Page 48 of Deny Me
Her parents met them at the door when they arrived back at the house. Charlotte walked up the steps barefoot, her ruined shoes dangling from one hand, dreading their reaction, but her mom tucked her against her side and escorted her to the elevator without comment. When they reached her bedroom, Charlotte put her hand up, stopping her mom before she could come inside.
“I’m okay,” she said, unsure if that was a lie or not. “I’m going to soak in a hot tub and crawl into bed.” She gave her mom a good-night kiss on the cheek. “Go back to Dad and I’ll see you in the morning.”
Her mom glanced down the hall where Mark and TC, two of the men who’d come from JCL to support Dain’s team, were topping the stairs. Their presence seemed to reassure her, because her face had softened when she looked back to Charlotte. “Are you sure?”
About the tub and bed? “Absolutely.”
By the time she crawled between the sheets, the effects of the day were hitting her like a two-ton elephant—every muscle ached, and any energy she’d thought she had was sinking into the mattress along with her body.
So of course that’s when the knock came.
Several words she rarely spoke escaped as she struggled up from the bed. “Coming!”
She assumed Mark or TC had something to tell her, maybe Elliot—although Elliot should be with Becky by now—but it wasn’t any of them waiting on the other side of the door. It was King.
Charlotte closed her eyes. King being here meant one thing: he wanted answers, and he wasn’t waiting until morning to get them. The time for hints and secrets was gone. Stepping back, she opened the door wider. “Come in.”
He didn’t hesitate.
She walked toward the bed, but at the last minute her body refused to settle. This was it, the moment of truth. The moment when he walked away and didn’t look back.
“What is it, King?”
His warmth reached her before he did, heating her back, then her arms when he gripped them. Charlotte winced, the muscles tender from bruises left by the earlier attack, and he gentled his touch immediately. “Sorry.” Long, powerful fingers trailed down her biceps, over her elbows, down to her wrists, where he took her captive. “Tell me, Charlotte.”
No need to ask what; she already knew. Still it took a moment to find words.
“About a week after you…left,” she finally began, “I started spotting. Nothing, really. My period was due. I had…other things on my mind.”
The grip on her wrists tightened before releasing completely. King stood at her back, the hard muscles of his pecs pressed into her shoulder blades, his breath warming her hair, but nothing else.
“I wasn’t paying enough attention, I guess. I started having pain, but”—she shrugged—“still, it was probably my period, right? Nothing I hadn’t dealt with before.”
King made a soft sound in his throat. Sympathy. They’d been sleeping together; he knew how hard her periods had been on her.
“And then I woke up one night with blood everywhere. The pain was worse.” She shuddered, her belly tensing as she remembered just how excruciating those long minutes had been before her parents had gotten her to the hospital. She hadn’t realized her body was capable of that kind of agony. “So much pain. It was an ectopic pregnancy. My fallopian tube had ruptured.”
“How close?”
She struggled to shake away the memories. “What?”
“How close did you come to dying?”
King’s voice was hoarse, hurting. She leaned back instinctively, holding him up the same way he’d been holding her, and gave him the only piece of information that mattered: “I recovered.” Her belly tensed with remembered pain. “The tube didn’t. My doctor diagnosed me with endometriosis. The abnormal growth in my tubes had blocked the embryo from traveling all the way to my uterus. The pregnancy destroyed that tube, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The endometriosis…it had spread. Everywhere.” She paused, feeling the words stick in her throat. “I had to have a hysterectomy. I could no longer have children. Ever.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
She was only twenty years old.
King’s body and mind reeled from the force of too many blows, too much emotion, devastation.Twenty.
Charlotte had just lost her fiancé, and then her child, and had been forced to grapple alone with the knowledge that she would never have another chance to carry her own baby in her body.
And that after dealing with the loss of a child.
We had a child.
She’d told him earlier, but he hadn’t been able to truly comprehend the words. Now he moved his hands from her wrists to her hips, slid them slowly across until the soft curve of her lower belly was against his palms. Their child had been here, waiting to grow. Waiting to live.
