§ § § - September 29, 2003

"Oh, good God, girl, aren't you pregnant yet?"

"How much has she let him try? She probably pushes him away every night."

"You seem to think you know a lot! I expect you're jealous, don't you think they are, Leslie?"

"I don't know…"

"Of course, they all are. You just watch. Leslie will be pregnant, and I'll see to it that she is."

"She isn't worthy of you and you both know it."

"Look at her, sitting there with that hurt expression. She knows it's her fault there's been no baby. Why you ever married her, I'll never understand."

"You know our father's dead because of you, don't you?"

"I didn't—!"

"Oh, but you did. You weren't enough help soon enough."

"She's trouble, Teppo. You should never have gotten involved with her. If it weren't for you, I'd throw her out…"

"Come on, Leslie, we don't need to listen to this. We're going to try again for that baby, and that will show every one of you. There's no need for us to listen to this."

"You'll listen and learn! How many times have we told you that girl is far beneath you? You're so blinded by what you think you feel for her, you discount the words of your own family…especially your mother, your own loving mother…"

"Shut up! Just shut up!"

"You dare tell a prince to shut up?"

"What—? I…no, it wasn't you—"

"You're no princess, and you've lost our brother his princely status because you refused to understand what he really means to our people. And now you can't even give him a child. What have you done to him? Why don't you release him?"

"You don't truly love him, I suspect…you aren't worthy of him."

"He's a prince. He deserves better than you. You're not worthy of him."

"You're not worthy of him…you're not worthy…"

"But I love him!" Leslie screamed and bolted upright in the bed. "I love him, don't you understand? Stop it, stop it!"

"Leslie, i ödets namn, what's wrong?" cried Christian, seizing her and hugging her hard. "Why the screaming? You must have been having a nightmare. Come on, my Rose, tell me about it…what was happening?"

"I saw Teppo's family first," Leslie sobbed. "They kept asking me why I wasn't pregnant, taunting me, telling me I wasn't worth it. And I yelled at them to shut up…and then they were suddenly your family, Carl Johan and Anna-Laura and your nieces and nephews, all staring at me…such cold eyes…telling me you were a prince and deserved better than me. But I love you…Christian, I love you, I love you…"

"Stop, Leslie, stop," Christian broke in firmly, urgently, rocking her and smoothing her hair, caressing her in a frantic attempt to beat back her hysteria. "It was only a bad dream, nothing more than that. Stop now. It's all right, my darling, it's all right." He kept stroking her, repeatedly coaxing her to calm down, until all that was left was her helpless crying. "Leslie, please…tell me how this dream could have come about. Exactly what was Teppo's family saying to you?"

She slowly dredged the hurtful comments out of her memory, repeating them as best she could remember them, shuddering in his arms. Christian sat and listened, and when she finished, he asked gently, "Is that what they said in real life?"

"Yes…over and over again, they asked me why on earth I wasn't pregnant yet. They'd denigrate me to Teppo, and they'd do it in English so I had no way of ignoring them, so I'd know exactly what they were saying about me. Every month that passed by, they'd do it again. His mother was always the worst."

"Leslie," Christian reminded her gently, "Teppo's mother was insane. You said as much to me yourself. How could you put such stock into her words? And his brothers and sisters seem to have been merely spiteful, as far as I can tell."

"But I didn't know that," Leslie said, staring at him with tears still standing in her eyes. "I didn't realize she was going crazy, and I don't know why the others did what they did…I can only think it was because his father died here."

"They were blaming you for something over which you had absolutely no control," Christian said. "They made it very much an unfair fight, half a dozen to one. And what did Teppo do to defend you?"

"He just…" Leslie began, stopped and stilled, and blinked, stunned. "Oh, my god…"

Christian clearly heard the note of horrified realization in her voice. "What?"

"All he ever said was that they were wrong, I'd get pregnant eventually…and right after that he'd take me downstairs and try again." Her startled gaze flew to his. "It was…it was more important to him to make sure he got me pregnant than to tell them off."

"It would seem so," Christian agreed, frowning. "And yet…you thought he loved you."

"He said so," Leslie said uncertainly.

"When exactly did all this begin? How long had you and Teppo been married before his mother and siblings began to badger you about not being pregnant?" Christian asked.

"Almost three years," Leslie said.

"Did they resent you before that? At least, did they do so that openly?"

"I…don't know," Leslie mumbled, her voice trailing off for a moment. Then she too frowned. "They must have been more subtle about it before that. But I always had the sense that they resented me, pretty much from the day Teppo brought me home. And in the last year Teppo started to get frustrated, and I felt like a failure."

Christian pressed, "Was he frustrated with you or his family?"

"I'm not sure," Leslie said very slowly. "Maybe all of us. I don't really know."

"Was he aware of your feelings, do you think?" Christian questioned.

"Probably not…I held it in," Leslie admitted. "I was already outnumbered as it was and I was trying not to rock the boat. And I was questioning myself, wondering why I couldn't get pregnant. It never occurred to me to think it could've been Teppo and not me. But I was right." She bit her lip. "I haven't gotten pregnant by you either, so it has to be me."

Christian shook his head. "What makes you think it's not me?"

