He’d run from that all his life, until he’d needed to run to it. And now he was embracing it. Along with his fury. She should have felt the same way. She shouldn’t have been able to go through with it—as he hadn’t been able to allow it.
She hadn’t, and he was angry about that.
But he had her now. And no matter how angry he was now, he wouldn’t let her go.
Not ever.
He hauled them both into the boat, starting up the motor and moving them away from the coastline as quickly as possible.
“Are youinsane?” she sputtered, her white dress in tatters, her hair a wreck.
“Yes,” he said.
“You could’ve killed us both.”
“But I didn’t.”
“You could have. You could have… And the baby.”
He froze. “The baby?”
“That’s why you came for me, isn’t it?”
“What baby, Emerald?”
She was waxen already, utterly pale, but all the remaining color flooded away from her face as she stared at him. “You didn’t know?”
“No. I didn’t fucking know. I still don’t. Tell me. Now.”
“I… Andrei, I’m pregnant.”
Rage. Rage and this crushing, relentless pain in his chest was all he knew.
She was pregnant with his baby, and she had been planning on marrying Lucian? Had been planning to give not just herself, but his child to another man.
It changed everything.
This had been about them. He’d been wounded that she’d been able to let it go so far, that she had kept walking toward this inevitability while he had broken.
In the stillness of the night, the ghost of his father had visited him. In the form of his own disgust. And it demanded to know why any son of the Ardelean crime family would behave with such cowardice. Would put the greater good over what he wanted. Needed. Deserved.
But now things had taken an even darker turn. Her willingness to marry another, and now the realization that she’d been trying to pass his child off as another man’s, made a mockery of them. Everything they were. Everything they had ever been.
He had been the one to go back on his word by taking her, by not allowing her to do what she felt was right, was her duty. And he had felt weak for that. But knowing now that she was pregnant with his child, knowing now that she had intended to pass that child off as belonging to another man, all of his illusions, and his guilt, shattered.
“I signed an agreement.”
“When did you find out?” The salt air was in his face, the spray of the sea lapping up against the boat, and it was not fear he felt now. Rage.
“I…” Her teeth were chattering, and had he been in a different mood, had it been a different moment in time, he would have done everything he could to keep her warm.
But everything had changed in the space of a breath. From the time they had gone beneath the surface, to when they had come up. Nothing was the same, and it never would be again.
“Did you even go to bed with me, say goodbye to me, knowing that you were pregnant with my child, withholding this information from me?”
“No,” she protested. “Andrei, of course I didn’t know. I found out this morning. I realized that I never had my… I realized that I was late. Ever since the yacht, and I hadn’t thought about it because everything has been mixed up since that day. I didn’t know. I had very little time to figure out what I was going to do. You were gone.”
“I would have answered your call.”
