“What?” he thundered, his brow darkening further.
“You tried to get me off the pill,” she panted. “Tried to get me to agree to having your child. You even told my mother we were going to have children.”
“Your mother misunderstood,” Jared snapped.
Kelsey gasped. “Don’t give me that! You as good as admitted to me that you promised her grandchildren. You asked me to have children with you! Don’t try and deny it.”
“I’m not denying it.” He stood staring at her for a moment, his eyes fathomless.
“You asked me,” she repeated, her voice shaken with everything that lie between them. She loved him. God, she loved him and she was afraid it would kill her.
“I want children,” he said, his words harsh, “but I don’t need to or want to trick a woman into having them for me.”
“You suggested it,” Kelsey said, trembling so hard she sat back down in the chair. “Then, you said I should get off the pill—“
“I’m getting accused of trickery because I was worried about your health!” he asked in incredulous anger.
“A-and then I couldn’t find my pills that time,” she faltered. “They just disappeared….”
“My God!” He sounded stunned. “You think I stole your pills to get you pregnant?”
Lowering her head into her hands, she sobbed silently, feeling as if she were being torn apart inside.
“Do you trust me so little? This is what you think of me? That I’d trick you into something as significant as having a child with me?”
Unable to look at him, the incredulity in his voice shredding what little composure she had left, she wept. Kelsey felt her tears dripping through her fingers, each hot drop soaking through the flannel pajamas she wore.
“Not every man sees children as objects to be obtained or discarded at a whim,” he told her, a mixture of contempt and pity in the words. “Regardless of your own personal experience.”
She said nothing, struggling to slow her weeping as she grasped for restraint. It did no good to rail against losing him. Losses of the heart were inevitable. She should never have let herself fall in love with him. She’d known he was the man she couldn’t just walk away from.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” he said suddenly in a detached voice that didn’t match the burning intensity in his eyes. “If love never lasts, marriages never last, why does it matter if you have children without love? If you had met a man and fallen in love with him….”
He stopped, seeming to labor with himself a moment before going on. “If you’d fallen in love with someone and married him rather than marrying me for your sister’s sake, would you have then had children with him?”
Trying to control the soft hiccupping breath in her throat, Kelsey wiped again at her tear-wet face and stared at him. “What do you mean?”
He stood in her small living room, his face dark as a moonless night, his hands shoved into his pants pockets in a posture seeming both defiant and resigned. “You want to have children. You told me that. So, in what circumstances do you see yourself having them? By yourself after making a withdrawal from some sperm bank?”
She made an instinctive gesture of denial. “No! I’d never want a fatherless child.”
“But if love never stays,” he said with soft urgency, “how does that work? You’d have a child with a man you loved, believing the two of you would eventually divorce? Yet, you are so opposed to having a child with me? Whom you plan to divorce.”
Staring at him, she realized he was trying to voice the dilemma she’d been unconsciously struggling with herself. Believing that children deserve parents who love each other, how could she ever have a child when she couldn’t believe love lasted? Any child of hers would be hurt by his parent’s eventual separation, just as she’d been hurt by hers.
Kelsey dragged a breath into her tight, burning lungs, her gaze fixed on his.
“Don’t you see the problem?” he said urgently. “Something has to give. You either have to have a child in a relationship you believe will end or you have to let yourself believe in a relationship lasting. Have to realize that some people can make love last!”
“I see what you’re saying,” she told him finally, feeling something hard and cold settle into her midsection. Reaching for a tissue to wipe the drying tears from her cheek, she said, “If I can only raise a child in a relationship that can’t be the way I want it to be—then I’ll have to…not have children.”
His eyes narrowed, his intent gaze not leaving her face. The tick of a nearby clock counted the seconds stretching between them in the frozen silence. “My God, Kelsey. I feel sorry for you. I wonder if your father knows the consequences of his desertion.”