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I say no repeatedly, but Taio mounts one argument after the next.
“Surely,” I say in some desperation after this has gone on for a long while, “the fact that I’m an ignorant American should disqualify me already from any possible consideration that I might become your wife.”
“None of that matters,” he says now, gruffly. “You are carrying my child. That is the beginning and the end of it.”
“Taio—” I begin, with renewed determination in my voice.
But he cuts me off this time by coming and kneeling down before me. So we are eye to eye. His gaze stays on my face for a long, simmering moment and then, perhaps inevitably, his hand moves to cover my belly.
It might be inevitable but I feel it.
Everywhere.
And it is complicated now, or perhaps I mean layered, with all that’s happened between us since the last time we really touched each other. The lies and separation. The truths discovered and told. This urge we seem to both have to protect each other.
The baby he now holds beneath his palms.
Inside me, yes. But ours.
I can remember, with perfect clarity, every single touch we shared between us. And now there is this.
The warmth of his hands. The wonder all over his face.
And the slickness between my legs that connects to that winding, humming, insatiable need deep inside me that is never far from the surface.
All of it makes my heart seem to swell and grow, and this time there doesn’t seem to be a single thing that I can do to keep the tears from falling. I tell myself it’s because I’ve never understood the lure of families, not until this moment.
Not until this man touched me like this, because now, suddenly, I feel as if I finally get it. He and I made this child together. What magic would it be to raise it together, too? And this does not feel like an intellectual question. It feels primal and raw, like it is coming from a part of me I’ve never encountered before.
“Annagret,” he says urgently. “You are the mother of this child already. Do not deny me the right to be its father. To be a family.”
And I am not prepared to argue that one away with my cheeks wet and his hands on me, that intensely raw look on his face. How could I? How could anyone?
I think of my own father, stooped by the weight of his inability to stand up for anything, especially me. I think of the times I cried while he held me over another cruelty or dismissal from my stepmother, yet nothing changed. And how I learned to stop crying.
I gaze at Taio, who has already stood up for our baby more than my father ever did for his.
I think of how the wordfamilyfeels in me when he says it.
The way he’s looking at me seems to jar my heart wide open, so wide open it ought to hurt, and I don’t have it in me to deny him anything, it seems. “Okay,” I manage to say, wiping at my eyes with the backs of my hands.
“Okay?” he repeats, and I am certain it is not that he does not comprehend the word.
He wants me to say it. He wants me to make it real. So I do. “I will marry you,” I tell him, though saying those words out loud makes me feel shaky inside. Not precarious. Just…awed by my own temerity to let myself believe in something like this. Like him. I try to soften it. “If you think that I must.”
“I know that you must,” he replies.
I expect him to stand, then, and start issuing commands, or whatever it is that Marquesses do. But he doesn’t move.
Taio stays where he is, those warm, heavy palms molded to the curve of my belly. His thumbs move almost absently, stroking my bump and the baby within.
It’s a tender moment, but it also sends a wildfire sensation spiraling through me and I wonder if I ought to be this immediately electrified by him when the baby isright here. Surely I ought to have been taken over by some maternal instinct by now that would protect me from seductions like this.
Like him.
But instead, I feel myself go soft and hot.
I can see that gleam in his dark gaze now, and I remember the last time I saw it. When he was so deep inside me and it was all that delirious pleasure, the moments of pain barely a memory—