Page 30 of Hideaway Whirlwind
Something in Birdie relaxes, and she moves closer, combing her bandaged fingers through my hair. “You need your sleep, too. I know…I know you haven’t been getting much with me and the kids here. Bet you’ll be happy once we’re out of your hair.”
“No,” I answer quickly, hating that she thinks I could ever be happy without them. “I’ll take y’all being here over sleep any day,” I say with all honesty, tipping my head into her hand. In fact, I prefer to stay awake so as not to miss a single moment with them, even if it would eventually do a number on my already poor mental health.
“Really?” she asks with doubt coloring her voice, her song turning melancholy. She still doesn’t get it.
When I take her by the hand, she allows me to walk her around so I can pull her down on my thigh. “Yes, Birdie,” I say, my heart cracking open. “Always.” I swallow hard, thinking of her in the shower with Storm, naked and vulnerable and unable to continue hiding her secret. I had thought all that talk about not looking at or touching her lovely stomach came from a place of insecurity—something I’m quite familiar with—but I was wrong. I’m treading into dangerous territory when Iskate my hand down her short torso and kiss her cheek. “All five of you.”
She reacts as if she’s been stabbed when she jumps up, cradling her stomach.
“Birdie…” I lean forward, holding my hand out, hoping she’ll take it.
“No,” she whispers, backing away toward the creek.
“Birdie…” I slip from my chair to kneel on the hard ground. “Please, come here.”
“No,” she mouths, taking another step back when I walk forward on my knees, wrapping the blanket tighter around herself, insulating herself from me and the secret she can no longer keep.
Fearing she’ll walk straight back into the creek and fall through the ice if I keep advancing on her, I sit back on my heels, though every muscle coils, preparing to spring to her rescue if she were to get within two feet of the creek. I won’t let anything happen to her or the baby.
“Please, Birdie, please. You don’t have to hide your pregnancy from me. You don’t have to hide anything from me.”
Birdie hisses, “I’m not pregnant.”
My thoughts are all over the place. I’ve seen the evidence up close with my own two eyes. Obsessed over and finally figured out what she meant when she mumbled“something like that”after I asked her about birth control. Felt how firm her lower abdomen was when I’d picked her up and taken her into the shower the first time. But instead of saying any of that, of arguing with her and driving her closer to the creek, I merely wait it out—something I’m good at.
“I’m not!” she yells.
I remain silent, still holding my hand out, letting her knowshe can take it at any time.
“Stop looking at me like that!”
I shake my head twice, my arm unwavering. No longer able to stay silent, I tell her calmly, “You called me ‘Papa’ in front of the kids. You stopped correcting them. That means something.”It means everything.
“No, it doesn’t!” she yells, though she looks off to the side, realizing I’m right and she hadn’t even been aware of it.
“You’re lying as much to yourself as you are to me.” Revealing everything I’ve held back, knowing I’m crazy to hope against all odds that she wants me, truly wants me after all, I tell her, “I want you. I want the kids.” I advance and look pointedly at her stomach, which she has tightly wrapped the blanket around. “I want the little one, too.”
Her voice is shrill when she screams, “No, you don’t!” She hurries to take three steps back and slashes her hand through the air. “It’s only been nine days!”
Chapter 14
Teagan
“A lot can happen in nine days,” he says, lowering his voice as I grow more flighty, like he’s calming a cornered animal. “Just ask Goldie. She’ll tell you.”
“Tell me what?” Memories push forward of the day Marigold introduced me to her husband when she visited Las Vegas a year after she left. How envious I was when her husband looked at her like she was the greatest gift to the world. How ready he looked to murder Colton, the father of her first child, Lily. Not because Colton was challenging Davis’sownershipof Marigold and Lily, but because Davis was utterly in love with his wife and his adoptive stepdaughter, willing to do literally anything for them.
“She hasn’t told you that Davis was with her when she gave birth right after they met? That they’ve been inseparable ever since?”
“No,” I answer with a whisper. Marigold and I weren’t truly friends when we worked together, merely acquaintances. I never had time or permission to have friends.
“When you see her again, ask her about the whirlwind. Askmy brother’s wife. Ask anyone in this town, and they’ll tell you what happens when you get swept up by it. You can’t escape fate.”
“Fate?” I shiver when Elliott nods and advances again, frozen in place instead of putting more distance between us. “There’s no such thing as fate! None of that is real.”
“It is real.” As soon as I’m within reach, he circles one arm around my waist and slips the other under my blanket. He pushes up my top to expose my stomach and drops his forehead against my lower abdomen. “Ask them,” he says, his hot breath fanning across my skin, lowering the shield protecting my heart that’s been harder to carry the more time I spend with him. “It’s real.”
I’ve never experienced anything like this moment. None of my pregnancies have ever been celebrated for the right reasons by the men who created them. To those men, our babies never came to be out of love, as I’d first believed. It was only ever about control.
