in disbelief. “You were pregnant then?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Do you remember that week we both caught a stomach virus?”
“The one I picked up on a trip to Boston and passed to you?”
“I didn’t think I’d been that sick.” She lifted her shoulder. “But it interfered with the pill and I got pregnant.”
“And you didn’t—” He turned back to the window. “I’m that boy’s—”
“Ethan’s.”
He crossed to the table, leaned on his fists, his face close to hers. Her heart thundered but she wouldn’t back away from his intimidation.
“I’m Ethan’s father.” His voice was lethally calm, but a bluish vein pulsed in his temple. “And you never once thought I had a right to know that.”
She’d thought it a million times but common sense had always prevailed.
“Are you my daddy?”
Gillian’s heart plummeted at her son’s happy, singsong question. Inquisitive and bright with the hearing of a bat, he never missed a thing.
For an instant, Max’s gaze fixed on hers and for the first time there was something other than anger in it. Was he looking for her permission? She shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “Not now.”
His gaze hardened. “If not now, then when?” Max pulled out the chair next to Gillian, spun it so it faced Ethan, and sat leaning his forearms on his knees, putting himself closer to Ethan’s level. “Yes. I’m your daddy,” he said gently.
So much for needing her permission.
She watched her son for his reaction. Ethan frowned, stared at Max for a few seconds, and then smiled. “Come play.”
Max glanced questioningly at Gillian. If he’d expected Ethan to be as stunned by the discovery as he’d been, he was very much mistaken.
She stood. “How about I put your favorite movie on, honey?” Normally, Gillian discouraged the watching of TV. Today was not normal. “The one about trains.”
“Okay.” Ethan headed blithely for the family room.
When she got back, Max was exactly where she’d left him, sitting in the chair, staring at the doorway, forearms resting on splayed knees. “Did you have to tell him that?”
He jerked upright. “I was hardly going to leave it to you,” he said quietly. “He deserves to know before he turns eighteen.”
“He’s never asked.”
“Well, he did and now he knows. And at least now he doesn’t have to call me Pweston.” And for just a second a wry smile lifted a corner of his lips and amusement passed between them. Then vanished. “I had a right to know, too, before he came looking for me wanting to know why he’d grown up without his father.”
“You didn’t want children.”
“I didn’t want to do jury service last year, either, but I did, and I coped and I think I did a good job.”
“Ethan deserves better than a father who’s only there because he has to be.”
“It’s better than no father at all.”
“Is it? I didn’t think so.” She’d had a reluctant, resentful, part-time father for her early years. It had taken her many more years to realize that his attitude and actions and eventual desertion were not a reflection of her worth. Even so, his rejection of her had shaped who she was.
“Clearly. But family is important. Having a mother and a father, that’s how it’s supposed to be.”
“Only if that mother and father both want to be there. Only if neither of them is resenting the child for its very existence.”
His gaze was cold on her face till finally, after a silence that stretched and hardened like a wall between them, he spoke.
“I had a right to know, and you denied me that right. You denied me two years and ten months of my child’s life?”
Gillian said nothing. She’d made the best decision she could with the facts she had at the time. And the fact was that Max had wanted nothing permanent in his life. Not a relationship and certainly not a child. For all the grueling and lonely time over those years, they had also been the best, most satisfying times of her life. She’d seen her son grow from a baby, his personality developing. It had been a privilege and a delight and she’d denied Max that opportunity. High-flying, career-driven, workaholic Max Preston who wouldn’t have time in his life for a child. Who’d said he didn’t want children. Ever.
High-flying, career-driven, workaholic Max Preston who’d just spent half an hour on her family-room floor playing trains. She wanted to weep. “If you’d called just once, just once, after we broke up …”
He shook his head. “Don’t you dare try to blame me.”
“I’m not. I’m just …” She didn’t know what she was. Confused? Anxious?
Max surged from his chair, strode back to the window.
“This changes everything.” He turned back to her. “Pack your bags.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean pack your bags. My son will know me. He’ll grow up with his father as part of a family. I’m seeing to that today.”
Gillian gripped the table as though that could anchor her. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“I’m saying,” he said quietly, “that we’re getting married.”
Three
Married?
Surely she had misheard him.
She’d never been good at reading his face but there was no mistaking the implacable seriousness of his voice.
And it terrified her.
But now was not the time to give in to, or even show, her fear. She thought frantically. This Max was not the man she’d thought she knew. “Maybe I owe you something.” Gillian spoke calmly, surprising herself with her composure. Deliberately, she released her grip on the table and rested her hands in her lap.
Where they clenched into fists as she struggled to find her center in a world that was spinning, threatening to spiral out of control.
“Damn right you do.”
“And yes, maybe we need to work something out but—”
“There are no maybes and buts, and there’s no we. I’ve already worked it out.”
She
