keep her safe? His idea of safe anyway.
“You don’t have to do this.” She stepped back. Instantly her cheek was cold from the loss of contact. His contact. “You don’t have to try to save me.”
“I’m not trying to save you. I’m trying to save me. No woman has ever lived up to your image in my mind. I stopped looking and hadn’t even realized I had until you came back into my life and turned it inside out. I didn’t know how miserable I was without you.”
Sophie was torn. Did she believe him? Trust him? Or did she trust as she always had, only in herself and no one else. Then she wouldn’t be let down, she couldn’t be hurt or left out in the cold.
Blake must have taken her silence as refusal as he forged ahead. “I’ll be anyone you want. I’ll be a duke or a tavern owner or even a farmer, just as long as you stand beside me.”
“As your what? As your maid or your mistress? Perhaps your close friend?” She had to hear the words. She wouldn’t believe it until she heard it from his mouth, checked the sincerity in his eyes against the reaction in her body. What if his relief at her safety and gratitude over her help this week coerced this declaration? She wouldn’t know if he offered her a life out of guilt and he wouldn’t know if she accepted out of desperation.
“I want you as my wife and the mother of my children. Imagine retelling this tale to the little ones.” His smile was the brightest she’d seen since they were children.
She could see in her mind the picture he painted. But there was just one problem with the vision. “There’s something I have to tell you before you say anything else.”
“If it’s no, then I probably don’t want to hear it. Do you need time to think on it? Do you need me to get down on my knees and apologize and tell you what an idiot I’ve been? How ashamed I am for the names I called you?”
“It’s not that.” She shook her head, her eyes burned with tears and the words stuck in her throat. “Before I came here...”
“Let’s forget the past. Put it all behind us and never look back ever again.”
“Can you do that?”
“Can you?”
“No.” It was the simplest answer. Whether he stayed an innkeeper, became a farmer or took the title, her past was always going to come between them and they would be hopelessly naive to think otherwise.
“No?”
“Before I came here, I was pregnant.”
“What?” This time it was Blake who stepped away from her. Exactly the reaction she’d expected from him.
“I lost the baby. And not the first one. Blake, I can never carry a child.”
“How many times have you been with child?”
The disgust she’d thought would follow his initial reaction was strangely absent in his question.
“Becoming pregnant is not always avoidable in my profession.”
“How many times?”
“Five. This one was to be the fifth child I would have liked to hold in my arms, heard her tiny cry...” Had someone to love and be loved by.
“I don’t understand. I’m sorry for your loss, but what does this have to do with anything between us?”
“If you take the title, I won’t be able to give you an heir. You’ll never be a father and I will never be a mother. We won’t ever have a family to call our own.”
Blake raked a hand through his already mussed hair and took a deep breath. His chest hurt with the effort not to explode and rail and rant. Not at her, but for her. And mostly at himself. He should have known there was something off about Sophie when she’d looked at him from her perch in the carriage in the yard that first day. When she’d alternated between fear and fury and then resignation, he’d thought her acting skills had matured while in London. But she really had been angry and upset...hurt. Why hadn’t he just let her be?
“Children don’t make a family, Sophie, love and commitment do. I’ll still take the title if that’s what you want. After the fathers we had to walk in the shadows of, I’m not even sure I want to be one. Matthew and Violet have plenty enough babes to go around now.”
“You say that now, but what about the future?”
“I’m already thirty-three years old. This is the future.”
“You are the only one who can decide to take