“I wanted to prove to him that given the same arena I could do better than he did. But I was valuable, perhaps.”
“He was proud of you.”
He didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything. He had never talked about these things with anyone else. But no one had ever asked him these sorts of questions.
She was interesting. The way she spoke about her work. The way she wanted to know about his.
He had branded her as something frivolous. Pointless. Because it had been convenient for him to do so, and yet on some level he must’ve known there was more to her. More to her than he had wanted to see. Than he had wanted to acknowledge. But it felt so much simpler to cast everyone in black and white, as he did his level best to keep his mother from imploding. It was easier to see things the way that she did. The appropriate people as villains.
And certainly not…
He certainly couldn’t afford to be anyone else’s savior.
That night that he had stopped Heather’s sexual encounter with that man, he had been filled with such a deep, profound sense of rage and possessiveness. It had been nearly overwhelming, and he had no more room in him for that. Anger was easy. Wanting to protect less so.
It had a cost. Such an intense cost.
“Don’t worry about your mother,” she said, kissing him on the shoulder. The simple affectionate gesture nearly took his breath away.
“Sadly, Heather,” he said, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling. “I have been doing nothing but worrying about her for the last twenty years. I’m not going to stop just because you told me to.”
“But what if you did?” she whispered.
And without giving it too much thought, he fell asleep with a woman beside him.
CHAPTER TEN
She would belying if she said she wasn’t nervous about meeting with Romeo’s mom. She was obviously very important to him, and a huge part of their issues came from the fact that the divorce had hurt her so much. And Heather had been lumped up into the grouping of very bad things that had caused trauma.
She figured it was in her best interest to dress demurely so as not to draw attention to herself or bring up any feelings about her being some kind of seductress who had trapped Romeo into this. “I have trapped you into marriage, though,” she said cheerfully as they got into his car and began to drive toward his mother’s home.
“Have you?”
“Yes. The ultimatum that I issued you was quite firm.”
“I truly hate to be the one to tell you this, but you effectively couldn’t trap me if you wanted to. You might have inherited a sizable fortune from my father, which we split, but don’t forget I was already in possession of my own.”
That made her bristle. “What are you saying?”
“You don’t have as much power over me as you think.”
She gazed at the Austrian countryside, which was beautiful, particularly in comparison to how annoyed she felt just at the moment.
“But you agreed.”
“Yes. Because I think it’s the best thing. I don’t think that our child should experience the difficulties that either of us did. And I think that it’s best, for many reasons, for the two of us to be married. But if I had decided not to marry you, I would never have surrendered full custody just because you said that was my only option.”
“That is really annoying.”
“Why? Why does it matter, when you got your way?”
“It matters because…” Well, now she felt manipulated.
“You wanted to think that you got something on your own?”
“Maybe. Or like maybe I was compelling.”
“You are compelling, Heather Gray. If you weren’t, I wouldn’t have gotten you pregnant in the first place.”
