Page 45 of Forbidden Pregnancy
Myra snorts indignantly. “I did not crawl back into your life. Cosima, in some misguided attempt to ensure her eldest brother doesn’t die completely alonedrugged meand that’s why I’m here. I was perfectly content never seeing you again.”
“You’re detached from your emotions,” I grumble, loathing that Myra could even make these words come out of my mouth. I don’t talk about feelings. She’s the only woman on the planet who makesmefeel like I’m sensitive and soft instead of a brutal killer who heartlessly moves through the world obeying his father’s command.
“I am smart,” she says. “I know you’re smart too, Michael. Which is why you know this isn’t reasonable and why you’re cooking up some demonic plan to keep me in your custody. It’s not going to work.”
Her saying that pisses me off even more. How the fuck can she sit there pregnant with my child and not want to fight for us? How can she give up so easily and just assume that nothing will work for the two of us? I have a new plan. I have a backup safehouse. We need to lay low until she has the baby and then we can figure it all out.
Naturally, she’s going to interpret my silence to mean that I’m utterly predictable and she knows what’s coming next, but nothing could be further from the truth.
“I’m taking you to a different safe house with a pit stop along the way, and then we will discuss your future. But you’re not leaving me.”
She gives me an annoyed expression as if to suggest I have too many “secret locations” to lay low. I’ve been on the lam quite a few times during my adult life. You pick up a few survival tactics along the way. Plus, most of the places belong to our extended family and aren’t mine personally. Myrawillbe safe. I can do that for both of us.
“Why not? Just let me have this baby and I’ll be out of your life. It’s time for the two of us to stop pretending you’re not a dangerous man.”
I don’t know if it’s from spending all those years as a private teacher, but Myra has this superhuman capacity to make me feel like a goddamn failure. The most infuriating part of this woman’s ability to get under my skin is the way it just makes me want to chase her approval down. There’s been nothing as challenging or as mentally stimulating to me like the football games I played in college until I met my match with Myra.
“What about our emotions? I love you, Myra. You know I love you.”
She purses her lips. This woman infuriates me, but I know her refusal to let the words come out of her mouth doesn’t mean she feels any less. I was with Myra that first day we made love outside against the guest house wall. It was the type of young and passionate encounter that I’m unlikely to have again at forty-years old.
Even with all the weight-lifting, my back isn’t what it used to be and my desire for hard, rough sex has been replaced with this powerful need to have the same woman in my arms when I wake up in the morning. There’s nothing appealing to me at this age about playing the field again. It doesn’t matter that I’m better looking and more mature than I ever used to be – I would much rather dedicate all of that growth to a family. To just one woman.
To Myra.
Her inability to admit that she loves me just adds yet another hurdle. My father sending men after us doesn’t help either, but that hurdle will disappear with time. If she trusts me, I may even find a faster way for us to get out of this. But I can’t have Myra disappearing on me. I can’t picture a life without her and I don’t want to try.
“Emotions have nothing to do with why I spent fourteen hours in captivity.”
She smells the bullshit before it even comes out of my mouth. “Maybe it was random.”
“You know what happened.”
“What difference would it make if I told you? You made up your mind that you want to disappear from my life.”
“It’s not random.”
I don’t know what she means by that and right now, I just want to drag Myra inside and tie her to the bed. She realizes we’ve stopped.
“Where are we?”
“Pittsburgh.”
“Pennsylvania? As in Pittsburgh Steelers, Pittsburgh Penguins, Pittsburgh?”
“The legendary city of Pittsburgh.”
“Okay, that’s a stretch,” Myra says. “Why are we here and why are we… not hidden away somewhere? It looks like I could get kidnapped by a stranger here.”
“This is my Aunt Viviana’s house. She’s up in the Adirondacks this week, so we can stay here a couple days until my next property opens up.”
Therealsafe house.
“Right. So Pittsburgh and lies are safer than honesty in our home city. Got it.”
There she goes again, getting under my skin in a way that honestly makes me want to tie her to the bed – with a ball gag.
“You and the baby must be hungry.”
