“Well, both,” she’d said with a guileless look. “If you say yes.”
He’d been self-serving enough to go along with the plan. The upside had been too good, offering access to her business and social circles along with a leap in his standing on the financial pages. And Adara had made it so easy. She had not only scripted their engagement and wedding, she’d known her lines. Their marriage had been perfect.
To the untrained eye.
He could look back now and see what a performance it had been on both their parts. From the reception to country clubs to rubbing shoulders with international bankers, they had set each other up like improv specialists, him feeding Adara lines and her staying on message.
And she’d conformed to brand like a pro, elevating her modest style to a timeless sophistication that had put both the hotels and his shipyard in a new class. She’d delivered exactly what she’d promised in terms of networking, opportunities and sheer hard work, putting in the late hours to attain the goals he’d laid out.
She had probably thought that’s all he’d wanted from her, he realized, heart clenching. It had been, initially, but somewhere along the line he’d begun to care—about a lot of things. She was an excellent cook and she bought him shirts he liked. Whenever they were about to leave for work or an evening event, she invariably smoothed his hair or straightened his tie and said, “You look nice.”
Part of him had stood back and called her actions patronizing, but a needier part had soaked up her approval. It was all the more powerful because he had admired her so much.
Adara set a very high standard for herself. Once he’d fully absorbed that, he’d begun taking it as a challenge to meet and exceed her expectations. Finally comfortable financially, he’d followed her lead and started helping others, selecting charities with thought for who he really wanted to help, creating foundations that benefited young mothers, street kids, and sailors unable to work due to disabilities.
Meanwhile, pride of possession had evolved into something so deep, Adara’s seeming to cheat on him earlier this summer had shaken him to the bone.
It wasn’t comfortable to be this invested. Sure he was a risk-taker, but not with his emotions. The way his heart had grown inordinately soft, especially in the last weeks, unnerved him, but he couldn’t help the way his chest swelled with feeling and pride every time he so much as thought about his wife.
A screen door creaked, drawing his glance. Pressure filled his chest as Adara appeared on the veranda and lifted a somber hand.
He didn’t deserve her or any of this, but he’d do anything to keep it.
* * *
Adara’s emotions were all over the place and that look of intense determination on Gideon’s face as he looked up at her gave her a chill near her heart. He seemed so ruthless in that second, exactly as her mother had just accused him of being. She could clearly see the man who’d said, Whatever it took, I had to amass some wealth and take control over my destiny.
But maybe her vision was colored by everything she was dealing with. When she started down the stairs, he met her at the bottom, his scowl deepening as he took in her red, puffy eyes. His arm was tender as he crooked it around her and drew her into his solid presence.
“Pretty rough, huh?”
She began to shake. Until the last few weeks, she’d had to keep her sorrows or worries inside her where they ate like acid. Now she had Gideon. Her mother was so wrong about him. He wasn’t cold and heartless like her father. Not at all.
“Can we stay out here a few minutes? I feel like I haven’t had air in weeks.” Not that the summer heat held much oxygen, but he obliged, ambling beside her as she took a turn around the pond. “This would have been a great place to grow up if my father had bought this earlier. And things had been different,” she mused, imagining a swing set and a sandbox.
“If Nic had been your father’s, you mean?”
Adara choked on a harsh laugh, voice breaking as she said, “Mom asked me if this baby was yours.” Her hand moved to protectively cover their unborn child’s ears. “What prospective grandmother has that as a first reaction?”
“I don’t have any doubt he or she is mine,” Gideon said with quiet resolution. “But even if you told me right now that it wasn’t, I’d stay right here and work through it with you.”
Adara checked her step, startled, thinking again, whatever it took... “You wouldn’t be angry?”
“I’d be angry as hell, but I wouldn’t take it out on you and the baby the way your father tortured you and your mother. I wouldn’t push you out of my life to fend for yourself, either.”
The way his mother had had to make her own way. Adara’s surprise and apprehension softened to understanding. He might have a streak of single-mindedness, but there was a marshmallow center under his hard shell.
“You’re a bigger person than me. Maybe it’s the miscarriages and fear of infidelity talking, but I don’t know if I could stay married if you had a baby with someone else.”
“You’re not sure you want to stay married, as it is, and the only woman having my baby is you.”
Adara pivoted away from that and continued walking, startled by the shaft of fear his light challenge pierced into her. It would seem her ability to dissemble around him was completely gone. He knew every thought in her head, every hesitation in her heart.
“My mother said she’d understand if it wasn’t yours,” Adara said with a sheared edge on her tone, recalling how that conversation had spun into directions she hadn’t anticipated any better than this one. Holding on to her composure had been nearly impossible as her mother had tried to find parallels in their two lives. “My parents had had a fight and the engagement was off. That’s why she slept with Nic’s dad. Olief was a journalist flying back to Europe. She had a layover. It was just a rebound thing. The sort of affair all her flight attendant friends were having. Then my father called and the wedding was back on.”
“Even though she knew she was pregnant?”
“I guess paternity could have gone either way. She loved my father so she married him and deluded herself into believing Nic was his.”
At least you’re not in love with your husband. I’ve always been proud of you for having that much sense, but children are a mistake, Adara. You have no idea how much power a man has over you once babies enter the picture.
Adara had recoiled from her mother’s words, finding it distasteful to be accused of having no feelings for Gideon even though that had been her goal for most of her marriage.
“I wanted her to be happy for us and she just took off on a bitter rant about my father.” Hearing her mother refer to her grandchild as a “mistake” had been the greatest blow of all. Her entire childhood, void as it had been of parental pride and joy, had crawled out from under the bed, grim and dark and ready to swallow her.
“She’s sick,” Gideon reminded her.
“I know, but—” But you lied to him, she had wanted to say. Maybe her father wouldn’t have twisted into such a cruel man if his wife had been honest from the start.
There was no use trying to change her mother at this point though. Challenging her, arguing and judging, were incredibly misplaced. Her mother wasn’t just sick, she was dying.
“We’ll do better by our child,” Gideon vowed, pausing to turn her into him. He lifted her hand to graze his lips across the backs of her fingers. The ring he’d given her yesterday winked at her.
At the same time, his eyes held a somber rebuke. Gideon was a patient man, but this time he wasn’t going to let her avoid his silent question. Even as she absorbed his earnest statement, her mother’s voice whispered again, You have no idea how much power a man has over you once babies enter the picture.
But she wasn’t her mother. There weren’t any lies between her and Gideon. The secrets and recriminations that had surrounded her growing up, forcing her to close off her heart out of self-protection, were old news. Their child, unpolluted by any of that, gave her a chance to love cleanly and openly.
This fresh start with this man, who already stirred her so deeply, was a chance to build a truly happy life. If she dared believe she was entitled to it and opened herself to letting it happen. It was a huge leap of faith, but she’d taken one in marrying him at all. Maybe she was putting her heart at deep risk, but again and again he’d proven himself to be a man she could trust.
“We will, won’t we?” she said in quiet promise.
Relief and a flicker of deeper emotion was quickly transformed into his predominant mask of arrogant confidence. For a second, he’d seemed moved, which made her heart trip, but now he was his typical conqueror self, nearly smug with triumph—which was familiar and oddly endearing, making her want to laugh and ignore her old self trying to warn her that she might be giving up too much too quickly.
But if she had a soupy, awed look on her face, he wore one of fierce tenderness.