MAYBE A WIZARD put a curse on his family during the Middle Ages, or had the powers above decided the d’Usay family had spent enough time on the planet and therefore anyone attached to the name needed to go? Or had he simply done something horrible in a previous life and therefore needed to suffer punishment in this one?
Jenna was bleeding. “Not a lot,” she said, but her voice had been tight and lacked conviction.
Bleeding meant miscarriage.
Philippe broke the speed laws driving them to the emergency room. There, he was forced aside while an overly chipper nurse shooed him from the room.
“We need to get her changed and then do an exam,” the nurse told him. “We’ll come get you as soon as we’re done.”
Now, with the tests and exams finished, he returned to find Jenna lying alone in the dim light. It was midmorning, or so the clock on the wall told him. He sat by her side and held her hand while the monitor beeped out her vital signs with soft regularity.
She looked like a pale angel. Soft and delicate. The hospital gown didn’t suit her—the colors were too muted. She was brighter than that.
Felix had not looked like an angel in his hospital bed. The last few weeks, his brother had looked like Nosferatu, all tight white skin and teeth.
Mama, however. She would have looked like an angel. He knew without having been there, because Mama had always insisted on looking her best.
She would have been jealous of how beautiful Jenna looked.
Jenna wasn’t dying, he reminded himself.
But their child might be.
He brushed a curl from her forehead, forcing a smile when she turned her head to look at him with large, frightened eyes. “The doctor come back yet?”
“Not yet. She’s on her way, the nurse outside said.” His voice was surprisingly calm, considering his insides felt ready to shatter. How he hated this feeling. The hollow feeling that felt as though someone cut your insides from your heart to your stomach.
The shadow he’d spent so many years trying avoid gripped his shoulder and held on fast. This was why you didn’t get involved. This was why you avoided falling in love. Because people you loved died, leaving you cold and hollow inside. Leaving you alone.
What had made him think he could escape the pain?
Jenna’s lower lip trembled. “I’m scared,” she said. They both were. “I’ve been lying here listing all the logical reasons for spotting, but it doesn’t help. All I keep thinking is what if...”
“Shh. Don’t say it.” If they swallowed the word, perhaps it would disappear. Pressing his forehead to hers, he whispered the refrain again as if reciting a prayer. “Don’t say it.” His hands squeezed hers as tightly as possible, their viselike grips grounding one another. In his mind’s eye, Philippe saw all the events he might never see—first steps, dances, smiles—and he prayed he was overreacting.
A knock on the door interrupted them. Looking up, he saw a woman no bigger than a girl with a gray topknot. “I am Dr. Bhattacharya,” she said, her voice soft and singsong. “How are we feeling?”
Horrible, Philippe started to say.
“Nervous,” Jenna replied.
“Not surprising. I have good news, though. Your exams came back with no signs of irregularities. The cervix is intact, the uterus looks in good shape and the bleeding seems to have stopped as well.”
“Oh thank God.” Jenna let out a sigh of relief that Philippe could feel reverberating through her body. He wasn’t quite as ready to relax. There was more that the doctor was leaving out.
“Your blood work did show that your progesterone level is low. There’s a good chance that’s what caused the bleeding. I’m going to prescribe a progesterone shot to see if we can boost your levels and keep this from happening again.”
“But everything’s going to be all right,” Jenna said. “I’m not miscarrying.”
“Obviously, with bleeding in early pregnancy, there’s always a chance of miscarriage,” Dr. Bhattacharya said. “I’m going to recommend that your ob-gyn monitors you closely just in case. But, looking at all the tests, I’m feeling good about the progesterone solving the problem.”
Relief tore through him. Was it possible to lose one’s breath from happiness, because he felt like all the air had rushed from his lungs in a single whoosh.
Thank you, he said silently. To whom, he didn’t know. All he knew was they’d been given a reprieve.
“There is one more test,” Dr. Bhattacharya said. She smiled at them both. “We’d like to do an ultrasound to check the baby’s heartbeat.”
“C-can we hear it at this point?” Jenna looked at him with excitement in her eyes. “It’s not too early?”
“Shouldn’t be,” the doctor replied.
A few minutes later, a machine had rolled in and Dr. Bhattacharya was tracing Jenna’s stomach with a wand and describing what she saw. Philippe was speechless. There, on the monitor, was his child. Tiny and hard to visualize, but more beautiful than anything he could imagine. That was, until...
“Here you go,” Dr. Bhattacharya said.
Jenna gasped. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “That’s our baby.”
It sounded like soft rapid hoof beats. Their child’s heart beat strong and sure. She was a fighter.
Like her mother. Philippe gazed at the woman beside him, awe in his heart. “C’est beau,” he said. “Perfect.”
“...you or the baby are at risk.”
The doctor’s words ripped him from the moment. “What did you say about risk?”
