Page 13 of Bride for Keeps

“Um, Mom and Dad. I… Would it be okay if…” She shoved her hands into her coat pockets, too hot in the face with embarrassment to feel the chill of the air around them.

Mom and Dad turned, exchanged one of those old married couple looks that caused a lance of pain to go through Sierra’s chest. Even at their best, she and Carter hadn’t had that.

Mom enveloped her in a hard, warm hug. “Have we really made it this hard for you to say you need to come home?” Mom sounded…hurt, almost. Which was odd. Her parents were always so stoic. She knew what they were feeling based on what they said, not what they sounded like.

“No, I just…”

“We’re sorry things didn’t work out, Sierra,” Dad said, in his same old gruff way, but the words were soft somehow. Her father who’d never been particularly soft. “I know we weren’t exactly supportive, but I hope you know we always supportyou.”

“Who told you?” she managed to ask.

Mom cleared her throat, twisting her fingers together in a rare sign of unease. “I overheard some nurses talking about… Well, they said Dr. McArthur’s wife was leaving him. At first I thought they meant Gerald, but that seems unlikely and now you’re asking to come home, so…”

“We’re getting divorced,” Sierra forced herself to say, bald and plain, because she couldn’t take her parents trying to convince her she was wrong. Telling her she had to fix things. “I know your feelings on divorce.”

Mom and Dad shared another look.

Dad cleared his throat. “I know we’ve been hard sometimes. It was the way we were raised, the way we thought it best to raise ours. We’re trying to be a little better by you three these days. I don’t support divorce unilaterally, no, but…like I said, Sierra, we’ll always supportyou.”

“Follow us home. It’s too cold to talk in this parking lot like this. We’ll make you some… Goodness, what time even is it? We’ll eat a meal and you can talk to us and tell us what you need.”

Sierra blinked at her mother. When had her parents changed? Opened and softened? Asked her what she needed?

She frowned a little because she had this horrifying thought all of a sudden that it wasn’tthemwho had changed. It was her. Like she’d grown up a little and realized the world, and they, weren’t out to get her.

She forced a smile and a nod and headed for her car, where she’d already thrown all the things she’d taken to Kaitlin’s, to follow Mom and Dad home.

But Mom’s words kept bouncing around in her head as she drove through the bizarre morning that felt like it should be night after being in a dark hospital room for a while.

Tell us what you need.

She wanted to. Tell her parents everything so they could fix this for her, but she knew they couldn’t, but worse, so much worse…

What if she didn’t know what she needed?

*

Carter never gotdrunk. There had been very few times in his life where he’d flirted with the edge of it. The night he’d met Sierra and his wedding night were about it. A little tipsy on alcohol and Sierra, both times. But that was very much it. He was a McArthur, expected to be in control always.

After Sierra had dropped her pregnancy bomb, then sauntered away so certain divorce was an inevitability, Carter had sat at his desk and stared at his lists.

It had been strange to sit there and not want to make new ones. He’d felt empty and numb and filled with zero desire to make a list or fill out a calendar. He couldn’t even find it in himself to do the math to figure out when their baby—baby—would be due.

Sometime around midnight, something inside of him had clicked. Maybe snapped. He’d gotten up, walked straight to the kitchen, found a sealed, expensive bottle of liquor his father had given him for some occasion or other. Carter didn’t even bother to read the label to see what kind it was.

He just started to drink. Right out of the bottle. There wasn’t much point to stopping either. There was no one to perform for. It didn’t matter if he got drunk because there was literally no one here who cared what he did.

Something cracked inside of him, only it wasn’t all that painful. Maybe it was the booze running though his system, but it almost felt freeing. He didn’t have to be perfect for his father—who wasn’t even his father. His mother had two other children to rely on now that Cole was home for good, and quite frankly, they were the children she hadn’t lied to their whole lives.

And Sierra was gone. Pregnant with his child andintenton divorce.

It didn’t make any sense. Alcohol didn’t either, he supposed, but the addition of quite a bit of it into his system made that seem rather funny instead of soul-crushingly awful. He managed to drink his way through a good three-fourths of the bottle over the course of the evening.

He watched the sun rise through the kitchen window in a drunken stupor and then figured he might as well burn all his plans. They were ash anyway. Luckily, the living room fireplace only required the flip of a switch and he had a nice little blaze.

Sierra had complained about the gas fireplace, saying a wood-burning one was so much moreauthentic.

“But it doesn’t do for the drunken burning of things, does it, babe?” Carter said into the empty room, grabbing a handful of the lists and printed papers off his desk. He marched back to the living room where the fire danced easily if notauthentically.

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