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“We have to have a baby within a year, or he gets all the money.”
I blinked. “You…we…what?”
He nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me this?” I asked. “This is one of those things that we probably should’ve talked about ahead of time…”
He shrugged. “There’s a loophole.”
I frowned. “What kind of loophole?”
I was almost afraid to ask.
“I don’t have to actually get you pregnant. I just have to produce an ‘heir.’ I can find a surrogate…”
For some reason, just those words alone were enough to make me see red.
“I will be the one having your baby, thank you very much,” I snarled.
He looked nervous.
“I was thinking that, too…but there’s a problem. What if you don’t get pregnant as fast as we need you to? Which is why I think we should have a surrogate carry our baby. Two of them, in fact.”
I blinked.
“You want some other woman to have our baby…two other women? You want them to have our babies?”
He nodded.
“But…”
My mind was whirling with the bomb that he’d just dropped at my feet.
“I have a year, honey. I have nothing against knocking you up. Far from it…but I can’t let Pablo win. I can’t. So…I have to hedge my bets. I have to have a backup plan in place that will ensure I don’t lose.”
Then I lost my temper. “Rhys, honey, these are babies. They’re not pawns!”
He looked disgusted with himself, and I realized rather quickly that he was no happier about this situation than I was.
Which immediately had my ire cooling down from a boil to a mere simmer.
He grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me down the hall.
He didn’t stop until we were in the bathroom, as far away from everyone and everything as we could get.
Then he leaned in until his face was a scant inch from mine.
“Tell me, Henley, what you think I should do? Because from where I’m standing, giving up sounds real fuckin’ easy right now.”Chapter 22Remember when you were little and you fell on the trampoline while everyone else kept jumping and you couldn’t get up? Yeah, that’s adulthood.
-Rhys to George
Rhys
I hadn’t wanted her to know this secret just yet. I wanted to enjoy a freakin’ week without dropping this bomb.
There were a hundred other things I should be thinking about right now.
I shouldn’t be forced to do this. I shouldn’t have to do it to avenge my father. Normal people didn’t have to do things like this. Normal people, if they suspected their father of being murdered, would’ve gone to the police.
But I wasn’t a normal person.
I never had been, and never would be.
“Oh, Rhys,” she whispered, putting her hand on my face.
I closed my eyes and felt like the weight of the world was on my shoulders.
I didn’t want to be forced to take this path, but I had been.
I didn’t want to have that money to deal with in the future. I was doing just goddamn fine on my own.
Yet, I didn’t have a choice.
I couldn’t let Pablo win.
I couldn’t and wouldn’t.
I’d do whatever it took, and unfortunately, that extended to Henley doing whatever it took, too.
She didn’t like what we had to do…and I didn’t either. But, short of killing Pablo, which I just wouldn’t do, I was in between a rock and a hard place.Chapter 23What the fuck are birds so excited about at five in the morning?
-Asking for a friend
Rhys
“You’ve never been to a concert?” I asked, dumbfounded.
She shook her head.
“The loud noises mess with my hearing.” She shook her head. “I have to remove my transmitter because it’s just so loud. If I don’t, then by the time I’m done my head is spinning, and it hurts to even have the receiver in for days. It just doesn’t seem worth it.”
I’d never once thought about it.
Renata had, of course, gone to concerts. She’d never been affected by that as Henley had.
It’d never once occurred to me when I got these tickets that she wouldn’t be able to enjoy the show. Now I felt like a complete worthless tool.
“I…” I hesitated. “I don’t know what to say.”
She shrugged.
“I tried it once in high school by going to the school talent show. I’ll never make that mistake again.” She hesitated. “But I still want to go with you. I’d love to go. The concerts are now required to have an interpreter at all concerts due to the Americans With Disabilities Act. Plus, this is a team function. It’d look weird if your wife didn’t attend with you.”
I grimaced.
I knew that. Unfortunately, from what I remembered, the interpreters were definitely not all that great.
They showed music using a sign, and one sign. They repeated that sign over and over again.
My sister had commented about it when we’d gone to a concert for the first time and laughed about it because she was glad that she could actually hear the words being sung rather than having to rely on the interpreter.
