His expression was impossible to read in the dim security lighting. “I saw the lights in your windows.”
“You just happened to be driving by?” It was a sarcastic question, of course. The rehearsal had ended hours ago, as she was sure the dinner afterward had. And of course there was nowhere to drive except to the inn on the dead-end road up Bride Mountain.
“Actually, I drove a couple of our guests back after the dinner,” he said, providing at least a partially credible explanation. He blew that by adding, “That was more than an hour ago.”
Tightening the thin robe she wore over her pajamas, she asked, “And what have you been doing since?”
“I sat in my car in the parking lot for a while. Started driving down the hill and got as far as the café. Sat in my car in the parking lot there, too.”
She’d wrapped the ends of her robe belt around her hands so fiercely her fingers ached, but she didn’t loosen it. “Why are you here?”
“I need to talk to you. May I come in? Or we could talk in the garden if you’d be more comfortable outside.”
Their last talk in the garden hadn’t gone well. But she wasn’t so sure she wanted to invite him in, either. Not if it was only so he could kick her heart around some more.
After hesitating for several long moments, she sighed sharply and moved out of the doorway. “Fine. Come in and say what you have to say. But if you’re here to convince me that we need to be coffee buddies, you’re wasting your breath.”
He winced and closed the door slowly behind him. “I’m so sorry I hurt you.”
“You did hurt me,” she agreed honestly. “But mostly, you made me furious.”
“Yeah, I got that idea.”
He offered a tentative smile that she didn’t return. His faded quickly. “I’ve thought very hard about what you said. I was arrogant.”
“Yes.” She had no intention of making this easy for him, though her heart was beating so fast now she was almost afraid he could hear it.
“I was condescending.”
“Yes.”
“I was terrified.”
Having been prepared to agree with wha
tever derogatory adjective he’d come up with next, she blinked. “Why?”
Squeezing the back of his neck, he sighed, looking so weary and sad that she almost reached out to him instinctively. She curled her fingers in her belt again to stop herself. “Because,” he said, “I walked into the inn and saw you holding a baby. And it knocked the socks off me.”
“See, that’s what I meant by arrogant,” she said, her temper igniting again. “You just assumed I was angling for you to marry me and make babies with me. Maybe I was hoping something might happen between us, maybe I wasn’t, but the least you could have done was talk with me about what I wanted, how I felt. About what you wanted, or didn’t want. Making an arbitrary decision to end things between us because you assumed I want marriage and kids was way overstepping your bounds. I mean, if you were tired of me, if you were no longer interested in seeing me that way, fine. Say so. I’d get over it. But don’t give me that obnoxiously noble song and dance about doing it for my sake, and all because you aren’t prepared to give me what you’re so sure I want or need.”
“Bonnie—”
She was on a roll. “I don’t know exactly what I want for the future yet, okay? I mean, I’ve always vaguely envisioned having kids someday, but I don’t know. Maybe if you and I had grown closer and we’d talked about it, I’d have decided I could be happy without kids, like Uncle Leo and Aunt Helen were. Maybe I’ll have that talk with someone else someday. But you needn’t panic just because you saw me holding a baby. I won’t interfere with all this great new freedom you’ll have after tomorrow.”
“Actually, you totally misunderstood the cause for my panic,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t because I was picturing you holding a child of mine. It’s because I had a sudden vision of you holding a baby you’d had with someone else.”
“I— What?”
He dropped the hand he’d been using to massage his neck, letting his arms hang loosely at his sides. “You just looked so young and fresh and pretty standing there. And there was my daughter, opening wedding gifts and being teased about having babies soon—and I pictured you meeting someone else, someone younger and with a less complicated history, and I could almost hear you giving me the speech about always being friends, so I thought maybe I should just save you the trouble. It’s the way all my relationships have ended, so I’ve just started expecting it. I’ve even told myself I liked it that way.”
He shrugged. “Like you said, I made a prediction of what was going to happen between us, but it wasn’t the one you thought. It wasn’t even the one I expected, to be honest. But I suppose it was still arrogant. I came to apologize for hurting you—for making you angry,” he corrected himself. “Maybe it’s too late for us to be friends now, and maybe there was never a real chance that it could have been anything more, but at the very least I didn’t want it to end with a fight.”
Bonnie was so confused now her head was spinning. She pushed her hands into her hair in an effort to stop it. “Are you saying you didn’t want to stop seeing me?”
“Of course I don’t want to stop seeing you. I just—well, I don’t want it to be all fun and games between us anymore, knowing that any day you could pull out the let’s-just-be-friends talk. Trust me, this is as much of a surprise to me as I’m sure it is to you, but I’ve discovered that I want more than that this time.”
She dropped her hands and studied his face intently. “And you wouldn’t necessarily rule out maybe getting married someday? Or maybe even having another child?”