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Her lips flattened, her features pinched. “Don’t,” she muttered. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“There are other options, Cress. IVF, donor sperm, adoption, you can still become a mother.”

She shook her head though, eyes almost wild. “I don’t want to talk about that. I’m sick of talking about that. For years, all I’ve done is count cycles and have sex and wee on sticks and I’m done talking about it for now. I need something else. I need…” and then she was lifting up onto the tips of her toes and kissing him desperately, wildly, her hands wrapping around his waist and holding on for dear life and for the briefest second he kissed her back, because there was a muscle memory of the past involved. But it was all wrong, so wrong. Jarringly so. He pulled his head up, breaking the kiss, shocked and dismayed, and furious.

“You have no right to kiss me,” he said. “You might not take your vows seriously, but I sure as hell do.”

“Your vows,” she spat, not relinquishing her hold around his waist. “I don’t want to talk about your vows either.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Fuck you.”

He reached behind himself and disentangled her arms. “I want you to listen to me very carefully.” He hoped she would remember his words. “You have a lot to think about. You’re hurting, you’re sad. You’re grieving the future you planned for. But you love Ewan—that future is with him.” She opened her mouth to say something but he shook his head once. “I understand how you feel, but at the same time, I will not have my wife disrespected in my home.”

“Your home? Please. Ewan and I are the ones who keep this place running, who take care of your parents. You haven’t been home in years.”

“And we both know why.” His eyes held a warning. “I want you both gone in the morning. Tia doesn’t deserve to be dragged into any of this. Understood?”

“You dragged her into it.”

“No, I married her.”

“Same thing.”

“This isn’t going to happen,” he said, gesturing from his chest to hers. “And you know that.”

“I know you want me.”

Even he was shocked by how wrong she was. “No, Cressida. I really don’t. Remember what I said—I want you both gone.”

“You wouldn’t be so angry if you didn’t still care for me.”

“I’m not angry,” he said, surprised by how honest that was. “I’m sad for you. I want you and Ewan to go home, take some space, and work out where you go from here. Nothing about this weekend is good for you.” And then, because she’d been an important part of his life, once upon a time, he put a hand on her upper arm consolingly. “You’ll get through it, Cress. But this isn’t the answer.”

She stared up at him, her lips moving, nothing coming out, tears sliding down her cheeks. And then, she looked away abruptly. “Fuck you,” she said, pulling out of his reach and stalking back inside the house.

He expelled a long, slow breath, as that sense of liberation from the past spread through him, the lifting of that weight all the more apparent now. Tia had done that for him, and he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to thank her—but he had a pretty good idea of how he could start.

It hadn’t been a fluke, then, in the orchard, when he’d made love to her and she’d seen stars for how utterly and thoroughly he could please her, in a way that felt almost as though he’d been created purely for that purpose. For Tia, sex had always been sex. Simple and easy. Pleasure expected—to varying degrees. It had never been transformational.

It had never scared her.

But sleeping with Hamish felt somewhat like the splitting of the atom. They’d crossed a threshold that held immense risk if they didn’t hold true to their original promise. She knew because when he held her it was so easy to come close to forgetting.

Her breath was coming in fits and spurts, her lungs trying hard to inflate and barely succeeding. Hamish’s breaths sawed from his body with the same intensity. She glanced across at him, her heart throbbing almost painfully at the sight of his face in profile, so familiar she could almost have believed she’d known him all her life.

There was only one other person she looked at and felt anything like this same sense of knowing and understanding, as though his soul had been bared to hers and she just intrinsically got him, but with Roman, that knowledge came through time. Decades of speaking, seeing, laughing, fearing their parents, sharing the same hopelessness and then hope, forging a shared vision of their futures. With Hamish, it was different.

She just looked at him and somehow knew him. For example, she could tell that as his breathing slowed, returned to normal, he was thinking about something. Something other than her?

She reached out, trailed her fingers down the centre of his chest, the feeling of his skin bunching beneath her touch doing strange things to her belly.

“That was more than two times,” she said, moving closer, putting her leg over his, smiling.

He turned to face her, eyes roaming her face hungrily. “Underpromise, overdeliver. It’s my motto in life.”

She frowned. He was distracted. “Do you regret it?”