Page 63 of The Broken Beginning: Part One

“Yeah? How do you figure?” His voice held a little attitude now too.

“You have the proof lying all over you.”

Merc glanced down at the pictures. “What is that supposed to mean?”

I spelled out everything those pictures symbolized to me, the fact that she even had pictures of the two of them together, to them obviously habitually sleeping together in the same bed like a real couple, his laughter, his smiles, his happiness.

“I’ve never had any of that from you.”

“There are pictures of me all over this house,” he argued.

“Yep, pictures of you and your son – for your son’s benefit. Trust me, I’d rather not see your face around every corner.”

He nodded. “You know almost everything you just said is a bunch of bullshit, right?”

“Excuse me?”

“First, let’s make this clear. She isn’t pregnant. Second, she came to you because she was desperate because after I dropped you off, I went to tell her that I would never see her again because I was in love with my wife.”

I did laugh at that, because if he thought I believed that for even a minute, he was nuts. The bastard ignored my outburst though.

“Third, those pictures are all old, from when we first started…” he trailed off there because he knew no matter how he tried to swing it, just the fact that he’d started something - especially something more than a casual once-in-a-while fuck - was not going to look good for him. “She took those pictures because it’s what she does. Shaina is a photographer. She lives her life through pictures. She got yelled at for most of the ones she took with me because I never wanted to be in them.”

“Feeling guilty?” I asked sarcastically, knowing he never did feel anything.

“Yeah, as a matter of fact. I never wanted there to be evidence of my own stupidity out there. Certainly, never wanted it shoved in your face. The fact is, she had those pictures of me because she took them. She demanded something of me and made it happen.” His narrow-eyed stare pinned me down then. “What have you ever demanded of me?”

“To not flaunt your women in my son’s face and yet this one showed up at my doorstep. Thankfully, he wasn’t here when she showed up.”

“I’m thankful for that too and sorrier than you’ll ever know that my shit decisions spilled over to you, to our home.”

“My home,” I corrected.

“Our home,” he repeated as we sat there quietly staring at one another for a while before he broke the silence again. “Do you have anything else you want to tell me?”

I sighed. How did this fucker already know? I could tell he did because his eyes drifted down to my midsection, as if he could see through the desk to the non-existent baby bump that I might have been hiding there.

I quickly bounced my shoulders up and down. “It doesn’t really matter because it changes nothing.”

“It changes a whole fuck of a lot, Lily.”

“No, Merc, it does not.” I sighed and looked away from him. “All it changes is the fact that I need a bigger house because two bedrooms won’t cut it. The room Declan is in now is too small for two growing boys and definitely too small if it turns out to be a girl.”

“All right, we’ll work on getting a bigger house.”

“No!”

“What do you mean, no? You just said…”

“I said that I need a bigger house, not we.”

“I see. So, this is my official notice that I’m no longer welcome?”

I laughed again. “I already gave that to you, but sure, if you need to hear it again, I don’t want you here. If you need to see Declan, I’ll have one of our fathers bring him to you. I would appreciate you keeping to the no whores around my boy promise you made, but I see that’s difficult for you, so…” I paused to think about a solution for that, and it was killing me because I didn’t want my son to grow up seeing the way his father behaved. There was no way I wanted him to grow up and think it was okay to ever treat a woman the way his father had treated me.

“You want your space – it’s yours. Stay here in the house until I can get you a new one.”

“I don’t want a house that belongs to you too.”

---