“So what’s the problem?”
“I told him.” Tina closed her eyes and saw Brian’s face again. The betrayal in his eyes and the fury stamped on his features. She couldn’t really blame him. He’d divorced her, after all. And if he hadn’t wanted her as his wife, why would he want her as the mother of his child? A child, by the way, he hadn’t realized he’d been conceiving. Maybe.
“Ahh…” Janet’s sigh was long and eloquent. “You knew going in he wouldn’t be happy about it.”
“I know,” she said and shook her head even as she dropped one hand to Peaches’s back and stroked the little dog gently. “But I didn’t know I’d—”
“—still love him?” Janet finished for her.
“Well, yeah.”
“Tina, honey, this way lies pain.”
“You’re right, but—” Tina’s brain went back to the night before. The passion, the desire, the hunger that had risen up and engulfed them both. It had been stronger somehow, bigger than what she and Brian had shared five years before. Was it because they’d been apart so long?
Or was it because they were meant to be together?
“So what are you going to do about it?”
Tina scowled. “What can I do?”
“Honestly, Tina,” Janet said, clucking her tongue loud enough that it sounded as though she were right beside Tina instead of at home, more than three thousand miles from South Carolina. “You love him and you’re just going to walk away again?”
Tina stiffened slightly. “I didn’t walk the last time, remember? Brian did.”
“And you let him decide for both of you what was going to happen.”
“Yes, but—”
Janet didn’t let her finish. “How about this time, the two of you actually talk about what happened?”
Good idea, in theory, Tina thought grimly. But as she remembered the look on Brian’s face when she’d left his apartment only that morning, she had a feeling that he would be a little less than receptive.
“And say what?”
“I don’t know,” Janet said, sarcasm dripping from every word, “how about, I love you?”
Those three words echoed over and over again in Tina’s mind as she stared blankly out the window. Outside, sunset pulsed in the sky, gilding the cloudstreaked horizon in brilliant shades of crimson and lavender.
“I said that five years ago,” Tina whispered, remembering the pain. “It didn’t help.”
“Couldn’t hurt, either.”
“Maybe,” she said, then changed the subject abruptly. There were no easy answers here. Nothing had really changed between her and Brian. And though she loved him and probably always would, she wasn’t going to tell Brian. What would be the point? Another chance at humiliation when he told her again that he didn’t want to be married to her? No, she thought. Passion was one thing—love was another. And all during the long night with Brian, he’d never once mentioned love.
While Janet talked about her pregnancy and the plans she had for her baby, Tina kept one hand firmly atop her flat abdomen. Silently, she prayed that inside, a child was already beginning to grow.
And if she was lucky, a small part of Brian would always be a part of her life—and no one would be able to take that away from her.
“I’m out.”
Connor, Aidan and Liam stared at Brian for a long minute. He shifted under that steady regard, then bounced the basketball a few times before turning, jumping and shooting for the basket. The ball ricocheted off the backboard and crashed through the pretty stretch of flowers lining the rectory’s driveway.
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