For the Sake of their Baby

“Everything’s changed. I thought you were safe, but you’re not, that’s what I’m trying to tell you, that’s why I’m here.”

She pointed at the door and said, “I want you to leave. Right now. Go.”

He managed to look bewildered for a moment. “How can you ask me to leave?”

“You have no right to come back here and try to make me feel…”

“Feel what, Liz?”

“Anything,” she mumbled.

He got to his feet in one fluid motion. “I suppose that explains the divorce papers delivered to the jail?”

She narrowed her eyes as months of frustration and grief fueled her anger and words too long unspoken flowed from her mouth with a life force of their own. “When you killed my uncle, you killed us. You killed any feelings I had for you. You killed our future. And you did it for his money. Was his money the only reason you married me in the first place? Was Uncle Devon actually right about you?”

Alex stood over her, eyes blazing again, fists balled, and for the first time in her life, Liz felt afraid of him. She sat frozen in her chair as he dropped to his knees by her side.

“You know why I married you,” he said, his voice deep with emotion. “In your heart, you damn well know why and it had nothing to do with money.”

Every womanly part of her knew he was right. It was just that his abrupt arrival had jolted her. She’d spent months mourning, she’d made herself sick with grief. It had been a long and difficult journey to escape the yawning abyss that had threatened to swallow her and her baby. She wasn’t about to allow herself to stand so close to the edge ever again.

“I don’t understand this charade,” he added in a hushed whisper, sending new chills down her spine that had nothing to do with the temperature. “We both know what really happened the night your uncle died. Okay, I signed on for the long haul. I was willing—I am willing—to protect you and our baby until my dying breath. Nothing’s changed when it comes to that.”

Liz shook her head. “What are you talking about?”

He pushed himself to his feet and glared down at her. “You know what I’m talking about.”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t. What do you mean you were willing to sign on for the long haul? What’s going on here, Alex? Stop talking in riddles.”

When he finally spoke, his voice was low and ominous, as though he sensed a thousand ears pressed against the windows, listening to their every word. Standing over her, his expression grim, he said, “Remember the night your uncle died? We went to his house to tell him about your pregnancy. There was a terrible fight.”

“We left the party and you were called to an emergency at the station,” she added. “The old church at Taylor’s Crossing was on fire.” She shuddered as she thought about that fire, mercifully without victims.

Alex stopped dead in his tracks and pinned her with a laser stare. “When I left you, you were still furious with Devon.”

Tears puddled in her eyes as old feelings of inadequacy welled up inside her. “Of course I was furious. For years I tried to please that man. I never could. That night was the last straw. The things he said—”

“He didn’t want you saddled to someone like me,” Alex said. “He wanted better for you than one of the Chase boys.”

One of the Chase boys. Sure, Alex had come from a disreputable family but he’d grown into a wonderful, trustworthy man. Her uncle had refused to see that. To him, Alex would always be the boy he’d forced Liz to break up with in high school—the boy with no future.

Did wonderful, trustworthy men commit murder? an inner voice demanded.

Alex a murderer. It didn’t sit right, it never had.

But he confessed.

It always came down to his confession.

“Later that night, you went back to his house,” Alex said softly.

“How do you know that?” She’d never admitted that bitter, pointless trip to anyone.

Alex said, “I saw you.”

Before he killed her uncle? Had she been that close to being able to stop him? A cry of anguish erupted and died in her throat. “I thought Uncle Devon might have had a…I don’t know, a change of heart,” she mumbled. “Except he didn’t have a heart and I should have known it. I guess I was still hoping he might come through.”

“But he didn’t.”

“Of course not. It was foolish of me to think he would. He was more sure than ever that I’d eventually do just as he wanted, like I always did. He said he was going to call his lawyer in the morning and set up the papers giving everything he had to a local nature conservatory. He didn’t care about the wetlands, it was just his way of showing me he had control. Because he judged everything by its monetary worth, he thought I did, too.”

Alex cleared his throat. “He never understood you.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore.”

He stared at her so hard she felt the back of her skull throb. Finally, he said, “Don’t ever tell anyone else you went back there that night. Do you understand? Not a soul.”

“Why—”

“Not a soul,” he repeated. “Promise me.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay.”

“You didn’t tell Kapp, did you?”

“I was in shock when he came, but I kept thinking the less I said the better it would be for you. After he left, I called your lawyer. I told him I wanted to help you. I couldn’t believe you’d ever kill anyone. But he confirmed that you’d confessed. He said you didn’t want any help from me, you didn’t even want to see me or talk to me. Alex, do you have any idea how much that hurt?”

“I—”

“Because for all intents and purposes, I lost you that night. I thought I was going to lose our baby, too. I’d lost one before and the thought of losing another… The doctor put me in bed for a week.”

“I—”

“It doesn’t matter if you’re out on a technicality. You’re still a murderer. I won’t have you around me or my baby.”

To her astonishment, Alex laughed. He laughed until a single tear rolled down his cheek, then he sat abruptly in one of the wing back chairs that flanked the stone-cold fireplace and buried his face in his hands.

Liz watched him with growing alarm until she found herself standing by his side. She shrugged off his coat and laid it aside. He apparently sensed her closeness for without looking up, he reached for her, caught the hem of her sweatshirt, pulled her onto his lap. He rested his cheek against her breasts, his chin on the curve of her belly.

While one tear did not a crying-jag make, she’d never seen Alex shed even that before. She’d always been the one to weep at the drop of a hat, not him. She wrapped her arms around him and smoothed his hair with an unsteady hand. She tried to dismiss how sitting in his lap made her feel. The way her body came alive. The way the world suddenly seemed to be okay again despite the fact that nothing was okay. It was like finally waking from a long, dreary sleep.

But where would this feeling of renewed life take her? Into heartbreak territory, that’s where. Into a new trial, the outcome of which didn’t matter because he was guilty and that was enough to destroy them. She concentrated on feeling pity. It was safer.

Eventually, he looked up. She fought the urge to touch his lips with her own. How else does a woman comfort a man she loves, even a man she knows she shouldn’t love?

His expression guarded, he said, “I found your long green scarf.”

She blinked a few times, totally at sea.