Tess cuddled around the pillow in her lonely bed for the third night in a row.
Dash had gone from attentive and loverlike to cold and dismissive in a devastatingly quick and thorough transformation. And all because he was furious her father had played matchmaker.
She’d tried to talk to him about it, but he had refused to listen.
He’d spent the past days working long hours and although he returned to the house before dinner, he did not come to bed until after Tess fell asleep.
Tonight, she was determined to wait up for him, to have it out. She wanted her marriage back. Things had been so good before. She could not accept that something so unimportant could destroy it all.
She threw herself on her back and kicked the covers off. A minute later, she rolled onto her stomach. Thirty agonizing minutes later he had still not come up.
Unable to wait another second in the silence of their huge bedroom, she got up.
Where was it written that she had to wait meekly in bed for him to show up? She would go to him.
She went in search of her robe. Pulling it on, she left the room. He would probably be working in the study. Light filtering from the cracked doorway indicated she had been right.
She pushed the door open and found him sitting at his desk, papers spread before him.
“Dash?” she called.
His head lifted and he looked at her with eyes that sliced into her heart with their coldness. “What?” he asked.
“We need to talk.”
“This is not so…not true. We have nothing to talk about.” He said.
She glared at him, fed up with his stupid male ego. “How can you say that? You’re being ridiculous about this thing with my father. Can’t you see that?”
In a second, he was towering over her, his big body vibrating with rage. “What are you saying to me?” he asked.
Okay, so she hadn’t been tactful. Her father’s bluntness had rubbed off on her, but it was the truth. “We were happy together, right? Why do you want to throw that away over something that just doesn’t matter?”
“To you it does not matter, but to me it is important.” He replied.
She reached her hands out in appeal. “I love you, Dash. Isn’t that more important than an my father’s machinations?”
His eyes burned her with a contempt she didn’t understand, but that hurt her horribly.
“Do not speak to me of love again. I can do without the kind of love a woman like you feels.” He said.
“A woman like me?” Tess repeated. What did he mean? “You told me you would treasure my love.” Whatever kind of woman she was.
“A man will say anything when his libido is involved.” He replied carelessly.
“I don’t believe that.” He couldn’t mean it. “You wanted to marry me. I didn’t force you into this” He had to care a little, even if he didn’t love her, she thought.
He scowled at her. “I have no choice about that, do I?”
Did he mean because like her, he thought she was already pregnant? “I don’t know,” she said honestly. Her menses weren’t due for another week.
His laugh was harsh. “For a man with family pride, it is no choice.”
“You feel like you have to get me pregnant?” She felt further and further out of her depth, while the pain of his rejection went deeper and deeper.
“Enough of this playacting. You know the alternative is untenable for me.” Dash said.
“I only know that days ago I was happier than I have ever been in my life and now I’m miserable.” She said. Tears clogged the back of her throat and she couldn’t go on.
Something twitched in his face, but he turned away from her. “Go back to bed, Tess.”
“I don’t want to go back without you.” Her pride was in tatters around her, but she was desperate to get through to him.
“I’m not in the mood for sex right now.” He replied.
For a hopelessly oversexed guy like her husband, that statement was the final blow to her rapidly toppling confidence.
“Neither am I,” she whispered from a tight throat as she turned to leave the room. She had never wanted just sex with him and clearly even that wasn’t on offer.
He let her go without a word.
The next day, Dash took off for a business trip abroad and Tess did her best to hide her despair from his mother and sister when they visited. She wasn’t entirely successful, but both women assumed her melancholy was due to Dash’s absence and she did not disabuse them of the notion. In a way it was the truth.
She did miss him, but she had missed him before he left and had no faith his return would decrease that one iota.
On the second day of his absence he called to tell her he would be gone another week. While he had not been overly warm on the phone, the fact he had called at all led to a rise in her spirits. His rejection had not diminished her love or need for him any more than years of her father’s neglect had exorcised the man from her heart.
Was she destined to spend her whole life loving, but never receiving love?
“I’m reluctant to release Miss Carson from the hospital,” Savannah’s doctor said grimly as he stood outside her hospital room. “She’s shown marked improvement. Her blood pressure is normal. But I’m not comfortable releasing her yet.”
Matt rubbed the back of his neck. “What can I do to make it possible? She’s unhappy here. She’s not herself.” He said.
The doctor nodded. “That’s precisely why I’m concerned about releasing her. At least here I can be assured she’s getting the care she needs. She’s not in good spirits and I’m deeply concerned about her stress level. It’s imperative that she not be placed in any situation that causes her undue distress.”
“If you give her the okay to travel I plan to take her away. Someplace warm where she’ll never have to lift a finger. I can have a medical team fly us to the island and once there, I’ll have a private physician to monitor her care as well as have the local hospital completely apprised of her condition and needs.”