SEALed With A Kiss(28)
“Rawlings isn’t going to get away with what he’s done, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“It’s not. Actually,” she said, in a distant voice that did little to reassure him, “I could care less about Rawlings.”
In that case, it had to be his behavior yesterday that had made her erect an invisible wall between them. “Look, I know we’ve got some stuff to talk about. Finding out that I was a father and I didn’t even know it until the baby was gone—that was a mind fuck. I just don’t understand why my wife—my most trusted friend—would keep something like that from me. I’m sorry if I snapped, okay? I’m just a little on the defensive here.”
To his astonishment, Lia socked him in the shoulder. “Don’t do that!” she railed.
“Do what? What’d I do now?”
“You’re apologizing! Why the hell are you apologizing when I’m the one who screwed up? I deserved every ounce of your anger and every harsh word you had to say to me.”
“Baby, don’t do this—”
“No, I have to. Right now I hate myself, and I’ve decided to move out for a while,” she added.
What? The words were so unexpected that the steering wheel wobbled in his grip. “What do you mean ‘move out’?” he asked, panic spiking his pulse.
“I just…I need some time alone, away from…us.”
Us? He had to tear his horrified gaze off her profile to keep from crashing into the guardrail. Stabbing on the hazard lights, he swung her Kia off the highway and into the breakdown lane, where he turned in his seat to reason with her. “I don’t understand. You gotta know I love you, no matter what.”
“I know that.” She turned her head to look at him. “But right now I don’t love myself. I kept you in the dark when I shouldn’t have. Because of my selfishness, I got our baby killed—”
“Lia.”
“Let me talk. I don’t deserve you, Vinny. I never have.”
“Don’t say that,” he begged, his heart thudding with dread that she really meant what she was saying. “Of course you deserve me. That’s bullshit.” He tried groping for her hand, but she pulled it away and hugged herself harder.
“It’s not bullshit. It’s the truth.” She turned her face away from him to stare into the trees beside the highway. “I’m going to move in with my sister for a while,” she said dully.
“How can you say that?” Vinny demanded. “When Rawlings took you away from me, I couldn’t even breathe, Lia. Don’t you understand? I can’t imagine my life without you. I don’t even want to.”
“You’ll be better off,” she insisted.
Taking in her stoic demeanor, he realized she was serious.
“Sweetheart, we can work this out,” he told her. “We’ve always worked things out.”
Her solemn expression offered him no hope. “Not this time,” she said simply.
Shocked into silence, Vinny turned his attention to the cars tearing past them. They had four more hours on the road before they got home. Something told him that four hours wouldn’t be enough time in which to change Lia’s mind—probably not even four days or even a week. They’d come upon a huge, unforeseeable knot in their bond as husband and wife, one that made him quail for how convoluted and complicated it appeared.
Being a SEAL, his first impulse was to tackle the problem head-on, to unravel the knot, and smooth things out between them. But his gut whispered that this problem wasn’t something he could fix. Only Lia, given time to heal and the space to remember how much they meant to each other, could untangle the knot from her end. All he could do was relinquish her in the hopes that she would realize they were better together than apart.
With his heart sinking like a stone, he merged back into traffic resigned to the fact that, for an unknown length of time, he was going to have to go through life without Lia right beside him.
Chapter Eight
‡
“Dat’s a licorice card,” Ryan stated, pointing a pudgy finger at the spot where Ophelia’s gingerbread man was about to land. “You have to skip a turn.”
“Are you sure?” Ophelia reached for the licorice card and turned it over. “Huh, you have the cards memorized,” she marveled.
He had trounced her at a memory game earlier that day, and she didn’t even know how he played those games on his Nintendo DS. At only three years of age, Ryan’s situational awareness reminded her of Vinny. “I bet you have a photographic memory, too,” she wagered, realizing now why she constantly lost to a three year old. “You’re cheating,” she added under her breath.