‘But surely you regret the decisions you made back then.’
Willow stiffened. ‘I’m not sure that I do. I did the best I could at the time, and I believed I was doing what was best for both of us.’
Jai sat up with a jerk, his lean, powerful bronzed body tense. ‘But you were wrong and I missed out on you being pregnant and on Hari’s arrival, not to mention every little change in him during the first seven months of his life!’ he shot back at her with unexpected ire.
Willow breathed in deep. ‘Well, I’m sorry about that,’ she muttered uncomfortably, wondering why on earth he was in such a dark mood.
Jai sprang out of bed. ‘I don’t think you’re one bit sorry for having denied me knowledge of my own child!’ he fired back at her accusingly.
‘Obviously I’m sorry that it upset you but be fair,’ Willow urged, disconcerted by that sudden anger of his. ‘I honestly didn’t realise how much Hari would mean to you or that you would feel so committed to our child once you found out about him.’
‘Had it been left to you I would never have found out about him!’ Jai intoned grimly. ‘And I still don’t understand what I did or said to deserve that treatment.’
Hugging the sheet round her, Willow had turned very pale, registering that she was finally catching a glimpse of the kind of feelings that Jai had, for whatever reason, concealed from her. He was still furious that she had not told him that she was pregnant. ‘It was the way you treated me the morning after that night we spent together,’ she told him honestly, for that was the truth of how she had felt at the time.
‘Nothing I said justifies your silence when you were carrying my child and in need of my support!’ Jai launched back at her without hesitation.
‘I managed perfectly well without your support,’ Willow snapped back defensively. ‘But that morning you condemned me for not telling you that I was a virgin, insisting that you would never have touched me had you known.’
‘That was the truth!’ Jai sliced in ruthlessly.
‘You also said that what we had done was wrong,’ she reminded him stubbornly. ‘And you accused me of still having a teenaged crush on you. I don’t know many women who would’ve wanted to contact a bloke who said stuff like that afterwards.’
‘It was your duty to contact me!’ Jai interposed icily.
But Willow was only warming up, a keen memory of her feelings back then awakened by his censure. In a sudden movement she bodily yanked the sheet from the bed and left it, but only after wrapping it securely round her, and her colour was high. ‘Oh, forget your stupid duty, Jai…it was how you made me feel that ruled how I behaved!’ she slammed back at him. ‘You made it sound like sleeping with me was the biggest mistake you had ever made.’
Jai flung his proud dark head back, his sensual mouth flattening into a thin hard line. ‘It was…’
‘Well then, don’t be surprised that I didn’t get in touch because if that night was such a mistake for you, I was in no mood to tell you that, to add to that mistake, I had also conceived a child that you obviously would not want.’
‘Those are two separate issues,’ Jai objected. ‘My night with you was ill-advised but my child could never be a mistake.’
‘You see how you’re simply changing your wording to make yourself sound better?’ Willow condemned angrily and, although she was always slow to anger, she was very, very angry just at that moment because, once again, Jai was making her feel bad. ‘Why is it so hard for you to accept that you are not the only one of us to have pride? And you humiliated me that morning and made me feel awful. You spent more time talking about my father’s books than you did on what had happened between us!’
‘That is untrue.’
‘No, it is true!’ Willow hissed back at him, green eyes blazing. ‘I disagreed with what you said about that night and, because I dared to disagree, that was the end of the discussion. You didn’t care about how you were making me feel.’
Jai registered that a huge argument had blossomed and decided to walk away rather than continue it, continuing it being beneath his dignity in his own mind. He flung open the concealed door in the panelling to the en suite bathroom and closed it firmly behind him, shaken by the fire in his bride and forced to consider her explanation by the essential streak of fairness that he had been raised to respect.
He had not humiliated her, he told himself fiercely as he stepped into his luxury rainforest shower, and then he recalled an image of her standing, small and pale and stiff, that morning. Well, if he had humiliated her, he had certainly not intended to do so. All he had done was express his feelings concerning their sexual encounter. But he had done so to a former virgin, who could understandably have felt very rejected by such a negative attitude, his conscience slung in with unwelcome timing. He had consciously been trying to distance himself from a chain of events that shamed him, he acknowledged grimly. And she had vehemently disagreed with him and he hadn’t known how to handle that, he conceded in grudging addition.
The door of the en suite bathroom opened, Willow finally having realised that the panelling effectively concealed doors into dressing rooms and other facilities only obvious to someone who actually saw a door being used.
‘And now you’re doing it to me again!’ Willow declared angrily from the doorway, incensed by his departure. ‘Walking away because I disagree with you!’
In the spacious shower cubicle Jai grimaced. ‘I’ll join you in a few minutes and we’ll talk.’
‘Oh, don’t bother on my account!’ his bride said sharply. ‘It’s probably jet lag but I’m exhausted and I’m going back to bed for a nap!’
Tears lashing her hurt eyes and angrily blinked back, Willow clambered back into the comfortable bed and curled up into a brooding ball of resentment. Some people didn’t like conflict and maybe he was one of them. Obviously, she needed to brush up on her communication skills and stop her temper jumping in first because she was willing to admit that nobody had ever made her as angry as Jai could. He was the very first person she had ever shouted at and in retrospect she was full of chagrin and regret because even she knew that that was not the way to persuade anyone round to a new point of view.
But she just felt so wounded by his outlook because those months pregnant and alone but for Shelley had been very tough. And she truly hadn’t appreciated that Jai was still so bone-deep outraged at her failure to tell him that she had conceived. No, he had managed to hide that reaction very effectively until he’d got her to the altar, she reflected bitterly, and only now was she seeing that, for all his appearance of frankness, Jai was much more complex below that surface façade of cool than he seemed and quite capable of nourishing reactions that she’d not even begun to detect.
But then, shouldn’t she have expected a few surprises when they were only really getting to know each other now? When it was only a practical marriage rather than one based on love and caring? Well, he definitely had all the caring genes when it came to their son, Willow conceded reluctantly, he just didn’t have them for her. She felt hollow inside, as if she had been gutted, and a quiver of self-loathing ran through her that she could still be so sensitive to Jai’s opinions.
He thought she had let Hari and him down by not informing him that she was pregnant. He would hold it against
