That was where she wouldn’t be sleeping tonight. He could picture her perfectly, on all fours in the middle of the mattress, her back bowed, hands tied to the headboard. He’d take her like that. Fuck her hard on her hands and knees. Grip her hips and sink into her. Smack her ass as he made her cry out in a pleasure.
A barely audible groan escaped his throat as the reel played before his eyes of her naked, lithe body trembling. Ready for him. He strolled into her room and brushed a hand over the corner of her bed. A few more minutes, and he could have her like that. That was his plan. He turned around to leave, when a flash of yellow caught his eye once more. Something about it felt familiar. He walked to her nightstand. The drawer was open and a small book appeared to have fallen off the nightstand into the drawer.
Or been shoved in.
Some part of him knew better. But another part was intrigued. Curious. Then far too curious when he saw the cover.
It was a photo album, and the cover image matched the picture in her kitchen frame. Another close-up shot of a sunflower. Somewhere inside of him, a warning bell told him maybe not to cross this line. He shouldn’t even be in her bedroom without permission. You don’t just walk into a woman’s bedroom, uninvited. And you don’t take a photo book out of a drawer without permission. But when you spot a black-and-white image slip out of one of the pages, and that black and white image has a name and a date, you might not be able to control yourself.
The name Paige-Prince, Shannon was printed in small letters on the edge, along with a date ten years ago, and then the words that knocked him to his knees. Highgate Maternal Fetal.
His heart sped in his chest, spinning wildly out of control. Blood pounded in his ears, and his throat went dry.
He inhaled deeply, as if the air would steel him, but his breath still came erratically. Then he did it. With traitorous fingers that dug into her privacy willfully, he pulled out the black-and-white image. He blinked. Once, twice, then he let it register. An ultrasound picture of a baby inside the womb.
His eyes returned to the date again, and he computed quickly. This was four months after they graduated from college. Four months after they split. A strange, sick fear descended on him, and his nerves frayed like the ends of a rope as questions assaulted him. Where was the baby? Did she give up a baby for adoption? Have an abortion? Have a kid somewhere? Was her grandma raising her baby?
Their baby...?
That thought was too foreign, too bizarre. He sat on the edge of her bed, frozen, holding the image, the private medical record.
His fingers itched to open the book.
His sense of right and wrong told him to let it be.
But selfish desire won. He flipped to the beginning. The album was scant, containing only a handful of images. The first was a shot of her in a mirror, and his heart tripped back in time as he gazed at Shannon, his Shannon, from ten years ago. Her hair was short then and still blond, her face so fresh and young, her expression a half-hearted smile. She had taken the photo of herself sideways, capturing the small swell of her belly in a mirror.
Seeing the ultrasound was one thing. Seeing her pregnant was entirely another. It walloped him.
He turned to the next page. The words nineteen weeks were written in blue ballpoint on the page, and in the plastic sleeve was another shot of Shannon, barely bigger. Then one at twenty weeks. He turned another page. An image of a white baby blanket on a hospital bed. After that the photos ended, and the last several pages contained only images of sunflowers.
He didn’t know what to make of the sunflowers, or of the way the story in these pictures was unfinished. The story ended, and then it became something else, told in a language he didn’t understand.
Shoes clicked on the floor, and the hair on his neck stood on end. He snapped the book closed as she called out his name. He started to stuff the book into the drawer. But when he turned around, she was standing in the doorway, and he had her photo book in his hand, trying to jam it into the nightstand.
Her expression was one of shock. Then disappointment, and next came a trace of grief. Somehow, her eyes contained all three.
She swallowed, and her face seemed pinched. But her voice gave her away. A bare whisper, laced with pain, as she closed her eyes, opened them, and spoke.
“Like I said, my house is a little bit messy.”
He nodded. “Is there something you need to tell me?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Yes. But why were you going through my things?” she asked again as she stood in the doorway. She wasn’t sure she could move.
Maybe he couldn’t either. He didn’t stray from the bed as he shrugged listlessly. “There’s no good answer, Shan. I saw the sunflower on the cover, and it matched the one in your picture frame.”
“So you went through a photo book that you found in my nightstand because it matched one in my kitchen?” she asked, taking the time to process each action he’d taken.
“It was open,” he said, his voice barren.
Her skin prickled with fear at the sound. With nerves too, because she was stumbling blindly now. She’d wanted to tell him on her own terms. Not like this. Never like this.
She shook her head, as if she could erase the last five minutes. Start over—begin at the beginning. Sit down, talk, share the whole sad story, and then feed the cat. She had never wanted him to discover the truth on his own. A part of her was mad as hell that he’d gone through her book, and a part of her was deeply ashamed at what he’d found—the evidence of all she’d withheld.
A new emotion bubbled up inside her, too. Terror. She was terrified he’d walk away.
“Were you pregnant ten years ago?”
No point lying. No point hiding. “I was,” she said with a nod.
“When?” he asked in a wobbly voice, as if every word was new and foreign.
“I found out two weeks after you left.”
“Where is the...” he said, letting his voice trail off.
Her heart cratered, beating a drumbeat of hurt and sadness.
Oh, this was the worst. This was harder than she’d ever imagined. She knew it wouldn’t be easy to get the awful words out, but being forced to say them tasted worse. Bitter and acrid to the tongue. She drew a deep breath, and laid them out, one by one, in a row of awfulness. “I was pregnant. It lasted for twenty weeks. My water broke and I went into labor in London, and the baby was born too early. He didn’t live.”
“He?” Brent asked hoarsely. It sounded as if he’d been punched.
She had never seen him like this, white as snow, shocked to the bone. “Yes. He.”
Time crawled painfully to the next minute, then the next, and then the next. Soon, he managed to string more words together. “Was. He. Mine?”
Something inside her snapped, like an electric wire sliced to the ground from high above. “Yes. How the hell can you ask that question?”
He held his hands out wide. “How the hell can I ask? Because you just told me you were pregnant. It’s normal to ask.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head, with some kind of dangerous cocktail of anger, shame and hurt mixing up inside her. “That’s not a normal question. It’s an insulting question.”