“She was talking about precautions in general,” Jenna said.
“I was saying that her doctor will want to monitor her closely throughout her pregnancy to make sure neither she or the baby are at risk.”
“You’re saying there still could be a problem then?” Worse, Jenna could be in danger as well?
“It’s just a precaution, Philippe. I’m sure they monitor pregnancies all the time.”
“We do,” Dr. Bhattacharya said. “We don’t want to take anything for granted.”
“No,” Philippe replied. “You don’t.” Hadn’t he, though? He sat back and studied the hand in his. In all his worry, he’d assumed Jenna would be all right.
What would he have done if he lost her? What would his world be like?
Dark, that’s what it would be. A world devoid of color and warmth.
He couldn’t let that happen. The d’Usay bad luck stopped here. Stopped now. Philippe wasn’t going to lose Jenna or his child. There was only one solution: keep them close and do everything in his control to keep them safe. Starting now.
“I don’t know about you, but I could use a few dozen hours of sleep.” Jenna sank her head against the headrest of Philippe’s rental car. Exhausted didn’t begin to cover how tired she felt. “Soon as I get back to the house, I’m going to scarf down some food and take a nap.”
“You will not scarf. You will have a healthy breakfast. If there is a possibility of risk, it will not be because of poor diet.”
“Yes, Mother.” She smiled as she said it. “Seriously, you don’t have to warn me twice. I’m aiming for a picture-perfect pregnancy from here on in. The next time I visit the hospital in a rush, I want it to be because my water broke.”
She ran a hand over her stomach. While she’d wanted the baby, she hadn’t known how deeply that desire went until she saw the blood. Then she knew with every fiber of her being. “You hear that, baby? No more scaring your father and me, or you’ll be grounded.”
“Then we are in agreement. We both want to do everything possible to keep you and the baby safe.”
“You are preaching to the choir. Although I feel better having talked to Dr. Bhattacharya. She knows her stuff, don’t you think?”
Philippe shrugged. “She was competent.”
“Well, I liked her,” she replied. Philippe had been in this weird, hard-to-please mode since they left the hospital, where everything on the island bothered him. She was cutting him some slack because of the stress they’d been under.
Sunshine was beginning to breach the horizon, its orange and yellow colors mixing with fading gray. “How long were we at the hospital, anyway? The clock was behind my head and I couldn’t see my... Oh my God, your flight. What time do you need to catch it?”
“Do not worry about the flight—I will reschedule.”
“Thank you.” In the midst of the chaos, she’d forgotten Philippe was planning to leave her. The two of them had been about to say goodbye, in fact, when the cramping hit.
Dragging out their goodbyes for another few hours might be postponing the inevitable, but Jenna was grateful anyway. “I hope it won’t cause too many problems.”
“They will have to deal. You and the baby come first.”
Jenna was so exhausted from the ordeal that she closed her eyes and pretended the words meant more than they did.
“You really are tired,” she heard Philippe say. “Once you have a few hours sleep, you can pack and we’ll head to my hotel.”
She pried open an eye. “Pack? For what?”
“The flight. Don’t worry about packing a lot. Just the essentials will do for now. I’ll have someone handle the rest.”
“Whoa, back up there, cowboy.” She opened her other eye and turned so she had a full view of his profile. “Where is it you think I’m going?”
“To Arles, of course.”
“What?” She shook her head. “No, I said last night that I couldn’t go to France with you, remember?”
“Yes, but...things are different now.”
They’d reached her driveway. Unbuckling his seat belt, Philippe turned so he too was studying her. He had one elbow propped on the wheel and the other on the seat back. If he leaned forward, he could pin her in place, Jenna noted. “We both agreed we were going to do everything possible to keep the baby healthy,” he said.
“Healthy, yes, but I was talking about more fruits and vegetables, not flying across the world for a vacation.”
“Not vacation,” he replied. “To live.”
Jenna looked at him and counted to three. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”
She got out of the car, and he followed her across the front lawn. “The situation is different now,” he said. “I realized just how much was at stake. How much I...that is, we...stand to lose.”
“Don’t you see?” He reached out and caught her arm. “If you come to France with me, I can make sure you have the finest doctors money can buy.”
“French doctors,” she replied.
“French, British, German. The best in the world. Whatever you need.”
“I don’t need French doctors! What I need is for you...” She stopped herself and took a deep breath. “We have perfectly adequate doctors in Nantucket.”
“My child deserves more than adequate care.”
“Then I’ll go to Boston if I need to. Or are you going to tell me they aren’t good enough, either?”
Yanking her arm free, she stomped up the front steps. The front door was open. They’d left in such a rush, she’d forgotten to turn the latch. Great, the way things were going, there was probably a robber pilfering through her jewelry.
Philippe was two steps behind her. “Ma chérie, please.”
