Created In Fire (Art of Love Series) (33 page)

Contemplating the similarity of his coercion of her to what her family had done to her all her life ending up keeping Michael awake for most of the night.

Unfortunately, the answer he finally came up with at three in the morning about how to fix things was going to be the biggest irony of his life.

No matter how much he wanted Carrie for his wife, Michael was going to have to divorce her.

Chapter 22

Five days into her marriage, Carrie was back in the therapist’s office. Not because things were worse between Michael and her, but simply because she was afraid not to go. She was now living her fantasy life and pretending her marriage was normal. He had kissed her so sweetly in the kitchen she’d been tempted to coax him back to bed.

Before she’d acted on the impulse, he’d gotten a phone call from his father and gone to help move some furniture. Carrie had used the excuse of running errands to keep her appointment.

The days since their wedding had been companionable and fun. They had all been filled with laughter, making love, and dancing in his kitchen, for pity’s sake. It was like it really was their honeymoon or something.

And since their wedding night, Michael hadn’t started a single argument with her.

She now understood why Michael had been so freaked out by her being nice the night of their rehearsal dinner. That much politeness from someone so passionate and opinionated just wasn’t right.

The only place Michael had been bossy with her for the last five days had been bed.

Then again—she hadn’t been argumentative either. He’d given her nothing to complain about at all. Nothing.

He hadn’t even teased her about his forty-year-old neighbor flirting with her. The man was good looking and worked at a bank downtown. Michael had nodded at the two of them talking intimately, but Carrie had seen the quick flash of fury in his gaze.

Still he’d said nothing. He hadn’t demanded any details of their conversation, nor had he made any nasty insinuations. He’d just gone on in the house as if he trusted her completely.

Carrie looked at the smiling woman sitting behind the desk and sighed. There was no getting around telling Dr. Whitmore the truth. The woman was better at extracting information from her than even her God-fearing parents and their guilt trips.

“My father actually volunteered to help me leave,” Carrie admitted. “Michael—I don’t think he really meant it.” Carrie looked at her hands. “But I didn’t run. I married him.”

“So how are you feeling about that decision now?” Dr. Whitmore asked.

Carrie blew out a breath. “More confused than ever?” She grinned when Dr. Whitmore laughed. “I—it’s like I dreamed up all the things that were wrong between us. Suddenly I’m just a normal woman married to an incredible man who treats her like a queen. It’s not true, but sometimes it feels true.”

Dr. Whitmore nodded and leaned a chin into her hand to listen. “Sounds pretty good to me,” she said.

Carrie laughed. “You don’t get it. This is the same man who unrepentantly announced to everyone at our wedding reception that he intended to cover me with cake icing and lick it off on our wedding night. Then when I got embarrassed enough to blast him for it, he put his face in my lap and cried. He’s infuriating. He is irresistible. But he is NOT nice.”

Dr. Whitmore threw back her head and laughed. “No—he doesn’t sound like it. But he does sound fun.”

Carrie looked at her hands and sighed again. “One moment I want to kill him, and the next—,” she paused, and then finally met Dr. Whitmore’s gaze. “Sometimes I think it wouldn’t be so bad to be married to him for real.”

“It’s legally binding now Carrie. How much more real can it be?” Dr. Whitmore asked. “You’re legally wed. You’re living in the same house. You’re having consensual sex. What’s left?”

“I thought this was the part where you tell me the answer,” Carrie said carefully.

“That’s the funny thing about therapy,” Dr. Whitmore said. “The smarter a person is about life; the more rationalizations they come up with for their circumstances. We are socially trained to seek logical explanations. But what most of us want is rarely logical.”

“After all our history of hurting each other, wanting Michael is definitely not logical,” Carrie agreed.

“Yet you married him when you could have run. You could have broken your contract. Are you staying because of the baby?” Dr. Whitmore asked, tilting her head at Carrie, who squirmed in her seat and rubbed her stomach. “If you’re feeling sick, we can talk about this another time?”