"Well, I…" She stopped and looked at him. "I don't think I…"

"You'll recall," Christian pointed out, "that Ingela was proven wrong about Kurt being my son. The fact that Karin Grimsby and I always used protection when we were seeing each other doesn't prove that I'm capable of siring a child. It may well have been Teppo then, and for all either of us knows, it's me now."

"But both of you?" Leslie protested. "I could see it being Teppo, but not you…"

"But you don't know that," Christian said. "I don't know it myself."

Leslie shook her head. "I can't…I still think it's me."

Christian sighed softly and carefully brushed away a tear with one thumb. "Leslie, my Rose, you must insist on taking the blame, mustn't you? Do you know what that tells me? It means that Teppo's family got to you. They succeeded so well in convincing you that you were worthless as a wife that you still believe it. Tell me this. Do his family and their cruel, misguided opinions really matter so much to you, thirteen years after his death?"

Leslie went absolutely stock-still in his embrace, and he watched her, waiting silently for her to process his words. It took her a full five minutes to absorb everything, and he sat patiently, with one hand still gathered around a hank of her hair and stroking down, ever so slowly, moving back up and stroking down again. Gradually he became aware that she'd started to shiver, and he kissed her forehead, rubbing her back.

At last she whispered, "They did get to me. They really did. And all these years I never questioned why they were always attacking me. I just let them make me believe that they were right and I wasn't good enough to be Teppo's wife because I never got pregnant."

"Frankly," Christian said, "I think you were too good for them. They were a bunch of fools…selfish, cruel idiots. Whatever their reasons for cutting you down, they were wrong. Furthermore, Teppo's reaction should have been different. By persisting in trying to make you pregnant, he merely proved that he agreed with them in some way. He should have stood at your side and told his family to back down and leave you in peace, and that they had no right to say such things about you, much less to you. He didn't do that, Leslie. Oh, he may have told them they were wrong, but that's as far as it went. It sounded to you as if he was defending you, but it was a halfhearted defense at best. In the end, his actions showed that he thought they must be right."

"We started having fights about it," Leslie said, staring into the dark, blinking. "We'd go through another of those confrontations, and he'd promptly try again…over and over and over. It started wearing me out and I didn't have the same desire for him, and sometimes I put him off, and then we'd argue. I kept suggesting there were other ways to have a child. We could try in-vitro fertilization, or surrogate motherhood, or adoption…and after months of this, he said maybe it was worth considering. Three days after that, he was killed."

"I see," Christian murmured. "You and I have the same options, you know. I don't think there's reason to panic just yet. We've never used any form of birth control, but we were never actively trying to become parents. And it's my understanding that after a certain period of unsuccessful attempts, only then is it considered that there may be fertility problems. You said something about tests with Dr. Lambert, didn't you?"

Leslie nodded. "They were fertility tests, yes. She said the results won't come back till next month."

"All right," Christian said and patted her shoulder. "Then that's for next month. As for Teppo, tell me—didn't you resent the fact that he was so singleminded?"

"I did, yes," Leslie admitted. "I wanted a baby too, of course…enough that I didn't question him. But I remember wishing he'd back off and give me a break. Now that I look at it, now that you point it out, I can see that he could be selfish sometimes, and he spent a lot of time putting his family over me in importance."

"It just seems to me," Christian mused, "that Teppo had a way of being impetuous, that he was really just too young and too immature to handle marriage properly. You were even younger than he, and more than that, he was the first man you ever fell in love with, and you tried too hard to please him, so that too often he got the upper hand. You were both so young…so he let his family goad him, and you let them carve away at your self-confidence, and it began to come between you. The only thing that stopped the erosion was his death. If I dare say it, that death may have been a blessing, very well disguised. It allowed you to make your escape from all that, to come back here and heal not only from Teppo's death but also the emotional and verbal abuse his mother and siblings put you through. You needed to regain yourself, to grow a little more."

Leslie nodded very slowly, her eyes wide with discovery. "I was so naïve, too…"

"So you were," he said. "But you are very much your own person. If you didn't have the courage to stand up for yourself back then, you certainly do now. You finished the growing up that you didn't have the chance to do before you leaped into marriage with Teppo and found yourself the object of their scorn. You became the woman I fell so much in love with, and you're worth everything to me, do you know that? And not just that, but my family agrees. They think the world of you. When I feared losing you in the event Kurt was my son, I told Carl Johan, and he told me to believe you and trust you, because he knew how deeply you love me. They've accepted you and welcomed you, and it's not just because they would have suffered my eternal wrath if they didn't." He grinned, and she had to laugh.

"I've come to realize," Leslie said softly, "that I was doing to you what Teppo did to me. I had to learn that lesson again. He was the one with the obsession before, even if it was his family pushing him. Now it's me…I've been the one pushing you, trying too hard, driving you away. I'm so sorry, Christian, please believe me. I still want very much to have your children, but I…I know how incredibly lucky I am to have you and your love. And if it's always just you and me, I'll always be grateful you're in my life."

Christian kissed her softly. "You must know I feel the same about you. We have time, my Rose, believe me, we do. If it's going to happen, it will, in its own time. And if not, we're never alone, not when we have a love like this."

"But we can still try sometimes, right?" she ventured hopefully.

He grinned. "Of course. More than sometimes. Ah, my Rose, I love you so much."

"I love you too, always," she murmured, and he kissed her again.

Next up: a very surprising blast from Leslie's past…