Page 80 of The Billionaire's Accidental Legacy

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THEYDIDN’TMAKELOVE.For two weeks they were on the island, and they didn’t make love.

They talked. About food now, since he knew what his favorites were, and about his friends at school.

It was difficult to dig deep enough to get to a personal part of Ewan. Because it was clear to Jessie that he had done everything he could to minimize that part of himself.

It was all related to the fact he hadn’t even known his own favorite foods. The degree to which he had given himself over to his desire to hurt his father had shaped everything he was.

It was frightening, sometimes.

He seemed like a warm, carefree playboy, and he was anything but.

It scared her sometimes, wondering how deep that core of destruction went within him. And if there was anything of a man left.

But that night when he had kissed her, just kissed her, she had found something helpful to hold on to.

You’re just as broken as he is.

Sometimes the voice whispered to her. Like now, when she was walking through the outdoor bridge system up inside the trees, enjoying the weather and the view through the fronds of the ocean below.

Sometimes that voice whispered to her that she wasn’t different. That this time away hadn’t transformed her.

She remembered what Maren had said.

That they were nothing more than women experiencing con artistry.

She had never needed that sort of buffer between herself and the decision she’d made.

She had seen herself as a con artist.

But what was she now? She was a woman about to have a baby.

She was...

She was falling in love with him.

They’d gone about everything all backward. Inside out. Except perhaps they hadn’t. Because the moment that she’d met him something had taken hold of her that she had not been able to get rid of since.

The moment she had first laid eyes on him.

He had made her feel things she’d never felt before, and she’d been driven by them.

If they’d struck up a conversation first, they both would have run in the other direction.

They had both constructed their entire lives in such a way that it had made them unable to get to know people. He had been surrounded by revelers, by parties for all these years, and yet he didn’t even know himself. And Jessie knew only Maren and protected her actual identity above all else.

It was almost necessary, then, that they’d made love first. Which had bonded them together by way of the baby.

She had been thinking more and more about the baby, too. As not just a baby, but a baby that would grow into a child.

A child who would need a mother.

She had never known what a real mother was supposed to do, what a real mother was supposed to be. She had images, saved in her files of TV and book moms, and the flashes of brilliance that her own had brought to her life before she had left forever.

But she didn’t want to be a mother constructed simply of images.

Of knowledge.

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