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‘For a start,’ she said, voice a little uneven, ‘we need to talk about where we’d live.’

‘I thought you understood,’ he explained. ‘I run the stations. This is where I have to be.’

She tilted her head towards his, knowing she wanted to avoid arguing, but also unable to let that stand unchallenged. ‘You have more money than Croesus,’ she pointed out. ‘You don’t have to work.’

‘It’s not in my nature to walk away from this.’

‘But you think it’s in mine?’

‘You can teach from anywhere, right?’

She flattened her lips, mentally conceding the point.

‘Okay, fine. So let’s imagine—hypothetically—that you get your way and I marry you. We live here. In your house. On your property. Can’t you see how weird that would be for me?’

‘Not particularly.’

She expelled a breath. ‘My mum worked damned hard to give us a home,’ she admitted. ‘It was a great point of pride for her, and it was ours. Ours to decorate and change, to truly feel a part of. I don’t think I’ll ever feel that here.’

He considered that a moment. ‘Fair point.’

She was so surprised she couldn’t say anything right away.

‘The house is neither here nor there. I’ll make sure it’s signed over to you in the pre-nup.’

Her lips parted, her eyes sparking with light. ‘That…that’s very generous, but that’s not what I meant, either.’

‘Then what did you mean? What do you want?’

Irritation flashed through her. ‘I don’t know. I can’t just…take your house.’

‘You won’t be taking it. You’ll be acquiring it in exchange for being reasonable enough to marry me and raise our child here.’

It made it feel so much worse. She couldn’t say why, but the mercenary nature of this conversation was the worst thing she could think of, even when it was exactly what she’d been aiming for, a moment earlier. It felt like the exact opposite of what she wanted, only she couldn’t say with any precision what that was.

‘But even then, it won’t feel like mine. This is where you and your brother grew up, where your father lived, and his father before him. I could never take that from you.’

‘Fine, how about I put it in trust for our child?’

Her lips pulled to the side as she considered that.

‘It will be neither yours nor mine, and when our son or daughter is twenty-five, it will become legally theirs.’

‘I mean… I guess that makes more sense.’

‘And in the meantime, whatever you want to do to the place, the decision is yours.’

‘But it’s your home,’ she stressed.

‘Believe me, Sarah, you and I put a very different emphasis on that word. In fact, I don’t know if I’ve ever had a home in the sense you’re describing. This is where I grew up, yes, but it never felt like a “nest” for me. It was never my safe space. If anything, I dreaded coming back here from boarding school, because my father made it so unpleasant. That’s all I care about. That we make an environment our child will feel safe in—where they can be themselves, no matter what.’

Her heart clenched. For the child they’d conceived, but also for the little boy Tate had been. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she murmured. ‘He sounds awful.’

He dipped his head.

‘Does your brother feel the same way?’

‘You can ask him yourself.’