Page 50 of Pregnant After One Forbidden Night

CHAPTER TWELVE

PRACTICAL JENNA, THE girl who had always loved to run and jump with her siblings far more than plan imaginary weddings with her cousins, stared up at Sebastian where he stood over her chair, her mind filled with marriage and parents and everything else they’d discussed.

Inside, she wrestled to put his revelations together with his reasons for why things had to be the way they were between them, and also her own wants and needs.

Was it time to accept that certain dreams had already become impossible? That, as Sebastian had said, because they had been together and were now tied for life, she needed to set aside the full picture of her dreams?

While she had never doubted that consequences could be irrevocable, perhaps she had also never truly respected her circumstances as such.

He would not give her the life she’d envisioned for herself, but given what he’d revealed, she suspected that had more to do with old childhood wounds than her worth in his eyes or a playboy’s fear of commitment.

Perhaps it was enough, then, that he had promised to care for her and her child.

She would go back to work eventually, of course, but it was no small thing that he had offered to support her and their child. Security, even without love and passion, was more than many women in her situation could hope for.

Their arrangement would not be in keeping with the Priory tradition, but he was right that she had become comfortable breaking with tradition long before she’d met Sebastian.

And though their parents would not be a unit, it was clear that her child would not lack for love from either of them, even if Sebastian had not used the word.

That he felt it was clear in his actions.

He had swooped in and addressed all of the greatest concerns that had been dogging her, outside of nausea and hormones, out of that love. It seemed he would swoop in and take care of her whole life if she let him. If she was willing to agree to his terms.

But was she?

Only if he would meet her halfway. Reaching out, she caught his hand and it was a warm pulsing beacon in her own.

Her mind returned to the imperative desire that had driven her during their encounter in the d’Tierrza library, more urgent now, more immediate, than it had even been during that first clandestine meeting: she wanted him, and he needed her—to bring him sweetness and light, to temper the darkness of his memories with the offer of a more hopeful future. She was the only one who could do it.

In a world in which she was the preternatural outsider, she had finally found a place made only for her—as long as she was willing to compromise.

Here in the secluded library with him, far from the judgment of even the sun, she realized she was.

Right or wrong, what had been true, from the moment they’d first spoken all the way through until now, was that there really wasn’t much she wasn’t willing to compromise in order to touch the complicated man before her.

But everyone had their issues, and hers, stark and clear at the end of another long day, which had followed over two months of long, hard days, was that the only place she had ever felt truly at home was in the arms of the man in front of her.

And she was done fighting it.

They’d crossed too many lines, incurred too many irreversible consequences. The only thing left to do was lean in and accept the fall.

If she was going to fall, though, she was taking him with her.

“Take me to your room, Sebastian,” she said.

He fought it. In his eyes played out a fierce battle against the nameless force that drew them to each other, as desperate as if his very life depending on it.

The air thickened around them, turning as full and pregnant as she was, until on a frustrated oath, his long fingers came down to curve around her arms and pull her to her feet.

And then he was drawing her through the blur of hallways.

They stopped in front of a door she had not yet entered.

He turned the knob and her heart leaped to her throat.

Inside, the room was palatial.

Far bigger than any single room in the rest of the house, the main suite at Redcliff lived up to every bit of Sebastian’s hedonistic reputation.

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