“Thank you for sharing that with me,” I say. My head tilts up so our eyes meet. “I’m sorry that you had to deal with her illness alone.”
Marcus kisses my lips tenderly. “I wish I could have done more to help her, but she wasn’t ready to get help. I think she would have been some day. I hope she would have been.”
I nod. “I think she would have. Jane was a self-righteous person. She liked attention and she liked drama. Eventually she would have come forward and admitted her disease, if only for the eyes she would have had on her.”
We stay on the couch, just holding each other for a while. When the silence gets to be too much, I say, “I miss her.”
Marcus kisses my cheek. “I miss her, too, sweetheart. But you and me? That has nothing to do with her,” he says fiercely. “And sweetheart, this baby? I won’t let anything hurt him or her. This baby was conceived in love because sweetheart, I love you. Not Jane. You.”
I gasp, eyes going wide. Because did Marcus just say those three words that make my heart leap? With tears in my eyes, I lean forward to kiss him … knowing that our fates are entwined to the end of our days.
Chapter Thirteen
Kelsey
I wake up with my cheek pressed against Marcus’s shoulder, his arm snaked around my waist. The clock on my cable box reads just after six p.m. To loosen my stiff neck, I stretch it to either side. The movement wakes Marcus from our late afternoon nap.
He yawns. “I didn’t know I fell asleep.”
“Me neither. I guess our conversation was kind of exhausting.”
Marcus nods. “I’m glad we talked about this. I’m glad you know about your sister now.”
“Me too. Thank you for telling me about her. It means a lot to me. I feel closer to Jane, somehow, even though she’s gone.”
Marcus is silent for a moment.
“I’m glad to hear that. She was a complicated woman with problems of her own, but she was still an amazing person.”
“Yeah,” I say slowly. But inside my head whirs because I’m still not sure where we’re going with all this. The fact that Marcus loves me doesn’t change our betrayal. I’m pregnant with my brother in law’s baby, and the stress makes me dizzy. I fall against the huge man. “Whoa, take it easy. Just breathe,” he soothes.
I listen to his advice and take a few deep breaths. My heart rate slows back down to a relatively normal rhythm.
“We have to do something about this baby,” I say in a low whisper. I don’t want to start another fight, but we can’t hide from this. Pregnancy is one of those things that gets pretty obvious after a few months. And a baby isn’t exactly something you can just pop out and surprise everyone with. Plus, this child would certainly be a shocker to the world. Probably an unwelcome one, come to think of it.
But it’s like Marcus can read my mind. Looking into my eyes, the alpha male speaks slowly.
“You know, Jane’s sickness caused her to stop wanting sex. It was a gradual thing, but over the last year before her death, her libido dwindled to nothing. She didn’t have the energy or the desire. We weren’t intimate even once in those last twelve months,” he confesses.
Where is Marcus going with this? I’m not exactly excited to hear about his sex life with my sister. I’ve worked really hard at keeping their relationship separate from ours in my head. It’s weird to think his cock had been inside my sister at some point in the past.
I shiver at the thought. Best to keep that from my brain. It makes our intimacy a lot less awesome.
Marcus stands and paces in my small living room like a caged animal. “When Jane stopped wanting to have sex, I started to think about sex with other women. I never acted on it, but my mind wandered. And sweetheart, it wandered to you.”
“What?” I gasp. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am,” he says. “I would fantasize about us being together. It was probably ridiculous, but it got me through a lot of the last few months I spent with Jane. Dealing with her issues was hard. Thinking about you made it easier.”
I don’t know what to say to this, so I keep quiet. Sure enough, Marcus starts up again.
“Being with you is completely different than being with Jane. And the sicker she got, the worse it was. I’m not proud of this, but even at the beginning, it was never easy with her. Our sex was clinical and vanilla. She never wanted to try new things. Missionary and doggy, and that was it. Jane never once let me finish inside of her, either, birth control or not. Even when we first started dating, I had to finish myself off with my hand most of the time.”