glance he wouldn’t amount to much. I made the mistake of saying I thought she could do better and that was it.” Her hand went up in surrender. “She let that boy attach to her like a lamprey. I say ‘boy’ deliberately. Her first suitor wasn’t ready to act like a man, but you could see straight away he had some stones. You remind me of him, if you want the truth.”
Henri wasn’t sure how to take that, especially when Milly was taking his measure with such a shrewd eye. He didn’t like talking about Cinnia’s past, either. Not when it included men her mother knew so well.
Aside from Cinnia, his mother had rarely met any woman he’d slept with. Cinnia was the only woman he’d ever trusted enough. First he’d taken her to watch Ramon race a few times, then he’d included her in a dinner with Gili in Paris after she began staying with him there. They’d been seeing each other a full year before he’d taken her to Spain for his birthday, where she’d finally met Trella and his mother.
Those had been big steps for him and she hadn’t pressed him to meet and mingle with her family, either, disappearing for a dozen lunches and overnights to see them before she’d started inviting him to accompany her.
He’d been relieved, but now it irritated him that other men had come and gone from this kitchen. He’d had many lovers before Cinnia. Why did he care that she’d had two?
“James would have been a good match for her, but they met too young. He let her down,” Milly continued with a disheartened sigh. “She went to the opposite end of the spectrum with Avery. Saw him as safe, I suppose. Not so capable of breaking her heart.”
That was why he hated the thought of her previous lovers. No other women had impacted him the way Cinnia had, but those other men had been fixtures in her life. They’d shaped her. They affected how she reacted to him.
“Avery could barely spoon his own oatmeal. It was my fault she got in so deep with him, of course. ‘Mum thinks we should marry for money.’ I never said that.” She held up an admonishing finger, then waved it away. “But that doesn’t matter. She had to prove she’s a feminist who can support a man, like someone would pin her with a Victoria Cross for that. Oh, she wanted so desperately to make me eat my words about him. And how did that turn out? He was a complete waste of her time and stole a thick slice of her savings, didn’t he? Exactly as I called it.”
She lowered her nose to the book and gave another page a loud flip.
Everything she’d said had given him a fresh view of Cinnia. Not so much a new angle, as a deeper understanding of her edges and shadows. Was this why she was holding him off? He came on strong at the best of times and his children’s safety was a red line for him. She had to live with him.
He shouldn’t have lost his temper, though. That must have scared her.
At the same time, she must also know he wouldn’t let her down the way those other men had. He kept his promises.
You said when I was ready to start a family, you would let me go. Are you going to keep your word?
Of course.
The pit of his belly roiled.
“I have my opinions about you, too, Henri,” Milly told him without looking up. “Not all of you falls short so if my daughter decided to marry you, I would support her decision.” Her head came up and her mouth was tight, her brows arched. “Exactly as I will if she refuses.”
He was absorbing that statement as she dropped her attention to the book, adjusted her glasses and set a fingernail onto the page.
“There we are. Classifieds. If she’s leaving, I can let out the rooms again, can’t I?”
CINNIA DIDN’T HAVE much to pack. Her sisters had been through her wardrobe like locusts once she had grown too big to wear most of it. Trella had been incredibly generous, bringing her maternity clothes and refusing to let her pay. Cinnia had given things back as she grew out of them.
She and Trella had been meeting in secret every other week and without her, Cinnia would have fallen apart by now.
Burying herself in work had also helped her cope. She’d busied herself with bringing on her partner who was taking over the payments on her start-up loan. Then there’d been all the arrangements to set up an office here at the house. For hours, sometimes days at a time, she could forget she was sitting on a ticking time bomb.
But she had always known that Henri would have to be told.
And that he would insist on her coming back for safety reasons. She didn’t blame him for that, she didn’t, especially after he had pulled back the curtain on how he really felt about the press.
She was still shaken by the bitterness he had revealed. And defeated. Her firm intentions to make her own way had buckled not from his show of temper, but from his helpless anguish. She couldn’t, absolutely couldn’t, make things harder for him. Not in good conscience.
But her life would change irrevocably now. It would have anyway, she supposed. Twins did that to a woman. But things with Henri would be profoundly different this time. She would no longer be his equal.
Not that she’d been his equal in the past, but she had been able to pretend they were traveling in parallel lanes, living their own lives and intersecting when it suited them for the same reason: sex.
Even before she had turned up pregnant, however, she had known she was following more than pacing. She was becoming more emotionally invested than he was, wrapping her life around his. She had hid it from herself as much as him, but the pregnancy had forced her to confront it. She’d had to ask herself, and him, how deeply he was involved.
“Do you love me?” she had asked him that morning in January, making sure to wait until they’d returned to London so she had an escape strategy that didn’t involve getting herself to the ferry.
In typical Henri fashion, he had dodged the question with a faintly bored “If you’re looking for a proposal—”
“I didn’t ask if you wanted to marry me,” she had interrupted sharply, hiding that his attitude stung like a scald. “I asked if you loved me.”
“And the reason you’re asking is because you want to change things between us.” He hadn’t even looked up from whatever he was reading on his tablet, like this was a tiresome conversation. “I told you I’d never marry you.”
She had sat there with her sip of orange juice eating a hole in her stomach.
Her pregnancy had already been weighing on her conscience for two weeks, earning her a few queries from him about why she was so withdrawn and distracted. He’d even set a hand on her forehead at one point, looking concerned when he asked if she was coming down sick again.
She had been heartsick, aware that he would not be happy about the pregnancy, while deep in her soul, she was so happy. There was no man whose baby she would want more.
But not like this. Not so he would feel manipulated and forced into marrying her. Not when she might be a little in love while he clearly didn’t have any deep feelings on his side.
So,
