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“Marry me. It’s the best solution. For the baby. For us.”
Her head snapped up. “Why is it the best for us?”
“If we were married we would have our child all the time. No missed Christmases, none of this every-other-weekend business. If we had shared custody there is no way you or I could be there for everything.”
“That’s true,” she said softly.
“And I can’t imagine that you intend to spend the rest of your life without a man. You’re what, twenty-nine?”
Her copper eyes narrowed. “Eight.”
“Either way you’re far too young to embrace a life of celibacy. Raising a child and having a personal life is not easy. If we were married, that would be taken care of. You and I share a pretty potent attraction, you can’t deny that.”
“I’m not exactly concerned about the baby’s impact on my sex life,” she said drily, pulling a cracker off the tray.
“Perhaps not now, but eventually you will be. I can also offer you financial security. You would be free to do what you liked.”
“I could stay at home with the baby?”
“If you like. Or you could continue to work and our child would be provided with the best caregiver available.”
“I wouldn’t keep working,” she said.
“I thought your career was important to you.”
“It is. But raising my child, being there for everything, that’s more important to me.”
Maximo only looked at her, his eyebrows raised as if he were waiting for her to continue. Alison wasn’t sure how to explain how she felt to him, or if she even wanted to.
She wanted to be the kind of mom who was there when her child got home from school; she wanted to have cookies baked, and to drive them to soccer practice. She wanted to be there, be interested, be involved. She wanted to be everything neither of her parents had bothered to be.
“If that’s what you want then I can’t imagine you want to spend a good portion of our child’s life shuttling him back and forth between households.”
She bit her lip so hard she tasted blood. “Well, it isn’t as though we’re bitter exes. We could share some of the time together. I could stay here sometimes.”
“And you think some kind of pieced-together living arrangement would be better than an intact family?”
“What I think is that we have an extremely unconventional situation and you’re playing like we can make it into the perfect, model family, when that just isn’t realistic.”
“I’m trying to do the best thing. You’re the one that’s too selfish to do the right thing by our son or daughter.”
She took another swallow of ginger ale to prevent herself from gagging. She’d been touched when she’d realized that he’d brought her the crackers and soda, but she was much less impressed now that she realized he was just using it as an opportunity to try to goad her into agreeing to marry him.
“I don’t understand why you’re the one pushing for marriage,” she said when she was certain she wasn’t going to be sick all over the floral duvet. “Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
A short, derisive laugh escaped his lips. “Perhaps traditionally, but then this is hardly a traditional situation. In this case, I am the one who has the most realistic concept of what it means to be a royal bastard.”
“Don’t call him that!” she said, putting a hand on her stomach, anger flaring up, hot and fast. “That’s a horrible term. No one even uses it in that way anymore!”
“Maybe not in the U.S., or maybe just not in the circles you’re in. But I can guarantee you that here, among the ruling class, legitimacy matters a great deal. Not just in terms of what our child can inherit. Do you want our son or daughter to be the dirty secret of the Rossi family? Do you want him or her to be the subject of sordid gossip for his or her entire life? The circumstances of the conception don’t matter. What matters is what people will say. They will create the seediest reality they can possibly think of and that will be the new truth. Whether you like the term or not, if you’re intent on refusing to marry me, you had better get used to it.”
The picture he painted was dark. She could see it clearly. People would stop talking when their child walked into a room, their expression censorious, their rejections subtle but painful.
“You may not want to be married to me, and frankly, I don’t want to be married at all,” he said. “But you can’t deny that it makes sense.”
“I just don’t like the idea of it.”
“Of marriage without love?” Maximo knew that most women would reject the idea, at least outwardly, even if their motive for marriage was truly money or status and not finer feelings at all. “I can assure you that love within a marriage does not guarantee happiness.” He didn’t like to talk about his marriage to Selena. Inevitably it brought up not only her shortcomings, but his own failures. And neither were things he revisited happily.
“That isn’t it.” She drew her knees up to her chest, the action, combined with her messy hair spilling over her shoulder and her pale, makeup-free face, made her look young and extremely innocent. “I never planned on marrying at all. So love isn’t really an issue. I just don’t want to be married.”
“Is this some kind of feminist thing?”
She snorted. “Hardly. It’s a personal thing. Marriage is a partnership, one that asks a lot of you. I don’t have any desire to give that much of myself to another person. Look how often marriages end in divorce. My own parents’ divorce was horrible, and during my two years as a divorce attorney I saw so much unhappiness. Those people grew to depend on each other and for one of them, usually the woman, divorce left them crippled. It was like watching someone trying to function after having a limb chopped off.”
“I know what it is to lose a spouse,” he said grimly, the brackets around his mouth deepening. “You can survive it. And what you’re talking about is love gone sour. That isn’t what we have. Our reasons for marriage are much stronger than that, and they will be the same in ten years as they are now. Love fades, lust does, too, but our child will always bond us together.”
He was right about that. Whether they married or not, Maximo Rossi was a permanent part of her life, because he would be a permanent part of her son’s or daughter’s life. A key part. One of the most important parts. He was her child’s father. Hadn’t her own father, or rather his absence, shaped her life in more ways than she could count?
And that was a whole other aspect of the situation she hadn’t considered before. It wasn’t just the presence of a parent that had an effect on a child, but the absence of one. What would it do to their child to live in a separate country from his or her father? What would it mean for them to be shuttled back and forth?
That was another tragedy she’d witnessed during her time as a divorce lawyer. The way it hurt the children involved. What it did to their self-esteem. Often, the children she helped in her new job, the ones who were on trial for petty crimes, were from broken homes.
She knew she would never let her child fall through the cracks like those children had, but the issue remained the same. If she could offer her son or daughter a greater amount of security, a better chance at success, shouldn’t she do it?
But marriage hadn’t factored into her life plans. She didn’t want to be a wife. Didn’t want to need Maximo. But no matter whether or not she needed Maximo her child would.
Logically, if she’d never intended to get married she wasn’t sacrificing anything by marrying Maximo. But … she still didn’t