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‘Nothing but a bottle of gin, but that’ll have to wait until I finish breastfeeding.’
‘Enough of the jokes,’ he snarled.
‘It’s either make jokes or let myself lose my rag like you’re on the verge of doing.’
He hated that she was right.
Breathing deeply, he rolled his neck. ‘Let me make one thing clear,’ he said tightly. ‘You might be the one carrying them but they are my children too, and Iwillbe a father to them.’
Her blue eyes flashed. ‘I know. That’s why I told you.’
‘Then as we are in agreement in that regard, Iwilldrive you home tomorrow because I’m moving back in.’
‘No and no, and before you explode, letmemake one thing clear.’ There wasn’t the slightest shred of amusement on her face. ‘When our year of marriage is up, we’re still divorcing.’
‘I’m counting the days until I can file the divorce papers, but you are not keeping me from my children,’ he bit back. ‘Try it and I will fight you, and don’t think I won’t, and I will win.’ Even if she did have the funds to fight him right back. Funds she’d inherited from his grandmother.
‘For heaven’s sake, Diaz, will you stop assuming the worst of me?’ she cried in exasperation. ‘When the babies are born you can be as involved as you want to be, but I’m carrying twins and that means extra risks and I’m not willing to risk their health or mine with the stress that living with you would bring.’
His barely controlled temper rose back up his throat. ‘You are calling me a health risk?’
‘Quite frankly, yes. My blood pressure has already risen and I’m barely halfway through the pregnancy.’
‘You can’t stop me moving back in. The house isn’t in your sole name yet.’ Unbeknownst to either of them, his grandmother had long ago transferred the house deeds into their joint names, long before she’d made her one request that neither of them had been able to refuse—that they marry.
‘You’re right, I can’t, so I’m going to appeal to whatever shred of decency you have left inside you and ask—beg—you, for the sake of our babies, to let me get on with the pregnancy alone.’
‘You have a responsibility to bring the babies safely into the world but I have a responsibility, as their father, to help you do that.’
‘And how is it going to help me when you and I can’t even be civil to each other?’ she demanded. ‘You can come to all the scans and appointments and other medical pregnancy stuff, but please, nothing more than that. Just sharing the same air as you raises my blood pressure and that isn’t good for them or for me.’
The cab came to a stop. In the distance, Westminster Abbey. He barely registered it.
Neither of them moved.
‘Please, Diaz,’ she beseeched. ‘I’ve put our babies first by telling you about the pregnancy when I could have kept you in the dark, and now I need you to put them first too. Please. For their sake.’
And this was the danger of Rose, he thought dimly as he gazed into the large blue eyes brimming with an emotion that made his heart pump far harder than it should. The flashes of vulnerability. They affected him in a way nothing else did, caused a painful ache in his chest he’d never learned how to erase.
Dios, how could one woman inflict so many contrary emotions in one man?
He’d been rash in his declaration that he move back into the Devon house with her. And that was another danger of Rose. The burning toxicity that flowed through his veins when he was with her. It always stopped him thinking rationally and brought out the impulsive side to his nature.
Rose was his personal poison, and there was no antidote.
‘Let me be sure I understand things,’ he said, speaking quietly as he gathered his thoughts and made another attempt to quell his inner turbulence. ‘You are saying that I can accompany you to all pregnancy-related appointments but that is the extent of my involvement with the pregnancy? But when the babies are born you will not try to stop me being a father to them?’
‘All I’m saying is let me bring them safely into the world without any pressure or stress and then yes, of course, you can be as hands-on a father as you wish to be.’
‘There is noof course, not with you.’
She closed her eyes and expelled a slow breath. ‘You have just proven my point. You assume the worst in everything I say or do. You always have.’
Now he was the one to expel a slow breath. ‘Not always,’ he rebutted softly.
Their eyes locked back together, shared memories flowing between them of those months when they’d pulled together and worked in harmony for his grandmother’s sake, and he remembered how his grandmother’s blind faith in Rose had been paid back tenfold in the tender love and care Rose had given her, and he felt it again, that ache, that yearn to cross the invisible divide they’d both erected between them…
They’d crossed that divide four months ago. Smashed it into pieces. The price they both had to pay for it was more than either of them could ever have imagined.