Back With Baby, Ex Regrets Deeply novel · Chapter 13 of 32

Chapter 13: Said Out Loud

I didn't say anything for so long that he started to look frightened.

It was a strange thing to see on him.

Alistair Kincaid, who had once told a minister of transport to sit down, standing in a hotel lobby with his hair wet, waiting to find out if I was going to leave.

"Faye," he said, his voice rough.

"Shut up," I said. "I'm working up to it."

His mouth moved.

Not a smile. The ghost of one.

"Take your time."

"Don't be polite to me. You've been polite to me for three years."

"Yes."

"I hate it."

"I know that now."

I folded my mother's program along its soft old creases and put it in the pocket of my jeans.

Then I took hold of his clean shirt with both hands.

"I love you," I said. "I think I loved you on the wall. I definitely loved you the night you made Teddy a garage out of stationery boxes. And I've been so angry at you for not loving me back that I couldn't see straight."

He closed his eyes.

"Say it again."

"No. You only get it once a day. You have to earn the rest."

"How?"

"Start by telling me things. Out loud. Like a person."

He opened his eyes and looked at me.

"I keep the program in my coat because I wanted it near me in meetings," he said. "I mended the lining myself the first time it tore. Badly. Gran had it redone and told me I sew like a drunk."

I laughed.

It came out wet.

"What else?"

"I knew you were pregnant two weeks before you told me. You stopped finishing your coffee." He touched the scar through my eyebrow with one thumb. "And I've wanted to kiss you here since the night you told me about the piano bench."

"So do it."

He did.

Then he kissed my mouth, right there by the potted palm, in front of the bellman coming back in from the rain.

The bellman went straight back out again.

We took the elevator up holding hands.

At the suite door Alistair stopped with the key card in his hand.

"He's asleep," he said. "If we wake him, I'm not reading the bus book a fourth time."

"Then be quiet."

"I'm always quiet."

"Not always," I said, and watched him go red to the ears for the first time in three years.

Teddy was flat on his back in the travel cot in the second bedroom, arms flung up, the bus on his chest.

I pulled the door almost shut.

When I turned around Alistair was in the middle of the living room, not touching me, the way he'd stood at Heriot Row on the first night.

Watching me.

Only now I knew what it had cost him.

"Come here," he said.

This time it was him who said it.

I came to him.

He didn't reach for me at first.

His hands stayed at his sides, and he looked down at me the way he had that first night at Heriot Row, except now I knew what the look meant.

"You're wet," he said.

"From the rain."

"From the rain." He touched my hair, pushed it back from my face. "And from waiting for me to touch you. Tell me I'm wrong."

I couldn't.

He knew it.

"Say it."

"You're not wrong."

"No." His thumb traced the scar through my eyebrow. "I've watched you for three years, Faye. I know when you want me. I know when you're pretending not to."

"I never pretended."

"You did." His voice was low and steady. "Every time you thought I was only being kind to you, you let me touch you and you didn't ask for more. You never once asked."

"I didn't think I was allowed."

"You were allowed." He took my wet sweater in both hands and lifted it over my head. "You were always allowed. I was waiting for you to take what you wanted."

The sweater hit the floor.

He looked at my breasts, at the plain bra I'd put on that morning, and he said, "I've wanted to tell you what these do to me since our wedding night."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because I'd have told you everything." He unclasped the bra and let it fall. "And I wouldn't have been able to stop telling you."

"Then don't stop now."

His breath came out hard.

"Take off your jeans."

His voice had gone rough, the way it did in meetings when someone had pushed him too far.

I unbuttoned them with shaking hands and pushed them down my legs.

The program from my pocket I set on the nightstand first.

Then I stood there in nothing but my underwear in the middle of the hotel suite, and Alistair Kincaid looked at me like a man who had been starving.

"God," he said quietly. "You're beautiful. I've never said that out loud to you either, have I?"

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