He placed his hands on her waist and brought her towards his body, another shudder going through him as her soft curves met his harder planes and angles. ‘I never get tired of making love with you.’
She looked up into his eyes, her lower body pressed closely to his, her hands snaking around his neck. ‘What’s the longest period you’ve made love to the same person?’ Her question was casually delivered and yet he sensed in her tone a deeper probe of interest.
‘Two weeks,’ Jack said. ‘But that was years and years ago.’
Harper’s brows lifted. ‘Why so long?’
For some strange reason he didn’t want to smile at her dry humour. For he suddenly realised he had never really ventured out of the shallow waters of casual dating. Not until he’d met Harper. Now he was in deep, so deep his feet couldn’t touch the bottom. He didn’t even know where the bottom was. All he knew was he was not going to swim away from his baby girl. He was not going to abandon Harper, either.
‘I had a fling with a woman I met when I was in New York,’ Jack said. ‘I’m not proud of it, looking back. I didn’t know she was married. She conveniently forgot to mention it.’
‘Were you in love with her?’
‘No, but it rankled that she hadn’t been honest with me.’
Harper lowered her gaze to his mouth for a moment. ‘So, telling the truth is a standard you uphold at all times?’ Her eyes came back to meet his in an almost defiant manner. ‘And one you expect in return?’
‘There are probably times when a little white lie is okay in order to keep from hurting someone unnecessarily, but I try to be straight with people. I don’t promise things I can’t deliver. I don’t say words I don’t mean.’
Harper gave a crooked smile that didn’t meet her eyes. ‘Good to know. I would hate for you to pretend to feel things you don’t feel.’
Jack placed his hand along the side of her face, gently tilting her head up so her mouth was within reach. ‘What I feel right now is almost indescribable.’
‘But you don’t love me.’ Her tone had a sound of resignation about it that plucked at his conscience like a plectrum.
His hand fell away from her face and she stepped back only slightly, but the gap suddenly felt like the width of the River Seine that ran outside their suite below. How could he close it without compromising himself? Without falling in the deep end without any way of getting out? ‘You know I care about you, Harper. That’s all I can offer you. Care and support and security. You’ll want for nothing in life. I’ll make sure of it.’
Her eyes misted over, and an invisible hand clutched at his guts. Her expression heralded a warning that he wasn’t ready to hear. ‘Yes, you’ll give me everything but the one thing I want most of all. The thing I’ve wanted all my life and never got.’
Jack moved a little distance away, determined to stay cool and calm, but it took more self-control than he realised. Fear clawed at his insides, prickly, cold fear that Harper was not going to fall in with his plans for their future. How could he convince her? He had promised her everything he was capable of giving.
He rubbed a hand down his face and released a ragged sigh. ‘I don’t want to lie to you.’
‘It’s not me you’re lying to, Jack. It’s yourself. You’re capable of loving and loving deeply. Look at the way you’ve bonded with Marli. But you don’t want to step beyond your comfort zone with me. I get it. I know I’m hardly what anyone would call in your circles a prize catch. But I want to be loved and I can’t marry you or anyone without it.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t run yourself down like that,’ Jack said, fighting anger and frustration and fear. ‘You’re everything a man could want in a partner.’
‘But you don’t really want a partner. You want a mother for your baby and a lover for your bed. And those roles are not necessarily mutually exclusive. You don’t want a soulmate, someone who shares everything with you and you with them. Someone with whom you can be yourself, yourtrueself. The person you could be if you would only allow it.’
‘You know, you’re really losing me with all this psychobabble crap,’ Jack said. ‘I am who I am. I’ve been honest with you from the get-go.’
‘Yes, you have, and I’m now being totally honest with you.’ Harper pulled the ring off her finger and handed it to him. ‘I can’t marry you, Jack. I’m sorry.’ There was a light of determination in her eyes that struck a chord of disquiet in him. She was the only woman to say no to him and it hurt. It hurt in places he had never hurt before. A pain that travelled through his body like a search-and-destroy missile, looking for all the vulnerable corners and crevices he normally kept hidden.
Jack ignored the engagement ring sitting in the middle of her palm. ‘Do you need more time? We’ve only had just over a month together and, what with taking care of Marli and your shoot and—’
‘And how much more time would I waste waiting for you to feel something you have decided you can’t or won’t feel? Weeks? Months? Years of my life?’ Harper said. ‘I want the fairy tale, Jack. I didn’t think I did until...until I met you.’
‘But you refused to see me again.’
She gave a gust of a sigh and placed the engagement ring on the coffee table near the sofa. ‘Yes, well, you’re the only one who is good at lying to yourself. I told myself I disliked you but really it was the opposite I was feeling. You threatened to distract me from my goals and it terrified me. I think that is also why I didn’t recognise I was pregnant, even though my symptoms were a little ambiguous. I just couldn’t go there in my mind.’
Jack was frowning so hard it was giving him a headache. A band of pain wrapped itself around his forehead, around his neck, around his chest, squeezing, compressing, crushing so he could barely take a breath. He didn’t want to hurt her, but how could he promise something he didn’t feel? It would only hurt her more in the end. ‘Are you saying you love me?’
Harper met his gaze with a level stare. ‘I know you don’t want to hear it, not from me or from anybody for that matter. But I do love you. I can’t say I wanted to fall in love with you but it happened anyway. But I can’t be with you if you don’t feel the same. I saw what happened to my mother when she loved a man with all of her being but he didn’t return those feelings. It destroyed her.’
Jack wasn’t sure how to handle what she had told him. Love was a four-letter word he avoided. He avoided it like a deadly contagion that threatened his very existence. He wore an emotion-resistant mask, he wore a suit of armour that was impenetrable. And yet...and yet...he was feeling such agonising pain now. Pain that Harper was not going to marry him. She was not going to live with him and bring up Marli with him in the family life he had envisaged.
‘So, this is your final decision?’ His brusque tone gave no clue to what he was actually feeling. But then, he wasn’t sure what exactly he was feeling other than anger, despair, fear and something else that lurked in the background shadows of his mind.