“Low blood sugar,” Carrie said, fighting the dizziness that came more and more frequently lately. “I’m fine. And no—the baby is part of it, but it’s not all of it.”

Dr. Whitmore just raised her eyebrows and waited.

Carrie huffed out a breath and swore as the woman merely grinned at her rising anger. “I don’t want Michael to be with anyone else, okay? No more blondes. No more brunettes. Just me. I want to be the only woman in his life. Why does that make me feel so stupid?”

“You tell me,” Dr. Whitmore said softly. “Since you’ve already decided you love him, it all sounds fairly reasonable to me. I am still not seeing a problem with anything you’ve shared.”

“
I don’t want him to hurt me again
,” Carrie exclaimed, closing her eyes.

“Again—sounds perfectly reasonable,” Dr. Whitmore said very quietly.

“What if Michael just decides one day that I’m not all that great? Am I going to be one of those women who gets liposuction, facelifts, breast implants, and God knows what else to keep her husband faithful to her? My mother was great. It didn’t keep my father faithful,” Carrie said carefully.

Dr. Whitmore leaned on her desk and put her hands together in front of her. “I’m going to be honest with you, Carrie—all relationships have that kind of risk built into them. Yet plenty of couples have long term, happily monogamous relationships.”

Carrie nodded. “I don’t know all that many.”

“Let me ask you this,” Dr. Whitmore said carefully. “Is it that you’re worried about Michael losing interest in you or just that you will become uninteresting to him? Our relationships are sometimes a mirror of our fears. Consider that you might be afraid of both. However, you only have the power to control one of those.”

“You’re saying no matter what I can’t stop Michael from cheating if he decides to do so,” Carrie stated flatly.

Dr. Whitmore nodded. “I know that’s a hard truth. However, you can choose to make yourself interesting and to like yourself so much that if he betrays you, it won’t hurt as badly. In your case, you’re going to have to learn to like who you truly are. Since you’re an action person, we can make a list of tasks for you to work on one at a time. I have a simple one that might open the doors to others. Want to hear it?”

“Sure,” Carrie said sharply. “That’s why I’m paying for therapy in the first place.”

“I’m really hard to offend, but now and again I do beat up a client for insults,” Dr. Whitmore said lightly, grinning at the younger woman’s furious gaze. “Even clients I like. You remind me of several of my favorites.”

“
Sorry.
Crap, I’m really sorry that came out so bad,” Carrie said, mortified. “This is what I’m really like. I try so hard not to be snarky with people, but it just happens when I—when I—damn, I guess when I panic or feel pressured.
Oh shit, I am like Michael. This is what he does. He panics and then goes for the emotional jugular.
”

Dr. Whitmore laughed. “Well, that breakthrough happened quickly. You probably shaved five years off your treatment program.”

Carrie put her face in her hands. “Hell, I guess that’s why you get the big bucks.”

“I still haven’t told you my suggestion,” Dr. Whitmore laughed.

“Do you have to? I think I’ve had enough enlightenment for the week,” Carrie told her, smiling when the woman laughed.

“Go back to your natural hair color, Carrie. Get physically back in touch with the real you,” Dr. Whitmore recommended. “To like yourself, you’re first going to have to find out who you really are. I think that woman has been hiding for quite a while.”

Carrie stared at her and blinked. She stood, swayed, and fell back into the chair. “Whoa—dizzy. Not from your suggestion—just baby stuff,” she said, when the doctor rushed around to her chair. “I’m fine. Really. Just low blood sugar and my blood pressure was a bit high last week at my checkup. They told me I had to give up stress.”

“I see. So you got married to a man who you weren’t sure you loved instead of taking up meditation or yoga?” Dr. Whitmore asked gently, standing by Carrie as she stood slowly this time.

