Free Up Close and Personal by Maureen Child

in his grip.
    A child?
    She’d lost their child and hadn’t bothered to tell him?
    What was he supposed to feel now? Relief? Grief? He didn’t know. In a blur, his conversation with Sam came rushing home to him and Ronan saw it all so differently now. In a blink all had changed. He might have been a father. He could have been in Sam’s shoes, waiting for the birth of a child. Shaken to the bone, he couldn’t even separate the colliding emotions inside him. All he was sure of was the fury.
    “Be damned if she’ll simply lay something like that out, then leave me without so much as an explanation.” He navigated Pacific Coast Highway, steering around the early morning traffic while his heart and guts twisted inside him until he could hardly draw a breath.
    “A child, she says, then tells me it’s gone?”
    He made the turns as she did, keeping to the speed limit, watching carefully that he kept the anger inside him on a tight, short leash.
    On her street, sunlight dappled through the trees planted on either side of the road. It was a pretty picture that he took absolutely no notice of. As she turned into the drive beside her house, he pulled his car up front and jumped out almost before the roar of the engine had died away. He came around the end of the car and stalked toward her, where she stood watching him as if he were a ghost.
    Ronan laughed shortly. “That you can be surprised to see I followed you here amazes me. Did you really think it was ended? Because you said it was so?”
    “You wanted your answer, you got it,” she shot back, and reached into the car for her purse. When she went to get her painting supplies from the trunk though, Ronan stopped her with one hand on her arm. “Leave them till later.”
    He felt her tense in his grip, as if she’d fight him on this, then he felt resignation sweep that tension away. She turned her face up to his and through the anger in her eyes, he read a depth to her sadness he was stunned as hell to admit he hadn’t noticed before. Had it been there since he got back? Had she been grieving the loss of his child without so much as mentioning it to him?
    “Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?” he muttered, still lost in the gleam of sorrow shining back at him.
    “When, Ronan? You were gone,” she reminded him. “You made it clear you were done with me.”
    “If I’d known…” He let that sentence dangle for he wasn’t sure even now what he might have done. How he might have reacted. Though he had damn well deserved the chance to make his own bloody decisions about how he felt.
    “If you’d known,” she said, “you would have thought I was trying to trap you into staying with me.”
    Maybe, he decided. Maybe he would have. And maybe not. “We’ll not know for sure now, though, will we?”
    “I know,” she insisted and the grief in her eyes burned away in the flash of temper.
    Was she right? He didn’t want to think so, but a glimmer of something resembling shame rippled through him and he had to admit at least to the possibility. He hadn’t planned on having a family. Ever . His own childhood had been enough of a roadmap to show him that emotional entanglements led to misery. Raised like that, Ronan was convinced he wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to raise a child as it should be raised.
    How could he show love to a child when he’d never seen it for himself?
    And how could he grieve for a child he hadn’t known existed until moments ago?
    “Come on,” he said, pulling her after him toward the house. “I’ll not have this conversation out in the open.”
    She pushed her car door closed and hurried her steps to keep up with his much longer stride. “I don’t want to do this now.”
    “That’s a shame then, for sure.” He drew her to a stop on the porch and held out one hand. “The key, Laura.”
    He could see the urge to argue in her eyes, but she only muttered something under her breath and handed over the keys she