my ring is on your finger.’
Maria scoffed.
‘I’m not a savage, Maria. I can control myself.’
‘For eighteen years?’
‘Yes.’
There was no compromise in his response. No room for her to question or doubt. He meant every word he said.
Her phone on the countertop vibrated, causing it to jump a little across the smooth marble.
And yet Micha didn’t take his eyes off her.
The phone continued to ring, completely ignorant of the battle of wills that was happening around it.
This marriage? Thiskindof marriage? It was everything she’d never wanted for herself. Everything she’d spent her entire life trying to avoid. But for her child? For the security, the legitimacy, the protection, he could offer them? There wasn’t even a single moment’s hesitation.
She nodded in agreement.
‘Okay,’ he said, his gaze flicking across to her phone. He picked it up and swiped the screen to accept the call, as if he had the damn right.
‘Ivy? What are you and your husband doing on Saturday?’ he asked and just like that, Maria’s life changedagain.
