While it was all he thought about. Heaven had opened its gates and pulled him inside. He hadn’t even tried to resist. Not really.
“I meant to pull out,” he stated baldly. “I knew the chance we were taking before I let it go as far as it did.” As much as he would love to let her carry all the blame, he remembered precisely the moment when he’d stilled her hips and tried to maintain his sanity. Then she’d said, I want it to be you.
He had wanted it to be him. The thought of any man following where he was being invited had been unthinkable. She belonged to him. He remembered the way the word mine had echoed in his head as he had breached and possessed and imprinted himself so indelibly onto her body that they were now tied together for the rest of their lives.
“You might have been at your best fighting weight that night, but I could have pushed you away. I’m not a victim.”
She shook her head, keeping her face covered. “I knew better. I was reckless and this is the consequence.”
“My baby is a punishment?” he asked testily.
She flinched and scowled at him over her fingers. “No. I just mean that I’m no victim, either. I knew what I was doing.”
The hell she had.
He rubbed the tops of his thighs, hearing Ra’id’s condemnation of him. Accepting it. He never should have touched her.
But he had.
“Maybe we’re both casualties of a divine sense of humor, doomed to repeat our parents’ ill-conceived actions.” He let his brow quirk at his own bad joke. “We made that baby together, Fern. Literally.”
She lowered her hands, face red as a beacon, but a light of earnestness glinted in her wet eyes. “Do you really see it that way? Because I’m not blind. I know what a mess this is.”
“It is,” he agreed. “I’m not going to sugarcoat that part. Right here, the two of us working out what to do, this is the easy part. When we take it out there, it will get ugly. I know that and I’m angry that I’m in this situation, but with myself, not you. If that’s the reason you’re trying to keep your distance from me, because you think I’ll blame you, then stop. Coming here to take responsibility for my child means taking responsibility.”
She seemed to let that sink in, her body seemingly braced, shoulders set with wary tension.
“Is that all you feel?” she challenged in a way that punched his heart. Vulnerability widened her eyes as she hurried to add, “I mean toward the baby.” Her lashes dropped in a way that left claw marks down his insides.
He wished he could offer her love. He was starting to realize she’d probably never known it in any form.
“Because if you just feel a sense of duty...” she continued.
“No, that’s not all I feel,” he assured her, hitching forward on the cushion, willing to lay himself bare because on this topic, he felt no shame and he thought it might reassure her. Win her over. “The first time I held Tariq, I experienced such a rush of emotion. Something I’d never felt before.” He clenched his fist, experiencing again the knock of his heart punching the inside wall of his chest, extending itself outward to try forming a shield around the baby. It reached across the space between them now, trying to take in this new one. “I felt so protective and proud it was laughable, but terrified and overwhelmed, too.”
The intense vulnerability had been foreign and unnerving to a man who took for granted his health and strength and power, but he’d grown to accept this feeling as a part of parenting.