Page 118 of Forbidden Hearts
She pulls her hands out of my grasp, stepping back, but there’s nowhere to go. Her back is against the wall. “Yes.”
“Yes to what?”
“Yes to it all. Everything has changed.”
I’m not a guy who likes riddles and games. It’s why these arrangements—as she called it—worked for me. There are rules, and we don’t cross the lines. No one gets hurt, and at the end of the day, we part as friends. Sara and I messed up, but we’ve found new rules, and they work. With Phoebe, she made every rule irrelevant and basically erased any chance at an arrangement.
I have never felt like this, and I’m not about to let her walk away without even telling me what the fuck is going on.
I take a deep breath and step back because crowding her isn’t helping. “Let me fix it.”
“You can’t fix this.”
“What isthis?”
“This is the end, Asher.”
Anger and frustration course through me. Doesn’t she see it? Doesn’t she know how much I care about her? How I left my family to come to her? How I broke every damn rule because I need her more than air?
No. It’s not the end.
“The fuck it is.”
Her back slides down the wall, and she curls protectively around herself. In an instant, I’m there, but she puts her hands up, stopping me from coming close.
She looks up, her eyes filled with so much sadness it could fill the room. “It will be.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m pregnant.”
I struggle to suck in a breath because suddenly it’s hard to breathe. She’s . . . no. This can’t be. Not again. Not that I don’t love my daughter, but I had no plans of having another child, if I did—not like this.
“You’re pregnant?” I choke on the words.
“It’s not yours,” she says quickly. “I’m eleven weeks, and we both know, I wasn’t here...eleven weeks ago.”
Phoebe’s eyes glimmer again, the tears flooding those brown eyes I love looking into.
And while I felt dread a few seconds ago, now it’s even worse. “The father . . . isn’t me?”
“Not unless you were in Iowa and we have no memory of it, no. It’s not yours.”
I’m not relieved. I’m not happy. I’m not really sure what the hell I am. Those words terrified me as much now as they did ten years ago, only for a far different reason.
Phoebe is pregnant, and it’s not my child, which means it’s another man’s baby growing inside the woman I’m falling in love with. If I’m not already there, which I’m pretty sure I am.
I feel a million chaotic emotions, but the most important thing I can do is keep calm and take things one step at a time. The first priority is making sure she’s okay.
I move to her slowly, squatting in front of her. “Are you healthy?”
She blinks, the tears falling. “What?”
“You and the baby, are you both okay?”
“Am I okay? I don’t know. No. I’m not okay. I’m pregnant with a married man’s baby, and he told me to get rid of it. So, yeah, not okay.”
What a piece of shit he is. I would love nothing more than to beat the fuck out of him for treating her this way. He doesn’t deserve to have ever touched her, to have known her or looked at her or breathed the same air as her because she’s too good for this world.
