Marriage…to Peter Ramsey!
Words he’d spoken to her earlier bounced around her dazed mind…You’ll be attached to the Ramsey zoo for a long time to come. Might as well start getting used to it.
It was ridiculously old-fashioned to get married for the sake of a child. People didn’t do it these days. There was no need to, particularly in this country. If unmarried mothers were in economic difficulties, they could get child support from the government. Besides, Peter knew she was independently wealthy. No financial problems. But he wasn’t talking financial support. He was targeting emotional security for their son, having both parents form a tight family unit for him.
“You can’t want to marry me,” she cried, seizing on the hard reality that unresolvable issues between parents did not provide a happy home life for a child.
“Why not?” he shot back, unmoved by her protest.
“You keep accusing me of lying, Peter. When there’s such a big trust problem between us…it would wear us both down, you suspecting me of God knows what, me having to defend everything I do or say. It would be a hell of a relationship. Bad for our child, not good.”
“If you could learn to be more open with me,” he retorted pointedly, “we wouldn’t have a problem, would we? It’s silence that breeds a lack of trust—hiding things that shouldn’t be hidden. Be straight with me, Erin. It’s as simple as that.”
She remembered Alicia Hemmings calling him a strait-laced bastard. Perhaps she should have taken more heed of that warning. There was no denying she had been at fault, not telling him she’d fallen pregnant, not correcting his assumption that she was a preschool teacher, which, of course, was at the heart of her biggest problem with him. The author thing invariably messed with men’s minds, making them resentful of her success and the celebrity that went with it.
“It’s not so simple, Peter,” she said dispiritedly.
“Yes, it is,” he insisted. “And you can’t say we’re not sexually compatible. I’d count that as a huge plus for our marriage.”
Was that why he’d come after her with this movie deal…remembering the incredibly erotic and passionate sex they’d had together, wanting it again? She searched his eyes, saw only a burning conviction that he was right and she couldn’t refute the argument. Yet how long would great sex last when he began resenting what she did and the attention it drew to her?
“Can you really see yourself living happily with what I am—a writer whose imagination can be triggered at any time, losing my awareness of you and your needs?”
“I’d never try to stop you from doing your thing, Erin,” he asserted, without even pausing to consider the situation. “You have a unique talent and I’d consider it a crime to put any limitation on it. We’ll hire a nanny in case you forget to feed Jack or—”
“I’m not that bad,” she cut in sharply. An adult who could look after himself was one thing, her own child quite another. “There’s no way I’d neglect Jack.”
“Whatever. It’s best he has me to give him attention when your mind is drifting elsewhere. That’s how a partnership works,” he said with satisfaction, apparently not the least bit perturbed about her need for time and space.
But he hadn’t lived with it, hadn’t been irritated and frustrated by it. He’d only experienced one short episode of it at Randwick and that had been more of a curiosity because it hadn’t happened to him before.
“What about when publicity centres on me instead of you?” she mocked, not believing he would be so reasonable about that knock to his ego.
He frowned as though he didn’t understand what she was getting at. “You can have as much or as little publicity as you like. Though I’d have to say you’re bound to get more when we’re married. Unavoidable. I can and will protect you from the worst of it, but any time we appear in public together…”
“Oh, come on!” she cried, exasperated by his dismissal of the point. “You don’t like me taking the spotlight from you. Every man I’ve been close to has resented it after a while and you’re no exception, Peter Ramsey. It instantly stuck in your craw that a newspaper headline was more about me than you.”
“It stuck in my craw that you’d deliberately deceived me about who you were,” he retorted fiercely. “I wouldn’t care if I never made another headline. It sure as hell doesn’t do anything for me.”
His vehemence rattled her judgement of the situation. Had she completely misread his reaction to the newspaper story? Feeling hopelessly confused, she held her tongue, needing time to review what had happened between them, try to see it from his point of view.