From Ex to Eternity(26)

This was clearly difficult for him. But he was here and it encouraged her to go on, to spill the blackness inside that had become frighteningly real, very fast.

“The pregnancy was an accident. But I wanted that baby,” she began slowly, sorting her thoughts as they came to her. “Then it was gone. Well, not really gone. They don’t tell you that. Instead of going to Aruba on our honeymoon, I got to have a D & C.”

“What is that?”

“It’s...not something I care to relive.” She shuddered and Keith pulled the blanket up higher around her shoulders with his free hand. “Look it up later if you think you can handle it.”

With a small growl of warning, Keith tipped her chin up to force her to look him in the eye. “You handled it. By yourself. I’d like to think I’m at least as strong as you. Tell me. I want to know what happened.”

The fire in his expression rendered her as speechless as he’d been mere moments ago. A strange flutter in her midsection scared her because it felt a bit like panic. Panic. If he’d morphed into a man she could lean on, who wouldn’t desert her to deal with the horrors of a miscarriage aftermath by herself, did that mean she could trust him this time?

How would she know?

There was only one way to find out. “I think I need more wine for this.”

Instantly, he complied, filling her glass nearly to the brim. And then he listened without interrupting as she told the unvarnished tale of the day before the wedding when she’d felt shuddery and nauseated but assumed it was nerves until the bleeding started. He didn’t butt in when she mentioned how Meredith had sat with her through the interminably long wait in the doctor’s office until the miscarriage was confirmed.

And then Cara described how she silently carried the knowledge that the pregnancy had terminated through the rehearsal dinner, smiling woodenly while friends and family toasted the couple, but slowly fading on the inside. Over the past two years, she’d often wondered if he’d picked up on the vibe because he’d been so quiet that night.

But in retrospect, he’d probably been dreading the ceremony and mentally preparing himself to enter into a union   with a woman he didn’t want to marry.

In the cold light of the current conversation, she realized he had been there for her in the simple fact of being willing to marry her. Had she failed to give him enough credit for that? It couldn’t have been an easy decision to make or to carry out.

Coupled with his solid presence tonight, she just didn’t know what to make of the still-present flutter that felt a lot less like panic now and more like anticipation.

Over half of her glass of wine remained, but she abbreviated the story of the day after the abandoned wedding. Some details were too much to repeat, but judging by the increased pressure on her hand and the bleakness in Keith’s gaze, she’d given him enough of an idea what happened during a D & C to make the point.

When she stopped talking, Keith pulled her against his chest and held her fiercely, wordlessly. But no words were necessary to absorb the strength he’d offered her.

The cleansing meant everything to her.

* * *

Keith held Cara for as long as she let him and when she pulled away, it seemed as good a time as any to switch to scotch. Because he sorely needed something stout to blunt the seething mess in his stomach.

When he’d convinced her to stay, he’d envisioned a slow, languorous dive into the kind of lovemaking they’d thus far been unable to indulge in due to Cara’s vanishing acts. That was the “more” he’d hoped for, not gut-wrenching emotional knots he had no idea how to untie.

The small bar in the corner of his suite provided a good cover for his shaking hands. Cara hadn’t pulled many punches, that was for sure. On the second try, he clunked ice into the highball and splashed amber liquor over it, then took a healthy swallow.

Fortified, he turned back to Cara and leaned a hip against the bar, hoping it didn’t look as if he was holding himself up.

He’d started this descent the moment he spied Cara across the room at the Dragonfly back in Houston. Now he had to see it through with no map and a broad field of quicksand in all directions.

“I don’t know how to do this part either,” he confessed.

Mostly because he had no idea what he was trying to hit. There were no goals, no tangible checklists or a specific solution to a particular problem. He had no skill set for relationships or any training, which was one of the many reasons he tried to avoid them.

Cara, as always, had turned that upside down. No matter what kind of parameters he put around their island fling, the emotional depths had been set up long ago and couldn’t be sidestepped.

Besides, he owed her for messing up two years ago, owed her for jumping into this rekindled affair willingly and without censor, and most of all, he owed her for her unconditional forgiveness.

“I’m not sitting over here with a scorecard,” she said. “I’d be the last person to tell you if you were doing it wrong.”

He poured a second glass of scotch and opted to return to the couch. Cara’s small smile bolstered him. Not a lot but enough. “I... Thank you for telling me about the miscarriage.”

“Really?” She pursed her lips in confusion. “I can’t honestly say what I was expecting your reaction to be, but that was not it.”

He couldn’t have said what his reaction should be either. But he had to man up and admit the truth. Or at least the part he could actually verbalize.

“I spent two years completely unaware you’d really been pregnant. And I’ve spent the last few days thinking about how I messed up.” And working through the guilt. “I spent zero time thinking about how the miscarriage happened, what you must have gone through. I’m sorry.”

Her strength astounded him. While he’d been admiring her business savvy and letting her cross his eyes with her new adventurous spirit, she’d actually been quietly amazing from the beginning. In his haste to escape the noose he’d created for himself, he’d missed it.

And in his haste to get her to stay tonight, he’d created an impossible internal quagmire. While processing her surprisingly calm recitation of the events, one thing had clearly risen to the surface—she’d been pregnant with a child. His child.

It had never been real before.

There in the low light of the temporary suite where he’d been staying for the duration of a temporary job, where he’d made love to a woman under the guise of a temporary affair, the baby became real—and just as temporary.

Something he could describe only as sadness filled him, hitching his lungs. For the first time in his life, he mourned the necessity of temporary.

“It’s okay.” Her hand on his thigh was warm and reassuring. “You’ve had a lot to process. And you’re here now. That means a lot to me.”

Yes, he was here. But he sensed she needed so much more than his largely mute presence. How much longer would she put up with his inability to say the right words, to reach out and express his own feelings?

This had gotten far too complicated and he had no solution.

“Cara...” I can’t do this.

The silence stretched and grew painful. He shifted uncomfortably, a little sick with the discovery that he wished he could be the man she deserved—but not only was he not, he couldn’t be. Furthermore, she didn’t trust him and he didn’t blame her. What were they really doing here but resolving her issues so she could say goodbye with a clear conscience?

“I get that this is hard for you, Keith.” Her espresso-colored eyes tracked his, carrying no condemnation, no expectation. Just understanding.

It nearly undid him.

“Do you really?” It came out all wrong, accusatory and harsh, but he couldn’t have changed it, not with all the ups and downs and the ache at the back of his throat.

He looked away.

“Yes,” she answered calmly. “I may not have known you very well back in Houston, but the reason for that is because you never let me in. I mean, I know that you grew up on Long Island and your dad worked on Wall Street. You went to Penn State and got a degree in international business. But those are just surface-level things by intention. It’s not a mystery to me that you’re the strong, silent type when it comes to intimacy.”

She cupped his jaw and guided his face up to meet her gaze.

“It’s okay,” she repeated. “I meant what I said. You’re here and that’s enough. I’m not asking you to bare your soul.”

Stricken, he stared at her, falling into her empathy with an ocean of relief swimming in his chest. She was giving him a pass and he was pathetically grateful enough to take it.

And then she sealed it with a soft kiss. Her lips rested on his and there was nothing but pure compassion in it.

“Come with me,” she instructed and stood, holding out her hand.

He took it, thoroughly intrigued when she led him to the bedroom. There, she undressed him carefully and threw back the covers on the king-size bed he’d slept in alone since arriving in Grace Bay.

“We’ve got a long day tomorrow and we need to get some sleep.” She patted the mattress. “Lie down.”

She was putting him to bed. It nearly made him laugh, but it caught on the lump in his throat. “Yes, ma’am.”