who knelt on the floor in front of her. He looked about as happy as a felon on his way to the hangman’s noose. “You don’t really want to marry me,” she said. The truth of the words made her feel cold.
He blinked. “You’re going to have my baby. Of course I want to marry you.”
“Get up off the floor this instant.” Honestly, he looked ridiculous down there. Who had decided a proposal should be delivered from the knees? Such a declaration should be made while looking each other squarely in the eyes.
He rose in a fluid motion. “I was just trying to do this right.” Doing it right would be declaring his undying love and passion for her, not proposing because he’d knocked her up and felt an obligation. “Getting married just because I’m pregnant would be the worst idea in the world,” she said.
“We wouldn’t be getting married just because you’re pregnant. I love you, Maggie.” His tone softened, almost pleading. “You know that.”
Did she know it? He’d certainly said it before—usually immediately before, during, or after sex. And he probably did have true feelings for her. But the distance between “I love you” and “I’m prepared to make a commitment to spend the rest of my life with you” was the distance between the earth and the moon.
She kept her arms folded across her chest, a barrier between them. “If I wasn’t pregnant, would you still have proposed to me?”
He had the grace to look at the floor between their feet. “Maybe not this soon, but . . .”
“And I wouldn’t have said yes if you had. We’ve barely known each other five months. My divorce has only been final seven months. I’m not ready for marriage again—and neither are you.”
He nodded. “So you’re turning me down?” He’d obviously come here expecting things to go one way and thought if he kept bullishly pressing forward he’d eventually get the result he wanted.
“I’m turning you down,” she said. “I don’t want a man who only wants to marry me out of a sense of obligation.”
His eyes met hers, sadness and confusion in their brown depths. “I want to take care of you and our baby,” he said.
The earnestness of his words breeched the barrier around her heart, and she felt a lump forming in her throat. Oh, God, please don’t let me start bawling, she thought. Tears had a way of derailing any serious discussion. Not to mention if she got too emotional he was liable to flee in panic—and she wouldn’t blame him if he did. She took a deep breath, marshaling control.
“I’m glad to hear it,” she said gently. “And you can do that. You don’t have to be a husband to be a father, any more than I have to be a wife to be a mother.”
He swallowed, his Adam’s apple jumping in his throat. “I don’t know anything about being a good father. My own dad did a pretty lousy job.”
He’d never said a word about his father before. All she knew about his family could be summed up in a few sentences: His mother lived in Florida, he hadn’t seen any of them in years, and he rarely talked to them. She had the impression he had a sister somewhere, though he never talked about his father. She resisted the urge to ask for more details; now wasn’t the time.
“I don’t know anything about being a mother either, but I guess we’ll learn. People do it all the time.” She tried to sound more confident than she felt. There was only a person’s life at stake here; she could think of a hundred different ways they could screw this up.
He wore his stubborn look again. “It doesn’t seem right, letting my kid be a bastard.”
This surprised a laugh from her. “Hello! This is the twenty-first century. Things like that don’t matter anymore.”
“They matter to me.”
Who would have guessed such traditional emotion ran through the heart of an avowed rebel? “Jameso, it will be all right, really.”
“What about your dad?”
Her father? What did Jake have to do with this? “What about him?”
“I know he ran out on your mom right after you were born. I want to prove to you I won’t be like that.”
This was why she loved the man—he had a talent for getting to the heart of the matter. “Then the way to prove it is to stick around. A marriage license didn’t stop my dad from leaving.”
“I do love you, Maggie.” He held out his arms and she went to him, the tension draining out of her as his arms encircled her.
“I know. And I love you. But that’s not enough.” She’d loved Carter, too. At least in the beginning. But the love hadn’t lasted. She wasn’t sure it ever could. And she was certain that marrying someone because you thought it was what you should do, instead of what you wanted to do, was a surefire way to kill whatever passion they shared.
“So what are we going to do now?” he asked.
“We go on the way we have been, and we’ll decide how to work things out when the baby gets here. We’ve got seven or eight months to figure it out.”
He held her tighter. “That doesn’t sound like long enough to me.”
Or to her, but it was seven or eight months for her and Jameso to get to know each other better and to figure out if they had a future that went beyond a shared child. A thought occurred to her and she nudged his shoulder. “Did you buy me a ring?”
“A ring?”
“An engagement ring. Did you buy me an engagement ring?” After all, he’d said he wanted to do things right.
“Uh, yeah. I went to a jeweler’s in Montrose this afternoon.”
That answered Rick’s question about what Jameso had been up to. “Let me see.”
He stepped back. “Uh-uh. You turned me down, remember?”
“Oh, come on, let me see!” She might never wear Jameso’s ring, but she could at least see what he’d picked out for her.
“Nope.” He shoved both hands in his pockets. Was that where he’d stashed the ring? “If I hurry, they’ll probably give me my money back.”
“You can still show it to me.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
The smug look on his face infuriated her, which was, of course, the whole idea. A bit of payback, perhaps, for her turning down his proposal? Though she still didn’t believe he’d actually wanted to marry her, she could believe his pride had been hurt, just a little. “So you really aren’t going to let me see the ring?”
“Maybe one day, when you change your mind about marrying me.” He bent and kissed her cheek, then walked out, leaving her to fume and to wonder. He’d sounded awfully certain, as if she really would change her mind. Or as if he really wanted her to.
“Excuse me, I’m looking for Miss Wynock?” Olivia’s voice sounded too loud in the hushed confines of Eureka Library. Everything smelled of old paper and furniture polish, and had the air of a place long shut off from the world, like a mausoleum or a seldom visited museum. Olivia herself hadn’t been in a library since high school, though Lucas spent hours in them, in every city in which they’d lived.
The woman behind the front desk stared at her, round-eyed behind thick glasses. “Cassie’s in the back,” she said in a normal tone of voice. She pointed a finger toward the back of the room. “Over in periodicals.”
Olivia tiptoed between low display shelves filled with fossils and old mining tools, past a bank of personal computers and shelves filled with videos and books, to an open section of armchairs and rotating magazine racks. A thin, gray-haired woman dressed in a gray skirt and a white blouse looked up at her approach. “Miss Wynock?” Olivia asked.
“Yes?”