No Longer Forbidden(53)

“Some day,” she emphasized with a glance over her shoulder.

A light flush warmed her chest and moved outward to her fingertips. A poignant burn chased it. This was the kind of conversation a couple with a future had, but she didn’t want Nic thinking she was begging for one.

“Eventually,” she insisted, certain she’d revealed too much as she hugged the towel she held. She tried to cover her tracks and self-protect with a hurried, “When the time and the man are right. Obviously I’m not ready now. I’ve spent all my life pleasing my mother and I’m still responsible for my father. You’ve said yourself that I’m immature. I can’t even take care of myself. I don’t have a home or a job …” She stopped, in danger of sounding pitiful. “And it’s not like you want me to be pregnant, is it?” She mustered fake cheer as she made herself face him. “Sure, you would have made the best of it, but do you even want children?”

A cold sweat broke out on Nic’s spine. Rowan had turned the tables so easily. One minute invoking his deepest empathy, the next putting him on the spot with eyes like deep green velvet, pale cheeks like wind-hollowed snow drifts and a wispy smile of brave fatalism softening her mouth. What heartaches did he harbor? she asked so ingenuously.

How could he admit that he would have welcomed a baby with her? It would be brutally hurtful, given what she’d just revealed. And unwelcome. “When the time and the man are right.” A serrated knife of guilt turned in his gut at how comfortable he would have been trapping her to him. Him. A man who could never make any woman happy, least of all one who had been unfairly tied down for too long.

“Do you want children?” she asked, her lips barely moving while a horrified shadow of inadequacy condensed in her eyes.

He’d hesitated too long. She was reading his silent torment and coming up with failure on her part. What could he do except offer up the agonizing truth? His jaw opened, but his vocal cords were too thick. His hand turned ineffectually for a second before sound finally emerged from his throat.

“I thought it might be a … second chance.” A satanic claw reached out and curled piercing talons into his heart, crushing the organ that had grown tender under Rowan’s influence. He instantly wished he hadn’t said that. A second chance? That was not how it worked. You didn’t reinvent your own childhood through your offspring.

“What do you mean?” The dark arches of Rowan’s brows slanted into a peak of confused hurt. “A second chance for who? At what?”

Was that tentative hope in her eyes?

He couldn’t examine it, because this was the foggy morning at boarding school all over again. After this, after Rowan had looked right into him, she’d see what everyone but he saw—the lack. The flaw that had made him a child to be turned from without looking back. He swallowed.

“A second chance for me,” he admitted, cringing at how pathetic that sounded. “At having a family.”

She looked as bloodless as he felt.

He shook his head in slow negation, all sensation falling away as a rushing sound invaded his ears. “I was fooling myself.”

“That’s not true, Nic—” Rowan started forward but he froze, lifting hands to ward her off, unwilling to have her touch him when he felt so skinless.

The way Nic threw up a wall of resistance, looking utterly rigid, like a block of stone, stopped Rowan in her tracks. She flashed back to the way he’d clamped down on his wistful sadness when talking of his siblings that morning and her heart tipped out of balance on a hard oh. How had she ever thought Nic was detached? He was the opposite. His emotions were so scythe-like he couldn’t bear to experience them.

“It doesn’t matter,” he asserted.

The backs of her eyes began to sting. She hated herself then for working her body into sterility. For provoking him into unprotected sex and letting him think briefly that she could give him what he needed. She never could.

A terrifying bleakness filled her. If he had loved her they might have found a workaround on making a family together, but there was absolutely no hope for a future with him now.

Rowan ducked her head and brushed a strand of hair back from her face, revealing a porcelain cheek locked in a paroxysm of disorientation and panic.

What must she be thinking? Nic wondered. That she was relieved not to be saddled with an emotional derelict? That she’d had a lucky break? That what he’d revealed made her so uncomfortable she wanted him out of her space?

“I know I’m not like other people,” he said, trying to gloss over his confiding something so personal and implausible. “I observe life. I don’t participate in it. Yes, I would try to make the best of things, but my best isn’t good enough. Any child I created would only suffer and turn out like me. Emotionally sterile.”