croaked.
He leaned forward. Close enough for her to reach out and touch his gorgeous face and on some instinctive level Lucy was tempted to do just that, knowing in her heart that in a few minutes’ time such a move would inevitably repulse him. Because wasn’t this the moment she’d been waiting for? The moment she had been secretly dreading?
‘Another baby,’ he repeated. ‘A child of our own.’
‘A child of our own,’ she echoed dully.
‘Neh.’ His black eyes glittered. ‘It makes sense.’
‘Does it?’
He didn’t seem to register the wobble in her voice and Lucy was grateful that her hair was successfully concealing the prickles of sweat which were beading her brow.
He nodded. ‘Of course it does. Perfect sense.’
‘B-because?’
He sucked in a deep breath before the words came out in a rush, as if he’d prepared them before saying them. ‘Because Xander needs a brother or a sister. I don’t want him growing up in a world occupied solely by adults. I want him to have someone to play with. Someone to keep him company. Someone who is there for him, fighting his corner. I want us to be a real family. To give him the brothers and sisters he needs, which might help erase the terrible start he endured at the beginning of his young life.’ He paused, and his black eyes had suddenly grown very intense. ‘And you are such a good mother that I think you need a child of your own to love and care for, as you have loved and cared for little Xander. Don’t you, Lucy?’ His mouth quirked into a reflective smile. ‘Something more worthwhile to keep you busy, rather than having to put on silk stockings to come and meet me at the airport.’
Lucy stared at him in dismay, and not just because he was making her sound like some kind of amateur hooker. Because this was the moment she’d dreaded. The moment she’d prayed would never come. But in the long run, mightn’t it all be for the best? Couldn’t admitting the bitter truth she’d nursed for so long provide some sort of catharsis for them all? Drakon had said he wanted a real family and she wanted that too. Couldn’t she show him that what they already had could be enough, if they were prepared to work at it? With an effort she composed herself, acutely aware of the fact that they were in a public place.
‘Perhaps we should order first,’ she said.
He narrowed his eyes. ‘Some men might be offended by your preoccupation with dinner,’ he observed, with a flash of mockery. ‘Are you so hungry that you can’t wait a moment longer or do you just want to make me suffer by making me wait for your answer?’
It was more the fact that she could see the waiter hovering in the background and Lucy didn’t want him coming over and disturbing them when she was in the middle of her story. The story she wished above all else she didn’t have to tell. Just as she wished that Drakon had worded his proposal with more affection and that he wanted more children for reasons which had to do with love, rather than expediency. But it was pointless wishing for the impossible. She knew that better than anyone. With cold dread, she cast her eye over the menu and chose something which would take ages to prepare and then attempted to speak as if she actually cared about it. ‘Why don’t we have the chateaubriand, to share?’
‘If that’s what you want.’
If only he knew that the only thing she wanted could never be hers. Lucy spoke quickly to the waiter and, once the order had been given, clasped her hands together as if praying for a courage she wasn’t sure she possessed.
‘Drakon. There’s something…’ Her voice trembled. ‘Something I haven’t told you.’
His body tensed—as if her tone was warning him that what she was about to say wasn’t just some undiscovered quirk of character. ‘Oh?’
She sucked in a deep breath but the air which made its way to her lungs was scorching her airways. ‘I can’t give Xander the brothers and sisters you want for him,’ she husked, ‘because I’m…’
Go on. Say it. Say those two painful words which you’ve never quite been able to get your head around.
‘I’m…infertile.’
There was total silence as he sat back in his seat and Lucy searched his face for some kind of reaction. But there was none. His enigmatic features were as unreadable as they’d ever been, and somehow that felt much worse than open pain, or anger.
‘Have you known about this for long?’
The conversational tone of his voice gave Lucy the hope she needed and she nodded. ‘I found out while I was nursing. It’s one of the reasons which made me leave midwifery. I found it…’ She swallowed as she tried to convey some of the pain she’d felt—not just the physical pain of endometriosis, but the emotional pain of knowing her womb was always going to be empty. ‘I found it increasingly hard to be around pregnant women and babies. Every day when I went into work, I was reminded of what I could never have.’ She searched his expression but still she could pick up nothing from his hard-featured stillness. ‘It’s one of the reasons I never really had any boyfriends before you, because most of the time I only felt like a shell of a woman.’
And now the cold words which began to fall like stones from his lips gave her a clue as to what he was feeling.
‘But you didn’t think it was pertinent to tell me all this before we were married?’
‘I meant to. But we didn’t really know each other back then, did we? It’s not the kind of thing you just casually drop into the conversation with a virtual stranger.’ She licked her lips. ‘And it didn’t seem relevant, because you said you didn’t ever want children of your own.’
‘But things change, Lucy,’ he ground out. ‘We’re both intelligent enough to realise that. People change their minds all the time. I would like to have been given the choice instead of having it taken away from me, without my knowledge.’
Lucy shook her head, but it didn’t change the fact that her throat felt as if someone were pressing their fingers against it, making it almost impossible to breathe. But she needed to breathe. To try to explain how it had been. How it had felt. ‘A couple of times I intended to tell you—but the right time never seemed to come up,’ she said. ‘The preparations for the wedding were so intense and all-consuming that I never found the opportunity to start a conversation about it.’
‘You could have made the time,’ he said repressively.
Her head was hurting and so was her heart. She could sense that he didn’t understand and she wanted to make him understand. ‘Did you ever see that film about Queen Elizabeth I—the one which won all the awards?’ she questioned suddenly.
‘What?’ he demanded, his dark look of accusation momentarily morphing into one of perplexity.
‘The English Queen was almost completely bald, and she hid her baldness beneath a lot of elaborate wigs,’ she rushed on. ‘But they said that anybody who had seen her in her true state could never look at her in quite the same way again. That she remained permanently ugly and scarred in the mind’s eye of the beholder. And that’s how I felt, Drakon. I didn’t want you to look at me as less than a woman. As some barren creature only to be pitied. I wanted you to continue to desire me and want me.’
He
