With the blankets in bed around her hips, and her nightgown pulled up over her expanding bump, Heather said nothing as the doctor put gel on her stomach and pressed the Doppler against her skin.
“Are you finding out the sex?”
“Yes,” they both said.
But then he could think about nothing, because suddenly, there was the baby. And arm, and hand. A profile. He hadn’t expected to be able to recognize anything. But he did. There was truly a child growing inside of her. That they had created in a moment of desperation. The kind of heated lust that he had never felt at any other time in his life. The kind he had never felt for anyone else.
And the end result was this. It was miraculous. It grabbed him by the throat and held him hard. She was measuring things. Organs, and though he couldn’t ascertain what was normal, he recognized certain things. The child’s brain. The heart, fluttering there. He had known that they were having a baby. Of course he had. It was why they had done all of this. It was why they were together. But he hadn’t been able to imagine it. Concrete in a way it hadn’t been when it had only been a due date. A rounding of her curves.
“And there,” the doctor said. “Right there you can see. That is a baby boy.”
“Everything looks good. I don’t have any concerns based on this ultrasound. And I would say that your due date is right on.”
“Oh,” Heather said. “We both know exactly when the baby was conceived.”
“Not everyone does.”
“Indeed not,” Romeo said. He smiled, and tried to look filled with good humor, but there was something about this that was sitting like a weight on his chest. A son. He was having a son.
And look at how the relationship with his own father had been. Their father-and-son bond had been severed forever by Romeo’s inability to come to grips with his feelings. His father had died without Romeo ever reconciling with him. He had never… He had never managed to fix it. Because the truth was, all the toxicity that he had seen between his parents lived inside of him. Either learned or inherited, he didn’t know. Heather’s mother had been…
It seemed as if she loved in a superior fashion. Certainly she had loved his father in a way that his father had not been able to love Carla. In a way that his father had not been able to love Romeo. And in a way Romeo had certainly never managed to demonstrate affection.
All he knew was great and terrible pain. All he knew was all-consuming, desperate, painful.
And what would he do with this boy? He would need every ounce of strength and willpower. He would need… He would need greatly to expand his emotional bandwidth, which currently felt all taken up.
“Are you okay?” Heather asked after she had gotten out of bed, the doctor still taking the equipment and preparing it for transport again.
“Yes. Did you want to go and shop for the nursery?”
“Yes,” she said. “I very much do.”
“There is a shop in town that sells lovely, locally made furniture. Perhaps we can go to the village.”
“I would love that. It’s been so long since I’ve actually left the estate and spent any time here.”
She was looking at him like he was losing it, which was maybe fair. Maybe fair since he felt like he was coming apart inside. Even if there was no reason.
They took one of his father’s classic cars down to the village, and Heather stroked the dashboard. “He loved this.”
“He did,” Romeo said, his throat tightening. God. He hadn’t anticipated this. Hadn’t anticipated that there would be such a host of regrets connected to his own father as he faced down this new iteration of a father-son relationship. What had he thought? Of course there was always going to be a chance that it would be a son. He hadn’t thought that it would matter. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe he would feel equally unable to parent a daughter. But this felt like the potential to be a mirror. And he didn’t want to repeat the same steps that he had already walked with his father, only backward.
No. The very idea was punishing.
The village itself was charming. It always had been, though Romeo himself had never spent an immense amount of time there. His mother had always taken him with her when she had traveled. She had required him to be her emotional support, she had always said. Even when his parents had been married, when she had gone on location for photo shoots, she had always taken him. His youth had been nomadic, or it had been stagnant. Because when they were at the estate, generally, whatever was happening was between his parents. And not him.
He had only been cannon fodder.
He swallowed hard, trying to regain his focus. This was about his child. This was about Heather.
“Romeo, you don’t seem okay,” she said.
“I’m fine,” he growled. He was searching the narrow streets for a place to park, and nearly cursing everything before finding a place near the store that he was looking for.
They got out, and walked down the old, crooked lane into a stone building that housed handmade furniture made by local artisans.
And Heather was immediately bright and cheery and looking at rocking chairs, cradles and cribs. Toy boxes. So he was trying to pull himself out of the funk that he found himself in, because she was enjoying this. She’d—