“Jessica said it took thirty years for her to change. Is it going to take me that much time too?” Carrie asked, actually liking that the doctor laughed at her question. It would probably help her to learn to laugh at herself more.

“Jessica Daniels is a special case. She’s one of a kind,” Dr. Whitmore joked, her smile the only indication of an answer to Carrie’s question.

Carrie nodded as she walked slowly to the door. “You really think dyeing my hair blonde will help?”

“Did it help to dye it brown when you were in college?” Dr. Whitmore asked.

Carrie nodded. “Yes. I guess it did. I wish I’d done it before I met Michael. He never would have looked at me.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Dr. Whitmore said. “I’ve heard too many people insist they really didn’t have much control over love. I’ve come to believe that certain people are just meant to meet.”

“Do you
really
believe that?” Carrie asked.

“Yes. But it doesn’t matter what I believe,” Dr. Whitmore said. “It only matters what my clients believe.”

Carrie walked out of the office, stopped to pay her bill and to make an appointment for the following week.

The thought of dyeing her hair back make her dizzier. Not to mention the fact that she’d likely get a chapter of her own in Shane’s book.

Carrie walked to her car in a daze of thought.

When the first cramp hit, she leaned on the car door and wondered what was wrong. Maybe she needed lunch, she thought.

When the second one came, it doubled her over. Carrie saw Dr. Whitmore rushing out of her office and running to her. The woman was speaking, but Carrie didn’t hear anything.

Then Carrie looked down and saw a puddle of blood at her feet. She wondered what was going on when the darkness claimed her.

*** *** ***

Carrie opened her eyes and saw Michael sitting by the bed. She watched as he stood up and bent over her to peer into her eyes.

“Carrie—oh, honey. I was so worried,” Michael said, his voice hitching. “How do you feel? Do you want a nurse?”

“Where am I? What happened?” she asked.

Michael sank back down into the chair he’d vacated. She didn’t know. He was going to be the one to tell her.

“What—what do you remember?” he asked quietly.

Carrie wrinkled her forehead, trying to think. Her eyes traced the IV in her arm to a bag of what looked like blood hanging next to the bed.

“Am I getting a blood transfusion?” she asked.

“Yes,” Michael said, squeezing and stroking her fingers in his. “You lost—you lost a lot for person your size. This is the third bag. You have two more to go. You had to have some minor surgery, but everything’s fine now.”

“I don’t understand,” Carrie said. Then flashes of the doctor’s office came back to her. “Did I get hurt?”

Michael shook his head. “No. Carrie, you lost the baby, honey,” he said quietly.

Carrie closed her eyes, opened them again. “What—Michael, are you sure?”

“Yes—very sure,” Michael said softly, not wanting to tell her yet it would have been a son. He couldn’t think too long about this child or the other one they’d lost. He needed to be calm for her.

“I didn’t do it on purpose, Michael,” Carrie said, her lip trembling. “You believe that don’t you?”

Grief hit without warning, welling up swiftly and wrenching a hard sob from him. Michael shook his head to clear his eyes so he could see her. He had to clear his throat a couple times before he could speak.

“Honey, of course not. You didn’t do anything wrong. The doctor said it was something that just happens sometimes. Too much stress. Your blood pressure shot up high. Maybe your blood sugar was too low, too. Who knows? The important thing is that you’re okay.”

“But the baby is gone,” she said, turning her head to the side.

“Yes,” Michael said, tugging on her hand, “but
you’re not
. You lost a lot of blood very quickly. If Dr Whitmore hadn’t seen you leaning against the car from her window, they might not have gotten you enough help in time.”

“Dr Whitmore. That’s right I went to see her—oh, now you know that too,” she said, her voice tired and defeated. Tears leaked out, and Michael handed her some tissues.

“Yes, I know and I’m glad,” Michael said. “I may go see her myself. I wasn’t exactly nice to the hospital staff when they wouldn’t let me in to see you. Shane had to intervene to keep them from kicking me out.”