AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Sinclair?”
She looked up. “What?”
“Talk to me. It’s time.”
“Now?”
Had one word ever been more filled with reluctance? “Well, not this very instant, no. I appreciate this might not be a conversation we want to have while sitting in my car, with my dick hanging out and your pants around your boots.” He backed up to give her room to scoot out of the car and promised his protesting cock they’d get back to the flipping, slapping, and fucking as soon as he could be damn sure the next time she cried in his arms it was for the right reasons. “Invite me in for coffee.”
In what looked like one continuous move, she hopped down, grabbed her jeans, and shimmied them up her long legs. “If we’re having this conversation, we’re going to want something stronger than coffee.”
Chapter Ten
Sinclair dropped two short tumblers and a half-empty bottle of whiskey onto her table with little regard for the glassware, but temper was wasted on the scarred pine. It had seen everything, survived everything, and accepted her carelessness with three soft thunks.
Shane looked up at her from his seat on the other side of the table. “You’re serious? It’s not even noon.”
“We were half naked in my driveway three minutes ago, and you’re going to get scandalized over a pre-noon drink?” The lip of the bottle clinked against the rim the glass closest to him as she poured a double. The scent of charred oak and vanilla seared her nose.
“Come on, how bad can it be?”
In answer, she lowered herself into a chair and poured another two fingers of the aged-to-amber liquid into the second glass.
His lips twisted into a jaded smile. “Baby girl, I wrote this scenario before I even boarded the bus to Parris Island. You met someone over the summer. Some smooth-talking French guy swept you off your feet, and you forgot all about the screwup who had nothing going for him besides a shot at the Marines in lieu of a jail cell. You were so far beyond me by the time I was able to reach out, a part of me knew I’d already missed my chance.”
Tempting. Oh, so tempting to go with his version of events. Write it off to his delay, and her fickle youth, and be done with it. No harm, no foul. But that wasn’t what happened. There had been harm. She brought the glass to her lips and tossed back the shot in one long, burning swallow. After a moment, the burn subsided, but the fire lingered in her veins like a distant relative to courage. “I was pregnant.”
He stared at her for a long moment, his face absolutely neutral, and then picked up his glass and took a long swallow. “What?”
“Before you start calculating ten years of child support payments, or judging me for whatever choice I made, you should know I lost the baby.”
“I…” He broke off, looked away, and downed the rest of his drink.
Had she ever seen him speechless before? Not that she recalled. Compelled to fill the silence, she added, “Nobody knows this except my family.”
He looked back at her. Unflinching. “I’m sorry.”
The bone-deep sincerity in his words hit her like a body blow. She pushed back from the table quickly enough to cause a screech of chair legs over floorboards and struggled for a pat reply. “Me, too.”
“How did it happen? I thought you were on the pill?”
I was stupid and reckless? “Darcy Briggs gave me her pills, because she’d broken up with her boyfriend. I didn’t know I was supposed to wait forty-eight hours before I relied on them without backup. I was so anxious to give you the perfect birthday present, I didn’t read the fine print.”
He nodded slowly, as if digesting the information. “So, you think our first time…?”
“First or second. One of the earliest. Between you leaving, and then Savannah and me flying out to meet up with our cousins and backpack through Europe, I didn’t realize. I missed you so much, Shane. Honestly, that gaping hole you left in my life took in all my attention. If not that, then the effort to walk around like a normal person and pretend the hole wasn’t there.”
“I know. I felt the same way. I’m sorry,” he said again, and she shook her head to fend it off.
“By the time I got to Paris, I knew something was wrong. I taxed what little French I knew to buy a pregnancy test. When it read positive, I just…I don’t know. I freaked. I tried to reach you by calling the base, but when the guy asked me to state the precise nature of the emergency, my throat froze. I hung up, boxed up all the careening emotions, and shoved them to the back of my mind. I told myself to sit tight until you called. Because I knew you’d call. You’d promised me you’d call as soon as you could.”
“Sinclair—”
“But you didn’t call.” She was pacing like a boxer in a ring, but she couldn’t get the story out if she stood still. “And we just kept moving. Frankfurt. Bonn. When we hit Rotterdam, I had really bad cramps, but I sucked it up. We’d figure everything out when we talked. Then we went to Amsterdam, and…”
She stopped stalking back and forth on her side of the table and poured herself another drink. This part took effort. Memories were flooding in faster than she could organize them. Long-buried feelings rode in their wake. Feelings she’d never really experienced until that summer. Fear. Panic. Helplessness. She took a sip and swallowed before continuing, “And in Amsterdam the pain flared into an overwhelming thing that I couldn’t ignore. Savannah found me curled up on the bathroom floor in our hostel, feverish and bleeding. She called for help, and called our parents. I woke up in a hospital about twenty-four hours later, with my parents and a doctor hanging over my bed. I’d had an ectopic pregnancy that continued too long. The doctor spewed a lot of information—a congenital defect resulting in a weird curvature in the tube, so the pregnancy couldn’t progress the way it should. I’m down to one now, but the defect was bilateral, so my chances of conceiving the normal way are, according to the surgeon, remote.” And if she did, her chances of having another ectopic pregnancy were good.
“Fuck it, Sinclair.” He braced his forearms on his knees and stared at the floor. “You should have let me know.”
