Page 29 of Shark’s Rise

“Stop,” he ordered, using that same take-no-prisoners tone Bas used with me.

I flared my nostrils. “Don’t you dare tell me to—”

“Don’t get all worked up! She wasn’t his woman.” He held my gaze for a few beats before declaring, “She was mine.”

I exhaled audibly. As much as I didn’t want to be so petty, his confession flooded me with gratitude. On top of everything else, my heart couldn’t handle yet another tale about one of Sebastian’s past conquests.

“You loved her,” I said knowingly. The pained look on Elijah’s face already spoke a thousand words of its own.

“I did. More than I knew I was capable of,” he agreed quietly.

“What happened?”

He shrugged. “Things…didn’t work out.”

I narrowed my eyes. Tilted my head a little. Waited.

Elijah was the one to sigh then, scrubbing his hand down his face. He looked like he was reconsidering his insistence on this story hour after all.

At last, he went on. “You and Bas…remind me a lot of us. Hensley and me,” he clarified. “Sometimes…it’s hard to watch the two of you. Brings up a lot of shit I didn’t realize I had buried. I’m sorry; I’m just trying to be honest…”

“It’s okay.” I was so sincere about it, my voice shook. “Really.”

He rubbed subconsciously at a phantom pain in the center of his chest. “Hensley was…beautiful. And sexy. And smart as hell. Fuck, probably smarter than me.”

“Imagine that,” I deadpanned with a smirk.

“She was everything I could’ve ever wanted in a woman. Every damn thing. I wanted to give her the world, you know? And I tried to. She had a restless spirit, though. I always felt like I just wasn’t enough. Like maybe one day it would all fizzle out for her. She always said I was crazy, that I was acting so insecure…”

“Now there’s something I really can’t picture.”

He grinned slyly, but I saw a new hollowness to the guy’s once-cocky swagger.

“Well, as luck would have it—or so I thought—she got pregnant.”

I grabbed a smaller pillow and clutched it close—to hide the tension that broadsided me. “Oh.” It was all I could eke out, past my suddenly deafening heartbeat.

“It just…happened,” he continued. “I mean, we were careful. Seriously careful. She always got some shot or something…at her doctor’s office. I never went with her when she got it, but she always assured me everything was fine.”

I tilted my head. “Nothing’s a hundred percent effective.”

“No shit.” He grunted out a laugh. “Regardless, I was fucking over the moon about it. I’ve always wanted a family. With the shitty childhood I had, I wanted to give a kid the life I never knew. Hensley recognized that too. We used to talk about it.”

I softened my grip on the pillow, realizing I was mesmerized by his anecdote now. The rapt emotion on his face had become a glow down his entire body. “So, what happened?” I asked gently. “She didn’t want the baby?”

“No, she did,” he insisted. “But she was so sick in the beginning. Throwing up all the time…” He shot me a pointed stare. “Of course, that’s not abnormal, and the doctors assured us things would mellow out. We went to all the appointments and did all the right things. I even proposed. I mean, sure, it accelerated all our plans, but it wasn’t like I didn’t plan to already. And shit, a baby! Right? It was time to get serious. Lock it down, and all that.” He waved his hand through the air, encompassing all the usual rituals for a couple when a baby is on the way.

“So, what happened?” I prodded again.

His glow dimmed. “Hensley was about five months along, maybe six…starting to really show…so she could no longer hide it from her friends and family. She’d been putting off telling people, no matter how many times I asked. She kept saying she ‘didn’t want to jinx it.’” He twisted his lips. “Bullshit like that.”

Oh, yeah. His light was officially out now. It even fled his face as he sat deeper into the chair and dropped his head back onto the cushion. Finally, when he spoke again, he didn’t even meet my eyes. He just kept staring up at the ceiling fan, whirling obliviously above us.

Then he dropped the bomb I could never have planned for.

“She told me the baby wasn’t mine.” His voice cracked on the last word. “And then she left.”

Silence. Deafening silence. I wished I could give him more, but I couldn’t. Sheer shock had taken over my thoughts…my heart. There was no sound in the air beyond the fan’s persistent wwhhaa wwhhaa wwhhaa. The blades sliced, heartless as daggers, through the pea-soup-thick air hanging between us. Emotions so asphyxiating, neither one of us was capable of inhaling or exhaling for a few long beats.