What Were You Expecting? (35 page)

He leaned forward to press a light kiss on her nose. “We weren’t ready, love.”

“Speak for yourself,” she answered saucily.

He looked surprised, then delighted, and he pulled her closer, close enough for her to feel that even after making love to her twice, he was ready for her again.

She chuckled lightly, feeling his the velvet steel of his length push insistently against her tummy. “Though I don’t know that I’d ever have been
ready
for this walloper… if I’d have known.”

“Walloper
?” he asked.

“It’s Scottish for…” she pushed her pelvis forward, eliciting a groan from his lips. “Let’s just say that yer a verra big man,
mo muirnín
.”

His face fell, stricken with concern as he started pulling away from her. “Did I hurt you, Maggie? Did I—”

She threw her arm over his waist, keeping his body flush against hers. “No! No, Nils. We fit together, love. So perfectly.”

“I was worried,” he confessed, relaxing against her, nuzzling her nose, pulling her closer.

“Of what?”

“Hurting you.”

“I promise you gave me nothin’ but pleasure,” she said, her nipples beading against his chest as her inner muscles reminded her of the bliss she’d just found in his arms. Which reminded her of the joy she’d felt when he declared, “This is real.”

“You meant it?” she asked. “About the truce being over?”

“That stupid truce,” he muttered, rolling onto his back. “I couldn’t think of another way for you to let me back into your life. For you to give me another chance. I couldn’t stand the thought of you choosing Beck over me.”

“Maybe I still will,” she said, saucily, propping herself up on one elbow to face him.

“What
?” His neck whipped sharply to the side to look at her and relaxed as he examined the grin she couldn’t hold back. “Don’t tease me like that.”

“You silly man,” she said, reaching out to trace his lips with her fingertip. He caught it between his teeth and bit down lightly. “There hasn’t been anyone for me…but you. Not for years.”

“You sure looked chummy with him at
Midsommardagen
,” he pouted, releasing her finger and staring up at the ceiling.

“I was angry with you.” She chewed her lip for a moment before asking, “Do you remember that night right before
Midsommardagen
? You were goin’ to help me straighten up the Prairie and instead you left me alone with Beck. Why’d you do that?”

“Same reason I left after we kissed. I thought he could be good for you. He’s a lawyer. Successful. Doesn’t have as much baggage as I do.”

“I want your baggage,
mo muirnín
,” she said, remembering his face as he told her about Veronica. She caressed his cheek with the tips of her fingers and he turned his neck to face her.

“Does that mean what I think it means?”

“What do you think it means?”

“Love,” he whispered, as one whispers sacred things. “
My
love.”

“Aye,” she said softly. “It means what you think it means. I dinna want Beck, my love. I only want you.”

He propped himself up on his elbow to mirror her. “Promise it’ll stay that way.”

“What’re you offerin’ me in return?” she teased.

He swallowed, looking down at the white sheets between them for a moment before seizing her eyes with a stark, vulnerable certainty. “My heart.”

Her breath caught and tears filled her eyes as she stared back at him. “Now see…ye go an’ say somethin’ like that and I canna think of another thing except this…”

She leaned forward to kiss him and he gathered her into his arms, pushing her gently onto her back and proving, again, that his heart wasn’t the only thing that belonged to her.

***

Four days.

He’d only be away from her for four days. Not four weeks. Not four months. Not four years. Four days. He could handle that, right?

As he drove the van toward the Bozeman Airport, farther and farther from Gardiner, he wished away the feelings of emptiness that battled with the fullness of his heart. Though Nils hadn’t exactly been celibate in the years since he lost Veronica, the affairs he’d had were almost universally meaningless and brief, with the exception of Tess, who’d somehow managed to become his friend during their short time together. But certainly no one had come close to owning his heart the way Maggie did; he hadn’t loved any of the others. Living his life without her now was unthinkable; after knowing the tenderness of her eyes when she drew back after kissing him, the teasing in them as she’d straddled him and rubbed herself over his lap, taunting him, the fire in them when he entered her, claimed her, climaxed in tandem with her, he’d never be able to let her go.

He’d sentenced himself to life the moment he’d carried Maggie into her bedroom, and he cursed himself for a fool now, because he hadn’t been completely honest with her about his past.

He thought about the normal trajectory of any relationship: friendship or flirtation to attraction, attraction to chemistry, chemistry to dating, dating to deepening feelings, deepening feelings to commitment, commitment to sex, to love, to marriage, to a life together. He and Maggie had gone from friendship and unacknowledged attraction to marriage to deepening feelings to sex. But what about commitment? What about love? What about honesty?

Though he’d told her what they had was “real,” he hadn’t articulated what he meant by that, and the reality is that he meant everything: the friendship, the attraction, the chemistry, the love, the commitment, the sex, the marriage, the life together. All of it. The whole shebang. Boiled down, he wanted Maggie and Nils Lindstrom, together forever.

He hadn’t intended to sleep with her without full disclosure, but when she’d insisted that he didn’t need to say any more about Veronica, he’d taken the out, and when she’d kissed him and taken her top off, it had short-circuited his brain. Any noble intentions of honesty had been thrown completely out the window at the exact same time logical thoughts of latent collateral damage dissolved into a sea of hot, pulsing lust.

Anyway, he hadn’t quite figured out how to say it.

My girlfriend and my son died on an operating table in Missoula.

