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For a second, I even wondered if the little girl was Carl’s kid, but the idea almost made me laugh out loud once I thought about it. Aspyn had never been into Carl, and he obviously only had eyes for Perri. Plus, it’s not like he’d send his daughter and woman away just to keep me comfortable.
That still didn’t help me figure out what he was hiding. It was time to push on through and get to the truth.
“She was there with her kid,” I said flatly.
Carl paled and swallowed. “Huh. Guess she was working a bit late or something.” He shrugged. “Well, I got some stuff to take care of.” He spun around and hurried off.
“Where you going?” I called to him.
“I told you. I have stuff to take care of,” he yelled over his shoulder.
I gritted my teeth and curled my hands into fists, anger coursing through my veins. I’d not said crap other than to say Aspyn was there with her kid. I didn’t understand why Carl was acting like that.
Storming off toward the cabin, I wondered if returning to Livingston had been a huge mistake after all.
* * *
Lying in bed that night, I couldn’t think about anything other than Carl. Ever since I’d arrived in town, he’d been acting strange, including him starting to say things and then stopping. And the way he turned white at the mention of Aspyn’s kid was beyond weird.
Why would act that way? Just because he was too chickenshit to tell me the woman I’d wanted for a good chunk of my life had moved on because I couldn’t pick up a phone?
No. Carl wasn’t like that. He wasn’t some touchy-feely guy. He was a Tennessee rancher for chrissake, not some top-knot boy from New York.
Something else was there right in front of me, waiting for me to see it. I just wasn’t understanding what it was.
I thought back to the kid. The little girl couldn’t have been much more than 2 years old from what I saw, not that I was an expert on rug rats.
I sat up in bed, my heart racing and palms sweaty. Two years old? Two years plus nine months was almost three years. And if she were just a few months over that, the numbers lined up exactly.
“No,” said. “It couldn’t be. No way.”
The kid didn’t look much like me, but that didn’t mean much because she looked a lot like Aspyn. Plenty of kids ended up looking closer to one parent than the other.
Maybe I was wrong. Aspyn had been on the pill. She wouldn’t lie about something like that.
No. It wouldn’t make sense for her to lie, but the pill wasn’t foolproof.
I ran my hands through my hair and took deep breaths. Crap.
If Aspyn’s daughter was my kid, that might explain why Carl was acting like a nervous little snake. The only thing I didn’t get was why he hadn’t mentioned it to me before. Even if we’d not been talking as much, we’d talked more than once in the last three years. He’d had so many chances to mention it, but he hadn’t.
The more I thought about everything, the less sense it made.
That night three years ago had been amazing: more than amazing. Even three years later, it remained seared into my mind and heart. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it was part of what had brought me back to Livingston.
But then the accident had messed me up, and I’d never talked to Aspyn again, half-convinced she wouldn’t want me.
Cowardice? Yeah. Maybe I didn’t want to lose the only thing I’d ever truly wanted, but the numbers didn’t lie.
There was a good chance the little girl was mine.
Chapter 11
Aspyn
I glanced at the time on my computer. Noon. Normally, that was the time we’d hit lunch, but on Fridays, it meant it was time to go home.
Joe had pitched it to us as a way to promote work-life balance, but then he’d turned around and pitched it to the voters as a way to save some money in the town budget. I would have been more pissed, but he took the same cut, so it was hard to say much.