“It was a scare, Philippe. Pregnant women have scares all the time, and they go on to have perfectly fine pregnancies. They don’t pick up and move halfway around the world.”
“People die all the time, too,” he shot back.
“No one is going to die.”
The entire conversation was ludicrous; she didn’t know why she was even entertaining it. She headed into the kitchen, where she found the bowl of fresh fruit Philippe had brought the day before. Part of their country dinner he’d planned to make. Bread, fruit and cheese. She grabbed an orange and a knife and began slicing with vehemence.
The worst part of this stupid conversation? It wasn’t that he had decided she needed to live in France, or that the basis for his decision had nothing to do with her, but rather his fear of losing the baby. No, the worst part was that she felt like an afterthought, and she hated herself for it.
A shadow fell across the doorway. “I didn’t mean to upset you. When we were in the hospital, I realized—I mean, truly realized—how much...I don’t want to lose her... I don’t want to lose...”
“I know. I don’t, either. When I first saw the spotting, I thought...” Jenna’s hands started to shake. The knife clattered to the counter as she pressed a trembling fist to her mouth. She would not sob. She would not...
“Shh.” Philippe’s hands gripped her shoulders, turning her to his chest. “It’s all right.”
She buried her face in his collar, letting his voice chase the tremors away. His arms were the balm she needed. The anchor. “I don’t know what I would have done without you at the hospital,” she said. His presence had kept her sane. She’d needed him.
She loved him.
A long, shuddering breath escaped her lips. She’d been dancing around the feeling with euphemisms for days, but now there was no escaping the truth. She loved Philippe d’Usay. She loved his child.
And he didn’t love her.
Sniffing, she pulled back. “You’re going to need a clean shirt,” she said. The collar was wet where she’d buried her face.
“I have plenty of shirts.” He kissed the top of her head. “Why don’t you sit down and rest and I will bring you a proper breakfast. I will impress you with my culinary skills,” he said, guiding her to a kitchen chair.
She let out a watery laugh. “You already impress me.”
“Mon Dieu, it’s a miracle. And here I have yet to crack an egg. How far we’ve come from that day on the terrace when you thought me a threat to your virtue.”
“I considered you a playboy who went through women like water,” she countered.
“‘Like water’ is an exaggeration. I like to think I am more selective than that.”
Jenna noticed he didn’t say was.
Perhaps she was being childish by playing games with semantics, but words counted. For as long as she could remember, she’d promised herself that when she fell in love, she would pick someone kind, considerate and devoted. Most importantly, however, she would fall for someone as far removed from her father as possible. Leave it to her to fall for a kind, considerate playboy. Words reminded her, during moments like this, that while Philippe was a part of her life, he was not committed to her.
“Fried or scrambled?”
“Scrambled.”
“Excellent choice. My fried eggs are horrible. You know,” he said, kicking the refrigerator door shut, “when you come to France, we can do this every morning.”
She looked up from the orange rind she was playing with. “What’s that? Cry over fruit?”
“Eat scrambled eggs.”
“We have scrambled eggs in New England.”
His face darkened, and he turned around. A second later, she heard the crack of an egg against the bowl. “I have lost every person in my life who has ever mattered to me. I can’t lose any more.”
The naked vulnerability in his voice punched her right in the heart. She wasn’t trying to hurt him. Couldn’t he see that? She was trying to protect herself. “This baby means everything to me, too,” she told him.
The baby she carried was part of Philippe which made her as precious to Jenna as her own life. “I would never let anything happen to her.”
“I know, but...”
“But what?”
He turned around. “You’ll be halfway around the world. There’s only so much flying back and forth that I can do. There are too many people depending on me to be in France.”
“I understand.”
“But I want to be there. I want to be a part of everything. I want to hear the baby’s heartbeat, see the ultrasound.” His face grew wistful. “Watch her smile for the first time. Share her first Christmas.”
In other words, he wanted to be a father. A true, hands-on father.
He knelt in front of her, hands grasping the sides of her chair. “That is why I want you to come to France,” he said. “So we can share these moments together.”
“Be a family,” Jenna whispered. Philippe painted a beautiful picture, prettier than any Provençal landscape. There was only one piece missing from his scenario.
She stared at the buttons on his shirt, thinking how smooth and starched he looked despite a night in the emergency room. She tried to image the same starchiness holding an infant as she cried and dribbled formula. He probably wouldn’t show a wrinkle. To the outside world, Philippe d’Usay would never look less than perfect.
“Tell me something.” Slowly, she lifted her eyes. “In this family picture, where are the baby and I when you have a date?”
At least he had the courtesy to look shocked at the question. “Pardon?”
