arms and carried back to the sofa. “You’re pregnant?” he asked. “And when were you going to tell me? Once you’d finally convinced me that we had to break up?”
It was Helen’s turn to be shocked and she could only stare up into his handsome, smiling face as his words sunk in, the pain filling her up as she realized she was going to have to disappoint him. And then the whole pitiful, humiliating truth would come out. “No. I’m not. I can’t,” she said sadly and pulled herself out of his arms.
“Don’t even try that on me, Helen. When was your last period?” he demanded, stopping her progress and spinning her around, then holding her upper arms as her head started swimming and her body swayed slightly. “Sorry,” he said, but he didn’t look sorry, she thought. “And why this sudden aversion to coffee? Fainting even at the smell of it? All signs of a pregnancy, according to Marie,” he explained.
Helen opened her mouth to speak, then stopped, thinking back. Her periods were always a little off, but she calculated back and realized that she hadn’t had a period since she’d left London. They were never that far off, she knew. Nine weeks?
And the coffee aversion had been sudden, even she acknowledged that. And her queasy stomach?
Shaking her head, she stood up and turned her back on Dimitri before taking a deep breath. “No. I can’t be pregnant,” she said, bracing her hands on the desk.
“Is this the same ‘can’t’ as in you can’t marry me instead of ‘won’t’ marry me?” he inquired softly.
It took her a long moment to get her voice under control. “No. This isn’t the same thing.” The pain obviously coming through in her voice because his face was no longer smiling, but concerned.
“Is your explanation going to clarify why you can’t and or won’t marry me?” he asked.
“Yes.” Helen sniffed and closed her eyes, leaning her head against his shoulder. “I can’t marry you because I can’t get pregnant.”
He waited patiently, letting her tell the story. But when she didn’t continue, he gently prompted, “How do you know?”
Sighing heavily, sadly, Helen accepted that she would have to explain. “About ten years ago, I was in a car accident. We were driving through an intersection and another car didn’t realize they were required to stop. The man had been drinking and simply ignored, or didn’t notice the red light. He crashed into the side of our vehicle. I was in the back seat and took most of the impact. I was in the hospital for over a month as they slowly repaired my body. But the one thing that they weren’t able to completely repair was my reproductive organs. The accident left me with a defect that has a larger than normal gap between the Fallopian tubes and the ovaries. It means that the egg disappears and disintegrates within my body before it can reach the uterus. In other words,” she explained sadly, “I can’t be pregnant, now or in the future.”
“And you’re sure that this defect eliminates the possibility of a pregnancy?”
Helen laughed harshly. “I’m sure. The doctors tried several different surgeries to correct the damage but in the end, they said it would have to heal the way it was. They ran into the possibility of damaging the surrounding organs if they kept trying.”
His hands were gently rubbing her shoulder soothingly and his chin was propped on top of her head. “So you’re disallowing the possibility that you might not still have this issue? Or that you’ve grown out of it?” he asked, moving up to lay his hands on her shoulders.
“No. I’m not disallowing it. I already mentioned that I was tested when I became a teenager. I have the deformity. The doctors were sure it isn’t possible to grow out of it. The gap is just too wide and apparently gets wider with age.”
“So it’s completely impossible that you are pregnant?” he suggested.
Helen shook her head. “You don’t understand. The doctors tried many times. I was in the hospital for so long and finally, my mother just told them no more. She wouldn’t put me through another operation so the whole issue was put to rest almost ten years ago.”
He held her tightly before asking, “Would it be a bad thing if you were pregnant?”
“No!” Helen immediately replied, turning to face him so he could see the sincerity in her eyes. “I would love to give you children. I saw you