Page 54 of Modern Romance July 2025 #4-8

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T HEO DID NOT grasp the words. For full-on minutes it felt as though she’d spoken to him in a foreign language.

It was her chin up, that challenging glint to her eye that finally shook him out of the shock of this all.

He’d felt his child move under his hands.

Rebecca loved him.

The ground he was so sure of, the foundation he’d built himself up on, seemed to tilt dangerously, reminding him too much of being a small boy, never sure of what his foundations were.

She only thought she loved him. Because, of course, that was ridiculous. Sexual chemistry could not be confused with love. Love made things perilous. Decidedly unstable .

“You are mistaken.”

For a moment, she reacted not at all. Then she threw her head back and laughed. And laughed. She wiped at her eyes. But she was not crying in anything but amusement.

What the very hell?

“Theo. Honestly.” She chuckled again. “Why would I be mistaken about how I feel?”

“You are simply confusing good sex—”

“I’m not some teenage innocent virgin,” she said, cutting him off, all humor gone. “I’m a grown woman. With at least one heartbreak under my belt. I know what love feels like, because I once thought I was in love and wasn’t.”

Theo wanted to sneer at the idea of this Patrick. Whether she’d loved him or not, the very idea of her being with someone else…

It didn’t matter. She was simply mistaken, and she needed it pointed out to her. “What is it you think you love about me, Rebecca?”

She moved to him, and he hated the sympathy in her blue eyes. He wanted to move away from her, but he wouldn’t let her win whatever manipulation this was.

That’s all it could be. All he’d ever known it to be. Love was used to get what a person wanted. Every wife his father had ever had had used the love he’d felt for her to get what she wanted—bigger homes, brighter jewels, Theo shipped off and away.

Rebecca simply wanted some kind of power over him, and she thought this would do it. This would give her some upper hand.

He refused.

“Is it that you think no one could love you?” she asked, with such gentleness it took the meaning a moment to hit like the stabbing pain it was.

He wanted to throw back his head and laugh as she had done. He was sure that’s what he would do, but he found his head would not move, a laugh would not emerge.

Instead, he struggled to breathe around a searing pain lodged between his ribs.

She put her palms to his chest as though she could see the injury and knew her touch would soothe it away, but there was nothing soothing in her words.

“I’ll admit, you need improvement,” she said, her eyes serious, her mouth curved into a soft smile. “You’re far too bossy and the obsession with the right thing gets old. Especially when you’ve suffered enough blows to know it doesn’t matter how many right things you do, mistakes still happen.”

Theo remembered, far too uncomfortably, what now felt like a dire warning from her father.

Life is full of wrong decisions.

But this was inaccurate. Because he had been making the right ones from the moment he’d had full control of his life.

Maybe he had not meant to spend a night with a beautiful Irish woman at some ridiculous wedding, and he’d certainly always meant to use protection, but the subsequent pregnancy and Rebecca in his life was not a wrong decision .

The wrong decision would have been ignoring her. Turning his back on her. Or worse, allowing her this idea they could have separate lives their child was shuttled back and forth between. Those were the wrong choices.

Theo had made the right ones.

That was all that mattered. Not shortcomings or thinking she was in love with him or whatever this was.

Not that he needed to argue with her. What did it matter if she fancied herself in love with him? She would not have that kind of power over him. He wouldn’t allow it.

They always leave, Theo. It’s never enough.

The old memory of his father crying into his bottle of whatever had been his drink of choice at the time, the first night Theo had been back from the first boarding school, was something he hadn’t considered in years. He would have said he’d locked those kinds of ugly memories away.

The way everything had changed every time a new woman had come into the house. Every time his father fancied himself in love . With Theo never holding enough of that love to make anything matter.

Still, memories were just that. Old things that had happened. Lessons, if you were smart enough. Theo knew as well as anyone that his father’s enough was never more than exactly what he wanted. So whatever he’d blubbered about had been about his own shortcomings. Not the women he’d chosen.

Theo was not like Atlas. He made choices not about what he wanted , but what was correct.

