He ran his hand through his hair, mussing it to wildness, and whirled to confront her. “Damn it, Charis!”
He sucked in an audible breath as he struggled for control. “I’m a freak, a poltroon, one step off being a lunatic. I can’t bear people around me, touching me. You know my affliction. In spite of my insatiable hunger for you, you know essentially I haven’t changed. Why can’t you see what you want is impossible?”
Stepping closer, she replied with matching heat. “Because of that insatiable hunger. Because you can bear my touch. Because I don’t care about other people. I only care about you.”
“You say that now. How will you feel in twenty years when you’ve wasted your youth on a man who only exists in your imagination?”
She couldn’t doubt his sincerity. No matter how mistaken he was. She made an angry sound in her throat. “And if I’m pregnant?”
He’d been pale. Now he went stark white. His eyes sparked like burning coals. “Don’t you want to bear my child?”
“I want it more than I can say.” Almost as much as she wanted to stake her place in his closed heart. Strange to recognize that need so powerfully and so immediately. She placed a trembling hand on her belly. Could a new life already grow inside her? The idea was overwhelming. Frightening. Exciting.
Gideon’s blazing eyes fastened on her gesture, and a savage expression crossed his face. “Dear God, are you pregnant?”
Was she? With all that had happened, she’d lost count of the days. And she’d been so focused on Gideon, she’d hardly considered consequences. “It’s too early to say. Do you still mean to send me away if I carry your child?”
He looked like he reeled at the prospect of fatherhood. “I don’t know.”
An ounce of her earlier sarcasm crept into her voice. “Why are you so shocked? The natural result of what we’ve done for the last two weeks is a baby. Surely you gave some thought to the matter.”
He slumped against the wall, his face ravaged with despair. “Yes.” He hesitated and shook his head with bleak incomprehension. “No.”
There was a charged silence, then he continued in a dull voice. “Of course I knew I took risks. If I thought beyond how much I wanted you, it was to say we’d deal with any complications when the time came.”
She twined her arms around herself as ice congealed in her blood. Her momentary hope shrank to a cold kernel the size of a pebble. “Risks? Complications? Don’t you want a baby?”
He tensed. “If I’m not fit to be a husband, I’m certainly not fit to be a father. If we have a child, it…” He must have interpreted her expression correctly because he paused. “…he or she must go with you.”
She raised her chin although she was so deathly tired of battling him. He loved her, she reminded herself. But the words lost their power with every repetition. “Why does anyone have to go anywhere?”
“Aren’t you listening?”
“All I’ve heard is a lot of nonsense.” She turned away and stalked toward the bedroom. She was disheartened, angry, exhausted. Trying to get Gideon to see sense was like flinging herself over and over against a mountain.
For one electric moment, she’d wondered if she’d shaken his certainty. She hadn’t mistaken what she’d seen in his face when he asked if she was with child. He’d been furious with himself. And her.
But she’d seen more in his ferocious black gaze.
She’d seen longing.
He wasn’t nearly as implacably set upon his desolate future as he wanted her to think. If she had his baby, he wouldn’t desert her. She knew that in her bones.
Dear God, let me be pregnant.
As she reached the doorway, he spoke in a grave voice. When she turned to face him, he looked weary and curiously defeated, although he’d withstood her every attack. “I know you believe I’m cruel and capricious and pigheaded. But I swear I’m acting in your best interests.”
“I wish you’d think of yourself for once. Ask yourself what you want and seize it.” Blinking back acrid, painful tears, she left him alone.
Twenty-two
Gideon turned the hired gig onto the lonely road that snaked across the moor to Penrhyn. At his side, Charis remained bundled away from him in her new blue pelisse and matching bonnet.
She’d been broodingly quiet since before they’d left Jersey yesterday. On the storm-tossed boat that finally reached the mainland south of Penrhyn this morning. During this jolting carriage ride in a shabby, ill-sprung vehicle over potholed roads.
It was well into the afternoon, and still she remained locked away as securely as if a wall of bricks and mortar separated them. She’d rebuffed his stilted attempts at conversation, seemingly content to stare at the rough countryside.
She’d never been a chatterer. Her ability to maintain a restful silence was one of the many things he admired.