Page 35 of The Baby Behind Their Marriage Merger

Yep, he’d screwed up.

Badly.

Jude sat in his car outside Addi’s house and lowered his window so that he could push the button on her free-standing intercom system. He was going to have to do some serious grovelling and issue a raft of apologies.

His actions could’ve caused her lasting harm and he owned that. He wasn’t used to thinking of other people and, when he did, he did it on his time scale, not theirs. He’d told her he was going to pay the lawyers and he should’ve done it immediately. By not doing so, it had slipped his mind. Addi had the right to be angry. In fact, if she was anything less than boil-his-head furious, he’d be surprised. All he could do was apologise and do better...

Be less selfish and more thoughtful.

This was one of the problems with being relentlessly single. He’d forgotten how to be part of a team, to consider other people, that his wasn’t the only schedule that mattered and that other people’s priorities were different. He’d become intensely self-absorbed, and he didn’t like it. When he was like this, he reminded himself too much of his grandfather: someone who lived in his own world, whose thoughts, desires and wants were all that mattered.

It wasn’t good enough.

‘It’s not a good time, Jude.’

At the tinny sound of Addi’s voice, Jude jolted in his seat and looked through the slats of the gate to the house beyond. There were lights on in the bottom rooms, but the upstairs rooms were dark. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was past nine. He grimaced. The meeting with his investor had only finished an hour ago and, as soon as he’d ushered her out of his office, he’d jumped into his car and headed here.

‘We need to talk, Addison,’ he told her.

‘We can talk in the morning,’ Addi told him.

‘I’m going to sit here until you let me in, Addi,’ he told her.

She mumbled something, a curse or an oath, but the gate did slide open and he parked his car behind Addi’s. There was an old hatchback in the other parking space, and he hoped that he wouldn’t have to apologise in front of Addi’s three sisters. He would, but he’d prefer to avoid that embarrassment if he could.

Jude left his car and walked up to the front door, the legs of his trousers brushing a pot plant that released a lovely smell of lemon. He looked for a doorbell but then the door opened and Addi stood there, dressed in yoga pants, thick socks and a thigh-length jersey, her face pale and her eyes tired.

He’d been pushing her, pushingthem, hard lately, flying her from hotel to hotel, country to country, and expecting her to hit the ground running when they got there. Their nights had been spent in bed exploring each other’s bodies, and some nights they’d only got a few hours’ sleep.

Yes, he’d known that he only had a limited amount of time with her, and that when they returned to South Africa they’d have to be a lot more circumspect if they wanted to keep seeing each other—they couldn’t spend every night together. But, because she was so very healthy, he tended to forget she was pregnant and needed rest. She could also do without feeling stressed. He’d failed to look after her.

Yes, she was working with him, but she was first and foremost the mother of his child, and his temporary wife. He should be making life easier for her, not harder. As he’d decided earlier, he had to do better, be better.

‘Come in,’ Addi told him, and he followed her into a small living room dominated by a cream couch covered in a bright-orange throw. Two old wingback chairs were crammed into the corner and an old TV sat on a credenza. Her laptop sat on the couch and he could see, even from a distance, that she’d been working on a spreadsheet, possibly the master spreadsheet he’d demanded, the one that needed constant updating as new data about Thorpe hotels came in.

She was trying to catch up on the work time she’d lost this afternoon by going to her lawyer.

‘Are your sisters around?’ he asked, wanting to know how circumspect he had to be.

Addi shook her head. ‘No, the girls are with Storm in Durban, and Lex is snowed in with Cole at the ski lodge in the Eastern Cape,’ Addi told him, crossing her arms over her chest. Right...and he was sure his friend wasn’t complaining about being snowbound with the woman he found endlessly fascinating.

He was allowing himself to be distracted. An empty house—good. Not hesitating, he walked over to her, placed his hands on either side of her face and rested his forehead against hers. ‘I am so, so sorry. I messed up and I’ve been kicking myself all afternoon. Forgive me?’

She pulled back to put some distance between them ‘Do you realise that, if I hadn’t had a meeting this afternoon, nobody would’ve attended the hearing tomorrow and I could’ve lost the girls before we even started to fight for them?’

Shame ran through him, hot and sour. ‘I’m sorry, Addi. So, so sorry. Look, I meant to pay them...’

Addi sat down on the edge of a closet chair. ‘But you didn’t because you had something better, or more important, to do,’ she said in a voice that held no emotion. ‘Your work is all that matters, Jude. Everything else comes way down the list.’

He couldn’t argue with that; Fisher International had been his entire focus for years, so he said nothing. But, in his defence, he’d had a lot more on his plate than usual—a massive business deal, a temporary wife, a stunning lover and a baby on the way.

‘The thing is you could’ve lost me the most important people in my life. But for the grace of God today, two little girls might’ve gone back to Joelle, who has the attention span of a flea. They could’ve been facing the childhood Lex and I did, but in a foreign country. Your selfishness and your lack of focus on anything but Fisher International nearly cost meeverything.’

He’d far prefer it if she yelled at him, or threw things, but her cold, low, unemotional voice slashed him in two. He’d known humiliation and regret but that was due to things that had been donetohim.

He’ddone this, it was his actions that could’ve led to huge, terrible ramifications. In his effort to live his life solo, not to allow anyone into his personal, emotional space and to protect himself from being hurt again, he hadn’t made time for other people, and didn’t consider what they wanted or needed to be important. His ‘I’ll get to it when I want to’ attitude had severely backfired. He’d hurt Addi and his actions had nearly cost her her sisters.

This time, he couldn’t blame his grandfather, Marina or Jane...this was onhim.

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