So Rebecca’s love was neither here nor there. Certainly something not to worry over if she could . It was irrelevant.

He would tell her that. Once he found his voice. Once she stopped touching him like he was something precious to her.

“But there is an innate kindness underneath all of that control,” she said, fitting her palm to his cheek.

“There is a desire to comfort and care for. There is a desire to make things better for others than they were for you. I happen to think that’s very admirable.

You will be an excellent father. Not perfect, but good.

No one’s perfect. No one’s right all the time. That’s what love is for.”

Her father had said that. What dream world did the Murphys live in? Not in a real one. Not in a substantial one. They could hide in their cottage and with their horses and pretend the world wasn’t hard. People weren’t cruel. That love mattered.

But they were wrong .

Rebecca had loved her horses, her training, and where had it gotten her? Nowhere.

Love was irrelevant. Pointless. Useless.

“Will you still marry me?” she asked him, still with that gentleness that was some foreign entity to him. He did not recall anyone treating him like this. He did not like it or want it. He was certain he didn’t.

“Knowing how I feel?” she continued. “That every day will be me trying to get you to admit that you love me, too.”

His chest felt tight. His palms hot. She made no sense and neither did this, so the only answer was to focus on the simplest fact he knew.

They would be married. It was the right choice for their child. Beginning and end of story.

“You may love me or not, Rebecca,” he said, wondering if that was really his voice that sounded so thready. “It really doesn’t matter. Love isn’t the point. Of anything.”

“If love is so pointless, Theo, why does it terrify you?”

“Terrify?” he scoffed, taking a step back so her hand fell off his chest, off his face.

He was not scared . He had stepped away from her because…because… Because she was trying to push something, and he wouldn’t be pushed.

“We will be married, Rebecca. As soon as the arrangements are made. I care not one bit how you think you feel, or what you think you’ll try to get out of me. Our feelings are not important. Everything we do will be for our child.”

“Because heaven forbid we try to make something work out for ourselves,” she said quietly, all accusation and yet not scathing or mean in delivery.

All that damn gentleness. “Heaven forbid we think the right choice is our own happiness. But you’d have to believe you could find it.

You’d have to believe you deserve it.” She sighed, her dark blue gaze never leaving his. “It’s all right, Theo. I’ll show you.”

“I have work,” he muttered, retreating. Not because he was wrong, or she was right. Not because he was terrified . But because this was pointless .

And she wouldn’t show him a damn thing.

He planned the wedding quickly, as if her declaration of love—something Rebecca repeated every night before they went to bed—was a wildfire coming for him and the only way to outrun it was to say I do .

Rebecca supposed that’s why she allowed him to make the decisions.

Until he admitted he loved her, this wedding was not real.

Yes, she would go to the altar in a white dress and say I do in front of both their parents.

And yes, she was mostly doing that because she loved him and thought… he had to love her, too. In some way.

But the wedding wasn’t about love. Not yet. First she had to find a way to get through to him.

It was proving to be a little harder than she’d anticipated, which she could admit was her own fault. She’d thought love would win the day, but she hadn’t counted on all the past traumas she’d have to fight through to get him to even admit love existed.

She didn’t really have a clue where to start, so she just showed up every day.

Every night. And every day, her stomach got a little bigger.

Their son’s kicks grew stronger. Sometimes she grabbed Theo’s hand, placed it against her stomach and watched his expression.

Soften and marvel, for a brief moment or two before he came back to himself and drew his hand away.

He loved. Oh, he would label it something else. Duty probably. But he loved. He was capable. It was in him. She just had to find a way for him to acknowledge that those things that chased across his face—for their child, for her—were love.

And love was not pointless. Or something to fear. Because he was edgy, grumpier than he’d been before, short with almost everyone around them.

Rebecca knew all that frustration was just fear he couldn’t admit to himself.

The only topics Theo would discuss were the wedding, plans for their son and deliciously dirty things in bed together, because neither could stop the physical attraction that raged between them—even when she said she loved him, even when he refused to say it back.

If she tried to discuss anything else, even something as inane as the weather, he changed the subject.