“You’ll hate me,” she stated. Then, with the quiet ferocity she’d used when demanding medical attention for the Bedouin girl, she added, “I won’t live like that again. I won’t.”
Anguish tortured her expression before she looked away, tears standing on her wide, unblinking eyes. She set her jaw, though, so obviously ready to hold her ground, he had to take her seriously.
“Again?” he prompted, disbelief scuffing his tone. Aside from this current streak of obstinacy, she was fairly compliant. Not someone difficult to get along with. He was furious with her, but couldn’t imagine anyone actively disliking her. “What do you mean by that? Who else hated you?”
“My mother,” she said in a small voice, looking at her wringing hands. Her pale brows crushed together and the corners of her mouth went down. Bright red lit her cheekbones while the rest of her was so pale her freckles stood out like stress cracks that warned she was on the brink of crumbling. “She got pregnant with me when she was seventeen. Her parents threw her out. My father disappeared. She barely scraped by trying to support me.”
“And she blamed you for that?” His heart took a sharp swerve. He distantly remembered her saying something like she didn’t like me much. He’d been distracted with making love to her, but now the hackles of his parenting instincts rose at the idea of a mother denigrating her child. His own had made a ton of mistakes, but nothing like that.
“She blamed me for all of it,” Fern said with equal parts incredulity and despondency. “As an adult, I can see it wasn’t really my fault, but this baby is.” She covered her bump with protective palms, turning up a face that was so anguished his gut clenched as though he’d been kicked. “She told me so many times that lust was bad and I slept with you anyway. I don’t blame you for hating me, but I can’t live with the glares and the snide remarks, Zafir. I won’t bring my child up in that. There has to be another way.”
The ground seemed to shift under him. Wasn’t really my fault, but this baby is...
“Fern...” He could hardly believe what she was saying. “Is that the reason you didn’t tell me about the baby? You thought I’d blame you for it?”
“Don’t you? You’re obviously furious.” Her hand came up as she choked out a helpless noise.
“Because you hid this from me!”
She jerked at the sharpness of his tone, but only pinched her mouth into a mutinous purse. “I shouldn’t have let it happen. I knew what I was doing was bad.”
She was ashamed to have slept with him, but not in the way he’d feared.
It struck him that all this time, while he’d been remembering the way she’d kissed him with abandon and taken him greedily into her, he’d been forgetting something far more important. Men don’t come on to me. How much experience do you think I have with refusing one?
Moving forward on feet weighted with self-reproach, he took a seat on the wingback chair that faced her. As he leaned his elbows on his knees, he resisted the urge to tuck the loose tendrils of hair that fell against her cheek behind her ear. He didn’t trust himself to let it end there.
And she had no idea.
“Fern, how many people were in that tent that night?” he asked quietly.
She lifted a baleful glance. “I know what I did, Zafir. I remember exactly who instigated this conception.”
Her skin radiated with color all the way down her neck. He would bet it went well into that belly and even into the thighs that had clamped around his hips with determination to draw his hard sex deeper into her welcoming depths. Not just offering, but begging. Insisting. She dropped her face into her hands as if she couldn’t bear to recall.