AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He growled at her. "You were writing about human parties. This isn't that."
She pulled herself up, crossing her arms. "Don't growl at me! I don't need your approval to publish. It's part of free speech."
He looked at her, shocked. "You're joking. You can't be serious."
"I am," she said, tilting her head a little to the left. "If you want, I'd be more than happy to send you what I finish before sending it to the printer. I'll even just do the article from an interview with you rather than other people if that makes you feel better."
He curled his hands into tight fists. She didn't understand what she was about to do, and his anger increased.
"This isn't about me. I'm talking about all shifters. You're going to put an even bigger line between us, which is already very delicate as it is. If you publish this, shifters will find out that there was a human at the party, and that's going to piss them off. And they already don't trust humans. Do you really want to add fuel to that fire? You would be proving them right."
She raised an eyebrow at him. "It's part of the job."
He ran a hand through his hair, now realizing just how stubborn she could be. He turned, taking a couple of deep breaths, and then paused. He turned back to her and pointed at her stomach.
"How about before you do anything, you think about what you are carrying first?"
She glanced down at her stomach and then back up at him.
He knew from a human point of view that maybe it didn't seem like a deal because she wasn't part of the shifter world, but that would all change. Once the baby was born, she was connected to them, and she had to think about that.
"There is a very high chance that the child you have is a shifter, and how do you think that will look when the article comes out? How about thinking about the outcome of everything before you send it in?"
He turned, storming through the apartment toward her front door. He pulled it open and slammed it shut as he left. Hewanted to scream, take the damn notebook, and rip it apart, but she could easily write it again.
He knew the only way to stop her was for her to decide not to, and he had to hope he had made his point clear.
THIRTEEN
FIONA
She stood staring at the door with her arms crossed for a solid minute. She was beyond angry because no one was going to tell her what she could and couldn't write. Not even Callum.
She walked across the room and opened the door. She peered outside, seeing he had left the building entirely. She shut the door and frowned. She thought he would’ve come back. She figured he needed to just pull himself together for a moment. She dropped her arms and swallowed, realizing how angry he was.
Her mind went numb with the amount of information that Callum threw at her. They were all valid points, but it was still just another person telling her what she could and couldn't write.
She placed her hand on her stomach and glanced down at it. She thought about Callum's warning. She chewed on her lip, unsure what to do next. This wasn't the first person pissed off about something she was writing. People threw fits when they didn't get what they wanted.
Yet, she knew that wasn't what Callum was doing. He was angry because there was a secret she would be revealing, andit was going to do more damage than good. Sure, people knew about shifters, but she would be writing to the world, and everyone could read her article.
She turned, picked up her article, and read over it. She only had a few things left to polish before she was done. She had put her heart and soul into her work, and to just be done with it, well, she didn't want to do that.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. After a moment of silence, she sat on her couch. She stared at her article, trying to think of a way that she could keep it.
She had tons of questions. What if she didn't state where she was? What if she rewrote the title? What if she changed everyone's names? What if she only wrote about the party and left out the interviews?
She hated the idea because the article would lose what made it special if she started cutting things out. She couldn't rewrite it. It was either how it was, or it just wasn't an article at all.
"Is it really that big of a deal?" she asked, knowing there wasn't anyone around to answer her. "I mean, it's just an article. It can't be that serious."
Yet, it was. Callum had even said it … it wasn't just an article. It was something that could change shifters' lives forever, and now that she was pregnant, she had to think about that.
She looked down at her stomach, feeling it tighten. Callum was right. She couldn't publish it. She didn't want to do anything to harm her child or Callum, and she didn't want this to come back and affect them.
She ripped the pages out of her notebook and looked at her shredder sitting next to her desk. She walked over, turned it on, and slid the pages into it. She felt relieved when she was done. It was the right thing to do.
She didn't want her child to have a hard life. She’d had that, and she remembered being jealous of people. She alwayswondered why she was stuck with the short straw when it came to everything. She wasn't going to do that to her baby before it was even born.
