Sarah's Child Read online

  He pulled her onto his lap and kissed her, careful not to let his arm touch her stomach; instead, he put his hand on her knees. “I think you’re beautiful,” he said, and she was. She was glowing, her hair lustrous, her skin radiant. He kissed her again, his hand going automatically to her full breasts.

  She sighed with pleasure, her lips parting for his. Shaken by her nearness and by the softness of her in his lap, he kept kissing her while he unbuttoned her top and sought the warm satin of her flesh. Her breasts were rounded, growing to fulfill the needs of his child, filling his palm. Her nipples strained to the touch, and she clenched her hands in his hair, kissing him wildly.

  “I’m going to explode,” he groaned, pulling his mouth away.

  Dr. Easterwood hadn’t told Sarah that she had to abstain yet, but she didn’t try to push Rome into making love to her. That was his decision, and she felt a little shy at the thought anyway. She was no longer slender; she’d feel awkward and not sexy enough for him.

  He rebuttoned her blouse, and Sarah knew he’d made his decision. She accepted it without argument, sliding from his lap. “I’m sorry for being such a crybaby,” she apologized, then suddenly realized what she’d said, and that she’d broken her promise.

  He gave her an unreadable look, one that made her flinch inside. No matter how she felt, she never mentioned her problems to him again. When the baby began kicking so energetically that she couldn’t sleep at night, she tolerated it in silence. She endured the growing aches and pains in her over-burdened muscles, the total discomfort; though it seemed like forever, she knew that in a matter of weeks it would all be over.

  On the first of October Dr. Easterwood told her to stop driving at all, and to get more rest. That was something she had to tell Rome, as that effectively put a stop to working at the store. So instead of being fussed over by Erica and Derek and a steady stream of customers, there was only Mrs. Melton to fuss over her, though Marcie did run up to see about her several times a day. Rome began spending all his evenings at home, though Sarah knew he would normally have at least a few business dinners to attend. Max was covering for him, was all he said when she asked him about it.

  Sarah found that she was too lethargic to even miss the store. She read a great deal and tried to decide on baby names, but she really couldn’t concentrate on anything. She slept a lot in the afternoons, because that was when the baby seemed to sleep. At night, it did aerobic exercises.

  During the nights, lying awake with only her unborn child for company, Sarah tormented herself, trying to decide if she’d made the right decision. Just the very thought of not having the baby was insupportable; it was Rome’s child, conceived in an act of love, and even before its birth she loved it with a deep devotion that startled her, for somehow she hadn’t expected to feel such a sense of physical ownership. The child was part of her too, an extension of herself. As such, she felt it keenly when Rome rejected the child.

  But the decision she’d made, even if it had been the only decision she could make, could blight the child’s life. She knew that Rome’s aversion to it wasn’t one to be taken lightly, that it had been formed in the blackest days of his life. She could still feel his anguish, his deep and utter despair, and even now she cried for him when she remembered the emptiness of his eyes. She had backed him into a corner, forced him to choose between accepting the physical presence of a child he didn’t want, or losing the warmth of his wife’s love, which still seemed so new and fragile to him. He’d never even hoped to find love again, not after the tragedy that had left his life a wasteland; when he did love, he was both astonished and frightened by it. But when faced with a choice, he’d chosen Sarah, even at the cost of considerable emotional pain to himself.

  Adoption was an alternative that kept springing to Sarah’s mind, only to make everything in her writhe in rejection. There was no easy answer; no matter what she did, someone would be hurt. If she gave up her child, its loss would haunt her for the rest of her life. If the love Rome felt for her eventually died under the weight of a burden he couldn’t carry, would she come to resent her own baby?

  Ever since she’d made the decision to keep the baby, she hadn’t let herself think of all those things. She’d taken each day as it came, not planning too far into the future, ignoring the problems she knew were waiting for her, because she simply couldn’t handle them. All she had been able to do was live in the present, her mind and body preoccupied with the processes of life going on inside her. She’d been kept busy by the store, distracted by the constant company of other people. But now she was spending her days mostly alone, with nothing to do but think, and she was afraid.

  If she lost Rome now, what would she do? She’d reached for a miracle when she married him, and found it. To have him walk away from her now would shatter her. Yet she’d risked destroying her marriage, and done it deliberately. Already he was more remote from her, and growing farther apart every day. He was kind, and solicitous of her comfort and health, but the baby prevented any real intimacy with him, and she was beginning to fear that they were merely polite strangers.

  The Rome she knew was an impatient, dynamic man; he made things and people move. He’d overcome a horror so great that many men would have buckled under it, broken forever. That Rome wasn’t the polite, carefully controlled man who came home from the office every night, asked if she felt all right, and ignored her for the rest of the evening. What if his distance was the result of indifference, and he wouldn’t approach her even without the bulk of pregnancy as a barrier? Was he simply doing the polite thing and lending her his name until after the baby was born?

  Sarah was thankful that the first natural childbirth class that she and Marcie attended came on a night when Rome was on an overnight business trip, so she didn’t have to explain to him where she’d gone. Sarah had put off the classes, hoping against hope that Rome would decide to attend them with her, but at last, time forced her to make a decision. If she didn’t attend the classes soon, the baby would come anyway. She felt shy and awkward about attending the classes so close to term, and she keenly felt Rome’s absence. Marcie was a dear friend, but every other woman in the class was accompanied by her husband, and Sarah intercepted several pitying glances that came her way.

  The class made her feel better in one respect: She was near term, but there were a lot of women so swollen with pregnancy that they made her little pumpkin of a stomach look hardly respectable. She patted her unborn child fondly, thinking that she liked it just the way it was.

  Rome came home early the next afternoon; he came into the living room where she was sitting with her feet propped on the coffee table while she industriously tried to complete every puzzle in a crossword puzzle book. Placing his briefcase down with controlled movements, he said, “I called you last night, but you weren’t here. Where were you?”

  Startled, Sarah looked up at him; then her glance slid away. She’d been wishing that he weren’t so remote, but somehow she’d forgotten just how disconcerting he could be when he pierced someone with those fierce dark eyes. He wasn’t remote now; he was angry.

  He unbuttoned his suit jacket and shrugged out of it, tossing it across the back of the sofa. Sitting down across from her, he raked his fingers through his wind-tossed dark hair. “I’m waiting,” he said softly.

  Sarah closed the crossword book and laid it aside. “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you before, but I didn’t know how to bring it up,” she admitted. “Marcie took me to the natural childbirth classes that hospitals give now; she’s going to be my coach. Last night was the first class.”

  His mouth tightened, and again she caught the flicker of something deep in his eyes, the same unreadable something that had been there several times before. “I suppose I’m lucky you didn’t ask Max,” he said.

  “Rome!” Shocked, a little hurt, she stared at him.

  He made an abrupt movement with his hand. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that. Damn!” he swore softly, sliding his hand to the back