CHAPTER EIGHT
SHEWASDOINGIT. She was losing her mind, and she was crying in front of this man. She didn’t like it. Not one bit, but she couldn’t stop herself. She was weeping, wailing. It was like she had lost all ability to be... Her. She had learned to be tough and strong and hold the shield up in front of all of her emotions when she was a girl.
A leader couldn’t afford to be led by their feelings, her father had taught her that. Instilled it into her so deep it was like it was carved into her soul.
And now she was just... She was falling apart. Maybe it was the hormones. Did you already have those kinds of hormones at this point in the pregnancy? She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything about being pregnant. In many ways, she didn’t know anything about being a woman.
She had no feminine influence in her life, she didn’t really have any female friends. She saved all of her feminine feelings for fiction.
She identified heavily with the women in the romances that she read, and put herself in their place, and when she did that, she felt... whole in a way that she wasn’t able to feel outside of that.
Because it was just so damned difficult.
Because in her real life she had to be unflappable, she had to be hard and she had to be capable of anything. And she did not feel capable of anything right now. In fact, she felt...
She felt like a disaster.
“I needed the contract,” she said. “It was the one my dad wanted. It was in the portfolio as the single most important thing that he was working toward. But when I got in there and I saw the building blocks of what there was, of what he was working on a decade ago to go in these cars, once they were ready to go to market... It wasn’t up to par. I had so much work to do so quickly. There was no real blueprint. But it was his white whale, and if I couldn’t get it... If I couldn’t get it, Gunnar, then I might as well not be in charge of the company. I might as well not be anything.”
Admitting that to him made her feel so much shame. She wondered if Gunnar did anything to prove himself, or if he simply just did it. Because he wanted to. Because it was something that felt good to do.
This was the problem. It wasn’t that for her. And it never could be.
“But what are you without your honor?”
“That’s philosophical. A wonderful idea. You want to do things simply to prove you’re the best. I wanted to do it to get the contract. It was something that mattered to my father. So how I did it didn’t matter. It was just... The getting it.” She squeezed her hands into fists. “It was the one thing he wanted of me Gunnar, and now it’s ruined and gone. I was willing to debase myself, to violate any morals I might have to see this done, and it’s for nothing anyway.”
“I see. And where exactly does our passionate interlude in the penthouse come into play? Simply to get rid of me, as you’ve said before?”
She shook her head. “I did want that. Because you make me feel...a way I don’t want to feel. But that night, I wanted something for myself. That’s all. It was a mistake. Like everything else. I...” She felt small then. Utterly undone. “I’m not perfect.” It cost her to say that. She looked up at him. “I’m not perfect. I don’t know how to do everything. I have been trying as hard as I can to do everything that my father would’ve done, and sometimes I think I do better than him, and sometimes I think I... Sometimes I think I have no idea what I’m doing. And that’s... That’s all. But I wanted to win this. And then... I was weak, I guess. Across the board.”
She watched his face as she admitted all this, tried to get a gauge for what he was thinking, feeling. She couldn’t.
“You will do the blood test,” he said.
“I don’t...”
“You will,” he said. “This is not up for debate or discussion. It is the way of things. And so, you will do as I say.”
“You’re such a dick,” she said.
“And you have proven yourself to be duplicitous. Therefore, you will be punished for it.”
“Punished with a blood test.”
“With a lack of trust.”
“What would I have to gain by lying now? I’ve ruined everything. Everything I cared about, it’s all nothing, so you might as well know it all. I read Viking romance novels and fantasize about you carrying me off and ravishing me, I don’t like the classics. I am in charge of this company, which I trained for all my life, and I feel unequal to it. All I wanted was to make my father proud and he died. He died and I didn’t have a chance to show him, so I was trying to do it as an homage and I messed that up too, and now I’m pregnant, and yes, I lied to you. I was underhanded with the contract, I lied about being with other men, but I was trying so hard to protect myself, and now I can’t so...why would I keep lying?”
She shrank beneath his withering blue gaze. And she found that she hated it. That she had earned his disdain. That she did not have his trust.
Why? Why did she feel this way for him?
He said nothing. He seemed unmoved by the way she’d just shattered, and it made her chest feel like it was too tight.
“Do you need to take everything from me, Gunnar, is that it?”
She had always known him to be steely, but he brought her cupcakes, and sometimes, it almost felt as if he were her friend as much as he was her enemy. She didn’t have any others.