Page 42 of Contractually Wed

It felt like he had been slapped so hard that the echoes of it rang in his ears. Every inch of him stilled.

“When Camilla asked gently, she said you two are not planning for a family and...”

The rest of his mother’s words drifted away as Apollo moved past her to the stairs. He took them three at a time, his heart thrashing around in his chest like a crushed toy.

All her stuff lay in half-open cosmetic bags or in haphazard piles in the drawers in the bathroom. He rifled through her handbag and her jewelry box and her pen case and her...

He found the discarded pill sheet first, sitting innocently under a pile of underwear. And in another drawer, a pharmacy receipt for two pregnancy tests. He didn’t have to see the tests themselves to know that his mother’s guess was right.

Jia had been sick that day when they’d been touring the client’s house in Andros Island, had had no appetite for days after and she had been so panic-stricken because she... She was pregnant.

With his child.

Their child.

A child she’d never planned for, and had made it clear enough times that she didn’t want with him. A child whose very conception had made her sick at heart. A child she was keeping a secret from him, over whom she was turning herself into a shadow.

Did she hate the idea so much, enough to want to...leave him?

It felt like a crack reverberated through his heart, the thought was that painful.

And in that moment of utter confusion and anguish, Apollo knew. In that moment when he had to face the possibility that Jia wanted to leave him, he knew.

It was as solid and real as the house he had built for his mother. As real as the anger he had finally allowed himself to feel against his father for abandoning them. As real as the hope he’d been nurturing for weeks now.

Dios mio, he was in love with his wife and he had no idea how to sit with that knowledge. When he knew that she was only in his life because he had forced her hand. When he knew that anything they had shared, anything they had created together, like this precious child, had been an accident of his path, not her choice.

He sank to the floor and clutched his head in his hands, feeling like he had hit the bottom of the world. Still, the crash was unending. But even through the panic pulsing through him, there was a pinprick of awe at this new emotion swirling through him.

He was in love and he had never known anything more terrifying or more wonderful.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THREEWEEKSAFTERher discovery, Jia had come up with a hundred different plans for how she could tell Apollo and discarded them all. Her period had always thrashed her about like a ship caught in a storm, and it seemed her pregnancy was going to be more of the same. Despite that, she’d forced herself to consider the ugly prospect of leaving him with a clear mind.

What kind of a future would she be providing for her child? Apollo had helped her shed her rose-colored lenses about her family. She would be all alone in the world with a tiny precious baby to care for.

That was, assuming Apollo simply let her go.

Abandoning his pregnant wife was something he would never do.

And if she stayed...would things get better? Could her love simply wither and die if she didn’t nurture it? Could she one day forget that it even existed, flickering like a live flame inside her chest? Would it be so bad to make a family with him knowing he admired her, respected her, even cared for her, in his own way?

When the questions became too much, she floated through her days in a strange limbo. Like a flesh wound on her finger hidden away under layers of gauze, so she only felt it when she had to use it. Then it became a pulsing throb of pain.

Nights were easier to get through.

Especially like now, when she was in bed and waiting for Apollo to join her. She’d spent the whole day with so many doubts that all she wanted was his brand of possession.

In the dark intimacy of their bedroom, she forgot everything. In their bed, with his hard, warm body tangled around hers or pinning her down into the mattress as he drove them to sweet release, or as he cradled her from behind and drowned her in his caresses making sweet love to her, it was easy to imagine that Apollo adored her as much as she adored him.

A sudden ping on her phone had her scooting up on the bed. It was a text from her sister.

Reading it made tears prick her eyelids—what didn’t these days?—and laugh at the same time. But beneath the joy that Rina was getting married and the acceptance of her sister’s long, heartfelt apology, a dark envy lingered. If Rina, who’d always let their father and brother intimidate her, who’d never gone against the grain even in thought, could find true love, why couldn’t Jia?

With uncharacteristic frustration, Jia threw her cellphone across the bedroom. It landed with a loud thump on the rug. God, what was she turning into? It was almost as if the pregnancy and her love for Apollo were releasing all the petty and intense but valid emotions she had caged inside all her life.

“Jia?” Apollo stood under the archway to their bedroom. “Did you just throw your phone across the room?”

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