Page 14 of A Baby to Make Her His Bride

“I guess you haven’t seen much of her.” That thought broke her heart. She looked at the page she had filled with different profiles and expressions of a baby who was sheer perfection. Cuddling her wiggly body was the purest joy Vienna had ever experienced.

“I held her for a few minutes the one time.” There was a note in his voice that was hard to place. Wistful? Homesick?

Vienna impulsively tore the page from her pad and offered it. “Since you don’t have any photos of her.”

He started to take it, then chucked his chin at her. “Sign it first.”

To her eternal chagrin, she blushed. It wasn’t good enough tosign, but she scrawled her name on the bottom.

“Thank you.” He took it and spent way more time studying it than made her comfortable. She was about to start making excuses about how hard it was to capture the sparkle in Peyton’s eye, when he asked, “Do you sell your work?”

“No,” she scoffed. “I didn’t even finish my art degree.”

“Art isn’t engineering. You don’t need a diploma before you’re allowed to get paid for it,” he said dryly. “Especially not when you’re this talented.”

Talent was highly subjective.

“I haven’t spent much time on it since I dropped out. Pursuing art felt... I don’t know. Useless.” She picked at the bits of paper that had been left behind in the spiral ring that bound the pad. “I was due to start my third year when I got engaged and everyone said, ‘What will you do with an art degree? Why bother?’ So I quit.”

“Hunter said that?”

“No. He was the only one encouraging me to stick with it, but I thought Neal and I would start our family right away so it made sense to focus on my marriage. Or so I thought. I was twenty. What can you expect?” she joked, trying to hide how much it still pained her that she’d quit for him. For a life that had been a pantomime of things she wanted, but false and farcical at its core.

“How long were you married?”

“Six years.” She could have left it there, but she was tired of maintaining an illusion that she had been in love. “It was more of a merger than a marriage.” She darted a look at him, expecting him to judge her again.

He only held his expression of polite interest.

“I’m not business-minded. Not like Hunter. Our father didn’t really want me there anyway. He was all about the boys’ club and father-son legacy. He was pretty sexist.” Horribly sexist, actually. His attitude had been that women were good for a handful of things, most of them involving the way they were plumbed. “I thought if I married to benefit the business, Dad would be happy.”

“He wasn’t?”

“Not particularly. But I should have known better. I should have listened to Hunter and stayed in school. He already had a connection with Dad, though. I didn’t, but I wanted one. The thing I failed to realize was thatDaddidn’t want one. Not with me.” It took everything she had to keep her voice even, but the unsteadiness was there, deep in her chest. “That’s what I meant yesterday, when I said we’d had different upbringings.”

He blinked in a small flinch, as though he couldn’t imagine his father behaving so callously.

“And you don’t have kids. Do you? I only mean, I didn’t see anything online that suggested you had.”

“No. No kids.” The topic was still raw enough to catch in her throat. “Which I know people will say is a blessing once they hear we’re divorced. No children were harmed by the breakdown of this marriage,” she said with bitter humor. “It doesn’t feel like a blessing, though.”

“I stepped on a nerve. You wanted a family,” he acknowledged grimly.

“I did. But I can’t. I have what’s called a hostile uterus.”

“I’ve never heard of that.”

“It means I can’t get pregnant. Not without help.” She spotted the striped, mousy shape of a chipmunk scampering in the branches of a nearby tree. She started to block it onto her page. “That worked for Neal because he didn’t really want kids.”

It was the first time she’d said that aloud, always keeping that hurtful truth unspoken so it sat pulsing and festering under her skin, insult to the injury of her fertility issues. It was the reason she had asked him for a divorce the first time.

“He told me he wanted a family before we married, but he’s the kind of salesman who will tell you anything to close a deal.” She exchanged pale ivory for almond, working fast before she lost sight of the small creature.

“After we married, he kept talking me into putting it off. ‘Don’t do it to make your father happy’,” she quoted. “It would have mademehappy, but mutual consent, right? Finally, he agreed to try, but a year and a half went by without success. I was devastated every month. He was relieved. I could tell.”

She scratched honey and umber against the page.

“I wanted to try IVF, but he had a lot of excuses for why the timing wasn’t right and he kept missing his appointments.”

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