An Act of Persuasion(31)

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to his stack of stuff and wanting to ignore his breach of her privacy.

“Books on pregnancy. I’ve gone through them and highlighted passages on morning sickness and the transitions that occur in the second trimester, which I think will make you feel better. I’ve also noted some questions in the margins that I’m hoping you can answer so I can better understand some things. Then I stopped at Chef Chen’s in Little China. I told Mrs. Chen about your morning sickness and she made up some special soup that she assures me will fix you right up.”

“That’s a lot of soup,” she said, desperately trying not to be affected by his attention.

“Mrs. Chen says I needed fixing up as well and threw in a quart of the house special lo mein.”

Her favorite. “Okay. Come on up.”

Might as well give in to the inevitable. Ben wasn’t going away peacefully. Besides that, Mrs. Chen was a genius with food and could cure anything from fever to the common cold with the right blend of spices and ginger. If she said this soup would make Anna feel better, then it would.

As she walked up to the second floor with him trailing, she considered how this meeting could have been awkward. After all, last night she’d let loose with everything she’d been feeling and holding on to for all those years. Usually the day after a big confession could be weird between two people, but Anna didn’t feel it.

Instead, she felt a little freer. Her secret was out there. She’d said it. Forget pride and forget rejection. Forget it all. She loved Ben Tyler. And it had felt good to say it because it was real and had been a part of her life for a long time.

She. Loved. Ben. Tyler.

He couldn’t make her unsay it. He couldn’t do anything but hear it.

The only thing that really pissed her off about the confession was that while he’d been staring at her as if she’d hit him with a two-by-four—looking more stunned than he had after she told him she was pregnant—she still actually thought he would say it back. It was crazy. It was insane. But she’d waited for it anyway.

She knew the man he was. She knew he was self-contained and emotionally unreachable. She was slowly coming to grips with the fact that her love could be entirely predicated on the premise that he simply wasn’t capable of loving her.

But deep inside, where she was really honest with herself, she knew that picture of Ben wasn’t entirely true. A man didn’t read pregnancy books and make notes in the margins if he didn’t have the capacity for great caring.

So what now really pissed her off was that he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see what she saw when he looked at her. He couldn’t know what had been shimmering in his eyes when he made love to her that night. Because there had been something there. Something more than desire. She’d seen...need. As though he had needed her so desperately in that moment. Didn’t that mean there had to be something more than sex between them?

But it’s not as though she could tell him. It was something he would have to acknowledge on his own.

That night she thought he had. She’d thought he was ready for what they could be. Except...he hadn’t been. She knew it hurt him when she left. As much as she hurt in those three months away from him, it didn’t give her any satisfaction to know he’d missed her, too.

They reached her apartment and she dropped off her purse and flipped off the sandals she was wearing. Barely into her fourth month and already her feet would swell if she was on them for any length of time. Lord only knew how her ankles would look when she was walking around with a bump the size of beach ball.

Ben set down the books on the coffee table and took the bags to the kitchen. Since he seemed comfortable in her space, she let him gather the plates and silverware. Picking up one of the books, she started to scan through the sections he’d highlighted. The man was crazy for information. He collected it the way some people collected coins. Reading, he said, was always one of the easiest ways to gather it.

She stopped when she saw a picture of a breast in the book. Next to it he’d written, Increased Sensitivity?

The seemingly innocuous question had her squirming and squeezing her legs together. In fact, her nipples and her breasts were more sensitive. If he were to touch them...

Whoa. Enough of that. As hard as leaving him had been, as hard as trying to imagine her future life without him had been, remembering the sex...had been just as hard.

Because she tried to imagine feeling that way with another man someday and it simply would not come. She certainly hadn’t felt that way with boyfriends she’d had before Ben.