Page 10 of Broken Pregnant Mate
He said I was a burden.
Folding into myself, digging my heels into the carpet to back away from him, my spine pressing into the wall, I hiss through my tears, “Getout.”
***
Aidan comes back at lunch, but I ignore him, and I ignore the food too, not touching it, so when he comes back to collect the tray, it’s still full.
“Emaline,” he says through the glass door. “You have to eat something.”
I’m turned away from him on the bed, but I feel his presence like a caress along my back. It makes me shiver, but I just pull away from it, curling into myself and slamming a wall up in my mind to keep him out.
That, at least, is something Vern made me good at.
Night falls, and Aidan is gone, replaced with the regular night shift guy, and I ignore dinner, too, waiting for my stomach to stop churning before I can eat a thing.
I sleep fitfully and start to feel better the next morning, until Aidan returns.
“Emaline,” he says from outside the door, his voice muffled as he passes lunch through the little slot. “Will you please say something?”
“Sure,” I say, hands shaking with hunger. I won’t take the lunch, but I’ll eat dinner tonight—I’m already starting to feel lightheaded.
Turning to look at him, I ask, “Where is Trenan?”
Something in Aidan’s expression shifts, and he leans forward, eyes intent on mine. “Why?”
“Because I want to talk to Trenan,” I say, setting my jaw and looking away from him again, like he’s not worth my time. “Not you.”
“Trenan’s wife has just had a baby,” Aidan says, and Iknowhe’s not supposed to tell me that, and yet, he has.
When he walks away, I run it through my mind. Why would he tell me something like that about Trenan—me, a prisoner, and Trenan, a guard?
A thought occurs to me, but it’s so ridiculous that I have to push it away.
Still, it returns—what if Aidan shared the information about Trenan’s wife and new child because Aidan thought that IwantedTrenan? That I liked him?
But why would Aidan even care?
That’s what you’ve been this whole time—dead fucking weight.
Dead fucking weight.
I crawl back into bed, only rising to eat dinner and quickly shove the tray back through the slot before I get sick from the taste of the food.
***
Aidan returns again the next day, but this time, he says nothing to me. When I hear his footsteps retreat and turn to look, I see more than just the lunch there waiting for me.
Lunch and a book.
My hands itch to touch it, to open it up—I’ve only had the same three books since coming in here. Aidan knows how much I love to read.
This is bait.
Still, it’s bait that I’m powerless to ignore. I pull the lunch into my cell, open the book, and start to read.
It’s a historical account of the Grayhide family, starting with Aidan’s great-great-great-grandfather. I’m not sure how he got his hands on a book like this—I assumed Jerrod Blacklock’s father would have had them all burned—but it’s something to pass the time in my cell.
When I finish the entire book, reading through to the last generation recorded in it—Aidan’s grandparents—I realize the few blank pages have been filled in with pen.
