“Five months... Impossible. I don’t believe it.” She shook her head.
“She was very, very lean; thinner than you, even. She’d never had regular periods. And she was always on a diet. She was crazy about fitness.”
“But almost five months... Didn’t it show?”
“A little, round belly, but that was all. She was sleeping when the baby moved. I didn’t recognize it at first, but I had remembered Alice’s first pregnancy, so when I felt the next kick I knew it had to be a baby. I panicked. The very next morning I took her, kicking and screaming, to Craigdale and locked her under my mother’s supervision. I threatened her with exposure, if she didn’t stay put and take care of herself until the end of the pregnancy. One month after Nathalie was born, I brought her back to London, and she returned to her perverted life.” He closed his eyes tight, the skin around them crinkling. “But I was too busy to see.” I didn’t want to see that I was a failure as a man, as a husband, as a lover.
“And?”
“I only discovered Heather’s betrayal because a very dear friend of mine insisted I hire a detective. I tried to righten things with her when I discovered it. She promised she would behave, but it was in vain. I was enraged with myself for not seeing Heather’s true colors from the beginning, not to have heard my parents’ advice. Feeling guilty of everything that was wrong in my life and Nathalie’s, I sank deeper into the mud. I don’t know what happened to me. I took off my wedding ring and each night, I fucked a different woman. I mean the word, Sophia. I didn’t make love or have sex with these women. I punished them for Heather’s and for their existence and I punished myself for being so stupid. I was ruthless. Vicious. I wanted to make them suffer.” His body was so stiff, that if not for his mouth moving she’d have thought he’d turned into a statue. “And do you know what made me even madder? They kept returning and asking for more.”
Sophia didn’t want to hear any more, but something keep pushing her. “And?”
“After a few months living in hell, I filed for a divorce...” He put both hands on his face, and his words came out muffled. “I did every fucking thing wrong. Every. Fucking. Thing. Wrong.”
A heavy silence suffocated them.
He hugged her in his arms and started talking again, “I thought... I asked Leonard to help me... We devised a plan. To pull it off, I needed proof of her drug addiction and of her unstable and perverted sexual behavior. I wanted to get full custody of Nathalie. It was not easy. First it took too much time to obtain the proofs and to convince the judge... Well, the day Leonard guaranteed it, I informed her about the divorce.” He squeezed his eyes tightly shut again. “She tried to make amends, she pleaded with me, but I’d made up my mind. It is beyond my capacity to understand why she did what she did, because she never loved Nathalie. I could only imagine that she would use her as leverage... unfortunately.” His hands clenched on her back, “In my selfishness-” He breathed deeply, “Nathalie payed for my sins.”
He lifted his eyelids and looked at her with tears in his eyes. “Nathalie... She was an angel, Sophia. So beautiful, so calm, always smiling. I woke up early to stay with her a few hours in the mornings and in the evenings when I arrived home I spent all the time I could with her. She was a blessing. I... I moved out and put the apartment on the market two months after she died. Every time I walked in, I expected her to come running, just like she always did, a big smile on her face, to throw herself in my arms.” His voice broke and he blinked to stop the tears from falling. “When I arrived home, I would spend hours in her little bed, smelling her baby scent. I didn’t let my mother give away her clothes. I slept with her stuffed elephant, one of her favorite toys. I heard her gentle voice calling me. I was going crazy.” Alistair’s face crumbled and he spoke with a deadened tone, “It was my fault, Sophia. Heather told me she was at Alice’s and I didn’t check. Heather put her asleep in the Porsche with no seatbelt. She crossed a red light. A bus ran into them. Heather died instantly, Nathalie, at the hospital. My mother got so depressed, she died three months later.” His green eyes were dark, all the light gone from them. There was only despair in his voice. “You see, your instincts were wrong when you absolved me.”
“Oh, Alistair. They weren’t.” His grief was so tangible, she knew he was far from overcoming it.
He had created a fortress of guilt around him, holding him hostage rather than giving sanctuary.
His suffering ate her up inside as if it were her own, and drained her like nothing else had since Gabriel’s death.
“I killed my daughter and my mother. That’s the truth.” His voice was so hoarse and his accent so thick that Sophia had difficulty understanding what he was saying.
“For God’s sake, Alistair Connor! You weren’t responsible. A mother is supposed to protect her children. With her life, if needed. That woman you married was not a mother. She was not a woman. She was a sick, insane monster.”
“I was-” He sighed profoundly, “I’m a monster, too. I’m guilty, mo chridhe. I have to suffer, to pay for my sins. I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve to be loved.”
Sophia looked at his bared soul and didn’t find the man she knew. No. A very different man is drowning the Alistair Connor I know in a cesspool of undeserved guilt.
It brought out in her a deep need to ease his misery. She straddled Alistair and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Do you think I will allow you to continue harming yourself? Well, I won’t. You have to stop this self-punishment. What you haven’t understood until now is that I consider you mine, and no one, no one harms what is mine.” She fisted his hair and pulled his head up to look at her. “Not even you are allowed to harm yourself. Do you understand?” She took his mouth hard.
He jerked his head back to look at her.
“Do you?” she insisted.
A pained look appeared on his face.
“I do. Oh, Sophia,” he murmured, burying his head in her hair and inhaling her sweet smell. “I need you, my love. I need you.”
“Take me. I’m yours.” She pulled his head to kiss him as if she could remove from within him all that darkness which poisoned his heart and soul.
“You don’t understand,” he shook his head fiercely. “I can’t be gentle. I can’t take you right now. I can’t. I want to-” Hurt you.
This is it, my chance to show him he can escape from all his violence and pain. His guilt and punishment. I can’t allow him to say no. “Please,” she spread her legs and pressed down on him, “make love to me.”
He burrowed his head in her neck, struggling for control. “That’s what you deserve. A man who’ll give you love.” He raised his head, his emerald eyes searching hers, “But right now, what I want is to take. To take you hard and fast enough to make me forget,” he said, his hands stealing under her wrap to palm her breast, plucking and pinching the nipples.
Sophia gasped astonished by this side of his she didn’t know, but didn’t block his advances, “You don’t need to hurt. You need to love.”
Alistair hated the darkness that surrounded him every time he thought about Heather. He was wary of hurting Sophia, but only she could help take away the painful memories. She was his light, his sun, the one that could drag him back from the cold hell he had been living in. He bent his head and cupped a breast with a greedy hand, sucking a nipple hard, biting it.