He didn’t wait for her to obey, swinging away from the bed and striding over to the wall of glass, standing there with his hands slung on his hips, looking out, though Tammy suspected he wasn’t seeing anything. His back was rigid with determination, and no doubt his mind was ticking through ways to get past her resistance.
She reached for a piece of toast. Her hand was trembling. The need to regain some strength forced her to eat and drink. Best to calm down, as well, she told herself. Stress wasn’t good for the baby. She munched through the raisin toast, washed it down with the sweet orange juice and did feel better for it, more settled for listening to what Fletcher had on his mind.
‘Plate and glass empty,’ she said, wanting him to enlighten her on his motives for marriage, since he’d just back-tracked on what were supposed to be hers.
He turned slowly, tension carving his handsome face into hard lines and emanating so powerfully from him, Tammy hugged herself in self-protective comfort, instinctively warding off the sense of attack coming at her.
‘I won’t let you shut me out of your life,’ he threw at her grimly. ‘As the father of our child, I have legal rights and I’ll claim them.’
She took a deep breath to ease the tightness in her chest and said, ‘I don’t want to shut you out, Fletcher, and I readily concede you have rights. I’ll always respect them.’
‘Words!’ he scoffed. ‘I won’t settle for anything less than a guaranteed situation. A contract, signed and sealed.’
His absolute insistence on a contract seemed totally unreasonable. ‘How involved do you want to be in our child’s life?’ she asked, wanting some idea of the depth and breadth of his commitment to fatherhood.
‘I will not have arbitrary limitations put upon my involvement,’ he threw at her in savage dismissal of any terms she might suggest. ‘I have to be there for my child, to stop what will happen if I’m not.’
Tammy shook her head, not understanding his vehement claim. ‘What do you think will happen? I promise you, I’ll love our child whether you’re there or not.’
‘But you’re not me, Tamalyn,’ he mocked. ‘And no-one who hasn’t been born a child prodigy can imagine what it’s like to be one.’
It was a jolt, hearing him describe himself in those terms. But, of course, he had been a prodigy, a super-brain at mathematics from a very early age. Not once had she connected that fact to the baby in her womb, and it stunned her to realise that he had, seeing it as an issue of prime importance.
‘I think you’ll be a very loving mother,’ he conceded, a wry twist on his lips. ‘It’s in your nature to be, and if love were enough…’He shook his head. ‘It’s not. When no one in your family has any empathy with how your mind works, the loneliness of it kills off the sense of being loved.’
Loneliness…she remembered Celine calling him a self-contained beast. Had Fletcher chosen to occupy a world of his own or been driven into that existence by the talent he’d been born with? She stared at him, gathering a completely new perspective of the man—a man alone in a way she had never been alone.
He started pacing around the bedroom like a caged lion, throwing out pieces of what he had lived with and hated. ‘My parents did their best for me. I know they did. It wasn’t their fault that I didn’t fit in anywhere, that I was taunted at school for being a weird oddity, resented at university for being so young and outshining the older students. I don’t blame them for finding Celine so much easier to love. Nothing abnormal about my sister. I was like some cuckoo in their nest, an alien child. No one in my family ever knew how to relate to me.’
She had never felt that—a misfit in the normal stream of humanity—unacceptable by other people. Her parents hadn’t wanted her but that was something else. Her nannies had liked her. So had her teachers all through her school years. There never had been any problem with acceptance by her friends or her associates at work.
‘Though there are piles of people wanting to relate to me now,’ Fletcher added cynically. ‘International success and billions of dollars makes what I am inside totally irrelevant to them.’
‘Not to me, Fletcher,’ Tammy put in quietly.
He halted, swinging around to claw into her. ‘The woman who can’t be bought. Why not, Tamalyn? What makes you immune to the lure of what you could get out of me?’
Understanding each other was good, Tammy thought. It might lead to trust, which was of prime importance to her. This time she didn’t hesitate over laying out the truth of her family background. ‘It’s how my mother works her life. She’s obsessed with pursuing wealthy men, acquiring whatever she can get out of them. I’ve seen how it is…being bought by a man…being discarded when a brighter bauble beckons.’ She shook her head. ‘I think it’s a self-destructive path. I couldn’t feel any respect for myself if I took it.’
‘Hard to shake a deep imprint,’ he bit out in frustration.
‘I know I’m capable of looking after myself,’ she asserted, flashing him a look of belligerent pride as she added, ‘I don’t need a man to do it.’
Ruthless purpose slid back into place. ‘You pride yourself on your independence, but this is something you can’t do alone. You have no idea what you’ll be faced with if our child inherits the same genetic pattern that made me a prodigy. You’ll fail as a mother if I’m not there to support you, because our child will need me, Tamalyn.’
Failure as a mother… Tammy inwardly recoiled from that thought. If she did have one ambition, it was to be the best mother any child could have. Yet with the details of Fletcher’s personal experience ringing through her mind, she didn’t feel so confident about dealing with needs she’d never known herself.
‘Partners in parenthood,’ he pushed at her, his dark eyes blazing conviction that this was how it had to be. ‘Marriage is the best set-up for that.’
He started strolling around to her side of the bed and she could feel his indomitable will bearing down on her, demanding her acceptance, dismissing any reluctance on her part to give in to him. Her heart started hammering. She wanted to be partners in parenthood with him, but marriage to her was a partnership of love, not one of need.
‘You might be disappointed, Fletcher,’ she threw at him. ‘Our child could turn out to be ordinary like me.’