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Her. That thought welled up inside of him, and seemed to grow and expand in intensity as the moments passed.

He wanted her.

But that wasn’t why he was doing it. It couldn’t be why.

Because that was a path he couldn’t go down. Strong emotion, intensity, those things were his enemy, and they always had been.

It wasn’t something he’d left behind. It lived in him.

He’d demonstrated that only recently.

What would Esme say if she knew?

When he was crossed he…he was a dangerous man. He always had been. He didn’t think that he would ever be a danger physically to Esme, to their child; if he did he wouldn’t have sat down at this table in the first place. But what he knew was that he had to keep a tight leash on his emotions.

This couldn’t be about feelings.

He had been right when he told her that he didn’t have the capacity for that kind of care. But it wasn’t so much that he couldn’t feel it; it was that he didn’t have the capacity to contain it. It would spill over into everything. Onto those he cared about. Into every corner of his life, and it would be…

He could remember, vividly, the time some neighborhood boys had been harassing her. He had scared them. He had beaten the hell out of them. They had been a little older than him. Bigger. But his fury had been unmatched. One of the boys had been part of the local cartel, but rather than killing Adonis for his impudence, they had offered him the chance to fight.

For money.

His violence had served him well then.

And he could never forget that it lived inside of him.

In that sense, it served him well now.

But he had to keep all of that on lockdown.

It was imperative.

“I want to protect you. I want to offer stability. A semblance of…”

“Something normal.”

“Yes. Something normal. Think about it. Our child could have two parents in their home. Could have dinner just like this every night. With the two of us.”

“That’s like… That’s like a sitcom. It’s not like anything real.”

“It could be real. Why not? If the only limit is what you and I are willing to do to make it happen…”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“I think the key thing is that it isn’t about the two of us.”

She looked up at him. “Sex?”

The word crackled in the air. It was stupid. He wasn’t inexperienced. Not in any fashion when it came to sex. He knew it as force and violence; he knew it as pleasure. Now, thanks to her, he knew it as a regret. Shame. Something he should never have done.

“That’s about the two of us,” he said, his voice rough. He wanted her. That was the problem. He wanted her so much he ached with it. He had thought about her every night in the six months since they had been apart, and he wanted her now. He hadn’t even looked at another woman since then. It had been the furthest thing from his mind.

“Yes,” she said. “I agree. But do you really think that we are not going to have sex with other people for eighteen years?”

“Whatever we do has to be in the best interest of the child. That’s why we’re doing this. We aren’t doing it for us.”

She nodded slowly, but he could see a small glimmer of disappointment on her face.