“Permitted?” Ivy said, her eyebrows rising again.
Should he have let her do that? Damian asked
“Ms. Madison is in excellent health, Your Highness. And,” the doctor added gently, “she is hardly the first woman to have a baby.”
Damian’s authoritative air vanished. “I know that,” he said, “but I am the first man to have one.” A beat of silence; the doctor smiled but not Ivy. “I mean, I mean—”
“You mean this is your first child,” the doctor said. “Of course, Your Highness. And I promise you, everything is fine.”
Outside, on the street, Ivy turned to Damian. “I understand why you’re so concerned. You—you lost a baby, with my sister.”
“I thoug
ht I lost a baby,” Damian said carefully. “But it was a lie.”
“Yes.” Her eyes clouded. “A terrible lie. But believing you’d really lost a baby must have been almost as bad as having it happen.”
Damian wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her, but they were on a crowded street. He made do with taking her hand, bringing it to his lips and pressing a kiss into the palm.
“I’m concerned because of you,” he said. “If anything happened to you…” He took a deep breath. “Ivy. You are—you are—”
My love.
The words were right there, on the tip of his tongue, but that was crazy. He hardly knew this woman. And there were still so many unanswered questions…
Besides, a man didn’t fall in love after, what, a week? There was no reason to be impulsive. To make a move he might regret.
“You are important to me.” He brought her hand to his mouth, kissed the palm and folded her fingers over the kiss. “Very important.”
Ivy nodded. They weren’t the words she yearned to hear, but they were close.
“I’m glad, because—because you’re very important to me, too.”
A smile lit his face. “Words meant to feed a man’s ego,” he said teasingly.
“Words that are true. Being with you, carrying your baby…” She hesitated, afraid she would blurt out too much. “I’ve never been this happy. And I want you to know that—that no matter what happens, you will always be—you will always be—”
She fell silent as their eyes met.
Damian’s heart turned over at what he saw in her face.
Years ago, he, Lucas and Nicolo had celebrated surviving finals week at Yale by driving to an airport in a little town called Danielson.
They’d taken a couple of hours of instruction, strapped on parachutes and boarded a plane after drawing slips of paper to decide which of them would go first.
He’d won.
“Or lost,” Nicolo had said, grinning.
It came back to him now, the way he’d felt standing in the plane’s open door, the wind trying to pluck him out, the ground beckoning from a million miles below.
What in hell am I doing? he’d thought.
“Jump,” his instructor had yelled.
And he had.
God, it had been incredible. Stepping into space. Soaring above the earth, then falling toward it.