Takeoff was immediate, and once they had reached altitude, he stood, and began to open up the drink cabinet. “Would you like something?”
“Obviously alcohol is off the table,” she said.
“Obviously.”
“I don’t understand what you’re doing,” she said. “First of all, regardless of the paternity of the baby, you can’t tell me that you actually want a kid?”
He looked at her, his blue eyes laser focused. “It is not about need. But we both need children, do we not?”
His own father had been a bastard. And as for the man who had been his father figure...
Gunnar had squandered that relationship. He had been wrong about what mattered. For it was not paternity. As for himself, he did not know how to be a father. But he did know that no child should be unwanted or uncared for.
He might not know how to show love or affection, but he had the means to care for a child.
“I suppose. To pass on the companies.”
“It is why our fathers had us,” he said. “Or at the very least, why my father decided to take part in raising me.”
The words seemed to cut her beneath her skin. She flinched. “I suppose so.”
“Anyway. I will let no child of mine go unclaimed. It is not my way.”
“Oh, really? Is this not the first time for you?”
He ignored that.
“And what about you? You want a child?”
She shook her head. “I’m busy. But I have a lot of money, I imagine that nannies can... Handle everything. Otherwise, I happen to know that there’s usually a good space for children to sit outside of conference rooms. And often there are snacks.” Her voice wavered at the end, as if she heard the words she spoke, and realized what she was consigning a child to.
Their own childhoods. Repeating.
Neither of them spoke for a long moment, but they looked at each other, and he could feel the shared history between them. It was a strange thing. This.
For the most part, he felt connected to no one and nothing. He’d broken the happy home he’d once had with his idiotic, childish demands to be reunited with a father who hadn’t loved him at all. He’d destroyed that connection. And as for his father...
Building one had never been on the table.
“Sometimes there are even cupcakes,” she said, her voice a whisper now.
“Yes. I suppose there are.”
They didn’t speak after that. And he was perfectly fine with that. He was still volcanic with anger toward her. He had decided to ruin her, and now things were complicated. He resented this barrier to her ruination.
Ruthless? Perhaps. But he had only ever been taught one way to be. His father had taken a happy twelve-year-old boy and had broken him, remade him. Forged him in the fire of uncompromising fury, with yet one goal set before him. Winning.
Gunnar had taken all that fire and fury and used it to make his own path. Make himself his own man, apart from his father. He might be principled in a way his father never had been, but that didn’t make him a man who knew how to bend.
Yet he’d grown too indulgent of Olive. He was reaping the punishment of that bad decision now.
He had seen her as soft. He had seen her as relatively harmless. He had seen her as something he wished to shield, protect. He did not need every contract in the tech market, and the fact was there were certain things that were better suited to the products that Ambient provided, than Magnum.
He was an honest man. To his core.
And perhaps that was what disappointed him so.
He had thought that she was better than her father. Better than his father. He had thought that she was...