Adara set a very high standard for herself. Once he’d fully absorbed that, he’d begun taking it as a challenge to meet and exceed her expectations. Finally comfortable financially, he’d followed her lead and started helping others, selecting charities with thought for who he really wanted to help, creating foundations that benefited young mothers, street kids, and sailors unable to work due to disabilities.
Meanwhile, pride of possession had evolved into something so deep, Adara’s seeming to cheat on him earlier this summer had shaken him to the bone.
It wasn’t comfortable to be this invested. Sure he was a risk-taker, but not with his emotions. The way his heart had grown inordinately soft, especially in the last weeks, unnerved him, but he couldn’t help the way his chest swelled with feeling and pride every time he so much as thought about his wife.
A screen door creaked, drawing his glance. Pressure filled his chest as Adara appeared on the veranda and lifted a somber hand.
He didn’t deserve her or any of this, but he’d do anything to keep it.
* * *
Adara’s emotions were all over the place and that look of intense determination on Gideon’s face as he looked up at her gave her a chill near her heart. He seemed so ruthless in that second, exactly as her mother had just accused him of being. She could clearly see the man who’d said, Whatever it took, I had to amass some wealth and take control over my destiny.
But maybe her vision was colored by everything she was dealing with. When she started down the stairs, he met her at the bottom, his scowl deepening as he took in her red, puffy eyes. His arm was tender as he crooked it around her and drew her into his solid presence.
“Pretty rough, huh?”
She began to shake. Until the last few weeks, she’d had to keep her sorrows or worries inside her where they ate like acid. Now she had Gideon. Her mother was so wrong about him. He wasn’t cold and heartless like her father. Not at all.
“Can we stay out here a few minutes? I feel like I haven’t had air in weeks.” Not that the summer heat held much oxygen, but he obliged, ambling beside her as she took a turn around the pond. “This would have been a great place to grow up if my father had bought this earlier. And things had been different,” she mused, imagining a swing set and a sandbox.
“If Nic had been your father’s, you mean?”
Adara choked on a harsh laugh, voice breaking as she said, “Mom asked me if this baby was yours.” Her hand moved to protectively cover their unborn child’s ears. “What prospective grandmother has that as a first reaction?”
“I don’t have any doubt he or she is mine,” Gideon said with quiet resolution. “But even if you told me right now that it wasn’t, I’d stay right here and work through it with you.”
Adara checked her step, startled, thinking again, whatever it took... “You wouldn’t be angry?”
“I’d be angry as hell, but I wouldn’t take it out on you and the baby the way your father tortured you and your mother. I wouldn’t push you out of my life to fend for yourself, either.”
The way his mother had had to make her own way. Adara’s surprise and apprehension softened to understanding. He might have a streak of single-mindedness, but there was a marshmallow center under his hard shell.
“You’re a bigger person than me. Maybe it’s the miscarriages and fear of infidelity talking, but I don’t know if I could stay married if you had a baby with someone else.”
“You’re not sure you want to stay married, as it is, and the only woman having my baby is you.”
Adara pivoted away from that and continued walking, startled by the shaft of fear his light challenge pierced into her. It would seem her ability to dissemble around him was completely gone. He knew every thought in her head, every hesitation in her heart.
“My mother said she’d understand if it wasn’t yours,” Adara said with a sheared edge on her tone, recalling how that conversation had spun into directions she hadn’t anticipated any better than this one. Holding on to her composure had been nearly impossible as her mother had tried to find parallels in their two lives. “My parents had had a fight and the engagement was off. That’s why she slept with Nic’s dad. Olief was a journalist flying back to Europe. She had a layover. It was just a rebound thing. The sort of affair all her flight attendant friends were having. Then my father called and the wedding was back on.”
“Even though she knew she was pregnant?”
“I guess paternity could have gone either way. She loved my father so she married him and deluded herself into believing Nic was his.”