“Wow.” She snatched a breath. “You’re an IVF baby?”
“Mmm.” He sat right up and pulled several blades of grass out, rubbing them between his fingers. “My parents tried and tried and tried and they got me. Then they kept trying. I wasn’t enough for them. Then I didn’t do what they wanted me to. I am the ultimate disappointment and it was all the worse, given what they’d gone through to get me.” He grabbed his shirt and pulled it on, covering that newly bronzed body. “Do you know what they said? That I wasn’t the son I should have been because I hadn’t been born from the act of love—so I didn’t have a loving heart.”
Nina’s stomach clenched. “But that’s crazy,” she cried, horrified. “Being an IVF baby doesn’t make you bionic. You’re not any less—” she couldn’t get the words out for her rage. “That’s the most—”
“I know it’s rubbish,” he interrupted with an odd laugh. “The real point is that I didn’t have the normal kind of love that other people get from their parents.” He suddenly sobered, turning his face away from her. “I wasn’t nurtured the same as most kids are. That’s why I can’t do family myself.”
Nina’s heart tore at his self-denial. He’d been wronged, but he was so wrong saying that. “What about Caspar and his family? You gave them so much. You care, Eduardo. You’re compassionate. More than most people.”
He shook his head. “That was a patient. Not a personal relationship.”
“It was a personal relationship,” she argued. “You visited them every day for months—if that’s not a personal relationship, then what is?”
“No,” he said. “It was professional. I kept my distance. I can’t do intimacy.”
He’d kept his distance? Of course he hadn’t—he’d been shaking that day he’d come to her—hiding his tears in her shirt, his whole body trembling in her arms. Did he think she’d not felt that? Seen that? Known that?
“I tried once,” he said softly. “But my hours killed it. She said I cared more for my test tubes than for her. Thing is,” he added, looking rueful, “I probably did.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being serious and dedicated and working hard,” she said, lifting her chin. “Many people sacrifice a lot of things for their work, but they still have relationships.”
He shook his head. “I can’t meet the needs of a partner. I can’t keep someone happy. And I don’t want children—I don’t want to do to them what my parents did to me.”
“You know what not to do.”
He shook his head. “I’d be an absentee father. That’s not fair.”
Nina swallowed—she was so angry with him for shutting himself off from what could be a rich part of life. He was taking the easy way out.
He watched her closely, reading her expression. Now he frowned. “In the end, my girlfriend didn’t believe I was working. She was jealous, suspicious. She thought there was someone else. It led to tantrums.”
And he hated fights and recriminations, didn’t he? If he’d spent most of his life battling his parents—feeling their emotional manipulation—then she didn’t blame him.
“My work is a huge part of my life,” he said. “It’s most of my life.”
“But you also have fun,” she argued. “You know how to have fun.” Her kind of fun—geeky Shakespeare-quoting fun and endless frolics in bed and interest in online newspapers and science magazines and spending forever in museums.
“For a limited time.” He looked apologetic—but it wasn’t for himself. That apology was for her.
Nina’s heart sliced open as she suddenly recognized what this was—an excuse. He was trying to let her down gently—blaming himself, not her. Telling her that he didn’t do long term. And he believed it too.
But she knew he’d do long term one day—when he’d met the right woman. It was just that she wasn’t that woman. She couldn’t change him, and actually she didn’t want to. The fact was that she wasn’t the one who could bring the balance to his life.
Okay. That was okay.
But now she had to walk away before she humiliated herself by crying and clinging because in her heart she was really not okay. Because she badly wanted to be that one—that woman for him.
For the final time, she twisted the ring off her finger. “You have to take this back now.”
He looked at her. He looked at the ring. But he didn’t take it.
“Surely you have a tongue in your head?” she prodded—falling back on Shakespeare to help her joke her way through the heartbreak.
“I don’t want it.”
“Oh, it’s just a zirconia, right?” She watched him.
He smiled—a lazy pull of that masculine mouth.
She sighed. No. She knew it wasn’t. “Why did you get it?”
“Because it’s simple and elegant and sparkles—most of all when no one’s looking. Like you.”
He couldn’t say things like that, it wasn’t fair. “Oh, that’s charming.” She tried to keep it cool as she held it out to him again. “But you have to take it back. Now.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, ‘No’?”
“I mean no.” His shoulders lifted.
“You have to take it back. It’s worth… I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I want you to have it.” He clamped his mouth shut—as if that was all he had to say about it.
Nina looked at him—why was he insisting on this? She didn’t believe there was anything more to his feelings, and she hated to think there was less. But suddenly she had to challenge him—to put the emotion out there. Too bad if it made him uncomfortable.
“I could have fallen for you, Eduardo. I really could have fallen.” For the first time, she lied. As he’d said, sometimes a white lie to protect yourself was necessary. For the truth was, she had fallen—far and fast.
Now she waited—terrified—would he pick up on the opening she’d just given him?
His mouth softened, but his gaze dropped and he looked down to the grass. “You’re going to have an amazing time.”
Nina clenched her teeth, only just maintaining some kind of smile as his words cauterized the wound in her heart. No, he hadn’t taken up that opening to declare anything. It seemed the ring thing was her good-bye prize. No, thanks.