Veronica was innocent and beautiful and got pregnant with my child, but we were young and foolish and she was scared to tell her aunt or her mother, scared to go to the doctor, scared to do anything but ignore the baby growing inside of her. She went into labor in the dingy room we shared in the basement of an old couple’s house. After hours of screaming and bleeding and finally fainting, I picked her up and carried her over twenty blocks to the emergency room, where I found out they were both in severe distress. The child was so big for her petite body, the labor was obstructed. Shoulder dystocia led to the compression of his cord and a lack of oxygen, which was the probable cause of his death. The doctors broke her pelvic bone trying to get him out, but he was already dead when they delivered him and she hemorrhaged to death anyway. My son’s name was Jens and I only held him once, for twenty minutes, before they took his broken little body away.

It was my fault
, he thought again, as he had a million times before.
It was my genes that created a child so big, it killed itself and its mother trying to be born. It was my fault…my fault…my fault…

The car beside him laid on the horn and snapped Nils out of his dark memories, as he righted the van from veering into the adjacent lane. He looked up at the bright green sign. He was halfway to Bozeman.

When Veronica had finally told him she was pregnant in April, she was barely showing, and when they graduated in May, they’d moved up to Missoula together. He told his parents he had a forestry internship for the summer, but the truth was that he worked at McDonald’s to scrape together enough money to pay for their rented room.

By July, she was huge and unwieldy, often complaining of pain, but refusing to go to the local clinic. She didn’t want to give her name. She didn’t want for her mother, who was still in Afghanistan, to be alerted to her shameful situation. Though he’d offered to marry her, the conversation had made her cry harder as she insisted she wasn’t ready to be anyone’s wife, anyone’s mother.
Her
plan was to quietly have the baby at home and give it up for adoption at a local hospital a week or two later. She’d read that you could leave any child under the age of twelve at a hospital and they would take it, and though the idea of giving up his child upset him in theory, he knew that it was the best option. He was only eighteen years old. Like Veronica, he wasn’t ready to be anyone’s husband, anyone’s father. Not to mention, in his teenage heart he truly believed that bringing home his illegitimate child to his god-fearing parents was an impossibility.

Veronica bought a book about home births and insisted Nils could handle the delivery, but he’d never read the book, choosing to pick up extra hours at work and bury his head in the sand of denial instead. Plus, he truly believed she’d change her mind and head to a hospital when the baby was final coming.

He was wrong about that. She’d labored for over twenty hours, insisting—up until the moment she finally passed out from pain and exhaustion—that they could handle it without a hospital, desperate that their shameful news never be exposed.

As far as he knew, the cause of her death had never been publicly disclosed, cold comfort though it was.

He’d stayed in Missoula for the reminder of that summer, returning home in October. Veronica’s funeral had been sparsely attended by her mother, who returned home from her tour when she was alerted by the hospital that her eighteen-year-old daughter had died in childbirth, and a few local relatives. Nils watched from a distance as they lowered the casket holding his girlfriend and son, and spent many long nights drunk and weeping by their gravesite, mumbling “I’m sorry…I’m sorry…I’m sorry” over and over again, trying to blot out the sheer horror of their death with cheap vodka.

Though people in Gardiner eventually heard the sad news about the pretty senior who died up in Missoula, she wasn’t a local girl in the strictest sense, and the news had been passing at best. At one point Lars had approached him, asking Nils if he knew the sad news about “that chick you dated last year” but that was the extent of anyone’s remembrances. She was a forgotten girl who’d left no imprint during her short stay.

Except for Nils, on whose heart her memory lingered, and who not only mourned her loss, but the terrible way she lost her life, and his culpability in her death and the death of their son. If only he’d insisted she go to the hospital when the labor began, when it got bad, when she first started bleeding…if only he’d insisted she go to a clinic and get checked out once or twice during her pregnancy, but he’d been a scared kid who knew nothing about girls and babies, hoping she’d have the baby and they’d go back to life and loving and feeling eighteen again.

When he told Maggie he had baggage, he meant the kind of baggage that changes your life forever. The kind of baggage that changes how you see the world and how you see yourself. The kind of baggage that you can’t actually forgive and you just hope that your life will give you opportunities to make amends. The kind of baggage that compels an eighteen-year-old kid, heartsick and paralyzed with guilt, muddy from the newly turned earth around him, to make a promise at the gravesite of his infant son:

I will never let this happen again,
Jens, min son, min son, min litta son. Jag lovar dig
. I promise you. I will remember what happened to you,
min Älskling son
, and I will never, ever let it happen again.

***

Maggie was walking on air.

She was married to the man she loved, who had finally told her—in his own way—how he felt about her.
My heart.
He’d offered her his heart, and she’d accepted it….along with everything else his body had to offer. And what a body it was. Her skin still flushed from the heat of their lovemaking, the secret place between her thighs humming with the memory of his strength, the way he filled her so completely. She was lost in the physical sensations and in his feelings for her. When she thought of the way he moved within her, gentle and slow, rough and fast, it made her sigh with pleasure, with longing. Four days. Four bloody days apart, and she was a soppy mess of need.

“Hey, Mags!” said Paul, distracting her from the spot on the counter she’d been wiping in a slow circular motion for the better part of an hour as she daydreamed.

She looked up, a grin coming easily to greet her friend.

“Whatever you’re thinking about must be pretty good.”

You have no idea.

He drummed his fingers on the counter as he took a seat. “Bethany said you had the flu. Glad you’re up and about.”

“Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday were terrible,” she admitted, gesturing to a coffee cup and filling it up when he nodded. “Doc Garrison gave me antivirals, though, which I strongly recommend. I was feelin’ better by yesterday.”