It would kill her.
It was finished. Dominic held it up in his hands, in awe of the power of his grandfather’s tools, in awe of the beauty they had created.
He didn’t know if she’d like it or even want it, but it was done and he would give it to her as a gift when the baby was born. Something shifted in his chest and he looked at his watch. So soon.
He didn’t want her to go. He wanted to tear up their agreement and keep her here. She belonged here, even if she’d never wanted this baby. And a question he’d wanted to put to her months ago—a possibility—surged back.
It had to be worth a try.
‘Stay,’ he said, as they lay together in the sweet afterglow of tender loving that night. ‘Don’t leave.’
Her heart bumped against a chest getting rapidly more crowded by the day, hope blossoming large but still too afraid to breathe.
‘What do you mean?’
He raised himself on one elbow, looking down at her. ‘There’s no reason for you to go. Not really.’
But what reason is there for me to stay? She licked her lips. ‘We have an agreement. I promised I wouldn’t change my mind. I wouldn’t cause any problems for you after the birth.’
‘You wouldn’t cause any problems! You’d be great. Rosa would love you to stay.’
And Dominic? What would Dominic love? Who did he love?
‘And I know you never wanted this baby, but you’d be good with it, I know. You could help Rosa, don’t you see, it would be perfect.’
Perfect.
‘You want me to stay and help with the baby after it’s born.’
He traced the fingers of one hand down the side of her face, his now familiar touch still causing her eyelashes to flutter and her breathing to hitch. ‘I know how hard it would be for you, how much you were looking forward to being free, but it wouldn’t be all bad, surely.’
His eyes shone with wicked intent, his hand now skimming her breast, but there was hope mixed in there too, she saw.
And he was so wrong. He was offering her some kind of miracle—the opportunity to hold this tiny infant, to feel its new baby breath on her cheek—he had no idea the world he was offering her!
But he wasn’t asking her to stay because he loved her. She would have him in his bed but she would not have him. Women like her could not expect to have men like him.
‘How long?’ she ventured. ‘How long would you expect me to stay?’ Before you throw me out.
And immediately his hand stilled on her thigh. ‘Would it be such a chore? Was I wrong to ask you? Would you rather leave and go back to that house?’
And she shook her head, for even without love, even without certainty or any degree of permanence, what he was offering her was one thousand times better than the alternative—returning to her little house, even if it was hers, alone with nothing but her thoughts and a shattered heart for company.
Who needed love when that was the alternate future you faced?
‘I’ll do it,’ she said softly, ‘I’ll stay.’
She was in the kitchen making salad when she felt it—the sharp stabbing pain that stole her breath and doubled her over. She clutched at the bench, wincing as another pain sliced through her. ‘What is it?’ shrieked Rosa, running from the other end of the kitchen.
‘I don’t know,’ she gasped, knowing only that it was a thousand times worse than the Braxton-Hicks contractions she was getting used to, fear curling down her spine. ‘It’s way too early.’
Rosa got her a chair, helped her to sit. ‘Hold on, I’ll call Dominic.’
Another shooting pain ripped through her, making her cry out with the intensity and with the sensation that something inside her was tearing free, the trickling flow that ran down her leg and spilled red against the tiled floor confirming it.
And panic flared inside her as another wrenching pain gripped her like a vice and Rosa’s face at the phone turned white.
No! she thought in her last seconds before the pain took her away. She could not lose this child! She wanted this child. She wanted her baby.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHAT the hell was going on? Dominic paced back and forth in the waiting room, a cold sweat blanketing him, waiting for news he felt as if he’d already been waiting on for hours.