Page 71 of Play for Keeps

But she couldn’t. Verbalizing her feelings would make them actual information. Information was knowledge. Knowledge equaled power. This man had enough power over her already. She couldn’t give him carte blanche. So she’d start with a few basic truths. Maybe those would be enough to placate him.

“I don’t want Mari to be pregnant with your baby.” He stiffened enough to tell her this was not the confession he wanted or expected. She needed to give him a little more. Enough to let him infer but not enough to confirm. “I wish you’d never slept with her, but given the circumstances, pretending would be fairly ridiculous.”

His eyes narrowed. “Is this a feeling?”

“Jealousy,” she replied with a jerky nod. “I’m jealous.” When his brows rose, Millie felt the need to spin the confession. “Not ‘I’m gonna put sugar in your gas tank’ jealous, but yes, jealous.”

Ty nodded, compressing his mouth into a thin line as he digested. “Jealous is a good start. What else?”

“Angry.”

An emotion easy to own. She’d been pissed off since this whole mess started. Pissed at Ty for marrying the nitwit. At the nitwit for being too blind to know what she had. At Dante Harris’s ingratitude and the vicious glee the press exhibited in taking what should have been a private matter and whipping it into a story concocted for consumption. She couldn’t even think about the morons who sat like lumps in front of their computers and television screens gobbling personal pain like handfuls of mixed nuts.

She was angry he kissed like he did. Sweet, sensual, drugging kisses that burned hotter than one of those fire-starter logs. The feel of his big, rough hands on her body stoked the flames higher and higher. She didn’t want to love him. Never asked him to love her. But now that she’d had him, she didn’t want to share one bit of him with anyone else. Not even a baby.

“You’re angry?” he clarified.

“Yes.” She bit the word off hard, incensed that he seemed to be questioning her right to feel this way. “Yes, I’m angry.” She tipped her chin up a notch. “What of it?”

Ty smiled as he pushed away and rose to his full height. But not a happy smile. The gleam of it glinted with a steely, sharp edge. “Nothing. I’m glad I’m not the only one.”

Once she had some breathing room, Millie sucked in a deep hit and went straight to the heart of the matter. “When was the last time you slept with Mari?” He blinked, then started to recover, but before he could say a word, she held up a hand to stop him. “Not slept, had sex. And not oral or anything else. Full intercourse, including ejaculation. The kind of sex that gets a woman knocked up.”

“A perverse part of me loves it when you get explicit.”

She acknowledged the comment but didn’t let the playful gambit deter her. “Great. We’ll get to perversions later, but right now, we’re talking about the probability of baby making.”

“A week or so before she left.” He raised a hand in a gesture of futility, then let it fall away. “I don’t remember exactly. I thought about what went wrong a lot…after. I can’t pin it on any trouble in bed, but I let a lot of other things go. Things I didn’t want to admit to seeing.”

Millie wet her lips, her mind clicking through various options as she tried to figure out how best to approach her next question. “And before you discovered the affair with Dante, did you suspect anything?”

He shook his head a split second too early for his denial to be anything but a knee-jerk reaction.

“Ty, anything?”

Something must have pinged, because he stopped on a dime. “Why? What did you hear?”

Despite years of speaking with caution and diplomacy, Millie couldn’t think of a single gentle way to break it to a man that his trophy wife had been making a chump out of him behind his back long before he’d copped a clue. “I’d seen some things posted on social media sites—”

“You saw them?”

Millie nodded, a guilty grimace twisting her lips. “A couple of pictures of Mari on PicturSpam with some of the football players.”Mari half-dressed and commanding the players’ full attention, she clarified for her own edification. “Maybe one or two with Dante.”Or ten, she amended in her head. She firmly believed that in cases such as these, it was better not to quantify matters any more than one absolutely had to. “I’d seen a few but didn’t want to make something out of nothing, so I didn’t think to say anything.”

Okay, that was mostly a lie. She had wanted to tell Ty about the photos but decided not to after talking the conundrum over with Avery and Kate. When her friends advised against getting involved, she had been relieved. Millie had been far too interested in Ty to risk being the one he forever associated with discovering his wife’s infidelity.

Fire flared in his eyes. His jaw tightened, but he relaxed it with obvious effort. Inclining his head in silent acknowledgment, he averted his face. She watched his chest rise and fall, wishing she could touch him, comfort him, remind him that he was a thousand times the man those boys would ever hope to be. But she couldn’t. Not now. Not if she wanted to hang on to any shred of her own sanity as well as preserve his.

“It’s possible you are the father,” she said at last.

“But I’m probably not,” he added hastily.

The seconds ticked silently between them, but she couldn’tnotask the question. “Does that make you happy or sad?”

“This whole mess makes me…mad.” But rather than ranting and raving, he threw himself back into his chair, propped his elbows on his knees, and dropped his head into his hands. “I don’t want any of this. I mean, I would have been happy to have a baby when I thought we were happy, but now?” He scrubbed his face with his hands. “Why do I ever think I’m going to get to be happy?”

The despair in his voice cut her to the quick. Needing to do something, Millie flipped the lid on the pizza box and closed it. “Whoa. Pretty nihilistic attitude you’ve got, fella.” She rose, taking the box with her. “Should I bust out the tiny violin?”

“Christ, Millie, I get it. You’re tough as nails, but do you think you can stop busting my balls for five minutes?”

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