Her Royal Husband by Cara Colter Page B

That much stronger than him? He never wanted her to leave his side again. He wanted them to be together now, forever.
    How could he let her go?
    And how could he make her stay, if she sincerely didn’t want to?
    For the first time, he made himself look at the remote possibility that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men were not going to be able to put this thing together again.
    It occurred to him he needed to know everything about her. To put on the strongest offensive he could, but also in case he had to bow to defeat. He would then need to have little pieces of her soul that he could mull over during the lonely nights when she was not with him.
    He took a deep breath. “Tell me everything. Why you aren’t mayor of Wintergreen by now, and what it waslike when our daughter took her first step and if you ever thought of me.”
    He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. The physical exertion had relaxed her. He wanted to remember her like this: with her short hair curling around her ears, and moisture beading on her face. She looked like a little woodland pixie, beautiful, mysterious, enchanted.
    For a long time she was silent. Just when he thought she was not going to say anything, she said, “I wasn’t sure what I wanted when I got home from California. My whole world seemed to be turned on end. Before I met you, I was the smart girl, uptight, master of the cutting remark. I was ambitious and intelligent.
    “And then you showed me this whole other side of myself. You weren’t threatened by me and because you seemed to love me exactly as I was I became what I had never been before—this girl full of light and love and laughter. When you walked away from that, I just didn’t know who I was or what I wanted to be.
    “And then I found out I was pregnant.”
    “Did you think about an abortion?” he asked her.
    “Of course! But in the end, I simply couldn’t. The child was the part of you I got to keep.
    “After Whitney was born, my Aunt Meg offered me the job with Botanical Bliss. It seemed like such a godsend because I was so mixed up, felt so much older and wiser in some ways and so much younger and more confused in others. I didn’t feel so sure I wanted to take the world by storm, anymore. I didn’t feel so sure about anything as I once had.
    “You know what? Whitney’s made it all worth it. She’s worth every sacrifice, and if some dreams were left by the wayside, she replaced them with new ones. Being a good mom is making just as much of a contribution to the world as being a good mayor. Maybe more. She showed me that.
    “I work with unwed mothers, too. I run a little support group for them. It’s the same tragic story over and over again. My story over and over again. Women who are too young giving away too much to men who use them and discard them all too willingly.”
    He drew a deep breath. So this was how she had managed to keep the flame of anger alive so long, kept it burning so brightly. She dealt in men betraying women on a regular basis.
    “I didn’t know you were pregnant, Jordan. Surely that’s a difference in the story. It’s not as if we didn’t take precautions.”
    “To regret it all would be to regret Whitney.”
    “Tell me more about Whitney,” he said, after she’d been silent too long.
    “I hoped her first word would be Mommy, of course,” Jordan said, and smiled with soft remembrance, “but it wasn’t.”
    “What was it?”
    “It’s awful. You don’t want to know.”
    “It can’t be that awful. And even if it is, I do want to know.”
    “Her first word was poop.”
    “No!” He laughed. “Poop?”
    “Um-hmm. An unfortunate incident with her crawling in the backyard and almost touching some. I yelled, ‘poop, don’t touch,’ and apparently my emphasis on that word had a huge impression on her. She began to yell poop and didn’t stop for a week. She yelled it in church, in the grocery store, out of her stroller as we walked down the