Page 38 of Pregnant After One Forbidden Night

She should be pleased. Instead, she pushed and resisted him. He liked it so much better when she went along.

Though, perhaps he should be grateful she was pushing back. The consequences, his mild irritation, were nowhere near so transformative as the alternative.

Because this was Jenna, he tried again. “None of this needs to be difficult, Jenna.”

“I want to get married someday, Sebastian.” The statement was soft and delivered without heat, her voice tender almost, as if she wanted to gentle the fact that she was once again throwing his carefully laid plans all to hell. “I want to have a satisfying career and I want to be a wife and I want our child to grow up in a happy, normal family.”

His skin felt hot and itchy at her words, his breath constricted, but he resisted the urge to fidget or rub. She asked for things he could not give her for reasons he would never be able to make her understand. Jenna had grown up with regular people, people who could pursue love without it destroying them. He had not. He knew the damage that the obsessive pursuit of love could inflict on a child. It was not her fault that the same tendency lurked in his own blood, that in his DNA lay the same programming. It wasn’t even her fault that she had been the catalyst that triggered and activated the potential of his latent disease. No, she wasn’t to blame for tempting him, but it remained his duty to protect them both from disaster. “Absolutely not. Marriage is not an option on the table between us.” He would not repeat his father’s mistakes, even with a woman like Jenna. The price was too high.

Nodding, she placed a gentling hand on his forearm. “I wasn’t asking you, Sebastian. I know we didn’t plan this, but before it happened, I had always planned to marry and have a family. I still want that.”

“You’ve gotten what you wanted then. You have your very own family now.”

“What you’re offering is not the same thing, Sebastian.”

“The only difference is a piece of paper, Jenna.”

She shook her head. “If you think that, I feel bad for you.”

With a strange growing sense of dread rising, reaching up to slowly grip and squeeze him around the throat, his voice was more clipped than he intended when he said, “A legal document does not make a stable family, Jenna, and you’re a fool if you think so.”

“You’re right, and that’s not why I want it. I want what the paper represents. I want that confidence for my child. I want them to grow up secure in the knowledge that the people who love them will be there for them, a steady, unshakeable unit, bound together by love, commitment and a proudly public promise. I want them to know that no matter what they choose or decide in their lives, they will at least always have a loving family to come home to that is proud of them, even if they make a mistake. I want them to see passion and fire and purpose and to know that they don’t have to choose between those things and their dreams and that anything that asks them to, be it person or situation, it isn’t right for them.” A look of surprise came to her face, as if she had only just heard her words by saying them out loud. “I want what my parents gave me,” she added softly, “even if all it does is blow up in their faces.”

Love and family. She wanted love and marriage and a happy family. Of course, she did.

He could not offer her that. But what he had to give her was just as good, if she would see it that way. “No other man will care for you as thoroughly as I would, Jenna. You have to sense that’s true.”

“That might be true, but it’s not the same thing. Whatever this strange obsessive thing between us is, it isn’t the same thing that carries couples through the highs and lows of a lifetime together, through the difficulties and triumphs of parenthood, or the inevitable desert-like stretches of distance and resentment. I want the thing that does that, Sebastian. I want a fully realized life, Sebastian, not a career and a business partner I raise kids with. I want what my parents have.”

“You don’t want what they have. If you did, you would have never gone away to chase your dreams in the big city. I read your academy admissions essay, Jenna. I’ll buy that you want wholesome and secure, and I can give you at least a version of both, but we both know that’s not all you want. You want fast and world-changing, too.”

Again, her hand fluttered to her belly, but she remained serious. “I wanted those things, Sebastian, and look where it got me. Pregnant, alone and no closer to fitting into the world than I ever was—further from it now, in fact. I have to think about what’s best for our child. I have to think about what happens when someone better comes along for you. What happens to me when you find a woman you do want to marry?” She spoke with her hands, gesturing between the two of them as they walked.

She wounded him though she didn’t know it, couldn’t know that the intensity of his need for her was so immense that he had not even seen another woman since laying eyes on her. She said she was invisible when it was she who had made every other woman on the planet disappear.

“I can assure you, that won’t happen. If I will not marry you, what makes you think I would marry anyone else?” he asked.

“It’s too late for silly fears and games, Sebastian. You’re going to be a father,” she said.

And it was too late for him to stop this train, however much she might deserve the answers she wanted.

He would give her the truth.

“I will not marry you, Jenna.”

“Wh—?” she stuttered for a moment as if his bald statement had gone through her chest, before pulling whatever question she had been about to ask back before it escaped. Then she caught her breath, balled up her fist and released it. “I know. That’s exactly why we’re having this conversation. We need to talk about the future. For our child.”

He gave her credit. The words had come out even if her voice had a faint tremor.

“Marriage no longer makes a difference as to whether or not our child will inherit Redcliff, in case that addresses your concerns.”

Jenna gasped. “Do not insult me. Wealth is the furthest thing from my mind and you know it.” When she wagged her finger at him while she spoke, it gave him a window into her childhood—and one into what a future with her might be like.

But marriage was not required for that future.

“Marriage is not on the table. A stable future with the father of your child, however, is.”

“And if that’s not enough?” she demanded, stubborn and strong and gorgeous, a knight without armor, defending honor and goodness.

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