Opposites Attract

love you, and making love with you is only one way to show it.” She managed, after three attempts, to button her blouse. When she looked up, he was at the window, his back to her. “Ty, I came here to tell you some things you must know. When I’m finished, I’ll go and give you time to think about them.”
    “Can’t you understand I don’t want to think anymore?”
    “It’s the last thing I’ll ask of you.”
    “All right.” In a gesture of fatigue she rarely saw in him, he rubbed both hands over his face. The liquor had burned out of his system—by the anger or the passion, he wasn’t sure. But he was cold sober. “Maybe I should tell you first that what Jess said to you three years ago was her own fabrication. I didn’t know anything about it until the other day when she told me what she’d done. In her own way, she was trying to protect me.”
    “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
    Turning, he gave her a grim smile. “Did you really think I was tired of you? Looking for a way out? Wondering how I could ditch you without raising too much fuss or interfering with my career?”
    Asher opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again. How strange that the words still hurt and made her defensive.
    “Obviously you did.”
    “And if I did?” she countered. “Everything she said fit. You’d never made a commitment to me. There’d never been any talk about the future.”
    “On either side,” he reminded her.
    Asher pushed away the logic. “If you’d once told me—”
    “Or perhaps you were uncertain enough of your own feelings that when Jess dumped that on you, you ran right to Wickerton. Even though you were carrying my baby.”
    “I didn’t know I was pregnant when I married Eric.” She saw him shrug her words away. In fury she grabbed both of his arms. “I tell you I didn’t know! Perhaps if I had known before I would have simply gone away. I don’t know what I would have done. I was already terrified you were growing tired of me before Jess confirmed it.”
    “And where the hell did you get a stupid idea like that?”
    “You’d been so moody, so withdrawn. Everything she said made sense.”
    “If I was moody and withdrawn, it was because I was trying to work out the best way to ask Asher Wolfe, Miss Society Tennis, to marry Starbuck from the Wrong Side of the Tracks.”
    Asher took an uncertain step toward him. “You would have married me?”
    “I still have the ring I bought you,” he answered.
    “A ring?” she repeated stupidly. “You’d bought me a ring?” For some inexplicable reason the thought of it stunned her more than anything else.
    “I’d planned to try a very conventional proposal. And if that didn’t work, maybe a kidnapping.”
    She tried to laugh because tears were entirely too close. “It would have worked.”
    “If you’d told me you were pregnant—”
    “Ty, I didn’t know! Damn it!” She pounded once against his chest. “Do you think I would have married Eric if I had known? It was weeks afterward that I found out.”
    “Why the hell didn’t you tell me then?”
    “Do you think I wanted to get you back that way?” The old pride lifted her chin. “And I was married to another man. I’d made him a promise.”
    “A promise that meant more than the life of the child we’d made together,” he retorted bitterly. “A promise that let you walk into one of those antiseptic clinics and destroy something innocent and beautiful. And mine.”
    The image was too ugly, the truth too painful. Flying at him, Asher struck him again and again until he pinned her hands behind her back.
“And mine!”
she shouted at him. “And mine, or doesn’t my part matter?”
    “You didn’t want it.” His fingers closed like steel as she tried to pull away. “But you didn’t have the decency to ask me if I did. Couldn’t you bear the thought of carrying part of me inside you for nine months?”
    “Don’t ask me what I could bear.” She wasn’t pale now, but vivid with fury. “I didn’t have an abortion,” she spat at him. “I miscarried. I miscarried and nearly died in the process. Would you feel better if I had? God knows I tried to.”
    “Miscarried?” His grip shifted from her wrists to her shoulders. “What are you talking about?”
    “Eric hated me too!” she shouted. “When I learned I was pregnant and told him, all he could say was that I’d deceived him. I’d tried to trick him into claiming the baby after you’d