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“Good job,” she said softly. “Isn’t he beautiful?”
Theo looked down at his newborn son. An innocent child who’d depend on him for everything. Not just for his home and education but to show him the meaning of a good life. To teach him how to be a man.
Theo felt something twist his heart, squeezing until it pulled the blood from his veins, choking oxygen from his brain.
Leaning over the bed, Emmie wrapped her arm around Theo’s shoulders and looked down at the baby dreamily. “What should we name him?” She gave a light laugh. “Theo Junior?”
He sucked in his breath. Wrap Theo’s name, with all its horrifying baggage, around their baby’s neck like an anchor?
“Call him what you want,” Theo said tightly. “Just don’t name him after me.”
She turned, clearly mystified. “Why?”
Theo looked into her violet eyes and suddenly knew she needed a better man than he could be. If he stayed, if he was true to his vows, then not just his son but his wife, too, would be sucked dry, giving him love he didn’t deserve. They’d give him everything and finally drown beneath the weight of Theo’s dark, unredeemable soul.
“I didn’t have car trouble.” He took a deep breath and told her the truth. “I just didn’t want to be here.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
DURINGTHEHOURSher husband had been missing, Emmie had been tortured by thoughts of a car accident, a heart attack, a violent mugging—all the tragedies of life that could happen at any time.
When Theo had appeared in the doorway, her fear had melted away. He was safe. She told herself she’d been foolish to worry.
But looking at his guilty, haunted face, she’d felt a flash of something she didn’t want to admit, even to herself. Something dark.
Now she knew what it was. She loved him. She’d somehow thought, if she sacrificed her needs for his, if she was a perfect wife and gave him everything she had, he might someday love her back. Now she knew she’d been lying to herself.
“I want an alliance of equals,” he’d told her in Paris. “Where we each can live the life we desire, and no one has to sacrifice. No one gets hurt.”
There was no such alliance. Emmie had sacrificed in Paris, working for months on a project she didn’t care about, when she’d wanted to be home getting ready for their baby. And Theo had sacrificed, too, leaving his Paris dream project barely started and returning to New York, a place he clearly didn’t want to be.
Theo didn’t want her life. She didn’t want his.
But still, in spite of everything, some part of Emmie had hoped desperately that they could find a way to be happy together. That somehow, either she would stop loving him—or he’d start loving her...
Now, all those hopes came crashing down.
“You didn’t want to be here?” she choked out.
Theo looked down at their sleeping baby in his powerful arms. Holding their newborn against his bare, hard-muscled chest, he was the picture of sexy masculinity.
Except he lacked the joyful face of a new father. For the first time, Emmie noticed the hollows beneath his dark eyes. He had the expression of a man trapped in his worst nightmare. He didn’t answer.
“You...don’t want our son?” she whispered. Waves of grief and hurt slammed into her.
His black eyes glittered. “He deserves better.”
“You’re his father. And my husband. Who better to—”
“Someone. Anyone.” Standing up, he carefully placed their sleeping baby back in her lap. He took a step back from her bed. “I’m sorry.”
Blinking back tears, she tried to breathe, to find her sympathy and compassion. But she couldn’t. He wasn’t just rejecting her. He was rejecting their son. “No.”
“I’m no good, Emmie. I’ve tried. But the truth is I can never be the man you want. The man he needs.”
As he picked his shirt up off the floor and put it back on, she stared at him in the dark quiet of the hospital room.
“You’re leaving us,” she breathed.
