Except it isn’t his home.
Her body trembled as her hands strayed to her belly.
It’s my home and our baby’s home. Not his. Because he doesn’t want it to be. Any more than he will ever want us.
Her mind struggled to engage with the thoughts careering around in her head. The emotions battered her as the hope she’d nurtured so diligently and so pointlessly for so long finally began to die.
He sat beside her saying nothing, offering no explanation, no solace, no comfort.
The hideous things that had happened to him as a child didn’t give her a connection with him, she realised. They didn’t have a shared pain after both having been rejected by their fathers. This was his pain. A pain he guarded so jealously, so relentlessly, he had married her just to destroy the man who had caused it.
The silence stretched, creating a chasm between them, until the distance felt like millions of miles instead of only a few feet.
The car pulled into the driveway of the Grosvenor Square house. Jack got out, dismissed the chauffeur and walked round the car to open her door.
She stepped out into the night, still dazed. His warm palm settled on her back to direct her into the house, the traitorous ripple only damning her more as he closed the front door and helped her off with her wrap.
‘Thank God that’s over with,’ he said, his hands cupping her stomach as he dragged her back against his body, his lips finding the rampant pulse in her neck.
She jolted as ripples flooded her core at the feel of his already burgeoning erection pressing into her back.
His mouth devoured the spot under her earlobe he knew was supremely sensitive.
‘Let’s go to bed,’ he suggested, but the raw, seductive command—one she had succumbed to so many times before—finally tore away the last of the fog until all that was left was the pain.
And the stark, gruelling light of truth.
‘No,’ she said, lurching out of his arms, wrenching herself away from the traitorous need.
‘Damn it. I need you tonight, Katherine,’ he said, his voice raw, his expression more transparent than she had ever seen it before.
She could see the hurt, the anger, the bitter confusion and the desperation the encounter with his father had caused. But she could also see in the rigid line of his jaw, in the anger sparking in his eyes, that this wasn’t about her, about them, and it never had been.
She was nothing more than a temporary port in a storm, their marriage nothing more than a convenient means for him to get his revenge for everything he’d suffered in childhood. Her heart broke for that brutalised child...but there was another child now, one who needed her love and support more.
She steeled herself against the desire to soothe, to console, to take the pain away the only way he would let her. And forced herself to say what she had to say.
‘I can’t do this any more, Jack. You need to leave.’
‘What...? Why?’ Jack yelled, the stubborn refusal on Katherine’s face—and the pulse of desperation swelling in his groin—all but crucifying him.
‘Because it’s not me you need, Jack,’ she said, her voice breaking on the words and only crucifying him more. ‘It’s your revenge.’
The fury surged. The fury that had been building ever since Daniel Smyth had strolled towards him with that smug, entitled smile on his face and Jack had been forced to face the sickening realisation that the son of a bitch had played him all along.
He knew who I was. Right from the start.
Daniel Smyth had got the board to insist Jack marry above his station so he could make the kid from a run-down council estate whom he had discarded before he’d even been born somehow worthy to become his heir. And Jack had eventually fallen right into the trap.
But that horrifying revelation, the cruel trick he’d allowed himself to fall for, wasn’t nearly as gutting as the closed expression on Katherine’s face now.
If only he could just lose himself in her. Forget about tonight, about his past, about the whole sick, stupid mess. He knew none of it would matter any more. After all, he hadn’t really married her to get the shares. He’d married her for a host of other reasons. But as he lifted his hand to touch her cheek, to draw her back in, she stepped back.
‘When you said you didn’t like the name Daniel, I thought we were having a discussion about our son.’
He let his hand drop. So they were back to that. ‘Katherine, I told you I can’t—’
‘But tonight I found out,’ she cut him off, the quiver of regret in her hushed tone crushing him, ‘I found out it had nothing to do with him. It was just another part of your past you won’t allow me to see.’
‘I told you on our wedding night what I can offer the child,’ he said, even though it felt like a lie now. ‘And what I can’t.’
She simply stared at him, the gleam of tears almost more than he could bear. ‘I know,’ she said, so softly he almost didn’t hear her. ‘And I believed you then. But that was before I fell in love with you.’
‘You...’ The flood of need hit him square in the chest. But right behind it was the fear. ‘No, you don’t...’ he said, locking away all the emotions he couldn’t afford to feel.
One side of her mouth quirked in a sad half-smile, but the sense of hopelessness hovered like a dark cloud in the hallway. ‘I spent the whole of my childhood trying to make my father love me. I can’t do that with you, Jack. I won’t.’ Her hand covered her stomach where their child grew. ‘I have to protect myself and my child. I don’t want you here any more.’
She turned and walked away from him.
He stood, rigid with shock and anger for several seconds, desperate to chase after her, to make her want him, the way he had so many times before.
But the scar burned on his cheek, the agony real again, and so raw.
He’d begged Harry Wolfe to want him, to care about him, because he’d felt so scared. So desperate. And all it had done was left him more alone. He’d be damned if he’d make that mistake a second time.
She would come back to him. On his terms. And, until she did, he would survive without her.
But as he marched out of the house, and slammed the door behind him, it felt as if part of his heart was being wrenched from his body.
The bitter irony was, it was the part of his heart he thought he had killed a long time ago.