Page 47 of Pregnant After One Forbidden Night

“It was too late for more coffee, anyway,” she said quietly.

He didn’t know how long she had been watching and the fact made him feel oddly vulnerable. It was too easy to let his guard down around Jenna.

But still he smiled at her. “It’s never too late for coffee.”

“You’ll be up all night.”

He shook his head, “By this point, I’d have to mainline caffeine for it to affect me.”

“It sounds like you have a problem,” she said teasingly.

Taking her in, bathing in her gentle humor, he said, “Among others. You might say I have an addictive personality.” And she was the greatest temptation. But it was his problem to manage the temptation. Or face the consequences. “It runs in the family.”

After a pause, she said, “Tell me about your family.” The demand was tentative and probing, as if she didn’t expect him to oblige but was too curious to risk not asking. Of course, she would be curious. His family history was her child’s history, as well.

He could do no less than tell her.

But where to start? How to reveal the sordid truth of his parents’ past to her so that she would know the dangers his rules and demands protected her from while assuring her that he would never falter in the same way and bring that chaos into her or their child’s life?

Where should he start?

Jenna was as far from his parents as it was possible to be—innocent, open, free from manipulative tendencies—singular, as he’d told her repeatedly. But what if there were limits to even her compassion? A part of him trembled at the possibility of telling her the story of his family and seeing condemnation in her face for the role he’d played.

At the age of ten, three years into his boarding school career with only one visit from his father—his mother hadn’t liked the feeling of the large gothic school building in Austria where they had sent him—he had stopped longing for the kind of relationship with his parents that he’d witnessed among his peers.

He accepted that whatever it was that he was lacking—whatever cold wrongness that existed in his heart, as his father had accused, that had led him to betray his mother and suffer his consequential exile without even the slightest urge to shed a tear—was the same thing which had finally stopped him from longing for that. A light came to his schoolmates’ parents’ eyes, even the coldest, when they landed on their progeny.

He hadn’t been able to recall his mother ever looking at him like that.

His father had been no better.

It had taken three years of waking up far away from home without so much as a whisper for him to realize they just didn’t care about him, were completely indifferent.

How would Jenna react?

With no real plan, he opened his mouth and said the first words that came to his mind. “My mother was unfaithful to my father.”

Jenna froze, the orbs of her large eyes widening and darkening until they matched his black coffee in color if not temperature. Unlike his coffee, her eyes were filled with beckoning warmth. They called to him, jolting through him, energizing him in a way the beverage never could, gently drawing more from him.

With words, she kept it simple. “I’m sorry,” she said softly.

He shrugged her words away. She had nothing to do with the old story. “You didn’t do anything.”

She ignored the brush-off, asking, “Did it tear your family apart?”

He looked away, a sound escaping that tried to be a laugh but didn’t quite make it. “No.”

“What happened?”

“At first, my father ignored it. When he no longer could, they lived brief, separate lives.”

Understanding oozed out of her, free for the taking when he wasn’t sure he wanted it.

“And what about you?”

“At first, I was a tool they used to manipulate each other. Eventually, they sent me to boarding school with rare visits home—where I was always alone—until my mother died when I was thirteen. After that it was year-round school until I turned eighteen. Then, my father died, too. University and early adulthood were a bit wild.” He would take those hazy and blurred memories over the crystal-clear snapshots from the years before.

Her bleeding heart ached for him. It was as clear as if the organ had been on her sleeve.

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