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George was waiting at a high-top table with a beer in front of him, glaring down at his phone.
“I see you finally got a smartphone.” I smirked as I sat across him and gestured at a flustered Wes, who was tending the bar with Jules.
“Keely wanted me to have one. I’m still trying to figure it out.” He set the phone down and looked over at me expectantly. “How’d your lady friend feel about being left up there alone?”
“If I tell you what’s going on with me, do you swear on your life you won’t say a word to Keely until I’m ready to tell her myself?”
George furrowed his brow. “This sounds serious—”
“It is, and I need your word, George, that you won’t tell my sister a word because I know for a fact she’ll tell Moira, and then half of Hot Springs will know by the next morning.”
“I’ll do my best,” he said, leaning back in his chair with an expression of marked concern glossing over his face. “What the hell is going with you?”
“I met someone. Someone really special and… She didn’t come back for a year—” I told him everything. Every detail. Well, not every detail, but enough to allude to the fact that all of this had come as a surprise to both of us. George just stared at me as I rambled.
“You…” he stammered after a long moment of me talking in rapid sentences and occasionally sipping from the beer Wes had brought me. “You got herpregnant?”
“Don’t say it so loud,” I hissed, but George leaned his head back and laughed like I’ve never heard him laugh before. “You fucking prick,” I hissed, then took a huge drag from my pint. “Do you even understand what I’m going through right now?”
“It sounds like all your loose behavior caught up to you, Pete. I knew it would.”
“Whoring,” I parroted, rolling my eyes. He wasn’t wrong, which was the worst part about it. I’d been less than responsible multiple times but it’d never come to this.
“It sounds to me like you got your dream girl back. Isn’t that something to be celebrating?”
“She has a lot of other things to be worried about right now and whether she and I are soulmates are the least of my worries as well,” I bit out.
“Keely’s gonna press me on this, you know. She’ll find out.”
“I’ll tell her. I just need to know if the baby is mine first.”
“You seriously have doubts about that after all she’s been through?”
I did, which made me the worst kind of man.
“I just need to know for sure. Otherwise… I can’t raise someone else’s kid, George.”
“I think if you want to be with Sierra as badly as it sounds, it may come to that.”
Chapter Ten
Sierra
Iwoke with a start, almost rolling off the unfamiliar bed in my haste to untangle myself from the soft sheets and thin quilt. It took me several seconds to remember where I was and why. Once my heart stopped pounding, I slowly rose into a seated position and looked around at the sparsely decorated room. Soft blue walls and warmly stained wood floors were broken up by piles of old cardboard boxes and plastic totes yellowed with age. My suitcase sat atop a dresser on the far side of the room, and my purse was in a heap on the floor next to the dirty clothes I’d discarded the night before.
I reminded myself that this was Pete’s apartment, and that reminder spurred those memories from the night before into action. Shame, guilt, remorse, and a wave of other contrasting emotions pinned me back to the bed and I stared up at the ceiling for a good while.
Sleep had been a blissful break from my reality.
Eventually, I peeled myself from the most comfortable bed I’d slept in in weeks and put on a pair of sweats to go with the old tee shirt I currently wore. I hadn’t packed much clothing. Used to having a practical department store at my fingertips in my closet back home and the requirement that I looked like a million dollars every second of the day, living out of a suitcase felt like an entirely new existence. I hadn’t packed well. I’d been wearing the same things every day for weeks now. The dress Pete wrecked had been the nicest thing I had.
I picked up my purse and counted the money I had leftover and sighed. The rental in Leavenworth had drained my meager funds, and I couldn’t try to access the trust fund now. It would tip off my parents to my location in an instant.
Funny how that worked, wasn’t it? Me, a twenty-nine-year-old woman still tethered to her parents. They’d kept it that way on purpose, using money to keep me dependent and willing to obey their demands of me.
It’d worked for far too long, and I was almost thirty and had a few thousand dollars to my name and a mostly empty suitcase.
That was it.
