Her head jerked in anguish. “I can’t go through this again.”
“Life is about taking risks. If you’re not prepared to face them, you might as well be dead.” His voice was shaking with the turbulence inside him. He scooped in a quick breath and challenged her again. “Is that what you want? To crawl into your hole and die because you lost the first round?”
She turned to him, her eyes water-bright and wounded. “I took the risk of marrying you, of trying to make a dream happen. And this is my punishment for it.”
“Punishment!” Disbelief burned into a sense of outrage. The jealousy he’d tried to suppress came pouring out in a fiery torrent. “What? Because you married me instead of the Latin lover who sucked you into giving him your heart to break?”
She flinched and he took savage satisfaction in striking her on the raw.
“I suppose if you’d lost his child, you would have sought comfort in him and there wouldn’t have been any sense of punishment at all. In fact, it’s me you’re punishing, for not being the man you really wanted.”
“Don’t!” she cried in a pained little voice.
“Don’t what?” he whipped back at her, hating the sense of being used and discarded. Offering him a divorce as though their marriage meant nothing! The frustrations she’d stirred poured into a bitter tirade. “Don’t send you roses? Don’t throw the truth in your face? Don’t touch you because your body is only a vessel for a baby which I failed to deliver on?”
“Stop it!” She clapped her hands over her ears.
It was the most inflammatory thing she could have done. Adrenalin pumped through Matt. He was on his feet so fast, his chair slammed onto the floor. He picked her up, hoisted her over his shoulder and strode for the bedroom, ignoring her wild struggle to escape from him, his whole body raging with the need for some grain of satisfaction out of all he’d given to make their marriage work.
“Fight as much as you like, but you will listen to me!”
He hurled her down on the bed, pinned her body there with his own, lifted her arms above her head and held them with a steely grip. “Cheat!” he snarled, revelling in the shock on her face.
“No...” she moaned.
“Yes! You made a lifelong commitment to me and here you are welshing on it within three months! Wanting to take off my wedding ring and walk away!”
She rolled her head in protest. “I didn’t say that!”
“It wasn’t me who brought up divorce, Peta.”
“I only meant...”
“What?”
“I might not be able to carry a baby full term. You want a family...” Tears welled into her eyes. “It’s what you married me for.”
“I married you for you,” he cried vehemently.
“Please don’t make me,” she sobbed, trying to squirm out from under him. “It would be rape, Matt.”
Rape! If she’d smashed a fist into his face it couldn’t have jolted him more. Yet the next instant he realised he was hard, his body having reacted to the volatile energy coursing through him. She was squirming away because she was frightened of his erection, recoiling from his supposed lust for her, the lust she had once said was mutual.
He picked himself off her and rolled onto the other side of the bed, deflated, defeated, drained of any will to fight on, horrified by the reaction he had unwittingly drawn from her. She moved into a scrunched-up huddle, shaking and weeping.
For a while he felt dazed, guilt, regret, shame, chasing through his mind. He was not a violent man. He’d only wanted her to talk to him. Physical force was anathema to him. For her to actually fear him, accuse him...it was the blackest hole Matt had ever fallen into.
Gradually reasoning returned, telling him he’d been driven by some survival instinct, natural enough in the circumstances. He’d fought...and he’d lost. Peta didn’t want him anymore. Not for anything.
He was conscious of his heartbeat slowing to a sluggish rate. His interest in life was reduced to zero. Nevertheless, life would go on. For both of them. Though it was clear it could only be in separate ways. Touching was impossible now.
Her sobs quietened and eventually stopped. She lay still, apart from him. The apartness hurt. He wondered if it would ever stop hurting. She didn’t know—never would know—how much she’d meant to him.
“I wouldn’t have taken you. Not in anger,” he said in justice to himself.
No reply.
He forced himself to swing his legs off the bed and stand up. “I guess you’d prefer to be alone.”