was two hundred miles out at sea, crewing on a bluefin tuna boat—that’s what I’d call it. I didn’t get your calls because there isn’t a heck of a lot of network coverage in the middle of the North Atlantic. And when I got back a week later I found out you’d hightailed it back to daddy because of one damn disagreement.’
The revelation of where he’d been while she’d been losing their baby gave her pause—but only for a moment. He could have rung her to tell her about the job before he’d boarded the boat, but in his typical don’t-ask-don’t-tell fashion he hadn’t. And what about the frantic message she’d left him while she’d waited for her father to arrive and take her to the emergency room? And later, when she’d come round from the fever dreams back in her bedroom on her father’s estate?
She’d asked the staff to contact Dane, to tell him about the baby, her heart breaking into a thousand pieces, but he’d never even responded to the news. Except to send through the signed divorce papers weeks later.
She could have forgiven him for not caring about her. Their marriage had been the definition of a shotgun wedding, the midnight elopement a crazy adventure hyped up on teenage hormones, testosterone-fuelled bravado and the mad panic caused by an unplanned pregnancy. But it was his failure to care about the three-month-old life which had died inside her, his failure to even be willing to mourn its passing, that she couldn’t forgive.
It had tortured her for months. How many lies he’d told about being there for her, respecting her decision to have the baby. How he’d even gone through with their farce of a marriage, while all the time planning to dump her at the first opportunity.
It had made no sense to her for so long—until she’d finally figured it out. Why he’d always deflected conversations about the future, about the baby. Why he’d never once returned her declarations of love even while stoking the sexual heat between them to fever pitch. Why he’d stormed out that morning after her innocent suggestion that she look for a job, too, because she knew he was struggling to pay their motel bill.
He’d gotten bored with the marriage, with the responsibility. And sex had been the only thing binding them together. He’d never wanted her or the baby. His offer of marriage had been a knee-jerk reaction he’d soon regretted. And once she’d lost the baby he’d had the perfect excuse he’d been looking for to discard her.
That truth had devastated her at the time. Brought her to her knees. How could she have been so wrong about him? About them? But it had been a turning point, too. Because she’d survived the loss, repaired her shattered heart, and made herself into the woman she was now—someone who didn’t rely on others to make herself whole.
Thanks to Dane’s carelessness, his neglect, she’d shut off her stupid, fragile, easily duped heart and found a new purpose—devoting herself to the company that was her legacy. She’d begged her father for a lowly internship position that autumn, when they’d returned to London, and begun working her backside off to learn everything she needed to know about Europe’s top maritime logistics brand.
At first it had been a distraction, a means of avoiding the great big empty space inside her. But eventually she’d stopped simply going through the motions and actually found something to care about again. She’d aced her MBA, learnt French and Spanish while working in Carmichael’s subsidiary offices in Calais and Cadiz, and even managed to persuade her father to give her a job at the company’s head office in Whitehall before he’d died—all the while fending off his attempts to find her a ‘suitable’ husband.
She’d earned the position she had now through hard work and dedication and toughened up enough to take charge of her life. So there was no way on earth she was going to back down from this fight and let Dane Redmond lay some ludicrous guilt trip on her when he was the one who had crushed her and every one of her hopes and dreams. Maybe they had been foolish hopes and stupid pipe dreams, but the callous way he’d done it had been unnecessarily cruel.
‘You promised to be there for me,’ she shot back, her fury going some way to mask the hollow pain in her stomach. The same pain she’d sworn never to feel again. ‘You swore you would protect me and support me. But when I needed you the most you weren’t there.’
‘What the hell did you need me there for?’ he spat the words out, the brittle light in the icy blue eyes shocking her into silence.
The fight slammed out of her lungs on a gasp of breath.
Because in that moment all she could see was his rage.
The hollow pain became sharp and jagged, tearing through the last of her resistance until all that was left was the horrifying uncertainty that had crippled her as a teenager.
Why was he so angry with her? When all she’d ever done was try to love him?
‘I wanted you to be there for me when I lost our baby,’ she whispered, her voice sounding as if it were coming from another dimension.
‘You wanted me to hold your hand while you aborted my kid?’
‘What?’ His sarcasm, the sneered disbelief sliced through her, and the jagged pain exploded into something huge.
‘You think I don’t know you got rid of it?’
The accusation in his voice, the contempt, suddenly made a terrible kind of sense.
‘But I—’ She tried to squeeze the words past the asteroid in her throat.
He cut her off. ‘I hitched a ride straight to the Vineyard once I got back on shore. We’d had that fight and you’d left some garbled message on my cell. When I got to your old man’s place he told me there was no baby any more, showed me the divorce papers you’d signed and then had me kicked out. And that’s when I figured out the truth. Daddy’s little princess had decided that my kid was an inconvenience she didn’t need.’
She didn’t see hatred any more, just a seething resentment, but she couldn’t process any of it. His words buzzed round in her brain like mutant bees which refused to land. Had she signed the divorce papers first? She couldn’t remember doing that. All she could remember was begging to see Dane, and her father showing her Dane’s signature on the documents. And how the sight of his name scrawled in black ink had killed the last tiny remnant of hope still lurking inside her.
‘I know the pregnancy was a mistake. Hell, the whole damn marriage was insane,’ Dane continued, his tone caustic with disgust. ‘And if you’d told me that’s what you’d decided to do I would have tried to understand. But you didn’t have the guts to own it, did you? You didn’t even have the guts to tell me that’s what you’d done? So don’t turn up here and pretend you were some innocent kid, seduced by the big bad wolf. Because we both know that’s garbage. There was only one innocent party in the whole screwed-up mess of our marriage and it wasn’t either one of us.’
She could barely hear him, those mutant killer bees had become a swarm. Her legs began to shake, and the jagged pain in her stomach joined the thudding cacophony in her skull. She locked her knees, wrapped her arms around her midriff and swallowed convulsively, trying to prevent the silent screams from vomiting out of her mouth.
How could you not know how much our baby meant to me?
‘What’s wrong?’ Dane demanded, the contempt turning to reluctant concern.
She tried to force her shattered thoughts into some semblance of order. But the machete embedded in her head was about to split her skull in two. And she couldn’t form the words.
