Chapter Ninety Six
His course was clear, provided there was no miscarriage.
If the baby was lost...
His mind instinctively shied from even considering that outcome.
Tomorrow, after the scan...he would think about it then...if he had to.
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'There is no heartbeat.'
No heartbeat...
Jasmine felt her own heart stop. She closed her eyes. The doctor's words kept on ringing in her mind—a death knell for her baby,
'Are you sure?' Collins demanded harshly. 'Can you check again?’
'I have been trying to find it for some time. Mr. Freeman. There's nothing. I'm sorry, but there's no point in holding out any hope. Given the amount of bleeding, it was highly unlikely that...'
'All right!' Collins snapped.
Silence. Jasmine floated in a sea of nothingness. No hope. No baby to love. Her heart had started beating again, sluggishly reluctant to bother with this life. She wanted to die, too.
'Miss Trent,..' The sympathetic tone in the doctor's voice forced her to open her eyelids and acknowledge him. Not his fault that her baby was dead.
Fate had decided she couldn't have it after all.
'It's best you have a curette now.'
'Yes,' she agreed. Time to turn over another page. She wasn't pregnant with a new life anymore.
Collins came off his chair, clearly hating this outcome, wanting to fight it, helplessly conflicted because he couldn't. 'Was it the flight?' he demanded. 'I called Jasmine to come here. It's a long flight from Sydney to L.A. The cabin pressure...'
'No. It should not cause a miscarriage,' the doctor assured him.
Collins looked wildly distraught. 'We had sex. Just hours before the bleeding started.'
The doctor sighed 'Pregnancy does not preclude sex, Mr. Templeton. If everything was normal...'
'What do you mean...normal?' it occurred to Jasmine that Collins felt he had caused this and was racked with guilt over it. Through the haze of her own deep inner grief, she wondered why he cared so much. Had he decided he wanted their child? He'd stayed with her all night, all morning. She hadn't asked why, needing the comfort of some familiar presence and he'd provided it, but if he'd been silently making a claim on their child...
Gone now.
Beyond claiming.
No claim on Collins, either.
All gone.
'I mean a miscarriage occurs when something is wrong,' the doctor explained. 'That's not to say Miss Leclaire won't carry a pregnancy to full term another time around, just that this one wasn't right. Nature has its own way of correcting its mistakes.'
A mistake...
She shouldn't have let it happen, shouldn't have pinned so much on it...planning a life around a child she loved, a child she'd stolen from Collins without his knowledge. That was wrong from the start. Not like Favour and Leonard . They had done it right.
Collins kept on talking, expending a crackling energy that felt wrong, too.
Futile. Out of place. It was finished, nothing left to argue over.
'Please...' It was an anguished croak. She looked hard at the doctor, appealing for finality .'...let's get on with it. Do what has to be done.'
Collins didn't know what to do. He couldn't help Jasmine through this last grim procedure. It was out of his hands. The medical staff had wheeled her away. But he couldn't bring himself to leave the hospital.
It was Friday. He should be contacting people or letting them contact him. He took out his phone. He'd switched the power off last night. His finger hovered over the button.
No.
Impossible to even think of business when Jasmine ...no life in her eyes...as dead as the child that might have been.
She'd wanted it.
And God help him, so had he.
Gut-wrenching disappointment that it wasn't to be.
He wandered around the hospital, had coffee in the canteen, found a place to shave and freshen up. They'd already brought Jasmine back to her room when he returned to it. She was sleeping. Probably didn't want to wake up. Merciful oblivion. He could do with some of that himself. But he knew what had happened wasn't going to go away. It was a scar on his soul...the lost child.
Collins wasn't used to emotional turmoil. He made a plan and stuck to it, refining it as opportunities presented themselves, though always retaining his vision of where he wanted to go. The end goal.
Where Jasmine Leclaire was concerned, his vision was very muddy. She kept knocking him off his straight-line thinking. The liming for a serious relationship was wrong, yet he had the sinking feeling that if he let her go now, he'd never get her back. And the wanting wasn't even sexual anymore.
He couldn't dismiss it on that basis. There was more to it. Difficult to define. Maybe it was the miscarriage messing him up, but it felt as though she was attached to some integral part of him and without her, there would be a very hollow place in his life that no one else would ever fill.
He picked up her hand, weighing it in his own-— a light delicate hand, fine-boned slender fingers, neatly shaped nails. They weren't claws. He doubted she would have scratched him for child maintenance, let alone anything Use. It was a soft, giving hand. She'd given him everything he'd wanted from her and made no demands on him. How many women were like that?
A memory from their first night together sprang into his mind—the blind date—Jasminesaying she'd agreed to it to please her sister, him saying...
Then you have a giving nature. That's a trap in itself, Jasmine.
Her answer— Oh, the giving only goes so far.
Him, curious— What would you take, given the chance?
That's a big question
.
And you don't intend to answer it yet?
That would spoil the game
.
He'd laughed, thinking it was a flirtatious game, but none of it had been a game to her. She'd given twice.
Unreservedly. And then she'd taken what she'd wanted—the chance of having a child from their union. And now she was left with nothing. Unless he could supply her with something she considered worth having.
Her fingers fluttered, subconsciously protesting their imprisonment.
She was waking up. His heart kicked, speeding up his pulse rate, shooting much-needed oxygen to his overworked brain. He had to establish some kind of positive rapport with Jasmine. Whatever it was they had together...he didn't want it to end here.