“Would we be upstairs out of sight, or are we going to be super cosmopolitan about the whole thing and double-date and stuff?” With that, she pushed herself out of the chair and headed into the living room. Her teacups from the night before were still on the coffee table, half-full. Picking up the nettle tea, she gave it a sniff, smiling sadly at the barnyard smell.
“What are you talking about?” Philippe asked.
“You and your ‘selective’ lifestyle,” she replied. “A family—a real family—is based on mutual commitment and love. You’ve made it very clear you don’t believe in either.”
“Perhaps I’ve changed.”
Jenna nearly dropped the cup. “Changed how?”
“What if I told you I’m just as afraid of losing you as I am the baby?” Taking the cup from her hands, he set it on the table. “There’s three parts to a family, Jenna. The baby, the father and the mother.” As he spoke, he traced a shape on her palm with his finger. “I cannot imagine my family without you as the third part. Our world would be very dark without you, Jenna Brown. My world would be dark. Je t’aime.”
She didn’t know what to say. His world would be dark? How she’d longed to hear words like that come out of his mouth. Her heart leaped with happiness.
Her head, however... She stepped back just as Philippe leaned in for a kiss. He ended up stumbling slightly and stubbing his shin on the coffee table.
“Leopards don’t change their spots, Philippe,” she told him.
Lines of confusion marked his forehead. “What does that mean?”
“It means...” That it took having his back against the wall for him to declare his feelings.
Turning her back to him, she crossed from the sofa to the window. It was light enough now that she could see her backyard. The foliage had turned, she noted. The leaves on her maple had become a kaleidoscope of yellow and orange. New England foliage was beautiful until you had to rake it up.
She played with the hem of her gingham curtain. “It means that you had a horrible scare tonight, and I think that you will say anything to make sure you have as full a role as possible in this baby’s life.”
Silence. The air grew thick. She could feel Philippe’s eyes at the back of her head. Pictured how they widened before darkening with offense.
“Is that how you really feel?” he asked.
Jenna continued to look out the window.
“Your silence says everything. If you don’t believe me, I don’t know what I can say to convince you.” There were footsteps as he walked across the room. Moving away, not closer. “You should get some rest,” he said.
“Where are you going?”
“To my hotel. I... I need to change my travel arrangements, and we obviously could use the space. Hopefully these negotiations will not take long, and I can return soon.”
“Don’t.”
She turned around. Philippe stood in the doorway, wearing a hopeful expression. It was clear he thought she wanted him to stay. “Don’t keep flying in and out.”
His face fell. “You’re cutting me out?”
“No.” She didn’t want to keep him from being a part of the baby’s life—she simply wanted to protect her heart. “I’ll let you know when there are important appointments so you can attend. But I can’t have you coming and going without warning. It’s too...”
“Much like your father?” he asked.
His comment brought her up short. “I was going to say disruptive. What on earth does my father have to do with anything?”
“The way he pops in and out of your mother’s life.”
“You think I’m comparing our situation to theirs?”
Philippe folded his arms. “I don’t know, ma chérie. Are you?”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Am I? Since the day we met, I have had to fight to gain your trust.”
“That’s not true,” Jenna said.
“Oh, but it is. You held yourself back from day one. Always wary, always waiting for me to prove I was a cad. I needed to take two steps forward for you to take one. And now I lay my soul bare and you don’t believe me. So tell me, Jenna, who are you comparing me to, if not your father?”
Jenna glared at him. Thanks to their argument, she never got her eggs—a promise Philippe failed to keep—and now she had a raging headache. The last thing she needed was his attempt at armchair psychology. And on top of it, to paint himself as the victim? Give her a break.
“First off,” she said, stabbing the air with her index finger, “you didn’t ‘lay your soul bare.’ You decided I was moving to France for the baby’s sake.”
“And yours,” he shot back. “Were you not listening? I told you how much you mean to me.”
“Only as an afterthought. You wouldn’t have mentioned your feelings at all if I hadn’t pressed the issue.”
“That is not true.”
“Isn’t it?” she asked. “You weren’t exactly professing undying love.”
“Do not presume to know my thoughts.”
“Then don’t presume to know mine!” Her shout hung between them. Philippe ran a hand through his hair.
“What are you afraid of, Jenna? We could have something good. A true family.”
Until you broke your promise and left us alone.
Left her alone.
The world would be a lot better if people used their heads instead of their hearts.
Wasn’t that what Philippe said the other afternoon? Well, she was using her head.
“I think you better leave,” she told him.
“Jenna...” He took a step forward. Jenna held her breath. Her resolve wasn’t as strong as she made it out to be. One kiss, one impassioned please and it would shatter. Convince me I’m wrong, she pleaded with him silently. Change my mind.
“I’ll let you know my travel itinerary as soon as I know it.” Turning on his heel, he walked away. Leaving Jenna alone.
“At least my father says goodbye when he leaves,” she whispered.