Page 33 of Under His Embrace

“I’ll come grab her in a few minutes,” Eva said. “Thank you.”

Fortunately, no one asked about my past with Franco again. I bet they were really eager for the gossip, but the slight shake of Eva’s head told the other two not to bring it up.

Thank you, Eva. Thank you.She was aware of our past, or at least whatever Franco told her about why I left. She seemed to get it that my history with Franco was a complicated and messy topic that I wasn’t ready to get into at the moment. Shesaid coming to this room and swimming would be a chance to unwind, and she was sticking to that offer.

“I am so nervous that I’ll have to have a C-section,” Nina griped as she settled back on the chair. “Every appointment I have, they say that my pelvis is tilted.” She winced as she got situated, clearly at the stage of nothing feeling comfortable.

“But if you have a C-section, won’t that prevent you from stretching out your hoochie and being loose?” Tessa teased.

Nina splashed at her. “Argh. I don’t want to hear about that, either.”

“It’s not so bad. It all goes back to normal.” The second the words left my mouth, I froze. I locked my body in place and didn’t exhale, tense and freaking out that I blurted that. Of all things to toss out casually, that shouldn’t have been it.

They took notice, looking at me with raised brows.

“What?” Tessa asked.

“You have a child?” Eva asked.

Shit. Shit. Shit.I had to backtrack out of this. They couldn’t know that I had a son—the son I never told Franco about. I worried enough that he’d never forgive me for hiding that from him, no matter how justified I thought I was in my choices regarding that secrecy. With these women giving me such a warm and easy welcome into their little group, I couldn’t risk their hating me and not forgiving me for my past as well.

I cleared my throat. “I… gave birth,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. “But the baby didn’t make it.”

Technically, both of those statements weren’t lies.

I had a miscarriage when I was dating someone in college, but no one needed to know about that. It was the first time I had sex after leaving home, after having Caleb. I hadn’t cared about the man, but I wanted to see if I was able to move on from the memories of Franco plaguing me, if I could be intimate with someone else. Newsflash—I didn’t. The sex meant nothing, Ididn’t even come, the condom broke, and I lost that baby. It was enough to turn me off from wanting to date. It also confirmed the impossibility of casual sex helping at all. It was just before I met Wes, and once he entered my life, I had zero chances of wanting to find a man again.

“Oh, my God.” Tessa set her hand on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

“That’s terrible, Chloe,” Nina said, frowning. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

None of them pushed to know if it was Franco’s baby, but I grew more nervous under Eva’s careful stare. She nodded, pressing her lips together in sorrow. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said sincerely, but I felt like she had to be wondering and thinking.

If she got it in her head that I was talking about Franco’s baby that I lost, she was wrong. I supposed the miscarriage counted as a baby I lost, and I had given birth—to Caleb. Even though I meshed the two truths together, it still worked as a lie.

The baby in the miscarriage hadn’t been carried long enough to be considered a viable pregnancy to begin with. I was still so young, and it just didn’t work out. While the event saddened me when it happened, I figured it was fate’s way of letting me know it wasn’t meant to be. So many women suffer miscarriages all the time, and when I learned I was one more number, a statistic among many, I moved past it.

I couldnottell these women the truth.

I did know a thing or two about childbirth because I had a child. I had Franco’s son. Caleb was the reason I joined the conversation and tossed out that the whole stretching fear was more of a myth. That was my experience I referenced, not the early-stage miscarriage with the one-night stand in college.

But they couldn’t know the whole story. They couldn’t have this raw truth. I refused to let them learn my deepest secret before I could tell Franco.

As I lowered my gaze to the water, I drew in a deep breath.

I had to tell him. We’d had sex twice now, and while I still had no direction of guessing what could happen next, I couldn’t let this guilt grow and increase pressure on me when I was selfish to want him so intimately. It wasn’t fair to either of us to carry on like this with my huge secret looming large between us.

I had to let Franco know my hard truth, and then, only then, would I be able to accept that we could truly start over with a clean slate of complete honesty between us.

If he’d even want me after I tell him that I hid his son from him.

15

FRANCO

The hackers found information on Wes. He didn’t try to hide anything about himself, and there was ample information about him to collect. Before long, we had many options of looking into Chloe’s ex, but it would take time to wade through it all and see what was important for the sake of removing him as a threat to Chloe and for any potential involvement he could’ve used to coordinate an attack on the Constella Family.

That was how we ruled—with no mercy for those who didn’t deserve it.

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