when he passed by her room at night. Fiona had literally shut him out.
So why was it open tonight?
Not that he was going to miss the opportunity to approach her.
The soft, warm light from her bedroom bathed the hall in a yellow glow. Curiosity tugged at him, and he peered into the room.
She was curled up in a tight ball on the settee at the foot of the bed, her sequined waistband expanding and contracting with her slow, determined breaths. He was surprised to see her still in her party clothes. Even with disheveled, wavy hair she was damn breathtaking. Her shoes were casually and chaotically tossed to the side.
For a moment, he thought she was asleep, and then he realized...
Fiona was crying.
A rush of protectiveness pulsed through his body. Fiona had been so calculating and logical these days that this spilling of emotion overwhelmed him. Damn, he didn’t want to see her like this. He never wanted to see her like this. It made him feel helpless, and that was a feeling he’d never handled well.
Once when Henri was younger, he’d walked into his mother’s room to find her crying. Tears had streaked her face, mascara marring her normally perfect complexion. She had been crying over the death of her career as a model. And his father’s infidelity. She’d been so shattered, and all Henri could do was watch from the sidelines.
She hadn’t been the most attentive or involved parent, but she’d been his mother and he’d wanted to make the world right for her.
He’d felt every bit as useless then as he felt now.
“Fiona?” He stepped tentatively into the room.
Startled, she sat up, dragging her wrist across her tears and smudging mascara into her hairline. “Henri, I don’t need help with my zipper.”
“I was on my way to my room and I heard you.” He stepped deeper into the room, tuxedo jacket hooked on one finger and slung over his shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not,” she said in a shaky voice, swinging her bare feet to the floor and digging her toes into the wool Persian rug they’d chosen together at an estate auction.
Something was different about her today. She was showing a vulnerability around him, an openness, he hadn’t seen in nearly a year. And that meant there was still something salvageable between them.
For the first time in a long time, they were actually talking, and he wasn’t giving up that window of opportunity to figure out what was going on in her mind. He didn’t know where they were going, but he sure as hell wasn’t willing to just write off what they’d had. “It’s tougher and tougher to be together in front of people and pretend. I get that. Totally. That’s what you’re upset about, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” she answered too quickly.
“Why am I having trouble believing you?” He draped his jacket over a wing-back chair by the restored fireplace. “We didn’t have trouble with trust before.”
“It’s easy to trust when you don’t know each other well, when we kept our life superficial.” The words came out of her mouth almost like lines from a play. Too calculated, too rehearsed.
He leaned back against the marble mantel. “You’re going to have to explain that to me, because I’m still bemused as hell as to where we went wrong.”
Sighing, she smoothed the silk dress over her knees. “We forgot to talk about the important things, like what would happen if we couldn’t have kids. What we would have bonding us besides having lots of sex and procreating.”
Sifting through her explanation, he tried to make sense of her conflicting signals, her words and body language and nervous twitches all at odds. “You only saw sex between us as about having children? Is that why you’ve been pushing me away since your mastectomy and hysterectomy?” Because of the genetic testing, the doctor had recommended both, and Henri hadn’t been able to deny the grief they’d both felt over the end to any chance of conceiving a child together. But the bottom line was, he’d cared most about keeping his wife alive. “You know I’m here for you, no matter what. I’m not going to leave you when you need me.”
Her expression was shuttered, her emotions hidden again. “We’ve discussed this. Without kids, we have nothing holding us together.”
Nothing except for their passion, their shared interests. Their shared life. She couldn’t be willing to discount that so quickly.
“And you’re still against adoption?” He was stumped about that, considering her father was adopted. But she’d closed down when he brought up the subject.
“I’m against a man staying with me for the children or out of sympathy because he thinks I’m going to die.” She shot to her feet, a coolness edging her features. “Could we please stop this discussion, dammit?”
Was that what she thought? That he had only stayed because of her cancer gene? They’d discussed divorce before then, but only briefly. After? She’d dug in her heels about the split.
He couldn’t deny he wouldn’t have left a woman facing the possibility of a terminal illness, but their relationship was more complex than that. He shoved away from the fireplace strewn with Wedgwood knickknacks, strode toward her and stopped just short of the settee.
He clasped her shoulders. “You said we never talked enough. So let’s talk. Tell me.”
Henri needed her to talk. To figure this out. Because even now, even with the smudged makeup and tousled brown hair, she was damn beautiful. The heat of her skin beneath his hands was familiar and intoxicating.
He still wanted her. Cancer or no cancer. Kids or no kids. Though his hands stayed steady on her shoulders, he wanted to send them traveling on her body. To push her back on the bed.
Their bed—before she’d sent him to his own room after they’d returned from her surgery overseas. She’d said the surgery left her in too much pain to risk being bumped in the night. And somehow over time, she’d kept the separate rooms edict in place. He didn’t know how so much time had slipped away, but day by day, he’d been so damn afraid he would say or do the wrong thing when she was in such a fragile state. He’d gone along with her request for space until the next thing he’d known their lawyer was drawing up papers.
He was done waiting around. He was a man of action.
After a moment of hesitation, she shrugged off his hands. “Talking now won’t change us splitting up. You have to understand that.”
“Then let’s talk to give each other peace when we walk away.” If he could keep her talking, they were still together. She wouldn’t be closing the door in his face.
She chewed her bottom lip before releasing it slowly, then nodding. “Speak then.”
He sat on the settee and held her hand, tugging gently. She held back for a moment before surrendering to sit beside him. He shuffled at the last instant so she landed on his lap.
“That’s not playing fair.”
“Then move.”
Indecision
