“What does that mean?” she asked quietly, reaching up to pluck a fine strand of hair away from her eyelashes as she kept her gaze fixed on the watery horizon, where the sunlight shimmered in every direction. “That you will accept full responsibility if I get pregnant?”

“I’ll assume full financial responsibility, for you and the child, and once the baby is born, I will assume full physical custody of the child—”

“What?” she choked, cutting him short as she turned to look at him where he was standing on the narrow stair landing behind her, leaning against the rock wall. “You’ll take my baby?”

“Our baby,” he calmly corrected, broad shoulders shifting, “and I am quite able to raise a child on my own, Morgan. I will get help, of course, but I’ll be a good father—”

“You’d take the baby away from me?”

“If that would make you feel better—”

“It wouldn’t.”

“You said earlier that you didn’t want to be a single mother.”

“I don’t. It wouldn’t be right for the baby. But that doesn’t mean you can have him or her.”

He walked toward her. “But I’m ready to be a father, and you’re not wanting to be a mother right now—”

“You can’t say that. You don’t know that. My God, Drakon! Where are you getting this from?”

“First of all, right now, as far as we know, there’s no baby. And secondly, should you conceive, then of course I’d want to support my child—financially, emotionally, physically. I won’t be an absentee father.”

Her skin prickled as he stood above her. The man was pure electricity. The air practically pulsed with energy. “No, I don’t want to be pregnant right now, it’s not high on my to-do list at the moment, with my father being held hostage and my family in chaos, but if I was pregnant, I’d manage.”

“That’s not good enough. My child deserves better than that. If you are pregnant, we’ll have to do the right thing for our child, which means raising him or her in a calm, stable home, without chaos.”

“Then you’d be stuck with me, Drakon, because I’m not handing over my child.”

“Our child.”

“Which might not even exist.”

“Which probably doesn’t exist, because when we were newlyweds and having unprotected sex every day, twice a day, for months, you didn’t get pregnant.”

She bit into her lip, hating the panic rushing through here. This was just a conversation of hypotheticals. “Does that mean if I do conceive, you’d want the baby and me to live with you?”

“Yes.”

It’s not real, she reminded herself, don’t freak out. “And we’d be divorced?”

“No.”

“No?”

He shook his head. “Absolutely not. If you’re pregnant, we’ll stay together. If you’re not, I’ll have my attorney file the divorce papers. But as we won’t know that for a couple more weeks, I won’t have my attorney file until we know for certain.”

“Awfully convenient,” she muttered under her breath.

“Happily so,” he answered, not rising to the bait. “This way there would be no stigma attached to the child. We’re still legally married. The baby would be a result of our reconciliation.”