“This isn’t happening. How could this be happening?” he mutters to himself. Like he’s forgotten I’m in the room. He paces about the abandoned barn on the back of the property. Light cuts through the slits in the boards, slicing across his strong features. Last time we were here, he’d been whispering into my ear, telling me how much he loved me.
When his fingers had found the button securing my dress in the back, I’d panicked and exclaimed I was late for my weaving lessons.
It still smells just the same in here, of rot and animal manure.
Fates, he’s handsome. So much more than I am.
Maybe that’s why he’s upset.
I’m plain, and he’s worried our baby will be plain, too.
I don’t think that’s possible, not when our baby’s father looks like Derek.
I wonder if I should tell him that, but then I remember I was confused too, when I first learned I was carrying a child. I hadn’t understood how it worked, and it dawns on me that Derek could be just as confused.
I’m talking before I can stop myself, the words spilling from my mouth like water soaking into the ground, and it’s seeping into the earth, and I can’t get a hold of it. “I think it might have something to do with the time in the pantry.” Derek stops his pacing. His body goes still, rigid, his fingers still lingering in his tousled hair, like they’ve forgotten they’re supposed to be messing his hair up. “I didn’t know that was how it worked either. I thought one had to be married to have a baby, but I think perhaps—”
“Fates, Blaise. Please don’t say another word.”
I don’t. It’s hard to find words when someone who is usually so gentle, so loving, sounds so very angry. Even though I grope for them, they don’t come, those traitorous words. So fickle. They were pouring out of my mouth only a moment ago, and now they refuse to budge.
Sometimes people cry when they’re happy. I’ve yet to see it until now, but perhaps sometimes people yell when they’re happy, too.
“Does anyone else know?” he asks. Shame floods me, and it’s so potent, I wonder if the baby can feel it. If it feels like it’s drowning. Of course Derek is upset. He’s going to be a father, and he wasn’t even the first person to find out. Fates, Clarissa knows. And the cook and the maid.
I tell him as much. “But they realized it before I did. I would never have told them before you. I would have wanted you to know first.”
Derek swallows, taking his hand and rubbing it across the front of his neck. The pressure of his fingers leaves red splotches on his skin. “And you’re sure I’m the father?”
Something sharp guts me. “Of course you’re the father, Derek. Who else would it be?”
“I have a hard time believing that, given how available you make yourself.”
I suck in a sharp breath. Why would anyone want to do that with someone they didn’t love with all their heart? “Of course not. I love you.”
I’m not sure why I expect him to say it back. He’s only said it the one time. I hadn’t noticed that until now.
“I mean it, Blaise. You can’t pin this on me just because you fancy me. If there’s a sliver of a chance this child could be anyone else’s, you have to tell me.”
It’s the first time the thought occurs to me that perhaps I’m not the only girl Derek has led into a pantry.
“It’s just you,” I whisper, my heart aching.
He advances on me, and typically I find it thrilling when he’s this close, close enough for me to feel his hot breath on my face, but now I suddenly have the urge to shrink myself, to scurry through the slats in the wood paneling.
“Does anyone else know?”
“I told you—Clarissa and the cook and the maid…”
“That I’m the father? Does anyone know that I’m the father?”
I blink then, and when I do, it’s like I’ve had a layer of filth over my eyes that’s just been wiped away, and I start to notice the ugly parts of Derek. The parts my eyes usually overlook. Like how his lip curls up in a sneer when something doesn’t go his way, or the way his nose flares when he’s angry, giving him the look of a flustered child.
But Derek is not a child.
“No, of course not,” I say.
Something like relief washes over his face, and when it sloshes off of him and onto me, I feel as though I might drown in it.
But there’s something worse than the drowning. There’s something lurking below the surface, a monster hiding in the shadows.
“Derek, we have to…you have to marry me. You must.” It comes out like a plea, and I hate that it has to come out of my mouth at all. The man is the one who is supposed to propose marriage, not the other way around. My lips feel smeared with grime just for speaking the words.
A shadow passes over his face, and that thing lurking in the corners of my gut stills for a moment, waiting.
“Okay. Of course, Blaise. Of course we’ll marry,” he says, taking my small hands in his calloused ones as he presses his lips to my fingers.
The monster under the surface is still there.
I realize when he leaves to return to his chores that I was expecting him to touch my belly before he left, to feel for his baby growing inside of me.
He doesn’t, and when I ask around for him an hour later, the head maid informs me that Derek is gone, and that if she knows men at all, she doesn’t expect he’ll be back.
CHAPTER 9
BLAISE
Nox continues to bring me hot food—steamed dumplings filled with shredded lamb, broccoli dripping with garlic butter, chilled lemon pies lined with a flaky crust that seems to dissolve as soon as it hits my tongue.
