life. Missing Lacey. Wondering if he had given up something great only for Sabine to have much-deserved second thoughts and decide to shut him out of Peyton’s life.
“I’m not doing this for you.” Sabine’s rules for him to see Peyton in person had come with a locked-down set of specifications. The most important was that she would not be telling Peyton who he was, and he wasn’t to either.
He would have agreed to anything. All that mattered was doing the right thing by Peyton. And Sabine. It didn’t matter what he wanted or what it would cost. And Sabine needed to know that he was willing to step up in every and any way. “Um … so … would you like to get married?”
Something between a laugh and a strangled yell came out of Sabine. It was so loud that the closest person turned to look at her. “What?”
“I just …” Victor shoved his hands in his pockets. “I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve done a lot of things wrong in my life, Sabine. I want to do the right thing by you. Both of you.”
Sabine put her hands on her hips. “And you think this is the right thing? Marrying a woman you don’t love because you both made a mistake one night and now you have a daughter?”
“I don’t know.” Most people would think he was bonkers, but the weird traditional part had risen up in him the last few weeks. Maybe this was what he was supposed to do. Marry the mother of his child. Sacrifice anything and everything to give them the best life he could.
Though Sabine seemed to have managed perfectly well without him.
His gaze stayed on Peyton, who, as Sabine had said, was totally entranced with pouring sand into her bucket and tipping it out.
“You know, I promised myself something after Peter.” Sabine put some sunglasses on, then dropped her bag onto the seat behind them. “I promised myself that no matter what my feelings were, I would never settle for a man who loved someone else. It’s not like we even have anything to try and salvage. We just made one terrible mistake. Even if that mistake did result in the best thing in my life.”
She was right, and they both knew it.
“Are you seeing someone?” He’d checked for rings before he’d broached marriage but realized their absence didn’t mean anything. Not when she would have been shedding every spare ounce to get ready for the world champs.
“Not at the moment.”
What did that mean? She had been? She might be soon? Victor quashed the questions. It wasn’t any of his business.
Silence sat between them for a few seconds. They both faced forward. At least Peyton provided an excellent excuse to not look at each other during this excruciating conversation.
“Please tell me you didn’t break up with your woman because you felt some bizarre kind of duty to marry me.”
“Not exactly.” Actually, the idea of marrying Sabine had shown up as he’d tried to work out what God wanted him to do. But he was hardly going to tell Sabine that when she’d turned him down.
“What does that mean?”
“We work in the same company. Or will soon—there’s about to be a merger. There’s a no-fraternization rule. I was planning to quit, but obviously, this changes everything.”
“How so?”
“For a start, I owe you three years of child support. And I need to keep my job to meet my ongoing obligations.”
Sabine scuffed the grass with the tip of her shoe. “I didn’t tell you about Peyton because I’m after money.”
“That’s good. Apart from a few quid in my savings account, there’s not a lot I can offer you. At the current rate, I’ll be paying the trust back for rehab until I’m sixty.” People looked at the estate and assumed his family was loaded, when the truth was the house was a financial sinkhole. And that was before months in rehab had been added.
“You’ve done some stupid stuff in your life, I grant you, but at least you did most of those while you were drunk. This whole doing it stone-cold sober is a new thing.”
“Lacey’s not just anyone. She’s going to be the CEO, Sabine.”
“So?”
“So she deserves someone a whole lot better than me.” It hurt him just to say that, even though he knew it was true. He missed her with a fierceness that didn’t seem possible, given how little time they’d actually spent together.