Page 45 of Accidental Baby For My Brother’s Best Friend

I don’t ask any questions. I don’t speak a word, actually, because I’m not sure what might come out of my mouth if I open it.

I walk the mile to the hotel, trying to calm down, but it doesn’t seem to be working. All I can think about is wrapping my hands around my former friend’s throat. Gemma’s been so sick and stressed, all because of him. What did hemean, talk about the baby? He’d done this, so he has to deal with it, now, and I’m beyond furious.

It’s easier to focus on the anger than the ache in my chest, the way there’s a voice in the back of my mind saying that if I had only told her earlier, if I’d only made a different choice…

What it boils down to is me not being good enough. I know that Gemma deserves better than an aging rock star with only a two-bedroom house and a shitty 1997 Plymouth to his name. I know she deserves better than the baggage I’ll bring with me, worrying about what she’s doing every time she’s not at home because of how Janis hurt me. Gemma deserves better, but Axel fucking Jermaine isn’t better.

It doesn’t matter, now. It’s over and all I have to do is kill Axel. Well, not kill. I can only maim him because, at the end of the day, I want Gemma to be safe and happy.

That’s all I want for the people I love.

There’s no point in denying it now, even to myself. I’m in love with Gemma Arden, despite the fact that she’s eleven years my junior and my best friend’s baby sister. I don’t know when it happened, if it was gradual or sudden, but right now it feels like I’ve been hit by a truck. I love her pale green eyes and all her curves and the way she loves the same snacks as I do. I love the way she sasses me and the way she arches her back beneath me, but it’s so much more than that. So much more that I can’t even think of her without my heart leaping into my throat.

I’m in love with her and she’s pregnant with another man’s baby, a man who used to be my friend, and it hurts somewhere deep in my bones, so instead of thinking about it, I focus on my goal.

Find Axel and knock some sense into him. He’s going to do right by Gemma if it kills us both.

I finally find him on the fourth floor, walking Gemma to her room, and I tell myself to wait, pause until she closes the door, but when he steps inside with her, I can’t help it, I lose it.

I grab the back of Axel’s shirt, tugging him backwards. He lets go of Gemma’s arm and stumbles backward, surprised.

“Oh shit, Locke, listen to me, it’s not what it looks like-” he starts, and I tackle him to the ground.

“So you didn’t knock up my girl?” I bark, and Axel elbows me in the throat and I lose my breath only for a moment before grabbing him again as he tries to crawl away.

We go rolling through the hallway with Axel fighting me the whole way, but I’m taller and I outweigh him by about twenty pounds, so I’m able to pin him. Blood is rushing in my ears and I can barely hear Gemma’s yells for me to stop or Axel’s protests. Axel is finally able to break through to me by screaming my name, but it barely registers and as he wiggles and almost breaks free, I headbutt him. It hurts my head but it cuts a line across Axel’s eyebrow and the blood makes something dark and primal in me satisfied.

Axel groans and I feel ten familiar manicured nails on my shoulder, trying to pull me off. Exhaustion washes over me in a wave, from the sleep deprivation or the heartbreak, I don’t know, but I let Gemma pull me off of my ex-friend and sit down on the hotel hallway floor.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Gemma yells, and I just look up at her, my head spinning from adrenaline. I regret not accepting the four or five tequila shots I’d been offered back at the venue, because I wish to God I was numb instead of all the anger and pain that’s swirling inside me.

“Locke,” Axel rasps, sitting up, and of course, Gemma goes to him, pressing a tissue she’d had in her purse against the wound above his eye.

“Don’t fucking talk to me,” I growl, standing up to loom over him, but Axel’s next words shake me more than I’m already shaken and I brace myself against the wall.

“The baby is yours, you fucking idiot,” Axel says tiredly, and when I look at Gemma, her pale green eyes widen and I know he’s telling the truth.

I put Gemma’s phone in her hand, still looking into her eyes. I pause for a moment, wanting to say something, anything.

Instead, I turn and walk away, making it to the elevator as Gemma calls out my name, and brushing past Samuel, who must have heard all the commotion.

There’s a mantra going through my head now, over and over. It has for a while, but it’s louder than ever, screaming in the front of my head.

Not good enough. Not good enough. Not good enough.

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