AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No,” he said with a slow shake of his head. It made Bree wonder if maybe he was in shock over the whole thing. She supposed that whether the baby was ever real or not, it had been real to him. He was still losing the idea of a child and the future he was planning with it.
“I need to call Missy here in a minute. You might not...” His voice trailed off.
Bree nodded. She wouldn’t want anyone else around when she had a hard conversation like that, either. “I’ll give you your privacy. Let me know if you need me.” Bree reached out and put her hand over his. She gave him a reassuring squeeze and a weak smile before heading downstairs.
When she reached the lower level of the cabin, she walked over to the leather couch and scooped up the remote. She put the television on a loud action movie with lots of gunfire and explosions. But even that couldn’t muffle everything.
The calm from a moment before was gone. She couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying, but Ian was yelling. Bree turned up the volume and wished she had packed some earplugs in her bag. She considered taking a shower. Or a walk. Or crawling under some blankets and covering her head with a pillow.
She felt awful for Ian. She knew he wasn’t happy, but he had been making the best of things for the child’s sake. He had always told her how important being a good father was to him. In her young, girlish fantasies, she’d imagined what Ian would be like with their children. She’d thought he would be a hands-on dad. She’d had fantasies of him singing them to sleep with lullabies he wrote especially for them.
To think that Missy had taken that loyalty and dedication in Ian and used it against him... It made Bree feel sick.
Despite the fact that Bree had broken up with Ian in college, she’d never wanted to hurt him. She’d tried to help him, but when that had failed, she had to err on the side of self-preservation. She couldn’t have sat back and watched his downward spiral any longer. Not when she’d loved him so much.
And she still cared about him now. She didn’t want that to be the case, but seeing Ian again had brought all those old feelings to the surface. In only a few short hours together, she’d been bombarded by her attraction to him and wrestled to keep herself at a physical distance. At the same time, her disappointment in his workaholic lifestyle was just as present. He was just as dedicated to the job now as he had been back then. But she couldn’t ignore her fierce protectiveness where he was concerned. Missy was lucky she’d never made it to the house last night. If all this had come to light with her here, Ian would have had to separate the women before someone had gotten hurt. And by “someone,” Bree meant Missy.
She entertained herself with fantasies of winning rowdy catfights. Eventually, she noticed the yelling had stopped. Bree didn’t know if he had hung up the phone or if his anger had finally run its course. Either way, she wasn’t going upstairs anytime soon. She flipped the television to a documentary on Pompeii and let her mind get lost in history instead of the eruption taking place upstairs.
About twenty minutes later, the dull thud of footsteps coming down the stairs roused her from the show. She turned down the volume and looked up in time to see Ian in the doorway. His face was stony and emotionless as he came over and dropped down onto the couch beside her.
Bree sat quietly and waited. He would talk when he was ready. She knew better than anyone that he didn’t like talking about his emotions. It might take him a while to be able to voice his feelings about what had just happened. Even Bree wasn’t sure she co
uld find the words if faced with a betrayal of this magnitude.
“It’s true,” he said at last. His voice was steady and even. The yelling was done and now he was back to the even-keeled Ian she knew. “Missy is not having my baby.”
At least now he knew for certain. “I’m sorry, Ian. Is there anything I can do?”
“No,” he said dismissively. “Missy has done enough.”
“I’m surprised she admitted to it.”
Ian chuckled bitterly. “She didn’t want to, I’m sure, but it’s the kind of lie where you’ll get found out eventually. I’d done my part by rationalizing away all my doubts, but eventually she would have had to start showing. Eventually, she’d have had to give birth to this baby.”
That was a hell of a lie to pull off. Had she really thought it through? “Did she tell you what she intended to do? If the story hadn’t hit the press, she couldn’t have kept the lie going on much longer.”
“She said she was hoping that we would stop using protection and she would actually get pregnant. If that didn’t work, she was going to pretend to miscarry after the wedding.”
Bree shook her head. “With so many women suffering through the reality of losing a child, I can’t imagine her faking something that terrible.”
“That’s because you don’t know the real Missy Kline. All anyone sees is the sexy blonde in music videos and on album covers. I’m sure people think she might be spoiled or a diva. But the truth is that she’s ruthless, especially when it comes to her career. She learned it from her viper of a stage mom.”
“Is that why she did it? For her career?” Bree’s career meant everything to her, but she had a limit of how far she would go to be successful. Most people did.
“That’s not what she said at first. When I confronted her, she cried and wailed that she thought she was losing me. She said she did what she had to do to keep us together because she loved me too much.”
Ian looked down at his hands folded in his lap. “That was absolute crap. I know what it feels like to have a woman love me and it was nothing like that. She barely knew me. She certainly didn’t love me. Missy has never been interested in anyone but herself. The truth was that her last album tanked and she was scrambling. I had no intention of renewing her contract and she’d burned too many bridges to jump to another label easily. That’s when her whole demeanor changed. She was buttering me up, using sex to get her way. I knew that much. What I didn’t know was that she’d realized it wasn’t working. Before I could end it, she’d cooked up the fake pregnancy to keep it going.
“That just turned into a publicity gold mine for her. Celebrity weddings and babies are big news. She started this whole charade to save her career, and it worked better than she’d ever imagined. The publicity about the engagement and the pregnancy boosted her mediocre songs to the tops of the charts. She’d sold the exclusive rights to our engagement and ceremony photos to Celebrity Magazine. The wedding was even going to be televised. Did you know that?”
She didn’t. Natalie might have mentioned it, but Bree had spent last Monday in a daze after finding out about Ian getting married. “Sounds romantic.”
“Doesn’t it? Every step she took was cold and calculated. She was going to revive her career so I would resign her. And if not me, she would see to it that she made enough headlines to get some other label to do it.”
“The whole thing sure backfired on her, though. Who’s going to sign her now?”
“I don’t care,” Ian admitted. “It sure as hell won’t be my label. The wedding is off and the minute she’s fulfilled the final obligations of her contract, I never want to see her pinched face again. If anyone else is dumb enough to offer her a record deal after all this, they deserve what they get.”
