Harlequin Desire January 2021--Box Set 1 of 2 by Maisey Yates (inspirational books .TXT) 📗

took a big, deep breath. “Maybe I care about tradition and I don’t want my child to be a bastard. Did you ever think about that?”

“Well, do you?”

“No. What I care about is the fact that you’re being ridiculous. We are good together.”

“And this is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to avoid. This obligation. This idea that two people have to be together. For the sake of the child. Do you know what it does to a child, Cricket? I was worried about you. About what I might do to you if I couldn’t be what you needed… But a kid. Dammit, that kid is basically me. You know what it’s like to find out you’re the unhappy glue that held your parents together for better or for worse? Mostly worse?”

“We already talked about this. It’s all about choices and—”

“But I’ve seen what it does. If I committed to that, if I committed to you… I would never let you leave.”

“Great. I don’t want to leave,” she said. “I want to be with you. I want to stay with you. Why is that bad? Why would it be so wrong?”

“I don’t love you,” he said, the words scraping his throat raw, and he knew they felt wrong. He knew they were wrong. But he couldn’t find any other words. Couldn’t figure out what else to say, what else might come from that hammering feeling in his chest.

“What if I said I loved you?”

“That’s what we can’t do, Cricket. We cannot have that. We would make each other miserable. I would make you miserable.”

“I want to be with you. I’m choosing that. What about my choice? Maybe I want to be with you even if I would be sorry that you didn’t love me. Maybe I’d rather be with you than not.”

“Cricket…”

“No. Be honest. Be honest about what you want and what you don’t want, Jackson. But don’t blame it on me, and don’t blame it on your need to protect me. Because that’s not what’s happening here. You’re not protecting me. You’re…protecting yourself. I’m standing here, and I’m not scared. I’m not scared to love you. I’m not scared to have this baby. And you know what? I’m not scared to do it alone, either. I would rather not. I mean, flat out, I’d rather not. But that’s just because I’d rather share my life with you. Because I have never felt so happy as I did living in that farmhouse with you. And so I would weather anything to figure out how we could work. You’re the one who doesn’t want to. And I can’t quite figure out why.

“You think because I’m young, because I was inexperienced, that I can’t understand what I want. But I do, Jackson. I do. I have always known what I wanted. A place in this world where I fit, and to be with you. It seems to me that what you’re after is a life where you won’t regret anything. And I don’t think anyone can guarantee you that, Jackson, I really don’t. We could be together, for better or worse, like you said. And maybe sometimes it would be worse. But I think it would still be a better kind of worse than being apart.”

“Because you don’t know what that looks like. Not really. I do. I watched my mom… I watched her wish for another life. And I was the cause of her not having it.”

“So, we can get married. And if you were miserable, we could get divorced.”

“Cricket…”

“No, really, what’s your problem? You’re afraid of what? You’re afraid of failing? Because we’re not trapped. We wouldn’t be. It would be up to us. But you’re afraid of something. Otherwise…this would be a different conversation. You’re acting like I didn’t grow up around a dysfunctional marriage. So why don’t you stop hiding behind the one you grew up around. I thought cowboys were supposed to be brave.”

Her words were like a dagger through his heart. He did feel like a coward. He felt like the worst kind of coward, standing there and offering her absolutely nothing. Standing there and failing her, except…

He knew what he knew.

He knew what it was to be a child who had been part of a marriage of obligation. More than that, he knew what it was to be the child who’d caused it. And maybe Creed had been willing to do that to be with his kid, but his brother had been through something entirely different. His brother had been barred from seeing his child.

His child.

So Jackson was going to live in a different house than his kid?

This was why they’d done it. He could understand it. That was the thing. Standing there staring at her, and the enticement of the future they could have…

But Cricket hadn’t said she loved him.

She was standing there, asking for something that would make their lives easier on a surface level. The thing that so many people did. To try and make a family for a child.

But he knew that beneath the surface of the happiest-looking nuclear family there could be rot and decay. A kind of desperate sadness that nobody saw but the people on the inside of the arrangement.

And whatever he was, he didn’t want to be her obligation. Whatever he was, he didn’t want to be her regret.

You’re protecting yourself…

How? He didn’t feel protected. Not now. What he felt was angry. Infuriated and just damn helpless.

He hadn’t done any different than his parents. And that was a galling thing. But he would do different now. He would. He would do better, for them both.

“Do you even want to be this baby’s father?”

“I’ll be a father. If I made a kid, I’m going to take care of the kid.”

“It’s a shame you can’t feel a little bit of that for me.”

“Whether you see it or not, Cricket, this is me caring.”

“No, I don’t see it,” she said, her tone as icy as her expression.

“We’ll find a