The joy on her face faded. "You don't think it'll work? Me doing this and the baby? I mean, day one and I forget dinner-"
He halted her by the simple expedient of a kiss. "I didn't mean anything like that. It'll work. You aren't superwoman so we'll get a cook and cleaner, but it'll work."
"No nanny," she declared, mule-faced. "I'll raise our baby."
"No nanny," he agreed.
"Caleb," she took a deep breath, "I know how important it is to you that I be at home, so thank you for supporting me in this."
Surprised, he said, "I never expected you to be a housewife if that wasn't what you wanted."
"But you prefer it. Tell me the truth."
He took a moment to think about it, remembering the fantasies of the perfect wife and family he'd created as a teenager-sure enough, his dream wife had always been a homemaker. Somehow, Vicki had picked up on something he'd shoved to the back of his consciousness. "It is nice having you at home, but only if you're content to be here. I want you to be happy, whatever that takes."
"Really?"
"Really. See? No big problem." He was trying very hard to be encouraging, though he worried that the more involved she grew with her new job, the less time she'd have for him and their child. The voice of the boy inside him, the one who'd been pushed to the periphery of everyone's life, wasn't quite as easy to silence as he'd believed.
"You know, for the first time in a long, long while, I'm starting to feel good about myself, like I'm worth something," Vicki said, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees.
He frowned and copied her gesture, looking at the silhouette of her face. "You're worth everything to me."
She smiled but it was bittersweet. "Until a few days ago, I thought I was an afterthought in your life." When he would have spoken, she stopped him with one finger against his lips. "I'm not blaming you. This has to do with how I see myself, not how you see me."
"How do you see yourself?" he asked, aware that she'd taken his accusations during their blowup on Sunday night to heart. Without any prompting on his part, she was telling him her secrets.
"I'm not proud of who I am and I want to be. I want to be a woman with goals, ambitions, dreams." Her eyes held such determination when she turned to him that he was stunned. "I want to live, Caleb. I want to look back on my life without regrets."
His gut tightened. "Why didn't you ever say anything before?"
"I was fine with the situation at first." She reached out and tangled the fingers of one of her hands with his, giving him a little peace. "It was kind of nice to be taken care of. No one had ever done that for me without making me feel like a burden."
"You were never that." To him, she was a gift, a creature of grace who'd found him to her liking.
"I know. That was what was so seductive. I let myself believe that it was okay to be looked after, to merely exist." Her fingers squeezed his. "I should've been looking after you, too-you needed the care as much as I did."
"How could you have known about Max?" Caleb scowled. "I was too bloody stubborn to talk."
"Don't you see, even if Max had been the perfect father, as your wife, I should've been fulfilling your needs, whatever they were. But I wasn't. I was letting you do all the work while I sat back." She tried out a smile. "I think I'm getting better at that part of it."
"You're perfect." He repeated her statement about him.
"But I can't build my whole sense of self around you. That's not healthy. It would suffocate you and negate my own strengths. I want to achieve things in life on my own. I want to find passion for something like you have for the firm."
"What about us? Not you or me, but what we are together?" He raised their clasped hands and kissed her knuckles. "We burn up together."
Her cheeks flushed. "Yes, we do. And I wouldn't change that for the world."
"But you need something else." Something he couldn't give her. His ego was taking a battering. He would never stop her doing what she wanted, but he couldn't understand why being his wife and the mother of his child wasn't enough.
"It's the same reason you go to work every day," she whispered. "You're living your dream. That's all I want-a dream of my own."
Caleb felt his heart break. He'd been focusing on the effect of her actions on him, when he should have been listening to what she'd been trying to say almost since the moment they'd gotten back together. His Vicki hadn't ever been given a chance to find out what her dreams were, much less whether they lay in being a wife and mother or something else entirely. What right did he have to deny her the same joy he'd found chasing his own?
"Then go out and find it." She could have had no idea what it took for him to say those words. After the life he'd lived, he was possessive beyond reason. She was his, the only person who'd ever been his. Except she never really had been. That woman had been a shadow of the one he was now beginning to know.
This new woman he was learning layer by layer would have to decide whether or not she wanted to belong to him, body and soul. And if she decided to give her passion to something else, leaving him the dregs? A good man, an unselfish man, would have let her embrace that new passion without hindrance. But Caleb found that where his wife was concerned, he wasn't a good man. He was damn selfish. Though he'd let her chase her dreams, he'd fight for her passion.
He'd fight to be her dream.
The next day, Vicki was alone in the house when she got a call from her grandmother. Ada wanted to know why she hadn't seen Caleb and Vicki for dinner since they'd begun living together again."We've been very busy," Vicki said, a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.
"I know he's a busy man but you could've made the time." Ada knew precisely what to say to hurt the most.
"I've started a new job."
Ada laughed. "What? Some charity thing? Really, Victoria, I've been doing that all my life."
Vicki didn't want to sully her hopes by putting them out for Ada's examination. "I know."
"So you'll come to dinner tonight at seven. I'll have the cook make something Italian. I know Caleb likes Italian." Without another word, she hung up.
Vicki groaned and dropped her head into her hands. Why had she let her grandmother bully her like that? She wasn't some weakling. She'd proven that again and again in the past few days. But it was as if the years of her life that she'd lived under Ada's control had scarred her permanently. When her grandmother had started browbeating her, she'd withdrawn into the protective shell she'd thought she'd never need again.
Picking up the phone, she called Caleb and told him what had happened. "I'm sorry, I just couldn't say no." She winced at how pathetic she sounded. "I did the hermit crab routine." Even though she could now see her coping tactic for what it was, it was hard to break out of the instinctive reaction.
To her surprise, he chuckled. "As long as you don't do it with me, you're allowed the occasional relapse."
"I feel like such a pushover."
"Don't take it so hard, honey. Both of us have our weak spots. Who says we have to deal with them alone? You keep Lara at bay. I'll take care of Queen Ada."
His willingness to accept her help made her feel better. "Do you want to go?"
"Might as well. Otherwise she'll keep hounding you. Tell you what, I'll charm the old bat into donating a ton to Heart."
She burst out laughing. "I can't believe you said that."
"I thought I was being nice. Then again, you're the only one I'm ever nice to." His chuckle was sinful enough to curl her toes. "I won't have time to change so she'll have to take me as I am."
She bit her lip, then pushed on bravely. "You're very sexy as you are."
A short silence. "You can't say things like that to me when I'm in the middle of drafting a memo. I think I just misspelled the client's name." His voice was husky, holding echoes of the pleasure they'd found in each other's arms the night before.
"Come home for lunch," she whispered, scandalized at herself. Who was this woman enticing her husband so boldly?
Caleb groaned. "I have a meeting way out in the suburbs at one o'clock."
Disappointment nipped her flaring sensuality in the bud. "I'll see you around six-thirty, then?"
"Bye, sweetheart."
When the bell rang a little before twelve, she didn't think anything of it. Walking to the door, she opened it, expecting a deliveryman, and gasped in surprise as Caleb pushed inside. "I have twenty minutes before I have to leave for the meeting." He kicked the door shut and kissed her. Hard.Moaning into his mouth, she didn't protest when his fingers went to the top of her sweatpants. Her body had gone from cool to blazing hot in the space of two seconds. He pushed down her panties at the same time as her sweatpants and broke the kiss barely long enough to bend down and whip the garments off her feet.